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Prufrock was soon followed by other poems, each one lighting up the postwar literary battlefields like a Very light high above the trenches. Gerontion, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, The Hollow Men, half a dozen others—by 1925, Eliot had already published most of the poems on which his fame is based. Longest and most important was, of course, The Waste Land, beginning with the immortal:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain
—going on for 434 lines, by turns jagged, colloquial, classical, lyrical, in a black hymn of the death that stalks life when it is devoid of meaning. It contains glowing lines, followed by shocking discords presented with an almost mocking ease. It contains haunting phrases ("I will show you fear in a handful of dust") and images:
And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
Though it contains famously obscure allusions to other literature, most of The Waste Land's language is simple and accessible. Its racy currency was part of its instant appeal to young and receptive readers in the '20s. No other poem has ever carried such a concentrated consciousness of the weight of the past upon the present; yet the most allusive lines can ring out even when the particular associative bells do not tremble for the reader.
The Ruins in the Soul. Eliot was better at reading his own poems aloud than are most poets, though he had nothing like the great brass gong of a voice that made Dylan Thomas so moving. The thousands who attended his lecture tours and the many thousands more who have listened to him on records heard a deep, husky, somewhat nasal voice, reading slowly with an enormous sadness. One of the most gripping pieces he read was The Hollow Men, that unrelenting expression of death-in-life which he published in 1925. In that voice the symbolism became tenebrous and severe:
Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Later in the same poem, he would startlingly break into a singsong half chant:
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper—and growl the last line with a hair-raising intensity that actually made it sound new again.
No poet in this century has given the language so many remembered lines. Bang-and-whimper is known instantly; so are the cruellest month, the rolled trouser-bottoms, the undared peach, the hippopotamus who went to heaven "while the True Church remains below," and I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
Equally unforgettable is "Apeneck Sweeney," barbarous symbol-hero of the play fragment Sweeney Agonistes and several poems.
(The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)