>>24557910
In his greatest poetry (I don't care for his post-conversion stuff) Eliot used disgusting and seedy imagery in a way that hadn't been done before, or at least with such great skill and effect. Obviously Shakespeare or Baudelaire depict the gruesome aspects of life, but what Eliot did was different. I understand this may be hard to understand from our perspective
>Let us go then, you and I,
>When the evening is spread out against the sky
>Like a patient etherized upon a table;
is not
>Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
>Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin
Something like this had never been done before, and likely had a bad influence on the course of English (and least we could accuse it of this more easily than Eliot accuses Milton language and method)
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
