AustLit

'It’s funny now to think of T.S. Eliot as a difficult poet, because so much of what he wrote, even those tedious lines that were caught in constipated working-out of prayer, had a lyrical ease. There wasn’t much that was fractured, because he allowed his lines a measure of relaxedness. The difficulty was all in the meaning not the music, no matter his warnings of the deception of the thrush. The fact is, as an experience, he was easy to take and the older I get, the more I realise he let us off lightly — even though we credit him, or pointedly, his book The Waste Land, as the birth pains of modernism.'  (Introduction)