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Meditating on Four Quartets
John E. Booty
*Meditating on Four Quartets* is a devotional companion to T.S. Eliot's late masterpiece, written by the Episcopal scholar John E. Booty and published by Cowley Publications in 1983. Eliot's *Four Quartets* — four intricate poems circling time, memory, and the eternal — can intimidate even practiced readers; Booty, a distinguished church historian, approaches them not as puzzles to be solved but as texts to be prayed. Moving through the poems, he draws out their Christian and contemplative dimensions, treating Eliot's meditations on stillness and redemption as spiritual exercises. It is a slim, quiet book, aimed at readers who want to dwell in the poems rather than merely analyze them. For anyone reading the *Quartets* as a work of the spirit as much as of the intellect, Booty is a gentle, learned guide.
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The author
John Everitt Booty (1925–2013) was an Episcopal priest and church historian who served as historiographer of the Episcopal Church. He taught at Virginia Theological Seminary and the Episcopal Divinity School and was dean of the seminary at the University of the South, and he was a noted scholar of the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker — a background that shaped his reading of Eliot's Anglican devotion.
The book
Published by Cowley Publications in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1983, the book walks through Eliot's Four Quartets as a sequence of meditations. Booty foregrounds the poems' spiritual argument — their concern with time and timelessness, purgation, and grace — offering them to the reader as material for contemplation and prayer rather than as objects of purely literary analysis.
How to read it
It works best read slowly, alongside Eliot's text, a poem or section at a time. Literary critics may want more on Eliot's technique, but for devotional and reflective reading Booty's guidance is warm and sure-footed.
For more context
Read it with Eliot's Four Quartets open beside it; Helen Gardner's The Composition of Four Quartets offers the fuller literary background.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- John E. Booty
- Publisher
- Cowley
- Place of publication
- Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Year
- 1983
- Edition
- Reprint (orig. 1983)
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Maine