East Coker

About “East Coker”

East Coker is the second poem in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It was written as a way for Eliot to return to poetry and was inspired by his earlier work Burnt Norton. The poem was completed in early 1940 and published in the UK in the Easter edition of the 1940 New English Weekly. It also appeared in the May 1940 issue of the American journal Partisan Review. The title comes from a village in Somerset, England, which is linked to Eliot's family history. Eliot's ashes were later placed in St Michael and All Angels' Church in East Coker. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.)