Thanks, Matt!
I would say Walther is making a fairly basic error. He's diagnosing Eliot, plausibly enough, as the capstone and commemoration and lament of the collapse of a certain strand of poetic endeavor. And insofar as that is correct, he's right, or right enough, that there's no further to go in that direction: collapse is collapse.
But he sees only the collapse, and not the seeds of the new sprouting within it. For that, you only need to wait a year, for William Carlos Williams' Spring and All (for my money the masterpiece of 20th century English-language poetry).
He's right in this much: Eliot has no heirs. But he's blind to this: we are all Williams' children.
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