Telescoping of Images in "The Waste Land"

It is especially provocative to read the following quote from Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" when considering how fragmentary The Waste Land is:

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary [...] in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

The poem forces us to ask whether Eliot has marshaled the abilities that he values most into a successful work. Does Eliot, after his sojourn in the waste land, "form new wholes"?

That is too large a question for an itsy-bitsy blog post, but I want to look at a technique that Eliot calls “telescoping of images” and attempt to determine whether it has the power to create the unity Eliot refers to. Here's the beginning of Section V, "What the Thunder Says":

After the torchlight read on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

The first thing to consider is Eliot's insistence on the word "after," which begins each of the first three lines of this final section. Eliot tries to focus on a moment after the sturm und drang of life. But I would suggest that this is not just some interlude or a lull; by definition, the moment after the sturm und drang of life is...death. Eliot juxtaposes life and death throughout the poem (along with a corresponding contrast between desire and frustration). But after all these "afters," Eliot actually deposits us in a present that only continues toward an ultimate after, the cessation of movement. That is, he does not offer death, just the act of dying. So, despite the insistence on the possibility of "after," we are only always moving toward "after."

To me, this seems like an example of telescoping images. The telescope metaphor itself exemplifies Eliot’s poetic practice. Looking through a telescope unifies distance and proximity. A telescope allows one the experience of a distant object as a close object. The distant object suddenly is near. [The way some small telescopes operate (that is, by sliding open and closed) also unifies pulling apart and staying together]. In the section quoted above, Eliot seems to unify after and during. The past (the torchlight, the silence, the agony) seem to weigh on the present; they are incorporated into the feeling of the present. Eliot's phrase "structure of feeling" is useful here (from his "Dante" essay). The present is not discrete, nor is the past ever really over.

This complex notion of time and movement is reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. One can never move because one must cross half the remaining distance, but half of that distance must be crossed first, ad infinitum. For Eliot, these are not philosopher's games but real problems of experience. However, they are not problems to be solved so much as they are problems to be captured in artistic expression. Poets get closer to reaching the absolute if they can telescope images into unities. They must create structures of feeling rather than individual responses. If we are conceived of as only "living," then we are separated from our inevitable "dying."

These ideas help make sense of Eliot's claim that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" ("Tradition and the Individual Talent"). He isn't arguing against emotion in poetry; he suggests that a "personality" is too singular, that an individual's emotional response is devoid of a context from which it can never truly escape. Instead, the poet should aim to achieve a union of past and present, subject and object, self and other. In short, the poet must seek to express the absolute. When Eliot complains at the end of his "Dante" essay that modern poets present "only odds and ends of still life," he offers in his poetry a telescoping of images that pulls these odds and ends into complex layers of time and relation.