In the deserts of the heart

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903E7DA1030F935A25752C0A9619C8B63

“Unlike many academic critics who have expended huge amounts of energy on uncovering Eliot’s sources, pointing to obscure allusions that might unlock hidden meanings in the verse, Mr. Raine zeros in on the emotional core of the poems, using his own familiarity with Eliot’s work to give the lay reader a visceral understanding of how the poet came to articulate his ideas and how those ideas evolved over the years.

As a poet himself, Mr. Raine has a practitioner’s understanding of language and rhythm and sound, and he uses this knowledge to convey the beauty and power of Eliot’s verse, and the myriad, subtle ways it works its magic on the reader. He points out how the use of the pedantic word ”therefrom” in ”Gerontion” (”I that was near your heart was removed therefrom ”) functions as a ”tiny cough in ink,” underscoring the narrator’s self-conscious, wallflower personality. And he points out the sexual urgency contained in the ”two adjacent, cunningly unpunctuated, present participles” in these lines from ”The Waste Land”: ”the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting.”

Locating thematic links between masterworks like ”The Waste Land” and lesser-known works like ”Animula,” Mr. Raine does a dexterous job of showing how Eliot developed the idea of ”the buried life.” The two most famous poems to address this theme directly are ”The Hollow Men,” which depicts those gutless, empty souls who, as Mr. Raine puts it, have been rejected by both ”heaven and hell because they have neither sinned nor been actively virtuous,” and ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which depicts a sensitive but timid man who has failed to seize the day, who, in Mr. Raine’s words, has resolved ”to remain repressed,” to avoid ”the element of risk that is part of truly living.”

”Animula,” Mr. Raine goes on, similarly depicts ”a psychically damaged, confined soul corroded by its own caution,” while ”Gerontion” is narrated by ”a voluptuary of inaction with an extensive collection of alibis” for his circumscribed life.

As for ”The Waste Land,” the title is itself a reference to the desert — a symbol of aridity, emptiness, the failure of feeling, as these lines from Eliot’s 1934 play ”The Rock” make clear:”