When T S Eliot was a boy, he would go with his family to the Massachusetts coast at Cape Ann, where his father had built a house for their summer holidays. The times he spent by the sea there inspired in Eliot a desire to write a book of essays about his memories of the place, memories which would later be embodied in a poem which takes as its title a ledge of rocks known as The Dry Salvages, a local landmark which could, and still can, be seen when the mist rises, a few hundred yards out to sea. “The sea”, Eliot would write in the poem, “is the land’s edge also”.

But why did thoughts and images of this Massachusetts location return to him fifty years later in wartime London during an intense period of writing in the last weeks of 1940? And how does the place fit into Eliot’s scheme of things for the third of his four Quartets, the other three of which are all set in England? ‘The Dry Salvages’ is the water quartet, its essence maritime. In Poetry Places 8 & 11, Eliot’s The Dry Salvages Day, 31st March 2012, Graham Fawcett transposes the poem to two places in coastal England, the estuarial Bradwell-on-Sea and the Jurassic coast near Burton Bradstock. .

The cost of the day will be £40 for the teaching sessions (or £32.50 concs. for 18 years & under, senior citizens, full-time students, unwaged - ES40 - and disabled) and a further £17.50 for coffee, lunch, and afternoon tea at Othona.

Click for details: http://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/events.htm#pp8bs