Eliot’s allusion, among countless others strewn about the pages of the single most consequential poem of the last century—so many “fragments,” he called them, “shored against my ruins”—recalls the famous opening line from Book III of the Confessions, where a youthful Augustine, having come at last to Carthage, finds himself “in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust.” He is not yet in love…
