It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
–Stephen Mallarme

I’ve had fun this month quoting people who made fun of modern poetry and commending to you the virtues of plain, understandable rhyming, rymthmic verse. And I must admit that when I first encountered T. S. Eliot in college, I was totally baffled. I wanted The Wasteland to read like a story, a narrative. I wanted it to make sense, logical ordered sense, and when it didn’t, I was ready to abandon Eliot and go back to—well, anything that could be explained in English.
Then, a friend who loved Eliot’s poetry explained something to me. She said it wasn’t a story as much as a series of images strung together. She said to enjoy and appreciate the images that I could identify and leave the rest for another time. So that’s what I did–and what I still do with modern poetry much of the time. And I’ve found some great fragments of poetry that way–although I still couldn’t explain to you what some them mean or why they are meaningful to me.

From Eliot’s The Hollow Men:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Now I call that creating silences around things!