Despite Eliot's professed historicism, and his concern with the tradition, the thing which characterizes the rhetoric of his criticism (and his poetry as well) is the absence of presence. To put it another way, history and art can only be an imperfect sign of the divine, an immanence available not to the will but only to an ascetic ecstasy. History and knowledge bear marks of guilt, as in "Gerontian," and only in the silence and innocence of the unspoken Word is the Word known in the world. As in the borrowing from the sermon of Lancelot Andrewes, the "sign" signifies an absence in itself in order to signify the "wonder" that it stands for—"The word within a word, unable to speak a word." The timeless monuments of history, of his early essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," are signs in time which signify an order that originates outside time and therefore seems to speak for the traditional idea of presence. But such signs in Eliot repeatedly become comments on themselves, and point to the silence of their own center. The sign is not of the center, but a mediation, a supplement. Eliot's symbolism is Episcopal, not Catholic, and thus a sign of history's lack, of language as a part of the universal problematic. Signs, and poems, become aesthetic objects …, each of which affirms its own center, its own silence, and not a creative origin outside itself. They are "symbols" of a lost significance. But by their own objective presence, their supplementation, they signify the Incarnation, itself a supplement that signifies the closure of history. These works, then, are evidence of man's desire to recover lost presence, and to redeem his original fault.

The enigmatic thing about Eliot's poetics, and the entire poetics of the New Criticism that derived from him, is the urgency with which it detached art from life into its own self-contained system, thus affirming the artifice of the center as the fiction of presence. The impersonality of art which Eliot asserts in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" cannot affirm a center or source outside the system of the work, except in some mysterious, lost origin. And those interpretations of Eliot's work which ascribe to him the faith in something like a Jungian universal unconscious, or which accept the fundamental structure of the Christian logos as an explanation of his ideal of the "autonomous" poem, do not honor the discourse of his method. For the Eliot who traveled to Spain or Southern France to stand in the presence of the prehistoric cave paintings, before he wrote "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and the one who derived his aesthetic from both the Symboliste and the Metaphysical poets, is a poet fully involved in the Modernist problematic.

What Eliot "interpreted" as the associated sensibility of the Metaphysical poets was the structure of the "self" as an aesthetic whole, a cosmos of centered elements in tension; or in other words, something different from the modern Bradleyan self, which is composed of those fragments of perception of which it is conscious. He aestheticized Renaissance philosophy, but in doing so, he brought into question the center which, because it is both within and without the "great chain of being" (both beginning and end), could hold otherwise irreconcilable opposites in tension. Eliot's metaphysical "conceit" becomes wholly an aestheic trope; his ideal of a reassociated self is the mark of contemporary dissociation. Poetry separates itself from life by feigning wholeness, by declaring itself a sign of wholeness. It is nostalgic for the old order. (pp. 265-67)

Eliot's poetry self-consciously separates itself from the world of sense experience, from life, from history, by the very acknowledgment of its centeredness and its artifice. Only by indulging the metaphors of religion as analogous to the metaphors of art can he bridge the distance between life and art. The metaphor of the Incarnation becomes his bridge, and selflessness (the state of innocence or will-less-ness) his definition of recovered wholeness. But behind it all lies the problematic, what he called in the Four Quartets the "primitive terror" that confronts anyone looking backward "behind the assurance / Of recorded history" toward the lost origin. What he evidently saw in the depths of the prehistoric caves was the silence and darkness of the center, at once the terror it inspired and the potentiality for signification it admitted. What he saw in his poetry was the sadness of the absence of presence, and the guilt which animated every effort toward its recovery. For him the poem becomes the supplement of an ideal of wholeness which is itself a sign of history's lack.

That Eliot chose, willfully, to substitute the metaphor of God for the "Something that is probably quite ineffable" which lay at the origin should not tempt one to define his poetics in terms of his professed orthodoxy. It is not historical cunning, or the "contrived corridors" of a history made up of multiple spars of Knowledge, that motivates Eliot's passiveness and impersonality or his orthodoxy. On the contrary, the admixture of innocence and intellectualism, emotion and knowledge, that bewilders his critics, discloses the kind of interpretion in which his poetry is involved. From beginning to end, from the dissociations of "Prufrock" to the "complete consort" of "Little Gidding," his effort is to reconstitute a lost whole, to recover a lost origin. His theme is fragmentation and guilt, the history of language and thus the history of history itself. His desire is to recover, if only in the game of art (so like the ritual of religion), the sign of the lost origin: the ineffable "still-point," the "silence" so fundamental to the structure of words and music.

The ideal of the "right" sentence in "Little Gidding," "where every word is at home, / Taking its place to support the others," tying end to beginning, is the ideal of "Every poem an epitaph." "Little Gidding," the last of the Quartets, those ritualized poems which attempt to evoke a figurative (still, silent) center within the brilliant articulations of their sounds, confesses to the endlessness of the search: "We shall not cease from exploration …" in search of a "condition of complete simplicity." That condition is of course the condition of unity, of the "fire and the rose" as "one." But it is only realizable in art, in the poem, in ritual, in those "signs" or "monuments" which are in history yet hint of the center which is outside it and known only by the slanted names. "History may be servitude, / History may be freedom"—thus a line in the third section of "Little Gidding," the section which introduces the metaphor of the hanged man (here, Christ) and leads to the figure of the Dove descending in section four. It is the figure of the "symbol perfected in death," and the perfect symbol of the problematic of language in Eliot. It links his poetry with Gnosticism in its attempt to transcend the paradox. Into the darkness at the center of the prehistoric caves, or into the silence at the center of words ("Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence"), the Word descends "With flame of incandescent terror / Of which the tongues declare, / The one discharge from sin and error." "Little Gidding" ends the Quartets by summing up the Eliot poetics. If history is either "servitude" or "freedom," history is the problematic; and therefore language is the universal problematic. The gesture of poetry's "exploration" is a gesture toward the recovery of what is lost. In Derrida's words, it "dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which is free from free-play," and thus free from the condition of the very medium, homeless words, to which it is condemned. (pp. 267-69)