Published on T. S. Eliot's seventy-fifth birthday, and the product of the poet's own sifting and salvaging, Collected Poems 1909–1962 offers illuminating insights into how Eliot viewed his career in its closing years. The last major work in the collection is Four Quartets, the sequence of poems that started in the mid-1930s with Burnt Norton, the poem which developed the model for those Eliot wrote in wartime: East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). But these are not the four last things the reader encounters in the Collected Poems; they have a postscript in the group of ‘Occasional Verses’ at the very end of the book. A poem written in celebration of Walter de la Mare's seventy-fifth birthday has a self-referential flavour; by far the best known of the five is Eliot's closing dedication to his wife; and the remaining three occasional poems are propaganda from the Second World War: ‘Defense of the Islands’ (1941), ‘A Note on War Poetry’ (1942) and ‘To the Indians Who Died in Africa’ (1943).