Have you ever seen a finished picture?  A picture or anything else?  Woe unto you the day it is said that you are finished!  To finish a work?  To finish a picture?  What nonsense!  To finish it means to be through with it, to kill, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow: the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the picture.

Pablo Picasso, 1948

The poetry of T.S. Eliot is a study in fragments.  It achieves its richness of imagery by teasing the imagination with bits of reality.  Rejecting the crutch of elaborate explanatory supports, it relies instead on pricks to the unconsciousness, creating vivid mental pictures that are all the more desirable because of the reader's participation in their formation. 

Children's voices in the orchard

Between the blossom -and the fruit time:

Golden head, crimson head,

Between the green tip and the root.

Black wing, brown wing hover over;

Twenty years and the spring is over;

Today grieves, tomorrow grieves,

Cover me over, light-in leaves

Golden head, black wing,

Cling, swing.

Spring, sing

Swing up into the apple tree.^l

Eliot gives birth to an image from disassembled pieces of the image.  He allows his readers to extend the constructions for which he supplies only the foundations.  His poetry, by virtue of its incompleteness, gains depth and meaning.

In 1747, Johann Sebastian Bach sent a musical offering to King Frederick of Prussia.  At an earlier audience with the king, Bach had been requested to extemporize a six part fugue, thus the subsequent musical offering contained the formal written version of this extemporization, as well as formal versions of a three part fugue, a trio sonata, and ten canons.  The curious thing was, though these pieces were among the most sophisticated Bach ever created, he never wrote them out in full. Indeed, the page preceeding the first sheet of music contains the inscription: 

Regis Iusfu Cantio Et Relaqua Canonica Arte Resolula

(At the King's Command, the Song and the Remainder Resolved with Canonic Art.)

The initials of the inscription spell RICERCAR, an Italian word meaning "to seek."  Bach intended that here be something for King Ferdinand to contribute to the Musical Offering. He left it unfinished on purpose.²

Long before Eliot, or even Bach, it had been accepted that art was an intellectual rather than a physical phenomenon.  Music and poetry were held as disciplines that recreated experiences not through pure imitation of objects, but rather through suggestion and the stimulation of imagination.  It has come to be understood that two dimensional and three dimensional representation can achieve the same end.  In fact, Meyer Schapiro has pointed out that abstract art has the value of being a "practical demonstration" of this concept.³  

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