The consolation of poetry

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/15/ts-eliot-festival-donmar-jeanette-winterson

“Art lasts because it gives us a language for our inner reality, and that is not a private hieroglyph; it is a connection across time to all those others who have suffered and failed, found happiness, lost it, faced death, ruin, struggled, survived, known the night-hours of inconsolable pain.

Eliot says: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” That, for him, was not the reality of dingy streets and gas fires, typists and tinned food, though he writes about those things so well, but the vast reality of two quite different invisible worlds – “the heavy burden of the growing soul” (Animula), and what might be called the “shaft of sunlight” (Four Quartets), a spiritual illumination that became, for Eliot, a journey towards God.”