The way Terry Eagleton reads T.S. Eliot is as a split text: at least one level of meaningless/at least one level of collective (un)consciousness. With asemics and polysemics and the interplay between them, we often have a single source of text and thereby an interplay of meaning/not meaning on what is usually a single plane. But the split Eagleton invokes gives us another textual problem: the identity of the text under interpretation. And this split creates yet another problem: the prioritization of the interpretation(s).
See what you think:
Poetry was not to engage the reader's mind: it did not really matter what a poem actually meant, and Eliot professed himself to be quite unperturbed by apparently outlandish interpretations of his own work. Meaning was no more than a sop thrown to the reader to keep him distracted, while the poem went stealthily to work on him in more physical and unconscious ways ... . (Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction, 35)
