referential character of words

[T.S. Eliot] has carried, one wants to say with a sort of ‘heroism’, his self-awareness about language into the depths of his poetry, into ‘the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings’ and the attack upon ‘the general mess of imprecision of feeling’. Unlike some other poets in the Imagist tradition, Mr Eliot has never lost his respect for words. The desire, as Hulme put it, to ‘hand over sensation bodily’ has never led Mr Eliot to make war upon language after the manner of Mallarmé or Pound. One of the deep characteristics of his poetry is a continual concern, in the midst of difficulties, for the referential character of words. (This one most movingly feels in the Four Quartets.)

—Iris Murdoch, “T.S. Eliot as a Moralist,” Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Allen Lane/Penguin, 1998)