A completely ironic poet passes beyond the realm of poetry into an inscrutable solipsism. After discovering the master ironist Jules Laforgue, the young Eliot grew more and more inscrutable himself. From the start of the manuscript poems in Inventions of the March Hare, objects and routines pile up, without the possibility of an action to resolve their significance. The ironically titled “Convictions (Curtain Raiser)” opens the collection with scenes of marionettes, including some knightly marionettes who discourse on moral philosophy:

Funny as it is to hear “learn to live by nature's laws!” from the mouth of a puppet, the joke comes at a high cost to the poet. He dwells in a world of suffocating convention, from which he is liberated only in mind. His mindless cast airs its “convictions,” overheated platitudes recorded by the poet with an occasional parenthesis, which marks the small difference of his freedom: “My marionettes (or so they say) / Have these keen moments every day.” Trapped by the same formalities of meter and manner, the poet and his marionettes bear a family resemblance. They dramatize his dilemma of what to say and do, as he studies the human mechanism and its moral repertoire.