T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton (1935)

Burnt Norton (below) is a country house in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire.  Nowadays people like to get married there, but back in the 1930s, T.S. Eliot visited it frequently and the house and its rose garden evoked in him a nostalgia for Britain’s faded splendor.  The ghosts and sounds of children playing that he sensed in the strange mix of past-in-the-present-and-future can still be felt in such places. 

Eliot is buried in St. Michael’s Church in East Coker, near Yeovil in Somerset, from where one of his ancestors had emigrated to Massachusetts in the 17th century. The town gave its name to another of the Four Quartets.