Collective Despair

'Still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings'

Every attempt 'is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure'

He has 'Only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say'

Nothing is to be learned from experience.

Our 'quiet-voiced elders' have deceived us.
'Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men but rather of their folly
The one wisdom we can hope to acquire 'is the wisdom of humility:
Humility is endless
The houses are all gone under the sea'

As for Eliot's contemporaries, the captains of industry, the merchants, men of letters, civil servants, chairmen of committees, he lists them all but removes them from the lanes and fields of Somerset and places them in an Underground train that has stopped too long between stations, where 'cold the sense and lost the motive of action.'

Simon Jenkins, Guardian: Comments, East Coker does not deserve the taint of TS Eliot's narcisstic gloom