A reader who is familiar with T.S. Eliot's poetry will not be confused by the authority that Eliot supposes in many of these essayed thoughts. Consider for instance that when he talks about poetry, he doesn't talk about hypothetical poetry, but rather, he talks from his own life experience, and with the confidence that his personal opinion is authoritative somehow, but as he notices, a person will probably have to see for themselves what kind of a reaction they have to Eliot's poetry. In Eliot's poetry, therefore, we can now see that he has constructed the poem to comply easily with many different imaginations at once, so people can experience it and share their experiences.
That's another of saying that although there is certainly value in canonizing English language masterpieces, that such a canon should not come with a tradition that tells people "What the poetry meant." This is because to Eliot, poetry is something not altogether normal or universal. There is a strange mystery in poetry, because the same words can have radically different meanings and senses depending on the reader, not to mention of course, different emotional sensations. Since the reader can bring new meaning to the poem, the poem is alive in a unique way.
Altogether, the prose says something clearly without actually saying it once—not only is Eliot's view of art something more technical, his view of the poetry itself is more mystic than the average reader might suspect. He takes a pragmatic, disciplined approach to it, but the product is some kind of mechanism that explains a new message to each person, depending on their own experience, their own emotions, their own timing and experience of a poem. He decidedly points to art for these purposes: The union of mankind through art and its criticism, the direct connection between author and reader, and the revelation to the readers of their very own self.
