T. S. 엘리엇은 『황무지』에서 자기실현을 성취하기 위해 종교적인 방 법 혹은 패러다임(기독교, 힌두교, 불교)을 고려하고 있고, 『칵테일 파티』에서는 현실적인 방법이나 패러다임(심리학 혹은 정신분석학)의 가능성 과 한계를 따져보고 있다. 각각의 작품은 이러한 엘리엇의 고려가 완전 히 이성적인 것에서 신비적인 영역으로 이동하는 지점으로 접근하고 있 지만, 엘리엇이 전통과 개인의 재능에서 말했듯이 자신은 그 사이의 경 계를 넘어서지는 않고 있다. 독자들이 반드시 숙고하고 해답을 구해야 하는 “압도적인 질문”으로 상상의 독자들을 인도하는 것은 바로 엘리엇 의 그러한 자제력일 것이다.

Among twentieth-century Korean writings in English, those of Professor Insoo Lee are singularly impressive for their particular combination of wit, well-reasoned argument, and mastery of subtitles of English idiom at all levels. The importance of T. S. Eliot as perhaps the most influential English or American poet of the twentieth century is established. Professor Lee is, of course, well known as the translator of Eliot’s The Waste Land into Korean. His rendering of the defining poem of the first half of the twentieth century stands today as a monument in the history of Korean translation. Eliot had influenced the works contained in the volume Inside Cloud Cuckoo Land: The Voice of Korea, containing the collected essays, translations, and journalistic articles produced by Professor Lee. Each also was a force for assuming personal moral responsibility in an age defined by warfare, by the trauma resulting from warfare and destruction: the period of World War I and II and the challenges of the subsequent so-called Cold War, and by a general moral lassitude in the era. The English language writings of Professor Lee attest not only the general influence of the era in which Eliot wrote, they also reveal some of the themes and turns of phrase that characterize the writings of Eliot.