As a poet, Eliot was constantly in search of new forms, and he found his voice in a combination of precise imagery, ironic wit, and the juxtaposition of disparate elements presented without explanation of their relationship to each other. His poetry is also significant for the way in which it refers to past works of literature, history, and philosophy, many of them obscure, as a way of enriching not only its own meaning but the function of language itself. Eliot was also interested in preserving the vast cultural heritage from the past that underlies every work of art. Oddly enough, however, despite Eliot`s famous obscurity and the vast trove of scholarship on which he unhesitatingly drew, his poetry is powerful enough in its rhythm and in its imagery to make itself clear and meaningful to the general reader.