As advertised, this page is devoted to a poet whom I (and I am only one out of many who share this view) believe to be the greatest single poetic genius of the twentieth century.  I am not implying that my respect for Eliot (ol'Tom as his chums sometimes called him...but that was more prevalent after he became a British subject) came about very easily.  On first reading, he was difficult.  On second reading, he was frustrating.  On third reading, he was unfathomable (as you may guess, this went on and on and on and on for many many readings).  One day, though, it clicked.  The puzzle pieces fell into their proper positions.  From out of the "fragments shorn against...ruins" that he presented in The Waste Land, came a semblance of form and content that amazed me.  Titilated me.  Nay, came close to astounding me much like David Copperfield when he made the Statue of Liberty disappear, and those helicopters flew over Ellis Island, and...but that was a long time past and several therapists ago...and besides I digress.  This sudden epiphany made something very clear to me, something that perhaps was clear to Eliot, but something I have yet to find in his criticism (though I am not finished reading all of it...it is a truly wise man who can admit he does not know everything), this apparent contradiction that appears in many of his greatest poems--this overall continuity in the face of disjointed, iconclastic imagery.  Of Cupid hiding behind his wing as Philomela is "rudely forc'd," while a loveless couple talk about nothing to the strains of a ludicrous "Shakespherian rag"...and that is only one example.  Incredible, isn't it?

Where does it connect to me?  Well, I became fascinated by this apparent paradox and began to study it.  I became interested in Eliot's belief that poetry was an escape from emotion, not an expression of it.  I also became equally fascinated by Peter Ackroyd's now-classical biographical portrait of Eliot, a man in deep personal turmoil for much of his life.  I saw the pain (much like many others before me, including Ackroyd, no doubt; why else would he expose it in his book?) written in those lines.  I realized that this statement of impersonality was Eliot's theory of poetry as he wished to believe, not exactly by what he could totally follow in practice.  Otherwise, where would such inspiration come from, if not from his own life and soul?  He would indeed be a cold, empty man (despite that image described of him nonetheless) had it not been for such pain that influenced him to write his verse in a thoroughly modern fashion, in such a way that we the readers could see what he meant and what he himself represented, and how what happened to him was merely a microcosmic view of the whole damn postwar system, such as in The Waste Land.
 

"Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism.  To me, it was the only relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling."

And much like his idol, Dante Alighieri, Eliot too wandered lost within the woods of internal error, struggling to find his faith.  What we see within Eliot's poetic work from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Four Quartets, is a sort of Commedia of his own--a struggle to come to grips and to accept what he indeed believed in.  Perhaps no one on this side of the millennium has come as close to being Dante reincarnate as Eliot, and it is in these basic tenets that I have begun to develop my own ideas about poetry and its function.  In order for it to be truly successful, poetry has to be both intensely personal and dispassionately impersonal at the same time.  Without this paradox, poetry simply cannot function on very many profound levels.  That is not to disqualify the importance of a careful study of such works; of course, for literary, scholastic, and cultural anthropoligical purposes, one would find a study of this kind rather valid and enlightening.  However, it does mean that poetry that does not follow this general rule cannot hope to hold the same weight of meaning that paradoxical verse does.  Therefore, in the universal duality of intimacy and distance, we find in Eliot a lesson to learn from.
 

    I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
    Both one and many; in the brown baked features
    The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
                                    --"Little Gidding," from Four Quartets (1942)