When I read Eliot's poetry as an undergrad I thought he was a pompous poet given to showing off his scholarship.The amount of classical allusions and cross references in his work gave me the impression and not only this ,deliberate obscurity seemed to be the goal and incoherence the objective.

I missed the beauty of the cadences of his structured stanzas and the exquisiteness of his imagery but now as I look back his work stands in definite relationship with the poetry that had gone before him as highly individualistic as well as rising above the contemporary work and at the same time adding to the sum total of the art and poetry traditions of the human race.