If you’re no stranger to such soul-paralyzing mind states as the poem creates, it may also serve as balm to the loneliness such states evoke by speaking out to your own hybrid species of spiritual pain.

In this way, it can work like the miracle of communion - you take the Eucharist of the writer’s words into the rough meat of your body in order to be transformed by someone else’s mysterious passion. It brings you into a community of like sufferers …

… The mere exercise of attention - eyes wide, ears pricked, heart open - is not a bad way to move through the world.

Mary Karr, in her introduction to the Modern Library edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.