East Coker (poem)
East Coker is the second poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It was started as a way for Eliot to get back into writing poetry and was modeled after Burnt Norton. It was finished during early 1940 and printed for the Easter edition of the 1940 New English Weekly. The title refers to a small community that was directly connected to Eliot's ancestry and was home to a church that was later to house Eliot's ashes.
The poem discusses time and disorder within nature that is the result of humanity following only science and not the divine. Leaders are described as materialistic and unable to understand reality. The only way for mankind to find salvation is through pursuing the divine by looking inwards and realizing that humanity is interconnected. Only then can people understand the universe.
Read more about East Coker (poem): Background, Poem, Themes, Source, Reception, See Also
Famous quotes containing the word east:
“The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)