[As] I read Eliot he is the one poet writing in English who is centrally in the symboliste tradition. What Eliot puts into his poems is determined preponderantly by his being an American; how he structures his poems is determined preponderantly by his sitting at the feet of the French, in the first place (as is generally acknowledged, and as he testified himself) at the feet of Jules Laforgue. Four decades of commentary and explication have been largely wasted, because of the refusal of commentators to explore either the American or the French backgrounds. Instead, the attempt has been made over and over again to come to terms with Eliot without going outside the narrowly English tradition. (p. 63)

If Laforgue was the presiding genius of Eliot's earlier poems, no figure presided more insistently over the later ones than Valéry, deliberately Mallarmé's disciple, and like his master...