News at Eleven (Back Page): Dark house, by which once more I stand

Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more--
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day. [--Tennyson]

'This,' [T.S.] Eliot says, 'is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion related to a particular place; and it gives me the shudder that I fail to get from anything in Maud.' 'Shudder' is a bit surprising coming from the stately Eliot, though the experience to which he refers may in some forms be common enough. He certainly experienced it, or something that puts him or us in mind of it. If the word is used as equivalent to 'frisson' (and lexicographers defining frisson seem unable to avoid 'shudder'), we can propose a debt to the French, likely in these years when English poets were influenced, as Eliot was, by Baudelaire and others.

from The London Review of Books: Eliot and the Shudder

~~~~~~~~~~~