ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot sporadically disavows any reversionary ambition. Eliot demurred from the view that The Waste Land was an expression of disillusion. He preferred to have it read as a record of modern man's illusion of disillusion, implying that for Eliot transcendence remains a possibility. The impressions of montage, of the fusing of incongruent elements, of the striking of notes that are dissonant have a richness and excitement that run counter to the mood of despair or of disillusion which informs the poem. There is a mitigation of the Manichaeanism in Eliot's development in the plays. In The Confidential Clerk, for example, the deflation of romantic expectations in one's vocation as well as in love means the acceptance of the second rate, not disillusion. The instability of appearances relates to the inescapable subjectivity of vision. That the object world is firm and solid is a metaphysical assumption very difficult to maintain in the disillusioned modern consciousness.
