Told from the perspective of one of the Magi or ‘wise men’ visiting the infant Christ, the poem examines the implications that the advent of Christ had for the other religions of the time. According to the poet himself, Eliot wrote the poem one Sunday after church (he converted to Christianity in 1927, the same year he wrote this), supposedly after imbibing half a bottle of gin. This was the first of Eliot’s popular Christmas poems, which he composed for special booklets/greetings cards published by the company he worked for, Faber and Faber.

Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem. The image (right) is of St Michael’s Church, where Eliot’s ashes are interred. (Andrew Elliott had left East Coker for New England in the late seventeenth century he was one of the judges at the Salem ‘witch’ trials of 1692.)Įliot also quotes from his sixteenth-century ancestor Thomas Elyot in the poem. This is the second poem in the sequence, named after the small village in Somerset from which Eliot’s ancestors hailed. We could have included Four Quartets as a poem in its own right, but the sequence can also be viewed as a collection of four individual pieces. This is one of the Four Quartets, which some critics – including Helen Gardner (who features in our pick of the best books about Eliot’s poetry) – have branded Eliot’s masterpiece. This picture of urban life makes ‘Preludes’ an important precursor – indeed, prelude – to T. In this quartet of short Eliot poems there seems to be little escape from the everyday urban life of drudgery: you get up, you go to work, you come home, you sleep (or try to), you do it all again the next day.

Things don’t change, the world keeps turning, things largely remain constant. Hulme (whose work we’ve discussed here), and F. Although critic Hugh Kenner thought these poems were not imagist per se, they are perhaps the meeting-point between Eliot’s poetry and that of poets like Richard Aldington, T. This is an almost imagistic portrayal of modern urban living with all is squalid and unseemly aspects.

Selected poems by ts eliot