In T. S. Eliot’s early poetry there is a fascination with sexual behavior, sexual criminality, and even instances of cannibalism. These occur in both his published work and in his unpublished Columbo and Bolo poems. Critical attention on this aspect of Eliot’s early work has focused on the themes of gender and race. His attitudes towards women have been well studied by feminist scholars. The critical focus on the Columbo and Bolo poems has emphasized Eliot’s attitudes towards African Americans and his consciousness of race in the American context. But there is another way of understanding these themes and this has rather more to do with class than gender or race. Eliot’s emblematic figure for the ordinary man from the lower classes, namely his Sweeney persona, has a decidedly Irish character. Eliot’s references to sex crimes and cannibalism emphasize the presence of such savagery, not in what used to be called ‘primitive’ societies, but in the very heart of civilization. For a well-educated, upper middle class young man with a New England background during the period of Irish immigration to America and to the political assertiveness of the Irish in both the United States and Great Britain, there is more to fear from the Sweeneys than from comical characters like King Bolo.

The concept of Original Sin is central to Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic theology. In both Paul's epistle to the Romans and Article IX of the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles, Original Sin is not seen merely as an aspect among others of a Christian life but an unavoidable condition of existence. This belief in the fallen state of humanity and nature presents the Christian poet with particular difficulties and nowhere are these difficulties more in evidence than in the matter of language. T. S. Eliot's embrace of Anglo-Catholicism within Anglicanism put the matter of language at the center of his later work, especially Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets. If humans are fallen creatures, the language they use must, in some sense, be fallen too. Eliot recognized this dilemma and adopted a number of stylistic devices in his later poetry to convey his sense of the fate of language in a fallen world. These devices include his use of repetition that suggests a kind of stammering, incomplete grammatical structures and punctuation, self-deprecatory statements, moments of self-exposure and confession. Most notably in both Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, Eliot cautions his readers not to be beguiled by the beauty of poetry itself. In 'East Coker' he goes so far as to state baldly that the 'poetry does not matter'.