J. Alfred Prufrock’s pathetic admission—“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”—states a central theme of many of T. S. Eliot’s works, which concern the frustrated struggle to achieve satisfactory expression. The poems are varied “raids on the inarticulate” (“East Coker”) by the inarticulate. Their failure of speech leads, in many poems, to the shifting of verbal action to nonhuman agents—a process epitomized by the thunder’s utterance, “da,” in The Waste Land. Given the weaknesses of language, the poems display a baffling world in which neither principles nor particulars can be expressed, so that poetry fails to work and, ultimately, ceases to matter. Among such inadequate words, Eliot concentrates, ironically or devoutly, on the paradox of the Incarnation expressed as the wordless Word. The end of Eliot’s exploration is a vision of a condition of stillness, which poems can point to but never reach.