Almost every poem Eliot wrote is dominated by one or more traditional epistemological concerns—knowledge and belief, memory and perception, forgetting, recognition, and precognition. But his poetry is also dominated by prophets and prophecies, magi, choric forebodings, people who know but cannot see or speak, or if they speak are not heeded. His people are surrounded by a world of talking birds, cryptic messages, telling images, and words unheard; and what his people come to know is what they should have known or do know already. Knowing is, for Eliot, an act of recognition or re-cognition…. The silent message, the word unheard—an image, a gesture, an atmosphere—is often associated with issues of life and death. Those who hear the word live; and those who do not, die. (pp. 179-80)

The word unheard … takes various forms. It may be knowledge in the possession of one who cannot speak. It may be knowledge embedded in an image not noticed. It may be an open warning, openly ignored. It may also be a silent gesture, like the nod of the Lady's head in Ash-Wednesday, fully acknowledged and acted upon, as Sweeney wisely acted among the nightingales; Eliot's word unheard is not always unregarded. But the word unheard appears most strikingly in such diverse figures as Philomel, the infant Christ in "Gerontion," and J. Alfred Prufrock—all unable to speak, and sure to be unheeded if or when speech becomes possible.

The knowledge that matters most in Eliot's world is not discursive and discovered, like scientific knowledge, but revealed, recovered, recognized. Eliot's world is much like the subconscious worlds described by Jung and Freud, each in a different way, and both different from Eliot's, yet all having in common the idea of knowledge latent, veiled, or hovering, often in some sense silent or unheeded, commonly available only through images. Common to all is the idea of knowing as an act of recovery or recognition, of being able to know in some sense without really knowing; and finally the idea of superficial knowledge as an evasion of deeper knowledge…. (p. 181)

One thing that frequently happens to people in an Eliot poem is that they pay insufficient attention to feelings and the felt whole. And one thing Eliot himself does in writing a poem is to preserve and convey a generous portion of the felt whole—images and sounds—compelling the reader to do much of the abstracting, if he wants abstractions. The importance that Eliot attaches to the felt whole sets up a common bond between him and the Imagists. But Eliot is obviously not presenting merely images in his poetry; he presents patterns of images and concepts, built together into a feeling or even a pattern of such feelings. His ultimate obligation as a craftsman is not to the image but to the feeling. Moreover, he regards pure perception and purely immediate experience as impossible, because all our perceptions are guided, or filtered through, various concepts and preconceptions…. (p. 182)

[The] main trend in the English and American schools throughout Eliot's era was toward analytic philosophy; and, given the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Eliot's epistemology leads rather directly away from that kind of philosophizing and toward poetry, the traditional province of feeling (in several senses of the term, including Eliot's). (p. 183)

Just as Eliot's epistemology leads from the writing of philosophy to the writing of poetry, so the particular kind of poetry he writes is a reflection of his attitude toward knowing. Knowledge is made available to his magi in images; it is also made available to his reader in images. Knowing is an act of recognition for the women of Canterbury; so it is for the reader. Knowledge hovers in Eliot's poetic world. It hovers also in his real world. Hence his poetry is built on image, myth, and allusion. His poetry conveys knowledge; but it is knowledge the reader already has, in a latent state of one sort or another. As in the Jungian and Freudian constructs, it may be recovered only through struggle or crisis—in this case, struggle with the poetry…. By means of image, allusion, and myth … Eliot conveys to his reader certain knowledge that the reader already possesses but does not readily recover. The poem thus draws on the subconscious, and it draws on archetypal memories, yet Eliot's poetry is not especially Freudian or Jungian. With those constructs it has only a common ancestor in ancient myths—Homer's Oxen-of-the-Sun incident, the Oedipus myth, the Adam story—where men know, but know darkly, and so die. One of the primary differences between the kind of knowing in Eliot's poetry and the kind postulated by Jung and Freud is that Eliot need not speculate; he need not postulate concepts of archetype or libido. Although he may use such concepts as "feeling" and felt whole in some of his prose, his poetry gets along well without them. The knowledge recovered by Eliot's poetry exists, not in a racial memory or a superego, but in tradition; and Eliot's allusions are a kind of documentation…. The knowledge that poetry recovers exists in time, and Eliot's attitude toward knowledge is thus closely linked to his attitude toward time—a relationship explored at length in Four Quartets. It is here, at the end of "East Coker," that Eliot achieves his most concise and explicit definition of poetry:

            the fight to recover what has been lost
           And found and lost again and again….

A few lines later his idea of poetry and his idea of life merge into one:

                            Not the intense moment
     Isolated, with no before and after,
     But a lifetime burning in every moment
     And not the lifetime of one man only
     But of old stones that cannot be deciphered….

