In 1930 he published his next major poem,
Ash-Wednesday, written after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Conspicuously different in style and tone from his earlier work, these confessional lyrics chart his continued search for order in an age of chaos. The culmination of this search as well as of Eliot's poetic writing is his great meditation on the nature of time and of human history,
Four Quartets (1936-1942). With
Four Quartets, Eliot virtually concluded his career as a poet.
Eliot was almost as distinguished a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921, he contributed approximately one hundred reviews and articles to perhaps a dozen periodicals. This early criticism was produced at night under the pressure of supplementing his meager salary, first as a teacher, then as a bank clerk; and not, as is sometimes suggested, under the compulsion to rewrite literary history. He did much, it is true, to generate a revolution in literary taste, but this was not part of his intention. Possessing a special critical intelligence and superb training in philosophy and literature, he wrote with such elegance and incision that his essays, however hastily written and for whatever motive, had an immediate impact.
