The talk delivered at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School which was held at the University of London in July 2009 exists only on a set of index cards. It began with the Modernist experiment in poetry and fiction (represented by The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s fiction) preceded by experiments in dance, music and art of a decade earlier. The talk went on to discuss what Eliot learnt from Stravinsky’s music for Diaghilev’s ballet, Sacre du Printemps, using Eliot’s still uncollected review for the New York Dial. I then spoke of The Waste Land as a vision of sorts, a vision of an inferno haunted by memories that were counter to the inferno: visionary moments of perfection, looking back to the fourth ‘Prelude’ and ahead to the visionary moment in the rose-garden of Burnt Norton: ‘Quick now, here, now, always’. The idea of the talk was the importance of what Eliot called in the Quartets, ‘hints and guesses’ of sublimitythe most an ordinary man can expect, as distinct from the saint’s lifetime ‘burning in every moment’.

• Lyndall Gordon(Oxford University)