The word unheard, as a symbol of the nature, process, and function of poetry, is generally referred to most explicitly in Eliot's later work, beginning with Ash-Wednesday, and more particularly the opening stanza of Section V …, which marks an important development. Prior to 1930 in such poems as "Gerontion," The Waste Land, and "Journey of the Magi" Eliot dwells primarily upon man's failure to hear and heed the word which is plainly, sometimes loudly or blatantly, set forth. During this earlier period the other aspect of the word unheard—the silent word silently heeded—ironically appears in only one important poem, "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," where Sweeney acts on the "felt whole" as Agamemnon did not. But in Ash-Wednesday both of these aspects appear together, and achieve full integration in Section V. Here, the fact that the silent Word does exist at the center is seen not merely as a consolation but also as something like a condition for the whirling of the unstilled, unhearing world:

      If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
      If the unheard, unspoken
      Word is unspoken, unheard:
      Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
      The Word without a word, the Word within
      The world and for the world;
      And the light shone in darkness and
      Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
      About the centre of the silent Word….

The pun on "still" is characteristic, with its multiple reference to time or duration, motion, and silence. The integration achieved in this poem is later developed and concentrated into a single image: "the still point of the turning world." As the geometer must postulate something he calls the "point"—a thing having neither depth nor breadth nor any dimensionality, yet somehow necessarily existing—without which he can have no geometry, so the unstilled world itself presupposes the geocentric still point, and for that matter the geotropic poet as well. Beginning with Ash-Wednesday, and no doubt due in part to the integration achieved there, Eliot sounds less like the prophet warning men against their obtuseness, more like the psalmist seeking his way into the silent center. He seeks that way, paradoxically, through words. Four Quartets is the continuation and culmination of that search, and a resolution of that paradox. Both the search and the resolution proceed through indispensable form…. [This] reliance on form as a way of redeeming words and music is reasserted, but redemptive form is now more explicitly Incarnation…. (pp. 184-87)

[Despite] the importance of the integration achieved in Ash-Wednesday and the elaboration of that achievement in Four Quartets, the word unheard is most successfully turned into poetry in the earlier work, where it is not explicit; the height of Eliot's achievement is The Waste Land, which is distinctly superior because more catholic, recovering more, from lost vegetation myths, the Upanishads, Greek drama, the Hebrew prophets, St. Augustine, Dante, the Elizabethans. Moreover, the function Eliot assigns to poetry is also a major function of literary criticism and scholarship: the recognition, recovery, or revelation of the word unheard. And The Waste Land is almost as much a work of criticism and scholarship as it is a poem—in this sense, too, an extraordinarily catholic work.

It is here, then, in The Waste Land that Eliot incarnates his word in the form likely to be most distinctly unheard by the modern ear. For it is here that the identification of tradition and the self, and the relation of tradition to redemption of the self, is most fully developed. The Cumaean sibyl in the epigraph is, as oracles traditionally have been, a source of information that does not fully inform, of knowing that often constitutes, in one way or another, not-knowing. As gatekeeper of the underworld in Vergil's Aeneid she also supplies Eliot with a symbol for the epic descent into Hell, which for Eliot as for Dante, represents a descent into the lower reaches of the self and the spectral images and the spectral knowledge waiting there—such a descent as in fact The Waste Land is—a descent through tradition, which is also a descent through the crowded sordid images of which the self is constituted. This identification of the self with the past is embodied in the ancient and virtually interminable self of the sibyl. In the main body of the poem this identification of self and past is achieved in the figure of Tiresias, presiding consciousness of The Waste Land…. (pp. 188-89)

"The Burial of the Dead" closes with an image of disinterment—a dog unearthing a corpse—that suggests the unearthing of buried truth. The allusion to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, the disinterment of a consciousness, supports this suggestion—and so, in particular, does the charge of hypocrisy, implying the corpse in every man's garden…. Voices, prophecies, images, and incarnations hover throughout [The Waste Land] carrying knowledge, but somehow silent, or unheard, or latent, or ignored. In some form or other the word unheard is everywhere present. And it is everywhere associated with death, the dominant imagery in Part I: the Cumaean sibyl, the handful of dust, the man who knows nothing looking into the silence, the Hanged Man and death by water respectively unseen and foreseen by Madame Sosostris, the buried corpse. The association is sometimes sinister, sometimes comic, always ambiguous, uncertain. The only kinds of knowing in Part I are virtually identical with not-knowing, and both are akin to death. Here and throughout The Waste Land true knowledge, vital knowledge, redemptive knowledge is everywhere latent but one way or another inoperative.

