HOME  |  POLITICS  |  INTERVIEWS  |  COLUMNS  |  BIOGRAPHIES  |  CULTURE  |  LITERATURE  |  POETRY  |  MUSIC  |  ABOUS US  |  CONTACT   

Vip Media is an independent platform dedicated to global journalism, cultural insight, and intellectual clarity. We exist to document, question, and interpret the forces shaping our world - with precision, integrity, and depth. Our editorial vision is rooted in curiosity and conviction: we pursue stories that matter, voices that challenge, and perspectives that transcend borders.

 

 

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot

 

THE POETRY OF ELIOT

(According to F.R. Leavis, J. Williamson, and Helen Gardner)

 

 

An in-depth exploration of T.S. Eliot’s poetry—from Prufrock to Four Quartets—tracing his evolution

through modernist fragmentation, mythic structure, spiritual crisis, and the search for transcendence.

 

Author: Saša Milivojev

 

T.S. Eliot stands as the first truly modern English poet and among the earliest European poets of the twentieth century. His debut collection, Poems 1909–1925, already heralds a profound shift and exerts considerable influence.

The earliest section of the book dates to 1917 and marks a pivotal moment in English lyric poetry—Prufrock. The opening poem of the entire collection is:

 

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

 

This poem represents a complete rupture with the traditions of the nineteenth century. The nature of its imagery reveals both a complexity of approach and a subtlety of tone.

By “complexity of approach,” we refer to Eliot’s ability to encompass a wide range of sensibilities and images within a single poem. He fuses a modern, urban sensibility—with depictions of the city, though no longer in the descriptive manner of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry—with a pervasive sense of aging, and the tragedy of aging and transience, both personal and universal. Diverse elements come into direct contact: from lines such as “I grow old … I grow old … / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” which were criticized at the time as unpoetic, to passages describing yellow smoke and fog drifting through the city, rubbing its back against windowpanes and urban canals—imagery poetic even by nineteenth-century standards. Thus, high poeticism is interwoven with irony and self-irony, reflecting a nuanced relationship with the self and the world.

The banality and superficiality of modern man are expressed in lines like “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” whose refrains evoke a claustrophobic sense of urban ennui.

In this way, the laws of the poetic are forgotten: the poet claims the liberty to use any material he deems significant. This is the sensibility of one who lives fully within his time. Yet, there are also passages whose rhythm is slow and ponderous, such as those with overtly refined and pathetic expressions like “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” or in combination with the caricatural: “I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter.” A conscious elegance in disappointment: “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”

 

Portrait of a Lady

 

In the following poem, Eliot achieves a far greater degree of balance and refinement. The tone is more consistent, the rhythm more harmonious. Here, he emerges as master of both poetic experience and technique. Everything is in motion, yet under absolute control. Again, the theme is aging—not personal, but that of a woman who is both a friend and something more. Personal aging is felt through reflections, fears, and premonitions of the future. The dialogic form is differentiated by presenting the lady’s utterances in the idiom of contemporary speech. The verse is free, yet Eliot’s strength lies in achieving internal precision and control. For the first time in English poetry, the poet approaches contemporary speech as closely as a novelist might. This marks a major triumph over traditional habits. The boldness of transitions and psychological delineations, along with the use of refrains that sustain rhythm and evoke the endless, meaningless duration of life in old age (as when the lady, realizing she is no longer capable of love or the charms of life, repeats: “I shall sit here, serving tea to friends”). This is the most significant poem in the Prufrock section.

Baudelaire owed much of his invention to Tristan Corbière and Jules Laforgue, as well as to the late Elizabethan dramatists and poets of England—all of whom Eliot studied. The development of urban sensibility links him to Baudelaire. He is particularly indebted to Laforgue for the self-ironic, skeptical stance in Prufrock. Yet, given the structural differences between French and English verse, this only underscores the originality required to transform such influences into great poetry. The most important poem following this work dates from 1920:

 

GERONTION (Greek: “Little Old Man”)

 

This poem is significant on multiple levels. It stands as a major poetic achievement in its own right, but it is also crucial for the precise development of Eliot’s celebrated technique—essential for understanding The Waste Land. The dynamic resemblance to late Elizabethan dramatic style is evident. Yet, no poem of comparable quality exists in the works of Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, Chapman, or even Donne, whom Eliot greatly esteemed—perhaps only in Shakespeare.

Here, sensation becomes word and word becomes sensation, as Eliot described the metaphysical poets. The poem exhibits:

It marks a stark departure from nineteenth-century English poets such as Tennyson. Even when Tennyson writes in iambic pentameter with dramatic intent, his tone is more Miltonic than Shakespearean. His poetic expression is distanced from speech, and the musicality of his language becomes an end in itself. In Eliot, both rhythm and language are rooted in contemporary speech.

Whereas Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady explore personal turmoil and individual concerns, Gerontion presents an old man who embodies a condition far removed from the poet’s own. He represents a comprehensive human consciousness, elevated beyond the individual.

Eliot’s method here eschews narrative and logical continuity. The poem is best read backwards—only at the end do we realize that all the characters are contents of the old man’s memory: “Tenants of the house / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.” Let us proceed: the poetic “I,” an old man “in a dry month,” too aged even to read, listens as a child reads to him, while he waits for rain. The imagery shifts to a Jew supposedly seen sitting on a window ledge, and simultaneously to a coughing goat on a hill near the house. These two images cannot be logically or visually connected; they coexist only as contents of consciousness—a fact revealed only at the end. All figures serve to help the old man resolve the question: What remains? What is the meaning?

This connects to the epigraph from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “Thou hast nor youth nor age, But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep, Dreaming of both.”

A central Eliot theme—present from Prufrock through The Waste Land and beyond—is also found here: the mixture of memory and desire within present barrenness. The old man, waiting in vain for rain in a barren month, experiences envy toward both others’ and his own youthful vigor. Youthful desire is entwined with the mysteries of faith: “The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Wrapped in the robes of darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger…”

Thus, youth and Christ’s strength are fused within a single line. Eliot’s signature leaps between themes are evident—entirely different emotions and sensations are juxtaposed and merged.

Most importantly, once this emotional depth is established through faith, it is contrasted—through a sublime passage—with worldly, modern frustration, evoked through concrete names, feelings, and images: “To be eaten, to be drunk, All in whispers, by Mr. Silver, With caressing hands, in Limoges, Who walked all night in the adjoining room, By Hakagawa, among the Titian paintings, who bowed, By Madame Tornquist in the darkened room, Who rearranged the flowers, by Fraulein von Kulp, Who entered the hall and passed through the door with a rustle.”

Again, the transition is exquisitely subtle. The feeling, elevated to a metaphysical level through allusion to the Holy Communion, is delicately contrasted with worldly vanity. The whispers—initially sacred, like those of prayer—become conspiratorial, lustful gossip, evoking brothels. Art is now introduced “among the Titians”—art and faith, both refuges from time and nihilistic reality, suffer the same frustration. Finally, the image descends to a very specific individual in a concrete pose, emphasizing present emptiness: “Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts. An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob.”

The image ends precisely where it began—with the old man in barren solitude.

Finally, Gerontion introduces another structural element of Eliot’s poetics: ambiguity. A prime example is the closing image of the gull. This image accompanies scenes from the newspaper—“World News”—with names listed haphazardly. The oily wind scatters a handful of the gull’s feathers, painfully revealing the futility and helplessness of individual life. Yet, the gull’s capricious vitality also stands in opposition to a world of finance, crime, and depravity. The old man’s position is now ambiguous: the feathers signify inevitable death and decay— “An old man driven by the Trade Winds To a sleepy corner”— but they also symbolize the strength and passion he has lost.

The following poems develop the technique initiated in Gerontion to a high degree. They are significant for introducing what will become dominant in The Waste Land: allusiveness and citationality, which were not yet present in Gerontion.

Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar This poem can be understood in relation to the opening citation from Antony and Cleopatra. Its primary function is ironic contrast: heroic, exalted love (in the first part of the poem) is juxtaposed with a contemptible episode from modern urban life, where the Jew Bleistein visits a brothel.

Sweeney Among the Nightingales A similar technique is employed. The allusion to Agamemnon’s murder is again contrasted with a brothel scene—where a prostitute (here a Jewish woman, which led to accusations of antisemitism against Eliot) kills the visitor, Sweeney. In the finale, myth and the everyday are fused through the existing church of Sacré-Cœur, where spilled liquid defiles the king’s shroud, all accompanied by Agamemnon’s cries.

In these two poems, the number of allusions is nearly incalculable—ranging from epigraphs and hidden quotations to descriptive allusions. They directly usher in The Waste Land.

 

THE WASTE LAND (1922–1923)

 

The central issue of The Waste Land is the problem of interpreting modern poetry. The poem provoked considerable controversy—Eliot was accused of requiring erudition for comprehension, and of providing insufficient commentary and guidance, as the symbolic and mythological references drawn from various cultures could not be grasped within such a brief framework. Today, this criticism carries less weight. First, it is partially valid; second, some elements may be better understood without commentary; and third, Eliot’s model has become foundational for modern poetry—marked by allusive practice, citationality, and intertextuality.

Modern sensibility and the consciousness of modern man are fractured—defined by distortion, dichotomy, and unresolved antinomies. Such a consciousness demands in art an open form, rather than a final, closed, and unified work. F.R. Leavis offers a widely influential objection: that The Waste Land fails to articulate a coherent metaphysical idea. Yet this critique reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Eliot. The poem is indeed organized, but this organization does not imply formal closure or conceptual completeness—not even metaphysical. Eliot’s erudition, his wealth of literary allusions and borrowings, reflects the current state of civilization. Traditions and cultures are presented, but no single tradition can encompass the vast diversity of material summoned by historical imagination—an imagination that must contend with the immense capital of the past. This is the source of fragmentation of form and the irreversible loss of a sense of absoluteness. Eliot’s aim is to present the absence of form as a form.

On the other hand, Eliot’s notes pose a separate problem. In short, they exert pressure on the reader’s reception. This pressure arises from the nature of artistic reception—the work demands to be constituted in the recipient’s consciousness as a more or less unified aesthetic object (which has nothing to do with extracting a metaphysical idea, since the poem is not a theological treatise but a work of art). A work with so many points of entry, so radically open, reaches a level of semantic extensiveness that threatens the formation of an aesthetic whole. The author’s notes thus function as a form of extratextual, non-fictional pressure on reception. The challenge of understanding this poem lies in determining the extent to which those notes belong to the world of the poem.

Leavis describes the condition of modernity as one of speed and diversity, shaped by life in the machine age. The result is a break in continuity and a violent uprooting of life. This metaphor of roots fits well within Eliot’s context—we witness the complete uprooting of old habits, of life once rooted in the earth. Urban imagery linking Eliot to Baudelaire and Laforgue is particularly significant.

Eliot’s first note refers to From Ritual to Romance, Jessie Weston’s anthropological study of fertility rites, where the motif of the waste land plays a central role. A second key parallel is Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which also engages with the waste land theme. Frazer’s grove of Diana is a multifaceted symbol. There, Diana’s priest is a murderer—he must kill his predecessor to renew the cycle of life. This ritual killing is not an end in itself; its purpose is to preserve the old within the framework of the new, which is the condition for continuity and development. This directly connects to Eliot’s conception of tradition and to the title The Waste Land, which is a direct allusion to Frazer’s forest. Thus, life is born from death. A fundamental link exists between the sacred and the profane. In Weston’s motif of the slain god (the “Hanged God,” in Eliot), the central element of sacrifice carries the same idea.

Eliot’s primary concern: birth, copulation, and death. The key theme is the distance between the civilization depicted in The Waste Land and natural rhythms, rendered through ironic contrast using anthropological motifs. Vegetative cults and fertility celebrations, with their attendant magic, represent harmony between human culture and the natural environment, expressing a sense of life’s unity. In the modern waste land: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…” Spring is thus perceived as cruel, because today—due to the rupture between civilization and nature—it fails to ignite the human spirit. It does not generate life and fulfillment, but rather disgust, spiritual lethargy, and unanswered questions. Again, we encounter the intermingling of memory and desire, familiar from earlier poems. Spring painfully blends memory and desire within present sterility. Once more, this unfolds on the level of personal aging, which, through Eliot’s characteristic transitions, becomes the aging of civilization.

The structural unity of this poem is not merely metaphysical, as some have claimed. It is constructed simultaneously on dramaturgical and musical levels. In fact, the entire poem possesses musical organization—it functions as a symphony, meaning it must be read from beginning to end. Each preceding passage creates a semantic background upon which all subsequent parts must be read.

Let us proceed.

The first section of the poem is The Burial of the Dead. In truth, the actual beginning is Eliot’s note, which establishes the connection to Weston and Frazer. The symbolism of vegetative cults presented in those works provides the initial semantic background. Thus, the anthropological foundation serves a positive function—it creates the most general backdrop, evoking a sense of life’s unity that is essential to the poem. Here, the personal experience of Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady is entirely transcended—there is a complete projection of consciousness and abandonment of the individual. The poet becomes not only aware of his entire era and all that preceded it, but excessively aware. The result of this excessive awareness is the loss and fragmentation of form, accompanied by a sense of futility.

What is the significance of anthropology in the poem? It is, after all, a science—and science is largely responsible for this maximal expansion of consciousness. A process of disintegration. To the modern mind, pagan cults are merely human customs. The modern individual possesses knowledge of fertility rites, but the primal experience of nature and its cycles is left to the primitive. Thus, it becomes clear why April is the cruellest month, and spring a barren season. Winter is the winter of forgetfulness, a sterile winter that covers everything in the snow of oblivion. Summer arrives with a downpour. The cycle is thus closed.

Each new cycle must be viewed as a symphonic variation on a theme. The image ascends to a higher level—now it is a specific, representative experience: drinking coffee in the square, childhood memories, and the finale: “In the mountains, one feels free / I read late into the night, and in winter I go south.” This is the feeling of modern vanity. It is the memory from the April line that blends “memory and desire.” The formula known from Gerontion: memory awakens desire, but fulfillment is impossible—the condition is sterility. This is suggested by “I read late into the night,” which carries the tone of empty intellectualism. Immediately follows the contrast and commentary: April may stir dead roots with rain, but since we are given an image of vain, hollow human rumination, the next question closes the cycle: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” This stony rubbish evokes the waste land through allusion to Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes—addressing the Son of Man: “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.” Thus begins the image of spiritual agony, which will be developed in later sections. The stanza ends with: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” The theme of fear is also developed in other parts of the poem. It is both the fear of death and a primordial terror, a horror before absolute nothingness—which later becomes fully apparent.

The excerpt from Tristan and Isolde introduces a stark contrast, presenting an image of romantic, absolute love. The girl with hyacinths embodies “memory and desire”; the hyacinth, like the lilac, is associated with fertility cults. It is directly evocative, and this is further intensified through anthropological analogy. Simultaneously, the flower is linked to the Hanged God—the god of vegetation. Thus, the desolation of the waste land briefly transforms into passionate ecstasy, only to return again to the tragic image of a man who is “neither living nor dead… staring into silence.” The passage on romantic love ends in despair.

The complexity deepens in the next section of the first movement, which introduces Madame Sosostris, the clairvoyant: “Famous clairvoyante / Had a bad cold, nevertheless / Known to be the wisest woman in Europe.” Eliot adopts an ironic stance here. She presents a Tarot deck, which becomes a new semantic field, crucial for the subsequent sections. The prophetess introduces the demi-monde, just as the earlier conversation in the square introduced vanity and superficiality. Eliot explains the significance of the Tarot in his notes. First, the Tarot is connected to fertility rites. Second, the figures on the cards serve as a backdrop for the characters in the pivotal section “What the Thunder Said.” Eliot demonstrates how various figures merge into one another: the Hanged Man relates to Frazer’s Hanged God of fertility, and later connects to the cloaked figure from the Emmaus journey that opens “What the Thunder Said.” We realize this is the same Son of God introduced in the first section. The Phoenician sailor with pearl eyes and the one-eyed merchant also reappear later, as do the crowds described by the prophetess, who are immediately identified in the next stanza with the masses crossing London Bridge. The prophetess warns to beware death by water. In the section “Death by Water,” we will see that this warning is futile—death is inevitable, and the salvific water longed for since the beginning, the water from which all life springs (in fertility rituals), does not save—it kills.

Thus, charlatanism and banality coexist with fate and metaphysical depth. Next comes the image of the Unreal City, shrouded in dawn mist, mown down by death. Eliot’s note helps us interpret this through the lens of Dante’s Inferno, where punishment for sin is endured in eternal wandering, aimlessness, and failure to reach a destination. The Unreal City alludes to Baudelaire, and its nightmarish quality is intensified by an episode from Eliot’s personal life, when he heard a chilling pause after the ninth chime of the clock at St. Mary Woolnoth. This becomes, within the poem, the horror of the modern city—its eerie silence: “The dead sound after the stroke of nine.” The poet meets a friend and asks about the corpse he buried last year in the garden: “Has it begun to sprout?” Again, this connects to the fertility cult, but here the dimension is nightmarish—previously introduced, now further developed.

The section ends with a line from Baudelaire’s opening poem in Les Fleurs du mal: “Tu! Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” This is a direct descent into the personal, highly effective, and distinctly Baudelairean.

The next section, A Game of Chess, begins with an allusion to Antony and Cleopatra, but quickly shifts into a feverish rhythm of neurasthenic agony (Leavis), continuing and expanding the nightmare theme from the first movement. We see two people trembling in fear at strange sounds in the house, and the Phoenician sailor with pearl eyes reemerges—this part of the second movement ends in a somber image of death. What follows appears to be a contrast—life—but it is a miserable life, where a failed thirty-year-old woman tries to attract a man, and everything ends in endless repetition of banality: “Good night! Good night! Good night! Good night!”

The Fire Sermon alludes to the Buddha’s sermon, the Buddhist counterpart to Christ’s preaching. The poetic “I” sits by the river fishing (an allusion to the Fisher King from the first section), reflecting on the death of his father the king, and his father before him. The line of the Hanged King is reestablished—tracing from Weston’s and Frazer’s Hanged God, through the Son of Man (Christ), to the Hanged King of the Tarot in the first section. Again, the Unreal City appears, but now it contains the one-eyed merchant from the Tarot, who is simultaneously real—a friend of the poet inviting him to lunch. The very center of the poem (the central part of the third section, which is itself central) is the key to interpretation. Eliot states this in his notes. It is the image of the androgynous prophet Tiresias, who supposedly merely observes, but is in fact the central actor of this world. Just as all characters blend into one another and emerge from one another, so too do all themes and variations complement each other. Tiresias, who sees all and knows all, is the convergence point of all male and female figures. The key to the poem is the attempt to place total human consciousness at the center of attention, embodied in Tiresias. This explains and justifies the difficult problem of the poem’s organization: the desire to present the consciousness of modern man promotes the absence of organizing principles, the lack of any internal direction. A poem that contains all myths cannot be built upon any single myth. Tiresias simultaneously describes and foretells scenes: “I, Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs / Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest.” Once again, love—meant to aspire toward creation—is reduced to mere sex and dissatisfaction, that is, fleeting gratification.

This passage also raises a problem regarding Eliot’s notes. It ends with the following lines: “To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out / O Lord Thou pluckest / burning.” Eliot claims this is clearly an allusion to St. Augustine (his arrival in Carthage) and to the Buddha. As a culmination, he says, he placed an allusion to representatives of Western and Eastern asceticism. However, the fact remains that these lines do not easily generate such an allusive level. It is the least convincing passage in that regard.

Death by Water, the fourth section, enacts the foretold demise of the Phoenician sailor. His death, previously foreshadowed by Madame Sosostris, now unfolds with stark finality. The sailor, once adorned with pearl eyes, is claimed by the very element that was longed for throughout the poem—water. Yet this water, symbolic of life and renewal in fertility rites, does not redeem—it destroys. The salvific promise collapses into fatal inevitability.

The fifth and final section, What the Thunder Said, is the most renowned. Much is clarified here. Its semantic structure is tripartite, interweaving:

Following the icy silence—echoing the silence after the ninth chime of St. Mary Woolnoth and the broader motif of the waste land—and the “murmur in the rocks,” which recalls the neurasthenic rhythm of A Game of Chess, Christ arrives with the sound of thunder. He is the evolved form of the Hanged God, the Fisher King, the resurrected buried corpse. His arrival signifies rebirth through death and simultaneously evokes the Emmaus narrative. He is the cloaked figure, the invisible companion on the Emmaus road.

Eliot, in his notes, introduces a striking intrusion of reality into this fictional world—he recounts how Arctic explorers, exhausted to the point of hallucination, reported visions of an unknown man following them. This Christ is the sum of all spring gods—Adonis, Attis, Osiris—sacrificed and hanged. The drought in this section becomes a thirst for the water of faith and healing, rendering the orchestration of the poem overtly religious. Yet the thunder is dry and barren—there is no rain, no resurrection, no renewal. After the opening, the verse loses its suppleness, dragging like the figures on London Bridge. The imagined sound of salvific rain becomes a torment.

The most significant passage presents a nightmarish vision of universal chaos, where the ruins of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, London, and Vienna appear as unreal cities—already familiar to us. The image ascends to a portrayal of humanity endlessly circling—a vision of eternal futility. Weston’s Chapel Perilous becomes a Chapel Dangerous, ominous, filled with bones that are sterile, incapable of sprouting life.

Then the thunder speaks, uttering the Upanishadic triad: Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata Eliot explains: Give, Sympathize, Control. Yet under “Give,” we find only the barren offering of the self—fleeting and devoid of essence. “Sympathize” connects to Bradley’s philosophy: since we perceive the world from finite perspectives, we live in isolated prisons and know only our own key. “Control” is deeply disheartening, culminating in the question: “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”

There is no transformation at the end of this incommensurable myth. The poet sits by the shore, fishing, behind him a barren plain and the ruins of London. He is Nerval’s Aquitanian prince of shattered towers.

The poem concludes with the Upanishadic invocation: Shantih Shantih Shantih This is a notably uneventful ending. Eliot felt compelled to comment on it in his notes, translating—by his own admission—only a partial meaning of the Vedic verse as “the peace which passeth understanding.” He tacitly acknowledges the limited effect such a line can have on the Western reader’s consciousness. It is the message of the later Four Quartets, where Eliot advocates acceptance of divine mystery regardless of rational insight.

 

THE HOLLOW MEN (1925)

 

These are the poems that follow The Waste Land. The dedication—“Mistah Kurtz—he dead”—refers to the character from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the novel, a boy announces the death of the protagonist, who has spent years in the African jungle trading ivory. The second epigraph is drawn from the children’s chant during Guy Fawkes Day, commemorating the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Parliament was to be blown up. On this anniversary, an effigy of Guy Fawkes—stuffed with straw—is burned, and children collect donations from passersby. The epigraph reads: “A penny for the Old Guy.”

The poem ends with the famous lines: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Thus, through quotation and allusion, a semantic framework is established—from beginning to end—signaling the disappearance of all hope, as we know from Conrad’s novel that the character dies unable to characterize his life with anything but the words: “The horror! The horror!” The entire poem is constructed to follow this allusive trajectory—initially steeped in neurasthenic agony, caught between “the idea and the reality,” “the motion and the act,” and ultimately concluding in a quietude that stems from the inability to articulate anything about a world of emptiness, as in Conrad.

On the other hand, the allusive spectrum introduced through the story of Old Guy evokes a world populated by hollow-headed beings—utterly vacuous existences. This is a complex layer, as Eliot confirmed that the title also relates to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (among other works), where Shakespeare notes that love in decline requires ceremony and theatricality. The hollow men, like parade horses, stage grotesque and pitiful displays, lacking all depth.

This is crucial within the poem itself, as it clarifies why the text is so deeply entwined with religious ritual. Through Shakespeare, the image of empty ceremony is evoked—the poem even ends like a liturgy, with choral repetition in address to God (“Thine is the Kingdom, Thine is the Life…”), which are in fact refrains within the poem. These men are not entirely dead—they are spiritually inert, and therein lies the irony. They touch heads emptily, as in mass, and sing together, but their heads are filled with straw—like the effigy of Guy Fawkes.

This is Eliot’s well-known contrast between sacred ritual and banal everyday life—a juxtaposition that exposes the spiritual void of modern existence.

 

ASH-WEDNESDAY (1930)

 

In this collection, Eliot’s preoccupation is purely religious. It follows the period of his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. A religious tone is interwoven with lamentation over the irrevocable loss of youthful creative power: “I have no hope that I shall ever know / The glory of the positive hour again”— that fragile moment in which we touch divinity, however partially and faintly—through creation. And this, now, is irretrievably lost.

The entire poem represents a struggle to attain faith in something beyond the self—a difficult effort to reach, through pure belief, something that reason cannot grasp. Life’s journey is presented as a metaphysical path between antinomies, toward the recognition of the One. The central problem of the poem is explicitly framed as the problem of patience and faith. Liturgical echoes appear in the allusion to Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, which Eliot renders in English. Patience and sincerity are posed as challenges of both faith and creation—our relationship to the Creator and to the created. The created must be embodied, however imperfectly, for if it is not embodied—if it is not made—it is nothing.

A direct prayer to the Virgin, surrounded by three leopards, exemplifies Eliot’s fusion of the irreconcilable—symbolically elusive even to interpretation. The Virgin is refracted through the image of Woman, as Christ is through Man.

 

FOUR QUARTETS (According to Helen Gardner)

 

These poems exhibit an almost mystical symmetry—both in meaning and in structure. They are four meditations on the same revelation, each articulated differently: through distinct symbolism, rhythm, and tone. Each bears the name of a geographical location with symbolic resonance:

The most frequent image in Four Quartets is that of the traveler—linked to the figures on London Bridge in The Waste Land and the journey to Emmaus. These are grotesquely grimacing faces, weary and wretched—not travelers, but wanderers. For Eliot, this is a metaphor for human sinfulness. Movement from point to point symbolizes partial knowledge, the imperfection of human intellect, which requires faith—for only faith can offer the complete picture. Faith is linked to movement that is stillness, akin to Taoist thought.

The paradox is that reason, rather than ignoring its own limitations, must acknowledge and understand them—and this recognition itself constitutes a path: a journey through past, present, and future.

The central sentence across all four poems concerns time, expressed in various ways. The essence is given at the very beginning: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future.” And another: “The way is not in movement but in stillness.”

Each poem offers three dimensions of meaning—literal, moral, and theological: