If you came this way: the Route to “Little Gidding”

Abstract

This lecture for the T. S. Eliot International Summer School on the grounds of Little Gidding aims to reconstruct the extent of Eliot’s knowledge of Little Gidding before his first visit in May 1936, five years before he began to compose the poem in July 1942. In a reading of “Little Gidding,” the lecture goes on to show how Eliot’s familiarity with the lives and activities of the Nicholas Ferrar family from 1625 to 1937 manifests itself in the imagery and enhances the sense of place and history that he creates in the poem. Drawing upon his correspondence about the composition of the poem, particularly his desire to build into its texture an “acute personal reminiscence, never to be explicated,” the lecture concludes that “Little Gidding” is in part a love song of great loss and deep regret, and that in the full sublimation of his love for Emily Hale, his Beatrice, he completes his own Vita Nuova.