The poem thus suggests the importance that Eliot assigns to "feelings" and "the felt whole," which people in The Waste Land consistently overlook or ignore. But Eliot transcends such philosophical and pseudo-philosophical terms to integrate dramatically his epistemology with his concern over human failure and redemption. It is this concern that … puts him in touch with the problem of knowledge as it typically appears in Greek epic and tragedy, Hebrew prophecy, and modern works in the same tradition, most notably Dante's Commedia. (pp. 189-91)

[The] most striking symbol in Part II is Philomel …, evoking the theme of lust. Raped and mutilated, she cannot speak what she knows; transformed into the nightingale, she sings, but the world will not hear. In the myth she reveals what she knows with a woven image, hence the characteristic pun on "still": "And still she cried, and still the world pursues."… [The words that are neither heard nor felt by the object of Prufrock's love song] are, of course, heard and felt by the reader, insofar as the poem is effective and the reader receptive. Prufrock's love song is, in this sense, really a love song. In the very process of not achieving that ultimate expression he longs for, he does achieve it. The poem he speaks is very nearly as musical as Four Quartets, and it does convey that total despair and alienation associated with the I-want-to-die genre of conventional love songs. Prufrock's word is, in fact, heard—just to the extent that his absurd private torment is transmuted into significant public poetry. (pp. 191-92)

Eliot commonly uses apparent nonsense to convey sense, as Shakespeare does in both comedy and tragedy. The effect of this technique might very aptly be described as moving the hearers to "collection," and recollection. (p. 192)

The Waste Land is radically different from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but the tones of melancholy, prophecy, and hysteria are as conspicuous in the voice of Prufrock, knowing it will not be heard, as they are in the voices of The Waste Land. (p. 193)

The closing lines of "The Fire Sermon" allude to St. Augustine's Confessions—first to Book III, in which Augustine recounts his chase after abstruse knowledge on two continents, like Eliot's, ending in a rejection of the academic for the religious, while nonetheless retaining an academic orientation. The substance of his confession in Book III is his failure to see the immanent God: "These things I then knew not, nor observed; they struck my sight on all sides, and I saw them not." Book X, to which Eliot also alludes here, is an involved epistemological dissertation on memory, which Augustine regards as the source of his knowledge of God; but how a knowledge of God reached his memory is a question he finds mysterious. He concludes that the Truth of God is all about him: "Every-where, O Truth, dost Thou give audience to all who ask counsel of Thee, and at once answer all…. Clearly dost Thou answer, though all do not clearly hear." And God, of course, is equally immanent…. Here is Eliot's emphasis on the ubiquity of truth, but its evasiveness, and man's extraordinary capacity for evading it—even when he appears to seek it most diligently. Here, too, is Eliot's emphasis on memory, and the act of knowing as an act or recognition. (pp. 194-95)

"What the Thunder Said" is surely among the noisiest poetry in the language—faces sneering and snarling, singing grass, the cicadas, the hermit thrush, "maternal lamentation," "falling towers," "whisper music," bats whistling, voices out of cisterns, the cock on the roof. The only interruption of this bedlam is the walk to Emmaus. In this incident two of Christ's disciples walk together discussing the strange events of the first Easter; Christ appears to them, unrecognized by his two followers, and enquires what they are talking about…. Their response to him is a masterpiece of dramatic irony that Eliot might have envied: "Are you the only man living in Jerusalem who does not know what has been happening there these last few days?" Then his disciples tell the risen Christ of his own crucifixion, expressing disappointment that he had not redeemed Israel. Still unrecognized, he rebukes them for not heeding the prophets, and soon after, at dinner, a recognition-scene occurs, but then he disappears. The whole incident epitomizes the kind of knowing-but-not-knowing—the virtual suppression of knowledge, or the fear of seeing and seizing the redemptive knowledge always close at hand—characteristic of Eliot's world. Yet in The Waste Land this knowledge is not exclusively Christian but goes back to the oldest of the Indo-European scriptures, the Upanishads. The final stanza recapitulates the entire section, and in large measure the poem itself—a jumble of noise, madness, hysteria, weariness, longing, climaxed by three words from a dead language, containing the sum of all redemptive knowledge, and a benediction…. Eliot fully expects his words to go unheard, as the tradition itself from which they come has gone unheard for up to several thousand years.

Yet ignorance of the word is death, and knowledge is redemptive. Despite his pessimism, Eliot thus exalts knowledge to an extent unsurpassed and hardly equaled by any other modern poet. In response to the ancient question, whether poetry conveys knowledge, Eliot's answer is positive. To be sure, the knowledge it conveys is knowledge we already have; yet for lack of it we go to perdition. (pp. 195-96)