I think I first came across TS Eliot’s Four Quartets in a volume of his collected poems belonging to my mother when I was maybe about 15 or 16. At that time we were studying The Waste Land for O-level. My mother also had the LP of Eliot’s recording of Four Quartets from 1947. I got a sense of spiritual inquiry from the poem and remember feeling more intrigued by that than by what I call the collage effect of The Waste Land, which is full of scattered imagery that is compelling, and the challenge is somehow to link it up.
With Four Quartets there is a strong thematic progression, the themes circling back as in a piece of music. I was asked to
