These poems are about old age and regret, but also poetic structure and art. After them, there was nothing much left to say
The greatness of the Four Quartets lies partly in their abstract considerations, but also in the way that they are so particular in their imagery. They are poems of long walks in the English countryside, and boating off the north-eastern US and of London in gloomy threatened peace and the dust and smoke of war; they are poems of middle age and a sense of fading powers. They are at once an attempt at making a final general statement about the spiritual life and an intense last flowering of the poetry of a very specific person.
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