Part II looks at the role of light—in its scientific and psycho-spiritual guises—in illuminating Eliot’s concept of poetic creation. It begins by establishing the permeation of astrophysics in Eliot’s intellectual milieu. It analyses the lateral connections between astronomy, literature and mythic imagination as disclosed in the Victorian debates about the death of the sun and their later modernist iterations in imaginings of the void within the atom. The chapter pays special and original attention to Eliot’s preoccupation with (and occasional antipathy toward) the scientific pronouncements of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans and Alfred North Whitehead, and charts the transmission of concepts such as entropy and vacuity from these scientists’ explications into Eliot’s poetry. Poems such as ‘Animula’, ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Gerontion’ are analysed for the ways in which their rhythms and imagery bear witness to the dominant metaphors of the processes of their creation. The chapter also engages with three related studies: Gillian Beer’s Open Fields (1996), Michael H. Whitworth’s Einstein’s Wake (2001), and Daniel Albright’s Quantum Poetics (1997).