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From: Nancy Gish Thanks for the reference. I'll check it. I don't think I see it in "The Hollow Men" in the same way, but I also don't mean to use the war as simply a "source," as in the source-hunting tradition. In any case, Eliot was never in the trenches, though he certainly knew men who were. ======================================================= Yes, among them, I believe, Gaudier Bjreszka (sp?), the sculptor and one of the founders of Vorticism. It always seemed to me that Eliot's poetry reflects the enormously depressing after mood of WWI. There was a big psychological downer, partly at the realisation of how brutally destructive that so-called civilisation was. There was great inability to come to terms with it (not unlike the after effects of Viet Nam in the US). Paralysis as in THM is a valid image. I suspect the inability to get one's head around 9/11 is similar. Most of us have had no contact with war. War cannot be accommodated by reason, even a so-called just war. Cheers, Peter