Call me out of date, but the best book I’ve ever read is a little copy of the Four Quartes by T.S. Eliot. It’s available separately from his other poems in Faber & Faber (my favourite copy) or bundled in with the collected poems by Faber & Faber.

The Four Quartets contains four related poems. The first poem was written in 1935, but the other three were all written during the second world war, and the events of that period underpin the poems with a dense and powerful mood. There is some reference to wartime scenes, but the poem can easily be read without any awareness of that (as I did for years). The four poems are Burn Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.

The theme of the poems is perhaps the most difficult theme a poet could attempt, the relationship of human life with the absolute and the struggle to understand what of true and lasting value. Eliot links us in the poem with centuries of this same quest, connecting allusions from other writers into a web of feeling which very subtly hints at and points to something which he knows himself cannot be said in words alone. He weaves a delicate metaphysic of another world, here, now, never and always - the very ground of being hinted at and yearned for, reached for.

FR Leavis said that Eliot’s style was liturgical at times, and this may be difficult for some readers. I certainly developed some of my literary taste dissecting Catholic Liturgy and deciding what I liked and what I didn’t, and there is a similarity in that every word is measured, every phrase carefully pointing at its meaning, yet with so many resonances ringing back through traditional thought to many other shades of meaning. Eliot has his resonances with Dante, with Old Testament stories, with the mystics of the middle ages and with themes of his other poems; but far more important is the resonance between the poems of the Four Quartets themselves, where through the rhyming of ideas more than the rhyming of words a feeling of structure is developed which is both quiet and beautiful and leaves one feeling and thinking about the very essence of life.

What more could one want from poetry?

I know of no other writing which touches such depth and that this could have been written in my century and my language is and in my country is a breathtaking thing to me.

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To those interested there is the most wonderful resource at: