T.S. ELIOT

If one poem more than any other typifies Eliot's genius for concise and free verse, it is The Waste Land, with its doomsday foreboding and confessional guilt of the 'hollow men'. Antithetical in character and style to Pound, who, after all, was an idealist, Eliot stands closer to Joyce ... as a materialist bent on chronicling the creeping decadence of Western man, the 'hollow man' - superficial as soulless automata, falling ever deeper into capitalist materialism, utterly incapable of spiritual redemption, destined for materialist damnation and an end to the remnants of realism, all liberal pretences, as barbarism closes-in ever closer for the kill, no way out, Eliot (like Dante before him) trapped in the soulless hell and just as surely a part of it - witness his predilection for a steady nine-to-five bank job - as those whom he is writing about or, rather, alluding to in poems such as The Waste Land.

An antipoet whose prose-like style confirms his own decadence in left-wing materialism, fallen away from love no less than from poetic realism, The Love Poem of J. Alfred Prufrock a bitter testimony to heartless degeneracy ... presented in the cruel metaphor of an ageing man, himself a microcosmic reflection of the decline into old age and concomitant moral senility of the once-proud West.

Impossible for me to like or admire Eliot, another of the great exiles from his native America, turned, like Henry James but unlike Ezra Pound, British citizen. That America gave birth to two such contrasting major poets as Pound and Eliot within the same generation, must surely be one of the great literary enigmas of the twentieth century! Certainly it provides ample testimony to democratic relativity, albeit a type of relativity in which, under nuclear pressure, the component parts diverge towards the extremes of fascism and communism respectively.