By Dwight Longenecker
Some time ago an old college friend who had gone on to be an English professor admitted that he not only did not enjoy the poetry of T.S.Eliot, but he didn’t have the faintest clue what Eliot was about.
I had been a fan of Eliot for a long time and asked what the problem was. “The poetry is totally fragmented. Nothing is connected. It seems like no more than a collection of images.”
My friend was right about the “collection of images.” In re-reading Eliot’s groundbreaking The Waste Land and The Hollow Men we are indeed confronted by “a heap of broken images. The images are auditory, visual, musical, literary and historical.
Here a quote from Shakespeare, Dante, the Old Testament or the Bhagavad Gita — there a snippet from a popular ragtime song or a Wagnerian opera. Here a reference to Frazer or Arthurian legend only to be brought up short with a vulgar conversation in a London pub between two cockney women. The visual images conjure up a bleak Parisian or London cityscape of the late 1920s: the poet sees a discarded waste bobbing in the Thames: “empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes.” There are rat infested alleyways, lonely slatterns and carbuncular clerks, crowds of shuffling commuters and the melancholy bells of city churches. The images are mingled with the…