The Eliot of 'Gerontion' and 'The Hollow Men' … is a quasi-Absentist, his protagonists the seeming victims of an incapacitated faith. The poems tempt us to share despair—at least they feel their way into it with a relish. At the same time they allow us to infer that not faith but the protagonists are to blame. They may be said to refer Christian belief to the reader and even to judge and as it were wait to receive the repentant speakers, who meanwhile enjoy their backwardness. So somehow the 'sightless' hollow men know that a holy plenitude is possible for others—others have crossed the tumid river with 'direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom'. Their desert Absentist realm, with its belatedness, its impotency, is not then the only kingdom, the only death. Now for the Absentist, absence is irremediable and insuperable; it pervades and limits everything; the 'broken jaw of our lost kingdoms' is all. By contrast, the hollow men torture themselves with knowledge of a numinous other realm—and please themselves by hanging back from it. 'Let me be no nearer', they pray as it were inversely, 'Let me also wear / deliberate disguises'. What is this if not self-willed? Their despair is disingenous.
Yet, spurious as spiritual destitution may be in his poems, Eliot provided models for Absentist forms. Introducing into English poetry an 'insidious' principle of disorientation, he dispersed the spatial and temporal closures of traditional verse. He exposed the medium itself to hesitations and reluctances, frustrations and panics. And he forced it to acknowledge the negative otherness of the world and the precipitate, arhythmic progress of mortality.
