Eliot – Poetry is an escape from Personality

The “depersonalization” occurs because the poet acquires an awareness of the
past that gives the pattern to give up what is at that moment for something more
valuable, outside of himself and to which he “owes loyalty”; and under whose light you must surrender and sacrifice to obtain and earn your unique position. ”

But what was the specific experience that he reconstructed in the poem? How I know He manifested the presence of his creator in verses that, far from being impersonal, not only enveloped but implied their self-sacrifice? The “dark night of the soul”, the flight of the hades mansion: a long journey of atonement and liberation from a human love sterile, infertile, unable to feed; towards another supernatural love, full, overflowing bloated of life. Social, cultural and historical metaphor, of course; but above all metaphor personal, as we will see.
It is very complex to identify processes in the work of an author, especially if they respond to interpretative hypotheses. However, in Eliot’s major poetic work it is possible distinguish two clear developments; of course in the formal, but basically in what we could call the motivation. This work, represented chronologically by The Earth Baldía (1922), Ash Wednesday (1930) and Cuatro Cuartetos (1940-1942), and in relation to the events in Europe and his own life, fits quite well with an anagogic structure to Dante’s way: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven.
Such a framework carries the risk of reductionist easyness, never just and never
enough; but it serves to emphasize that, in the case of Eliot, the historical processes they strongly marked his work, while he took charge of them; especially as soon as They coincided with their own and personal. It is true that -Eliot was a poet of his time which, however, was strongly opposed to it “. But it is also true that there arose the one who made his life his work and his work his life. In the case of La Tierra Baldía -perhaps the highest example of this reality-, the foregoing does not mean that it is possible to find in the verses that compose it a literal proof of his life, but rather -the agony of the poet expressed in the poem; in the heart of its meaning and in the whole process of its transmutation. In other words, if the poem was – a criticism of his culture, it was because he fully expressed the mind and feelings of the poet