In the course of a late lecture, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” Eliot recommended that readers of a poem should endeavor to grasp what the poem is aiming to be. Tentatively drawing on the language of philosophy, he suggested they should try to grasp its “entelechy” (PP [London], p. 110), a word which in Aristotle emphasizes purpose in contradistinction to cause. Eliot's recommendation offers a useful way to understand the relation of his early poems to those that follow, in terms of the end he thought they shared, and this end can be elucidated by means of a comparison with W. B. Yeats.

Take, for example, the well-known lines which close Yeats's “Among School Children,” describing the image of the chestnut tree and the impossibility of knowing the dancer from the dance. What equivalent ecstatic moment is there in Eliot to set alongside these lines, when all is felt as unity? The images of the Chinese jar in its stillness in Burnt Norton and of the ceremonious dancers in East Coker come immediately to mind, but there are a dozen possibilities to choose from, across the whole span of Eliot's career, from Four Quartets back to The Waste Land and “Gerontion” and before. It is difficult to settle on any one of them, and the difficulty is indeed the first fact to emerge from the comparison.

There are also many similar passages in Yeats which extend the meaning of what he wrote in “Among School Children.” For example, “Upon a Dying Lady” associates the dancing-place with a heavenly afterlife, the fourth stanza of “Byzantium” equates the dance with trance, and so on. But in Eliot the case is significantly different. Each of the possibilities is partial, haunting, suggestive. Altogether, they send the reader turning backward and forward, from one to another, and that is their nature; each set of lines needs another to complete its meaning, not just to add another dimension to a meaning which is already complete.