Customer Reviews
Only Eliot will do. - By: C. Nation, 15 Dec 2008 
I used to listen to The Four Quartets on 12" vinyl, read by Eliot. Apart from the wonderful poetry, his very voice has echoedin my mind these past 30 years since I last heard the recording.
There are phrases which,in his reading, have stayed with me: "human kind can not bear very much reality", "all shall be well & all manner of things shall be well." "We shall not cease from exploration & the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started & know the place for the first time."
They say that Paul Scofield's reading is magnificent. I don't know: I've not heard it. But, however good, it cannot compare with the author himself reading this work. It is,in a word, sublime.
And - BONUS TIME! Amazon's listing has it that this is an audio cassette edition. Not so - it's CD! I was getting all worked up about having to get the cassettes copied to CD but note: 'HCCD 1164' [Harper Collins] is a 2-CD set. So 4 Quartets can go straight into my Sony MP3 player. Magic.
Never fails - By: Ted Fisher, 25 Mar 2007 This may sound curmudgeonly, but listening to T.S. Eliot reading "Four Quartets" has almost never failed to put me to sleep, no matter how agitated I may be. Once his lugubrious voice hits "Time present & time past are both perhaps presentin time future", I start to calm down, & I'm usually asleep soon after the end of the first stanza of Burnt Norton. It's truly amazing. Don't get me wrong, I love Eliot's poetry & am capable of appreciating it. But if you are spending hundreds on sleeping aids, try this instead.
THE VOICE OF THE POET - By: Val De Beer, 29 May 2005 What an absolute joy it was to hear T S Eliot's own voice reading his poems which affected a whole generation during the Second World War & after & which have inspired students & readers ever since.
Although he tends to keep his voice dispassionate because of his belief that one must project one's own interpretation on the poems, it is still wonderful to hear him saying 'Da, Datta, Dayadavam' at the end of What the Thunder Said, & know that he is experiencing the peace which he describes.
Of course,the movement of the poemsin The Waste Land & thosein Four Quartets do convey the extent of his own personal suffering & then finally the release & happiness towards the end of his life, but to us, it also provides a comfort when we need it as the same movement is often also ours.
I love his poetry & I loved listening to him reading it.
