It is possible to perceive form not as the shell but as the forces shaping the shell. ‘Every force’, as Guy Davenport has remarked, ‘evolves a form.’ In the case of Eliot's poetry it is the force of emotion which shapes the form. For Pound it was axiomatic that emotion is the source of form, but if demonstration were called for one could take ‘Preludes’ and observe a simple and powerful emotion shaping a heap of sordid images into a coherent world, and evolving a form which is specific to the soul constituted of those images. The form is what brings everything in a poem together, so that we can see it as a whole and find that it makes sense to us.

To apprehend the inner, shaping form of a poem, or of a play or novel, is one of the great pleasures of reading, indeed an ultimate satisfaction. Yet, as readers and critics of Eliot, we perhaps take it too much for granted. To attend to it directly now and again may not only recover that satisfaction but lead also to an enhanced appreciation of his enduring achievement. Eliot was at once an innovator and an inventor of form. To invent can mean to discover, or to rediscover, something latent or lost. But it would not mean, when we are talking of Eliot, to make up forms no one had ever thought of – though the form of his Four Quartets has claims to be a major invention in that sense.