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Four Quartets

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Four Quartets

By: T. S. Eliot
Narrated by: Ralph Fiennes
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About this listen

A masterly new recording by Ralph Fiennes. Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T. S. Eliot's career as a poet.

While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in 20th-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author.

It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.

©1944 T. S. Eliot (P)2011 Faber & Faber Ltd Classics Collections & Anthologies Literary History & Criticism Poetry

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Critic reviews

"Eliot's own reading of Four Quartets was masterly, but this recording is an elegant tribute." ( The Guardian)
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This poem says it all. The voyage to truth is a Divine revelation. Through endless humility there is union - “The Fire and the Rose are one” 😊🙏❤️

Simply Beautiful

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Beautiful and meaningful narration. I have listened to this many times. Ralph Fiennes interpretation is excellent

Brilliant recording

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Beautifully read, this will take me ages to listen to over and over - it is such a brilliant poem and merits reflection.
I wish I had noticed that there is another version which includes The Wasteland also in the one credit, I would think that was better value.
But still. Brilliant.

Fascinating

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fill pf luscious evocations 9f time and place. i use it to drift off into dream filled sleep

really lovely.

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Superb. A well paced and sensitive reading which allows the listener to take in at least some of the meaning at the first time of listening.

Excellent Reading

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Well narrated by RF. difficult but poignant stuff. A good Sunday night listen in the shed.

Well read Ralph

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T.S. Eliot isn't for everyone, and I suspect he'd be proud of that. Much of 'Four Quartets', however brilliant, is also mired in the sort of intellectual bombast that critics celebrate for its seriousness and technical finesse.

Praise must be given here to Ralph Fiennes, whose delivery does much to revivify the more arid areas of the text. With an almost hypnotic smoothness, he elevates poetic posturing to a point where the listener can't help but be immersed in the shifting landscape. As

'garlic and sapphires in the mud
clot the bedded axletree'

of Eliot's often precise, often deliberate convolutions, Fiennes delivery is as haunting as it is 'fructifying'.

Fiennes makes sense of the dense

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I am older now, and Four Quartets has a different message to bestow on me than it did twenty years ago. To hear the rich, mellifluous tones of Ralph Fiennes intoning what seems to me almost a liturgy, or a litany of TS’s misgivings, is to balance the pleasure of textual truth, depth, and feeling - if not at times horror at Time’s misdeeds - with Ralph’s ever-present ironical delivery that allows a certain space for breathing into what can at times be a mightily oppressive monolith of a work. Again I am taken by the sometimes naive rhyming scheme interpolated within the alternate lines of leaden learning and profundity and whimsical, childlike lightness. It works, of course, it must do, celebrated as it is. But if it works, it works as the testament of a man embittered by decline, and, in that, it works its mysterious dark magic on me, at once seeming to offer hope, at another, the blackest of oncoming, inevitable blackness.

Hope - or Nihilism?

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Absolutely beautiful but maybe a bit expensive at a full credit for a work that is under an hour long.

Absolutely beautiful

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This piece of literature was well read by Ralph Fiennes. Relaxing to listen to on a Monday evening.

Beautifully read by Ralph Fiennes

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