Burnt Norton, composed in 1935, is in every sense the central work in Eliot's verse between 1931 and 1939. It grew out of Murder in the Cathedral, and it led on to The Family Reunion. First published as the conclusion to Collected Poems 1909–1935, it seemed the culmination of his ‘pure, unapplied poetry’, and, to Eliot himself, its end. Only with the war did it prove to have been incomplete, and to require the three further Quartets.

The other poems of the decade, after the ‘unfinished’ ‘Coriolan’, are minor, or simply amusements. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, mostly written in 1934–6, show the poet practising his technique behind the mask of the comic versifier. The eleven minor poems have more to them than that: they reveal in an accessible, even intimate way, something of the author of Burnt Norton.

‘Five-Finger Exercises’, published in the Criterion in January 1933, were probably written before Eliot left for America in the autumn of 1932, to lecture at Harvard. There is a mordant wound beneath their wit. The prevalence of animals, and the lightness with which much learning is alluded to, would suggest an unbending towards pleasantry. Yet ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot!’ His prim and grim sense of Time and Mortality is the burden of these lines, and they are not disposed to be kind to the animal.