Poetry as consolation

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

“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.

For Eliot, the 3D world where we live, that which he calls in The Waste Land the “unreal city”, is a beguiling or distressing distraction from facing life head on, facing ourselves as we are – and ultimately, facing God. He is tough, he refuses consolation, “Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.””