Reading an article about T.S. Eliot in The Nation, the ostensible raison d’etre being the publication of his letters, reminded me of what an incredible, awe-inspiring thing it was the read him as a teenager.

Prufrock was in our 12th grade English textbook, but, of course, it was the copy of The Wasteland among my mother’s books that was most exciting.

The abstraction, the literary-mindedness of it all, affected me as much as the despairing, existential gut punch of it.

Poems didn’t have to be literal, visible, but could be densely allusive, creating all sorts of possibilities that I had never seen before.

The article has a telling line, speaking of Eliot’s The Hollow Men:

a confounding performance, at once viscerally immediate and yet strangely abstracted

Though, to put it in context, the article’s author does not ascribe that to most of his other famous works, it feels very right to me as a depiction of the act of reading Eliot for the first time. Viscerally immediate and simultaneously strangely abstracted. And strange meaning more than just “oddly” or “weirdly” but something more… French, shall we say. Strange as truly Other. And most especially, strange as estranged from something. From the world, from each other.