Background & Structure of "Burnt Norton"

For my portion of our group presentation I'm going to go over the background and overall structure of "Burnt Norton".

The title of the poem refers to a manor in Gloucestershire. I was doing some research on the building itself and found some cool info on another blog that states that "the property is essentially divided into four quadrants, like chambers of the heart, and Eliot naturally would have proceeded from an upper chamber toward a lower chamber, then looked down on the dry, concrete pools that he alludes to in the poem. Beyond the pools (which the owner says never held water), he might have turned right into the present-day rose garden." This concept of the four quadrants is kind of cool and seems linked to the notion of four quartets. It's kind of nice to get a bit of an image of how it is set up in order to see the manor for ourselves as we move throughout it in the poem.

The manor still exists and you can visit it and take a tour or even have a wedding reception there.

























Unlike the other poems in the "Four Quartets" "Burnt Norton" was actually published in 1936, about five years before the other poems, in a volume of called Collected Poems 1909-1935. At the time Eliot was working on a play called Murder in the Cathedral and many of the fragments that he removed from the composition of the play went into "Burnt Norton".

One of the important concepts to note in "Burnt Norton" and the whole of the Quartets is the emphasis of music on the structure of the poems. In the Western tradition string quartets have played chamber music which was considered by Goethe to be "four rational people conversing". A good way to think of the poems, at least "Burnt Norton", is a highly intelligent religious philosopher making an argument about the nature of time. At the beginning of Burnt Norton Eliot puts forward a sort of hypothesis that he tests throughout the poem.

Going along with the musical-structure theme many critics have found it appropriate to consider the different "sections" within each poem as various musical movements. In this way Eliot can blend the separate movements together to gain an overall statement. It is important to note in the poem how, as it progresses, Eliot provides contrapuntal themes to many of his earlier notions thus providing the different movements.

To sum up I will mention how the poem was received. It seems that "Burnt Norton" was received with mixed reviews. Some people thought that it beautifully captured religious and philosophical themes while other reviewers, such as George Orwell, thought that the use of religious themes harmed the piece.