Mr. Eliot’s poetry has occasioned an unusual amount of irritated or enthusiastic bewilderment. The bewilderment has several sources. The most formidable is the unobtrusiveness, in some cases the absence, of any coherent intellectual thread upon which the items of the poem are strung. A reader of ‘Gerontion,’ of ‘Preludes,’ or of ‘The Waste Land,’ may, if he will, after repeated readings, introduce such a thread. Another reader after much effort may fail to contrive one. But in either case energy will have been misapplied. For the items are united by the accord, contrast, and interaction of their emotional effects, not by an intellectual scheme that analysis must work out. The value lies in the unified response which this interaction creates in the right reader. The only intellectual activity required takes place in the realisation of the separate items. We can, of course, make a ‘rationalisation’ of the whole experience, as we can of any experience. If we do, we are adding something which does not belong to the poem. Such a logical scheme is, at best, a scaffolding that vanishes when the poem is constructed. But we have so built into our nervous systems a demand for intellectual coherence, even in poetry, that we find a difficulty in doing without it. This point may be misunderstood, for the charge most usually brought against Mr. Eliot’s poetry is that it is overintellectualised. One reason for this is his use of allusion. A reader who in one short poem picks up allusions to _The Aspern Papers_, _Othello_, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s,’ Marston, _The Phœnix and the Turtle_, _Antony and Cleopatra_ (twice), ‘The Extasie,’ _Macbeth_, _The Merchant of Venice_, and Ruskin, feels that his wits are being unusually well exercised. He may easily leap to the conclusion that the basis of the poem is in wit also. But this would be a mistake. These things come in, not that the reader may be ingenious or admire the writer’s erudition (this last accusation has tempted several critics to disgrace themselves), but for the sake of the emotional aura which they bring and the attitudes they incite. Allusion in Mr. Eliot’s hands is a technical device for compression. ‘The Waste Land’ is the equivalent in content to an epic. Without this device twelve books would have been needed. But these allusions and the notes in which some of them are elucidated have made many a petulant reader turn down his thumb at once. Such a reader has not begun to understand what it is all about.