I recall T.S. Eliot was one of the two poets I had to read in my Junior year HS English clbum. Even the hideous incompetence of my English teacher couldn’t taint T.S. Eliot entirely. While Eliot struck me as a bit dark for my tastes, the man clearly knew how to create an image. From the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” This isn’t the way I would describe the evening sky, but it certainly makes for a memorable image.

Hollow Men is my favorite, however. The image of those shades, damned to half-existence in death as they were in life, is terribly haunting. “Those who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom / Remember us—if at all—not as lost / Violent souls, but only / As the hollow men / The stuffed men.” These were the petty sycophants, the middlemen and paper-shufflers. The businessmen who calmly sold the public dangerous products because it was the path of least resistance, and didn’t even have a stain on their conscious. They weren’t evil or cruel, per se. They just didn’t do anything with their lives. If they were good, it was only because that was easier then being evil. If they were evil, it was because being evil was the path of least resistance.