[Eliot's pessimism] finds its complement in the historical disillusion of our epoch…. It is because the dilemma of man's true significance is at the heart of the century's trouble that Eliot has gained such a large audience, and that his work has provoked such extreme reactions.

Yet there seems to be a paradox here, for his poetry is the poetry of the isolation of a single soul, and very rarely do personal human relationships figure in it. It is a poetry that is almost always remote from the more ordinary human emotions, and such emotions, when they are treated of, are viewed by someone standing apart from the action and viewing it coolly. (p. 177)

The earlier poems show some attempt to find significance in human relationships, but they are really a report of the failure of this attempt. The breakdown of communication between human beings or the failure...