St. Michael’s Church & Coker Court in 2008; image via Wikimedia Commons user Mike Searle

T. S. Eliot made two visits to the Somerset village of East Coker, where his remains are now interred. On June 18, 1936 he wrote to his friend Polly Tandy, “By foot to the pretty village of East Coker, the only blemish of which is a memorial stained glass window, the ugliest I ever saw, Faith Hope & Love with malignant faces, Love a little higher than her villainous sisters by reason of standing on the family arms incorrectly inscribed, which has been put in only this year by an American cousin.”

Gradually, he developed a fascination with the local history and his family’s ties to the place, and on March 31, 1937, writing to John Hayward, he signed himself “Your oblgd obt servt | Th. Eliot | of Somerset.” On August 5, he reported to Lady Richmond, wife of the Editor of the Times Literary Supplement: “I walked from East to West Coker in great heat.” Three years later, he remembered that walk in East Coker, the second of his Four Quartets, in the line “Into the village, in the electric heat.”

East Coker is a version of pastoral poetry, yet it is infused with the realism of the most modern and urban of poets. Where Gerard Manley Hopkins saw “Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,/ Grass and greenworld all together,” Eliot