From such divergent contexts and metaphoric domains, a shifting picture emerges of Eliot’s elusive animating spirit. This study builds up a gradual picture based on numerous works, in order to draw out the presence in Eliot’s poetry of a self-awareness and understanding of its own generation. As Eliot wrote, ‘The healthy metaphor adds to the strength of the language; it makes available some of that physical source of energy upon which the life of language depends.’ This concluding chapter begins with an exploration of the conjunctions (and differences) between Eliot and Coleridge in their attempts to fathom the ghostly presences and deep surges of their creativity. Finding in Eliot’s criticism a need to reconcile numerous paradigms of literary creation, each of which in some measure attain ‘the direct experience, the immediate contact’ with feeling transmuted into art, it maps a series of interconnections manifest in Eliot’s writing between ‘the religious comprehension’ of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, Coleridgean Romanticism, and the sensual cynicism of the French post-Romantic tradition exemplified by Flaubert, Valéry, Gide, Baudelaire and Laforgue.