When all this has been done by the reader, when the materials with which the words are to clothe themselves have been collected, the poem still remains to be read. And it is easy to fail in this undertaking. An ‘attitude of intellectual suspicion’ must certainly be abandoned. But this is not difficult to those who still know how to give their feelings precedence to their thoughts, who can accept and unify an experience without trying to catch it in an intellectual net or to squeeze out a doctrine. One form of this attempt must be mentioned. Some, misled no doubt by its origin in a Mystery, have endeavoured to give the poem a symbolical reading. But its symbols are not mystical, but emotional. They stand, that is, not for ineffable objects, but for normal human experience. The poem, in fact, is radically naturalistic; only its compression makes it appear otherwise. And in this it probably comes nearer to the original Mystery which it perpetuates than transcendentalism does. If it were desired to label in three words the most characteristic feature of Mr. Eliot’s technique, this might be done by calling his poetry a music of ideas. The ideas are of all kinds, abstract and concrete, general and particular, and, like the musician’s phrases, they are arranged, not that they may tell us something, but that their effects in us may combine into a coherent whole of feeling and attitude and produce a peculiar liberation of the will. They are there to be responded to, not to be pondered or worked out. This is, of course, a method used intermittently in very much poetry, and only an accentuation and isolation of one of its normal resources. The peculiarity of Mr. Eliot’s later, more puzzling, work is his deliberate and almost exclusive employment of it. In the earlier poems this logical freedom appears only occasionally. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ for example, there is a patch at the beginning and another at the end, but the rest of the poem is quite straightforward. In ‘Gerontion,’ the first long poem in this manner, the air of monologue, of a stream of associations, is a kind of disguise, and the last two lines, Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season,