Elusive ...

... Book Review: The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volumes 1 and 2: 1898-1925 - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In 1925, he wrote Virginia Woolf: "I feel like a shell with no machinery in it, the moment I try to use my mind at all; it's no use." His wording recalls the "voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells" of "The Waste Land" and the vacuity that gives "The Hollow Men" (1925) its theme.