Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding

First separate editions. 22.5 x 15 cm, original coloured card wrappers, stapled. London, Faber and Faber. 1940-1942

T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in the first separate editions, published by Faber between 1940 and 1942. Burnt Norton was first published in 1936 in Collected Poems 1909–1935, and East Coker in the literary review New English Weekly in 1940. The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, which is sometimes found sewn but is stapled here, made their first appearance in these separate editions. These poems, in which Eliot meditates on time, humanity and the divine, number among the most important in twentieth-century English poetry.

Excellent copies with some faint marks to covers, and some occasional small creasing to extremities, staples a little rusty. Final pages of Burnt Norton unopened.