The poetry of presence c/o Kenner's 'Mechanic Muse'

'... Eliot's poetry responds to yet another of the new century's pervasive experiences, that of being talked to by people we cannot see. This happens whenever we pick up a telephone, a thing we do so many times a day we quite overlook the strangeness of what lappens next. A character in The Cocktail Party remarks that you can't tell the truth on the telephone, meaning probably that you lose three quarters of your communicative power when you cannot be seen and your breathing body is absent, and you must fabricate mere semantic sequences. Your words are only a fraction of what you say, and the telephone throws you back on nothing but words. It is in Sweeney Agonistes, the play that gives the telephone bell a wholly metrical speaking part, that we hear the famous phrase, "I gotta use words vhen I talk to you."
    When the phone rings in that play - 

    Ting a ling ling 

    Ting a ling ling

Dusty snatches it up and says,

Hello Hello are you there?' 

Kenner, H. (1987) The Mechanic Muse, Oxford: OUP. pp.34-35.