The first of some remaining matters I should like to discuss concerns a regret. The scope of my remarks provided no suitable occasion to explore, in any systematic way, the tone of iconoclasm, malicious humor, and arch complicity that is so prominent in Eliot's early verse but that nearly vanishes after 1927 (though reappearing at unexpected moments in the drama, such as when the four knights address the audience late in Murder in the Cathedral). Part of Eliot's humor had to do with addressing one audience while rebuffing another. Eliot was a crafty cultural politician, and nowhere more clearly than in his early tendency to clothe himself in the style of the buffoon, the joker, the snake in the grass. Though on occasion it got him into trouble, this vein is useful and corrective, and it is Eliot at his most alive. Its disappearance reduced his poetry's breadth, and I wish he had persisted in it a little longer. There is not enough of it around. Although understanding the seriousness is often necessary for understanding the comedy, the opposite is true as well. To overlook Eliot's satire, derision, and a certain vaudeville quality is to miss the ballast of his gravity, pessimism, and intellectual passion. It is to neglect also the clues that most reveal him as a bizarre “late product,” a genuine exotic.

I confess it is this sense of the ridiculous that struck me when I first read Eliot, long ago by now. It is, however, a qualified ridiculousness, never far from self-mockery.