The common observation of the coldly apocalyptic gesture in Eliot, the intoning of favored set phrases ("Unreal City"), the self-concealing reverie that proved a peculiarly satisfying mode, fit nonetheless with [Gabriel Pearson's account of the social situation of Eliot as an embattled aesthete]; but with the proviso that we take this in its spirit, since with slight alterations it could cover any symbolist retreat to language, any style enamored of obscure intensities of speech. Disinheritance being a general modernist theme, various social situations may lie behind it, not merely that of a poet who may have felt expelled from a world more sturdily composed than the one his poems would reflect. The tone of lament, or of disdainful surmise, implies some more hopeful relation to sources of health that the poems can only point to off-the-page. In certain of the early poems, some nicely turned pieces of grumbling are symptomatic of the banishment to an interior world or, more accurately, a composed and witty stage idiom, one incapable of offering any representation of the social world that is not immediately thrown into doubt by its own ironic self-regard, its appetite for appropriation and dissembling gestures.
It is of course understandably easy, and for polemical purposes useful, to allow Eliot's knowledge of certain intimate modern gestures to yield a large proposition about an entire way of life. Certainly "The Waste Land" sweeps up into one bold but under-articulated structure a great many intimations of decline and exhaustion, in this respect resembling other works written between the wars…. Eliot's intimations were bolstered by Frazer, and then were free to go their way, the common ritual that made the scaffolding of the poem being an immemorial fiction rather than a superior vision from whose standpoint behavior could be confidently judged. Part V solicits a vision that will not appear, and the composite figure it addresses disappears into the chaos that follows, the tottering capitals of Europe reduced to figures in a nightmare. This argues for Eliot's attraction to incantation as a way of resisting the temptation to transform indignant perceptions into a lawyer's brief, or overmoralized lament…. [One can, however,] point to what keeps the poem from being a half-hearted jeremiad or Spenglerian tract on the decline of the West; and this can only be its art, its chosen mode of language.
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