Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

C RITICAL C OMPANION TO

T. S. Eliot

C RITICAL C OMPANION TO

T. S. Eliot A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

RUSSELL ELLIOTT MURPHY

Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot Copyright © 2007 by Russell Elliott Murphy All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murphy, Russell E. (Russell Elliott) Critical companion to T. S. Eliot: a literary reference to his life and work / Russell Elliott Murphy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8160-6183-9 (acid-free paper) 1. Eliot T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965—Encyclopedias. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography—Encyclopedias. I. Title. PS3509.L43Z7887 2007 821′.912—dc22—[B] 2006034076 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Cathy Rincon/Anastasia Plé Printed in the United States of America VB Hermitage 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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Part I: Biography

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Part II: Works A to Z

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Part III: Related People, Places, and Topics

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Part IV: Appendices

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1. T. S. Eliot Chronology 2. Significant Publications by T. S. Eliot 3. Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources Index

577 583 585 590

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS E

ven in the age of Google, one cannot approach an exhaustive treatment of a poet as erudite and well-read as T. S. Eliot without virtually constant recourse to one of the several works of stellar scholarship that the poet’s achievement has generated. In particular, I must single out Grover Smith’s remarkable T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meanings, a classic of its kind. Peter Ackroyd’s T. S. Eliot: A Life is a veritable font of data and anecdote detailing the poet’s day-to-day experiences and was another welcome source of bibliographical as well as biographical information, as was Christopher Rick’s T. S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare, Poems 1909–1917, a truly indispensable reference for anyone interested in the poet’s early career. Finally, there is Jewel Spears Brooker’s recent and valuable T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews to be noted as well. I have been reading, studying, reading about, writing about, and teaching the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot for going on four decades now. It is impossible for me, by now, to distinguish neatly and honestly among my own most original thoughts and feelings regarding Eliot’s work and significance and those thoughts and feelings that took shape in me thanks only to my exposure to the ideas of other teachers, scholars, and critics. If,

indeed, there is any purpose to what we in literary studies do, it is to influence and inspire each other in the same ways that we have been influenced and inspired in the classroom and the library. So, then, if at any point I seem to be echoing the thoughts or feelings of others who have “said it much better,” I can honestly say that I was in no way mindful of the borrowing either at the time of my writing or subsequently, and I must therefore be left to hope that others will be satisfied with the flattery supplied by my unconscious imitation, if not tribute. Still, let it be known that the major influences on my own understanding of Eliot, whatever that may mean, are most certainly Cleanth Brooks, Elizabeth Drew, Helen Gardner, F. O. Matthiessen, and Hugh Kenner . . . always Hugh Kenner. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Jerry Weist and Dana Hawkes of Eastern Point in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the present owners of the Eliots’ one-time summer home there, for graciously allowing us to photograph its exterior and interior. I will close by acknowledging that all translations of Dante are mine, as is the translation of Hadrian’s “Animula” and anything else that may have required translating.

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INTRODUCTION T

his book is not a shortcut to an appreciation and understanding of the writing of T. S. Eliot for the simple reason that there can be no shortcut to the inner workings of such a complex literary achievement as his. Rather, this book is as comprehensive a guide to Eliot as has yet been published. That is no small claim, nor is this a small book. Eliot is one of the more difficult poets of the 20th century, perhaps of all time. Doc Ock, a character in the movie Spider-Man 2, put it well. During a conversation with young Peter Parker, alias Spider-Man, when the good doctor has not yet morphed into a supervillain and is still only just Dr. Otto Octavius, he relates how his future wife, a literature student when they met in college, learned science for his sake and how he in turn attempted to learn literature for hers. His future wife had been much more successful at mastering his field of study than he had been at mastering hers. “She was studying T. S. Eliot,” he explains to Parker, “and, compared to science, Eliot is very complicated.” That admission of Dr. Octavius’s is a fact: Eliot is very complicated, and there is no easy way to understand his work. Nonetheless, this book is designed to assist the student in doing so. While the entries in this volume on Eliot’s poetry, verse drama, and literary and social criticism recognize and address the complexity of Eliot’s thought and technique, they are written with an aim toward trying to defuse rather than compound that complexity, although never at the expense of sound

scholarship and authentic interpretation. This volume hopes to add to the impressive and extensive quantity of scholarship and criticism that Eliot’s life and work have inspired virtually from the beginning of his literary career with the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. To discuss Eliot’s work requires the recognition of genuine limitations. Although students all too often imagine that the way to come to grips with the “meaning” of a particular Eliot poem is to decode the meaning of every single line, such an attempt often provides just the illusion of clarification at the expense of admitting complexity. Any so-called meaning in a line of Eliot’s can often be refuted by the next line. And then there are all the various allusions to deal with as well—to mythology and to literature, to the Bible and to other religious texts, to operatic pieces, to ragtime music, and to much more. Many an academic career has been made and unmade in the effort to explain Eliot’s allusions, many of which are not even in English. The truth is, Eliot’s style of poetry, very much unintelligible at times, is often intentionally that way. The poet of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, “Gerontion” and “The Hollow Men,” to cite but a few of the titles for which he is best known, was never one to make his readers’ lives easier. So, then, it would be both unfair to the poet and unwise for his readers to expect any teacher or book to make Eliot’s poetry so readily accessible that no questions remain. ix

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

The commentaries in this book recognize and respect Eliot’s complexity by seeking constantly to interpret and to contextualize, but they also aim to provide readers with as much detailed background and peripheral information as can be gathered, all in the hopes that readers can then judge those interpretations for themselves, in good Eliot fashion. They may even be inspired to come up with interpretations of their own. How to Use This Book This book is divided into four principal sections. Part I provides a biographical essay that lays out the

major influences and developments in Eliot’s life in narrative fashion. Part II offers extensive treatment of Eliot’s individual poems, plays, and major works of prose. Entries on all these works are arranged in alphabetical order. Part III provides detailed entries on individuals, places, and works by others that helped shape the poet’s interests and writing. Part IV contains a chronology and an extensive bibliography of works by and about Eliot. To indicate a cross-reference, any name or term that appears as an entry in Part III is printed on first appearance in an entry in SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

PART I

Biography

Biography

T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot) (1888–1965) The rule that great artists do not generally lead interesting lives certainly applies in the case of Thomas Stearns Eliot, the American-born 20thcentury English poet, critic, and verse dramatist. Nonetheless, his life has garnered intense critical scrutiny, if by his life one means not just its actions and events but his tastes and interests and values as well. The man who virtually invented the idea of separating the poet from the poem and the life and times from the work has been subjected to more analysis and interpretation of the relationship among the life and the work and the times than any other literary figure of the 20th century, perhaps of all time. The reason for this kind of scrutiny is obvious: Few other poets have left behind a body of work whose meanings continue to be inscrutable, and yet the interest these works hold for readers continues to be contagious. Who the person T. S. Eliot was remains not so much a puzzle as a challenge, precisely because his poetry can simultaneously bedazzle and befuddle readers. It is not odd, then, that critics and scholars, who are themselves nothing more than glorified readers, persist to this day in trying to untangle from the facts of the reasonably normal life that Eliot led the nuanced minutiae of some particular biographical detail that will finally cast an unfailingly clear light on an image or an illusion or symbol whose very attraction as poetry, meanwhile, seems to lie in its adamant resistance to any sort of unerring interpretation, as the poet himself well knew.

EARLY LIFE T. S. Eliot was born on September 23, 1888, in ST. LOUIS, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns. Although the Eliots were a reasonably prosperous family who could trace their original New England roots back to the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the St. Louis of the time still had some of the rough-and-tumble spirit of a frontier town and river city from its own original heyday

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as the fabled Gateway to the West. Growing up in that vibrantly active community along the fabled Mississippi River would remain an experience that would shape Eliot’s poetry and acute sense of place well into his advancing years. “The Dry Salvages,” composed during the height of World War II in the summer of 1940, begins with its famous image of a river that is unmistakably the Mississippi, a “strong brown god.” Eliot, however, was a scion of a family with close ties to the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant establishment of another water city—staid, old BOSTON and environs, a harbor city with a self-confidently progressive culture capable of laying credible if not somewhat self-congratulatory claim at that time to being the Hub of the Universe. The Massachusetts family’s founder, Andrew Eliot, emigrated from the English village of East Coker in the 17th century, settling in Beverly, Massachusetts, where he served as town clerk. He is reputed as well to have served as a juror during the notorious Salem witch trials. T. S. Eliot’s paternal grandfather, WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT, was a Harvard Divinity School graduate and a disciple of William Ellery Channing, one of the founding forces behind American UNITARIANISM. As a young man, William Eliot had “lit out for the territories” (as another literary native son of Missouri, Mark Twain, later famously phrased America’s then-obsessive fascination with going west). William, whom his grandson Thomas would grow up to resemble, settled in St. Louis in 1834. There, in keeping with Unitarianism’s call to civic duty and with the fulfillment of social obligations inherently required by the privilege accorded to his class, William devoted himself to philanthropic endeavors among his other service to the community. He founded the Unitarian church in St. Louis, the first west of the Mississippi, and helped found WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY. William’s son Henry, the poet’s father, would be of a more worldly and practical bent. Despite an early business failure, Henry eventually ended up president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, a position whose success would enable the family to lead a comfortable middle-class life. That material success nevertheless did not translate into the family’s abandoning their once-fashionable Locust

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

Eliot’s ancestral home of East Coker, shown as it is today. Eliot first visited East Coker in August 1937, and the town would later be the locale for the Quartet of the same name. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

Street address long after urban sprawl had brought the area into some decay and other equally prosperous families had moved out into the burgeoning suburbs. So, then, just as that powerful sense of devotion to a city to whose civic and moral wellbeing grandfather William had devoted so much of his life would have its own salutary effect on the future poet, father Henry’s remaining city-bound would expose Eliot the boy to the somewhat grittier aspects of the American urban experience at a time when it was undergoing rapid and uncontrolled transformations on virtually every front, from the social and political to the economic and technological. It was the women in the young Eliot’s early life, however, who would have the most profound effect upon the developing literary genius. Eliot was not only the last child born to Henry and Charlotte, but a late child as well, coming when his parents were already in their 40s and his six older siblings were already well out of their childhood years. Furthermore, five of these six elder children were girls, and Eliot, a precociously bright child who, while

not frail, was not of particularly robust health and would suffer throughout his life from a congenital double hernia, was protected and doted on. There was also the early influence of his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne, who took him to Roman Catholic Mass with her in both St. Louis and GLOUCESTER, Massachusetts, where the Eliots summered beginning in 1893. Eliot would later recall that he had conversations with her about the existence of God when he was only six. Foremost among these early influences was his mother, Charlotte, a former schoolteacher and another transplanted New Englander, whose own family also had close ties to Harvard Divinity School and Boston society. A cultured, genteel woman, upon her marriage to Henry she devoted herself to raising a family and to church and civic work. She was also particularly devout in her religious practices, honoring the Madonna and Child Jesus and St. Francis despite or perhaps because of the humanist bent of her Unitarian background. Her other interests included the austere Italian Renaissance moral reformer Savonarola, about whom she wrote

Biography

T. S. Eliot, between three and five years of age in 1892 or 1893 (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

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a book-length poem. Indeed, young Eliot’s literary and moral interests must have flourished under the especially protective eyes of his highly accomplished and loving mother, whom the poet’s brother, Henry, Jr., said Eliot, among all her children, most resembled both physically and in character. Later, when her son Tom began to show such promise as a poet during his undergraduate years at Harvard, Charlotte would write to say that she hoped that her son would achieve the literary recognition that she herself, as a young woman, had hoped to achieve in her own life but that had evaded her as a consequence of her wifely and maternal duties. Under Charlotte’s ever-watchful eye, the somewhat frail Eliot was nevertheless allowed to have a normal boyhood, during which he enjoyed both the comforts of a securely middle-class life and the freedoms of a city neighborhood. In 1896, Henry Sr. was prosperous enough for the family to build a substantial summer home on Eastern Point at Gloucester. Although Charlotte

Eliot with his mother in 1895, while vacationing in Gloucester, Massachusetts (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

Advocate staff, 1910. A young Eliot is seated third from left in the front row. Between 1907 and 1910, Eliot published a total of 14 poems in the Advocate. (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

prohibited him from engaging in overly strenuous physical activities because of hernias, Eliot became a very avid coastal sailor, sometimes venturing as far north up the New England seaboard as Canada. He was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis until his 16th year. There he published several stories in the Smith Academy Record inspired by visits to the native village exhibits at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904. In 1905, he left home to spend his last year of secondary education as a student at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. There he began the last phase of his preparation for his matriculating as an undergraduate at HARVARD College beginning in 1906.

THE POET TAKES SHAPE Already visible in Eliot’s roots are the seeds of the identity issues that would make Eliot an American

poet who would become a British subject in 1928. At 18, Eliot was a midwesterner or southerner, depending on one’s view of St. Louis’s regional identity, whose family had been from New England and who would himself move there. He was also a socially privileged individual raised in the middle of the social stew that is any American inner city to this day, as psychically at home on the banks of a great, rolling, mythic river as along the rocky shores of an immense and equally fabled ocean. Is it any wonder, then, that Eliot very likely would feel at home everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere and that his earliest literary influences were neither American nor English but European? Eliot found his first and most profound literary influences not in America or even in England, but in two continental European venues, contemporary France and late medieval Florence, Italy. The

Biography story of Eliot’s exposure to the French symbolists is almost legendary among students of the poet; his exposure to the Italian poet DANTE ALIGHIERI is hardly less well known. But neither influence could have come about were it not for Eliot’s exposure to a cosmopolitan undergraduate education at HARVARD, an institution of higher learning that, despite its venerability, has always taken pride in its being a progressive force in American education. When the young Tom Eliot went to Harvard in the fall of 1906, he had been preceded not only by his brother Henry, Jr., but also by a number of Eliot ancestors. Indeed, a distant cousin, Charles William Eliot, was the university’s then-seated president. Nevertheless, so thoroughly midwestern was the future poet, despite the summers in Gloucester and the year at the Milton Academy, that fellow students characterized his speech with a racial slur, calling it a “nigger drawl.” For all that people who would meet Eliot throughout his adult life would comment on his shyness, Eliot was both a successful student and, more important, classmate. He was active in all the various social clubs that then constituted the core of the undergraduate experience, forming many lifelong friendships, most notably with the fellow future poet and critic CONRAD AIKEN, whom he joined in 1909 on the board of Harvard’s undergraduate literary magazine, the Advocate. Eliot’s literary aspirations, however, had already been given an incalculable boost from a source that so changed his life that he would be expressing his “great indebtedness” to the source of that inspiration years later. In December 1908, while looking through the offerings available in the Harvard Union library, Eliot stumbled upon ARTHUR SYMONS’s critical study The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, and through that work he was introduced to the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE. Whatever the exact shape that Eliot’s affinity for the tragic young French poet and his self-deprecatingly seriocomic verse took, there was enough of an affinity that by the following spring Eliot had acquired a three-volume set of Laforgue’s complete works, although he could barely translate the French. In an August 1917 letter to an admirer of his own first volume, Prufrock and Other Obser-

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vations, he would admit to feeling “more grateful” to Laforgue than any other poetic influence that he could think of at that time. What Laforgue gave Eliot, it is generally agreed, was the ability to manufacture poetic emotions by means of the mask. In Laforgue’s case, the worldweary, elegant sophisticate who could also act the double and play the pathetic fool to his own passions may have been in keeping with the facts of his life as a consumptive dandy. Eliot learned from that sort of self-modeling, nevertheless, that to write poetry was as much to adopt a tone and a style as it was to express oneself. By the time he completed his undergraduate studies and a master’s program in English literature at Harvard in 1910, he had already learned to cast the “I” of the poem in whatever droll or pathetic role might serve the purposes not of biography but of art. In essence, not yet out of his 22nd year, Eliot seemed to know instinctively that craft is more critical to the poet and the poem than content— indeed, that craft is content, if by craft is meant the ability to cast words into verses with such a multiplicity of frequently contradictory moods and tones and meanings that a personality totally independent of the poet emerges. That abstracting from experience, rather than composing out of it, changed, no doubt, as Eliot matured and began to acquire a center to his values and beliefs. For now, however, while he was still an impressionable young person just learning the skills that would become the basis for his trade in life, the mastering of the craft of poetry occupied most of his attention. He was learning it primarily from the symbolist poets, whose view of the world might seem, on the surface, to be so alien to his own—a person raised in relative ease and luxury in the stable surroundings of a long-established family and the cultural and religious traditions associated with his New England Puritan heritage—as to defy any resemblances.

THE TRAVELING STUDENT Eliot spent the summer following his June 1910 graduation from Harvard with his family in Gloucester, convincing them to allow him to travel to Paris that fall, and he left for Europe in October, shortly

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

after his 22nd birthday. In addition to Paris’s reputation among the English and Anglo-Americans as a city where moral, religious, and intellectual strictures were under far less restraint, it had also long been something of a finishing school for young British and American people of so-called breeding and prospects. There Eliot took classes in French literature at the Sorbonne and honed his philosophical skills by attending lectures at the Collège de France conducted by the renowned French idealist philosopher HENRI BERGSON. During the 11 months that Eliot spent in Paris, however, equally significant events were occurring on other fronts in his life and interests. For one thing, he turned his hand to perfecting the poems in the symbolist style that he had penned during his undergraduate days, most notably “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and the “Preludes.” Far more significant by any standard of measurement, he composed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and worked on “Portrait of a Lady,” a poem that he had begun in early 1910 but would not complete until after his return to America in November 1911. He also struck up a friendship with a young Frenchman, Jean Verdenal, who shared his interest in contemporary French poetry. Verdenal’s subsequent death in World War I, in which he served as a medical officer, caused Eliot enough grief that he would later dedicate his first published volume of poetry, 1917’s Prufrock and Other Observations, to this friend of his youth and fellow poetry enthusiast. Beyond his academic studies, Eliot also had a private tutor in French. In addition, he took up smoking strong French cigarettes, a vice that he continued for many years afterward and that no doubt contributed to the emphysema that he developed later in life. He also toyed with the idea of remaining in Paris, where he would become a poet writing verse in French, not English. Youthful binges of wish-fulfillment aside, the Paris of the time offered him cultural delights, from opera and ballet to the high-kicking dancers at the Moulin Rouge and the decadent nightlife of the so aptly named Montparnasse, the student and artist quarter that, little more than a decade later, would achieve enduring fame in American letters as the lengendary Left Bank that the equally legendary

expatriates, among them Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, would soon frequent. Despite bouts of loneliness and homesickness brought on by his characteristic shyness, it was a wonderful year for Eliot, just the sort of release and relief from the humdrum of the familiar and the routine that a young person of Eliot’s deceptively restless nature needed at this critical juncture in his passage from youth into adulthood. He used Paris as a home base from which he might visit other European locales. In April, he traveled for the first time to the city that would become his future home, London, where he wrote the poem “Interlude in London.” In July, he traveled to Munich and then south into northern Italy. His lovely lyric “La figlia che piange” would be the fruit of that excursion. By the time his close friend from Harvard, Conrad Aiken, visited him in Paris in the summer of 1911, however, Eliot was expressing a determination to return to Harvard to enroll in the graduate program there in philosophy. By September, he had sailed back to America, where he again joined his family on Eastern Point in Gloucester. When the fall semester began at Harvard, he was enrolled in the university’s graduate school to study for his doctorate in philosophy.

GRADUATE YEARS For the next three years, Eliot studied philosophy at Harvard. He took classes in Hindu philosophy, Sanskrit, and Indian philology. In 1912, he also met and fell in love with Emily Hale, with whom he would resume a subdued romantic relationship several decades later when his first marriage began to fall apart. Eliot was very successful as a doctoral candidate and flourished amid the rigors of academic life. In June 1913, he purchased a copy of F. H. BRADLEY’s Appearance and Reality, the work that would become the subject of his doctoral dissertation. That fall semester, he took a course in various types of scientific methods under JOSIAH ROYCE. The paper he produced for that course, on assessing primitive rituals, would conclude that any scientific validity is flawed by virtue of the fact that the observer’s observations are distorted by his own experiences. Tenets such as these, questioning the

Biography human ability to access any experience that might be said to approximate an objective reality, would ultimately form the foundation for much of Eliot’s modernist thinking, which relied on tradition as a hedge against the moral and intellectual pitfalls awaiting any sort of personal myopia. By October 1913, Eliot had proved to be both adept enough at and devoted enough to his graduate studies in philosophy to be appointed president of the University Philosophical Club. By March 1914, impressed by a visiting professor from England, BERTRAND RUSSELL, Eliot obtained a prestigious appointment by Harvard to a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship in Philosophy, which he planned to spend at Merton College, Oxford, for the 1914–15 academic year. There he would study Aristotle under the tutelage of Harold Joachim, one of Bradley’s disciples. Although Eliot could hardly have known it at the time, once he set sail for England that summer of 1914, except for a brief visit the following summer, he would not return to America again for another 17 years.

married. Thus began a marriage that was not so much troubled or stormy or passionate as odd. By all accounts, as a domestic pair, they both seemed to be self-indulgent hypochondriacs, who were, nevertheless, often genuinely ill with one malady or another. They both seemed, too, to be fairly ignorant with regard to maintaining healthy sexual relations, though not necessarily virginal. Vivien is said to have suffered from neurasthenia, or what would today be called a nervous disorder, that made her very high strung and her behavior erratic. Furthermore, she had a persistent problem with extremely irregular menstrual cycles, creating problems both with her personal hygiene and with the couple’s capacity to have a normal sex life, if any at all. Despite this, there are reasons to believe that during the first years of her marriage to Eliot, Vivien carried on an affair with Bertrand Russell,

THE OXFORD YEAR Two events conspired to make Eliot become the English rather than the American poet that he would eventually enter literary history as. The first, and far more significant, was the outbreak of hostilities in Europe that would eventually be known as the Great War, or World War I. Eliot had no sooner arrived in England in July 1914 to take up his Oxford studies that fall than he departed for a summer class in Marburg, Germany, where he was when war between Russia and Germany broke out on August 1. The summer seminar was cancelled, although it was another two weeks before Eliot was permitted to leave Germany and return to England, where he began his course of study at Oxford on October 6. He would return to America the following July to summer with his family at Gloucester. Otherwise, Eliot essentially maintained his residence in England from that moment on. The other event that effectively sealed Eliot’s fate occured on April 24, 1915, when he met Vivien Haigh-Wood, the attractive and certainly eccentric daughter of the landscape and portrait painter Charles Haigh-Wood. On June 26, they

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Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot in 1921, about six years into her marriage with Eliot (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot marriage and Vivien’s slow but inevitable decline into what can only be described as madness, neither can there be any doubt that Eliot continued to suffer a great deal from feelings of personal guilt and anguish over the tragic travesty their marriage turned out to be almost from the first.

DENIZEN OF LITERARY LONDON

Eliot in 1933, in formal wear before presenting a visiting lecture in New York (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

the mentor whose charm and brilliance had drawn Eliot to study in England in the first place. The marriage was one of a virtually steady though never dramatic decline, more painful for their friends, perhaps, than for themselves, although it would not effectively dissolve until the fall of 1932 when Eliot left for America to take up a yearlong visiting professorship at Harvard. From that point on, although Vivien would refuse to admit it, they were estranged. Shortly after his return to England, in September 1933, Eliot filed for a formal separation, although Vivien continued to harrass him and their mutual acquaintances as if they were still husband and wife. By the summer of 1938, she would be committed by her family to a private mental hospital, where she died of a heart attack at the comparatively youthful age of 58 in 1947. While no one, not even future biographers, would hold Eliot personally responsible for the dissolution of the

The summer of 1914 through spring of 1915 witnessed another significant development for Eliot, one that would also have enduring effects, although in this case reasonably salutary ones, on the blossoming poet’s life and work. Through the kind offices of his Harvard undergraduate friend, Conrad Aiken, Eliot would meet another visiting American poet, EZRA POUND, in London on September 22, thus beginning one of American and English letters’ most celebrated and productive literary and personal friendships. Their relationship extended well into the 1950s, by which time Pound, tried by U.S. authorities for his activities on behalf of Fascist Italy, an enemy power, during World War II, had been declared incurably insane and was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. But their relationship had in fact culminated in the earlier collaborative effort that would produce, in 1922, the final version of Eliot’s early modernist masterpiece The Waste Land. Eliot had already been introduced to Pound’s work by another Harvard undergraduate back in 1909 when Eliot was first experimenting in his own new kind of poetry based on his exposure to the French symbolists. Pound, at that time, was still translating the works of the 13th-century French Provençal poets known collectively as the Troubadours, whose love lyrics were apparently not Eliot’s cup of tea. Whatever his reasons may have been, Eliot did not agree with the assessment, made then, that he would find Pound’s work to be “up your street.” By the time of their meeting five or more years later, however, Pound, by then under the influence of a recent acquaintanceship with the Chinese ideogram, had become a self-styled imagist poet far more in keeping with his own time and with the stylistic and thematic revolution then taking place in poetry writing. Employing concrete images

Biography along with the freer poetic style categorized under the general heading VERS LIBRE, or free verse, the elder poet, Pound, was also making a name for himself as an editor and promoter of this new kind of poetry emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. It was in this later role that he took Eliot under his literary wing. Pound used his considerable influence to do everything that he could to ensure that the work of the younger man, whom he famously described to Harriet Monroe, then the editor of Poetry magazine, as a poet who had “made himself modern all of his own,” was published and was afforded the recognition that it deserved. By early October, Pound had sent Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Monroe at Poetry, for which Pound was the European editor. The poem, Eliot’s first major success, would appear in that review the next June. Under the auspices of such literary acquaintances as Aiken and Pound, along with the social circles that Eliot shared as a result of his marriage to Vivien and of the mentorship of Russell, who had since returned to England, Eliot found himself being quickly ushered into the sorts of literary, academic, and journalistic environments that would serve him well as he began to cultivate a burgeoning career in London as a poet and critic of some modest note. In time, and particularly by virtue of his attendance at such venues as Lady OTTOLINE MORRELL’s literary salon for upper-crust young British bohemians at her estate at Garsington, he would come to know the sister-and-brother

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poets, Dame Edith, Sir Osbert, and Sir Sacherverell SITWELL and VIRGINIA WOOLF and her husband Leonard Woolf. These were the people at the center of the famous Bloomsbury Group, whose Hogarth Press would publish the early work of many of the new young writers, including Eliot and other future literary luminaries such as Aldous Huxley and Wyndham Lewis. In the meantime, Eliot continued to publish in outlets such as Poetry and Others. By the end of 1915, he would see the “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” published in Lewis’s Blast; “Portrait of a Lady” in Others; and “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” and “Cousin Nancy” published in Poetry. At the end of that year, Pound included him in his Catholic Anthology, sealing Eliot’s reputation as a rising star among the new voices then emerging in English and American poetry. In the meantime, too, he finally completed his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.” Eliot booked passage for travel to America in early April 1916 so that he might defend his dissertation and thus complete his graduate program with a viva, or oral defense. When the departure date was delayed as a result of the war, however, he had to cancel these plans. Although Harvard accepted his thesis without any defense, it would not be until 1947 that Eliot actually received his doctoral degree in a special ceremony at Harvard in Cambridge. He would eventually publish the dissertation under the shortened and less academic-sounding title Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley in 1964.

LEADING TWO LIVES

Eliot in 1947, shortly after receiving his honorary doctorate from Harvard (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

For their living, the young married couple relied on the income that Eliot earned teaching Latin at Highgate Junior School. Throughout 1916, Eliot was also publishing articles and reviews in the New Statesman and the Monist and was offering courses and lectures on modern French and English literature. In September, he told his brother, Henry, that “Prufrock” might very well have been his “swan song,” and by the end of the year, he suggested that he was ready to give up on teaching as well. It is

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

no surprise, then, that by mid-March of 1917, he began to work for Lloyds Bank, taking a position in the colonial and foreign department that would maintain him financially for the next seven years. By the end of the succeeding year, brother Henry would report that young Tom had become financially independent and no longer required support from his family. For all its apparent stops and starts, Eliot’s accomplishments to date were appreciable. After a mere three years in England, and in view of how much he, like everyone else, had had to make do because of the circumstances created on all sides by the war, he had become a figure of note in the small but influential circles in which he moved. For better or worse, he had been widely published, networked, and accepted by the literary establishment of a foreign capital that also happened to be one of the world’s most dynamic cities. He was about to issue a complete volume of poetry that, to this day, is regarded as a remarkable poetic achievement, and he had landed himself a job that most others would regard as a career, all the while marrying and fulfilling as well the rigorous requirements of a graduate degree in philosophy. It seemed, however, that Eliot was marking himself out for a literary career rather than the academic one for which he had been preparing himself since entering Harvard as a freshman in 1906. At the very least, it was clear that he could no longer maintain a private life as a man of letters of increasing influence and respect while trying to serve the demands of a career as a teacher of high school language and literature. He did not abandon teaching entirely just yet, presenting a three-year program in modern English literature and then, in September 1917, taking on the additional teaching burden of a six-month series of weekly lectures on Victorian literature. His employment at Lloyds and his literary endeavors, however, began to occupy more and more of his time and attention. Despite his failing confidence in his poetic gifts, doubts that would assail him periodically throughout his life, Eliot achieved further literary success and recognition once his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, was brought out by the Egoist Limited Press in June 1917. Only a

month earlier, Eliot had begun to review for the prestigious Little Review, and with the publication of the first volume of his poetry, Eliot found his influence further expanded when he was appointed assistant poetry editor for the equally significant periodical the EGOIST. Pound was never far from the scene, simultaneously promoting Eliot’s interests and keeping him engaged in poetry writing, especially at a time when Eliot felt that his talents and sources of inspiration had become so diminished and unlikely to recover that he was willing to try writing poetry in French. The poems he wrote during this time include “Dans le restaurant,” from which a critical portion of The Waste Land would eventually emerge. Pound had already sought, back in September 1916, to secure lawyer JOHN QUINN in New York as a patron for Eliot, whom Pound wished to characterize as a struggling, young poet. Throughout 1917 and 1918, Pound also kept Eliot’s flagging creative juices flowing by encouraging him to work in a mutual experimentation with the so-called quatrains originally developed by the 19th-century French poet Théophile Gautier. Eliot’s efforts with these four-line stanzas with their four-beat lines would result in such curiously opaque poems as “The Hippopotamus” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” among others, while Pound ended up using the quatrain form to great effect in the first few parts of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published in 1919. Theirs was a mutually beneficial relationship. In January 1918, Knopf in New York published Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, Eliot’s introduction to Pound’s latest work. Pound was careful to inform Quinn that he did not want Eliot’s name to be too much associated with his own as a critical voice since it might impede Eliot’s progress and promise as a poet in his own right, so the pamphlet-length book was published anonymously. The United States had entered the war against Germany on April 6, 1917, and by late 1918, Eliot was beginning to chafe at being a reasonably able-bodied young man while both his native and adopted countries were at war. Several efforts to find an opportunity for service, first with the U.S. Navy and then with the U.S. Army, met with all sorts of

Biography bureaucratic entanglements, however. These efforts all came to an end, more or less, when an armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, but not before Eliot had taken a leave of absence from Lloyds in order to report for duty. Pound, working behind the scenes as usual, informed Quinn that he had, with characteristic cheek, visited the U.S. embassy in London to ask that they not allow Eliot, whom he characterized as one of the few living Americans capable of advancing civilization, to risk his life in a conflict meant presumably to preserve it. In the meantime, Pound had also prepared for publication by Knopf a volume containing Eliot’s work to date. It would appear in February 1920 as Poems 1920, and it included his first genuinely original work since “Prufrock,” the poem “Gerontion.” The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press would release a similar volume, Poems, in May 1919. At the same time, Eliot’s own editing and reviewing responsibilities were keeping him busy even as they followed their own vagaries. He was offered the assistant editorship of the Athenaeum in March but declined it, a certain sign that these literary successes were beginning to become a different kind of burden, but a burden no less. By September 1919, however, he accepted a welcome invitation to write lead articles for the extremely influential Times Literary Supplement. Then the Egoist, of which he had been assistant editor and which had been publishing excerpts from JAMES JOYCE’s modernist triumph, the novel Ulysses, ceased publication in December of that same year, but not before publishing one of Eliot’s most influential literary essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in installments in its two final issues. With so much activity on so many fronts, 1920 proved to be a particularly busy and pivotal year, as might be expected. In addition to the Knopf volume, the Ovid Press published yet another collection of his poetry, Ara Vos Prec, in February, and the Methuen Press would release his first collection of critical prose, The Sacred Wood, that November. It would include, among other noteworthy early work, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “Hamlet and His Problems,” and “The Metaphysical Poets.” Eliot was keeping busy with both work and leisure activities as well, maintaining a busy social life

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while continuing this increasingly productive life of his as a poet and critic. In 1919, for example, although he was sent on excursions into outlying areas by Lloyds for weeks at a time, he still found time to take a walking tour of southern France with Ezra Pound in August. The following August, he would finally meet Joyce, in Paris, before embarking on a bicycle tour of northern France in the company of Wyndham Lewis. Although Vivien traveled in his social circles, she was conspicuously absent from many of these extended vacations. Eliot’s father had died in January 1919. In June 1921, he and Vivien would be visited for several months by his mother, Henry, and an elder sister, Marian. He would complain to his mother in late December 1920 that his successes at finding more and more publishing outlets for his essays were preventing him from achieving other, more creative aims. Nonetheless, he and Harvard classmate SCOFIELD THAYER, in July of 1921, decided to approach Lady ROTHERMERE, the estranged wife of a newspaper magnate and one of England’s wealthiest men, to interest her in a new international review that would combine Thayer’s the DIAL in New York with another journal that Eliot would edit from London. Lady Rothermere ultimately would accede to their plans but decided to limit her financial support to a review located in London. The result, the CRITERION, edited by Eliot, would, for the next decade and a half or more, be one of the most significant European outlets in English for new young writers and thinkers. Indeed, its first number, published in October 1922, would introduce the world to Eliot’s own modernist masterwork, The Waste Land.

THE POET OF THE WASTE LAND Since as early as September 1920, Eliot had been sharing with various intimates, his mother among them, his hopes to find the time to work on a long poem, “something which I thought better or more important.” The Waste Land, the poem that resulted, has not only been universally acclaimed as great poetry but is likely to be one of the enduring cultural documents of the 20th century. Contrary to a story that has come to gain near legendary status among literature students, the poet of The Waste Land was not confined to an

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

insane asylum in Switzerland at the time that he composed the poem. Neither Eliot nor Vivien were ever in excellent health, and they seemed to feed off each other throughout their various bouts of headaches, flu, stress, and sundry other discomforts, most of them, no doubt, far more real than imagined. In March 1921, by which time Eliot presumably had begun work on his long poem, Vivien collapsed and had to be hospitalized. She was back home with him in April and then went to the seaside for further rest and recuperation in May. The subsequent summer of 1921, during which Eliot continued working on his long poem, was, however, also a particularly oppressively hot and dry summer—one that took a toll on the poet’s nerves, if not his health. In late September, he visited a physician, who recommended a prolonged period of total rest. By mid-October, following the doctor’s advice, Eliot had checked into a hotel in Margate, where Vivien joined him. The idea was that he would remain there a month and then travel to a cottage near Monte Carlo lent him by Lady Rothermere, where he would spend another two months relaxing and recuperating. All the latest rage for treating stress among his London circle, however, including Lady Ottoline and Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous, was to check into a clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland, run by a Dr. Vittoz. On their recommendation and with Vivien’s consent, Eliot checked into Dr. Vittoz’s clinic sometime in late November. Vivien, who had traveled with him as far as to Paris, meanwhile checked into a sanatorium there. Inasmuch as Lloyds, to justify Eliot’s three-month leave of absence, had written “nervous breakdown” on the documentation approving his leave, the misconception has been perpetuated that Eliot did indeed suffer a nervous breakdown in 1921 and, while institutionalized for treatment for it, composed The Waste Land. The fact was, however, that he had been working diligently enough on that poem, originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” to show a working draft to Pound when he and Vivien visited him in Paris before Eliot continued on to Lausanne. Dr. Vittoz’s unique treatment, which focused on reducing in his patients a corrosive self-absorption, proved to be very beneficial to Eliot.

In any event, when Eliot rejoined Vivien in Paris in January 1922, Pound reported to Quinn that Eliot had in his suitcase “a damn good poem (19 pages),” one that he, Pound, hoped Thayer would soon be publishing in The Dial. From Pound’s other comments, it appears that it must have been during that same period of time, which ran barely more than a week (Eliot arrived in Paris of January 2 and had left by the 12th in order to resume his post at Lloyds), that Pound edited Eliot’s composition. These editorial changes, virtually all of them wholesale excisions, resulted in the version of The Waste Land that was finally published simultaneously in Eliot’s Criterion in London and Thayer’s Dial in New York in October 1922 and then published in book form, with its equally famous notes, by Boni & Liveright in New York that December. Pound, working again behind the scenes, convinced Quinn to arrange for Eliot to receive from The Dial a prize of $2000. Subsequently, as a token of esteem for this generosity, Eliot remanded to Quinn the original Waste Land manuscript, which included Pound’s and Vivien’s suggested revisions, most of which Eliot had incorporated into the finished poem. That literary treasure would effectively disappear from the public consciousness until October 25, 1968, when the New York Public Library revealed that the manuscript had been sold to their Berg Collection in April 1958 by Quinn’s niece, Mary (Mrs. Thomas F. Conroy). Eliot had passed away by then, on January 4, 1965, but his widow, Valerie, to the delight of Eliot scholars everywhere, would publish these original drafts of The Waste Land in both facsimile and transcript in a superbly scholarly book-length edition in the spring of 1971. The poem’s initial publication back in 1922 proved to be a publishing event of the first order, confirming Pound’s conviction, on first seeing the completed manuscript, that Eliot’s work ought to “make the rest of us shut up shop.” Though not all the reviewers—and there would be many over the next year or more—agreed with what they took to be the poetry’s dispirited pessimism, none failed to regard Eliot’s as a literary achievement of the first order. Had he never written another word, The Waste Land would have secured Eliot’s place in the history of English literature for all time—a remark-

Biography able accomplishment for a 30-year-old man who had arrived in London only eight years earlier as a young graduate student in philosophy who just happened to have seriously dabbled, as an undergraduate, in poetry writing. Along with The Sacred Wood and, now, his editorship of a bold, new review, the Criterion, by the close of 1922 Eliot found himself to be, perhaps even more than Joyce or Pound, the central figure in the modernist movement, certainly the most publicly acknowledged among them as such. That same year closed out another phase in the poet’s life on a less illustrious but no less emphatic note. Convinced that Eliot’s perennial mental distress was partly the result of his economic worries, Pound, in March 1922, had revived a subscription, called “Bel Esprit,” to raise Eliot an additional £300 per year (the idea was that 30 individuals would contribute £10 annually). Somehow, perhaps because of the notoriety that had come to him with the publication of The Waste Land, the Liverpool Post published a story that £800 had come to Eliot as a result of Pound’s scheme, but that Eliot had subsequently reneged on a promise to leave his post with Lloyds, one of the terms of the subscription. Eliot was forced to write a letter to the editor of the Post, insisting that he had received no such sum and demanding that the Post retract the story, which they subsequently did. Although it occurred in this relatively undramatic way and might not seem to have been so momentous an event at the time, by the end of 1922, Eliot not only had become firmly established as one of the shining literary lights of his generation but had openly declared his independence from the patronizing protectiveness of Ezra Pound. Still, when it was published in book form, Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to Pound, his longtime literary mentor and sponsor, borrowing a phrase from Dante to honor him as “il miglior fabbro”—the better craftsman. And rightly so. With the exceptions of all the celebrated literary allusions, whose inclusion as a literary device was Eliot’s idea as well, the words and the sentiments and the great complexity of theme of The Waste Land were all Eliot’s. The final structure of The Waste Land, however, with its economy of statement and its fragmented tone, was

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all Pound’s doing and has become as much a part of the poem’s celebrity as the extensive use of allusions and the notes.

SUCCESSES AND CREATIVE INERTIA If 1922 concluded with Eliot as the foremost spokesperson for the spirit of that postwar generation that would very shortly be called by Gertrude Stein the Lost Generation, he would spend much of the rest of the 1920s becoming the Lost Leader. Proclaimed the poet who had given voice to the “disillusionment of a generation” by 1930 and the publication of the collection Ash-Wednesday, he had made what to some might seem to be a complete turnaround, casting his poetic and, apparently, personal fate not with echoing the chaos and disorder of his age, which The Waste Land had seemed to do so powerfully, but with orthodox political, literary, and religious traditions. Such a reading as this of the shift that would take place in Eliot’s ideology during the next eight years, however, presupposes that The Waste Land was indeed an expression of disillusionment, a charge or encomium, depending on one’s point of view, that Eliot always assiduously denied. For him, the poem was a bit of “rhythmical grumbling,” “a grouse against the world,” one that finally expressed his generation’s “illusion of being disillusioned.” The road from the relative triumph of late 1922 to his re-creation of self whose culmination was sealed with AshWednesday, however, while not a straight one, was nevertheless neither an unpredictable one nor an unlikely one. 1923 opened with the financial and marital stress that seemed by now to have become a way of life for the poet. He was able, nevertheless, to put away the money that the Dial’s and other prizes resulting from The Waste Land had earned him as a slush fund and hedge against the day when he might leave Lloyds. To accomplish that goal, he cast about for a position in publishing, preferably as the editor of a major periodical, but then he ended up withdrawing his name from consideration to be the editor of the Nation, as if plagued with uncertainties about which route he should take. At the same time and with the same sort of somewhat characteristic confusion of motives and aims, he

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

expressed to Quinn his regret at having taken upon himself the task of editing the Criterion. This seemingly contradictory behavior, however, makes more sense when the simple necessity of earning a sufficient living without overtaxing his delicate nervous system is factored in. Along with Vivien’s health problems, which were increasing and would eventually take on serious mental overtones, Eliot had simply stretched his meager physical, emotional, and mental constitutional resources much too thin. In the process, he was reaching hither and thither for a panacea, if not in fact virtually flailing about in his quest for one. Indeed, as if manifesting these conflicts, his own personal behavior began to become rather suspect. During the course of the ensuing months, consumed by the very sort of deflation of spirits that might be expected of someone who had expended such creative energy successfully composing The Waste Land, Eliot took to wearing a very pale green face powder in public. Virginia Woolf even reported seeing him wearing red lipstick, and among mutual friends, the poet Siegfried Sassoon took to calling him “the undertaker.” Nevertheless, he managed to publish 10 articles between April and December 1923 and began to conceptualize his next major creative effort, the never-completed verse drama “Sweeney Agonistes.” The way this intensely modernist, nearly absurdist drama more or less celebrates futility and despair as a way of life should seem fitting in context, given the overall tenor of frustration and disappointment that seemed to be dominating the poet’s personal and professional life at this time. Still, it would be wrong to read Eliot’s biography into Sweeney’s lugubrious disdain for anything but raw sex expressed in cannibalistic terms—as if the natural universe were not just inhospitable but abhorrent. What Eliot and Sweeney seemed to share, rather, was a disdain for hopefulness. That Eliot abandoned the work in 1924, despite its containing some of his best and most original modernist verse, seemed to be the only logical conclusion available. Whether the poet intended it or not, from this vantage point the drama can be viewed as a necessary emptying and bottoming out of all kinds of older themes, tones, and atti-

tudes on Eliot’s part in order for him to achieve a creative and spiritual self-renewal. For all was not lost. For one thing, “Sweeney Agonistes” remains a perfected enough piece of work to have a place in the Eliot canon; additionally, he had finally tried his hand at writing for the stage, an interest that would consume more and more of his energies and talents as time passed. Salvaged, too, from among those parts of the drama that never found a more permanent place in it was the poetry that would become 1925’s “The Hollow Men.” Eliot’s resilience as a creative force never ceases to amaze. Whenever it seemed to him that he had completely exhausted all his creative energies, he would invariably exceed himself, as he did in the case of “The Hollow Men.” With that poem, he provided yet another startlingly original metaphorical reference point for the Western world’s spiritual and moral malaise following the war. At the same time but far behind the scenes, Eliot was beginning to be drawn toward the orthodox Christianity that had always appeared to be the unspoken text that his devotion to tradition both inspired and, paradoxically, from which it sprang. In that same year, 1923, he began to drink more heavily, at least to the extent of embarrassing himself among his social circle, but happenstance introduced him as well to William Force Stead, an American poet who had also been ordained an Anglican priest. Stead later remembered Eliot at the time as being a man for whom a carefree enjoyment of life was an impossibility. Their meeting, nevertheless, apparently enabled Eliot to start to channel his lifelong flirtation with spirituality into a life-altering conversion to an orthodox Christianity some four years hence. The net result was that at the very same time that Eliot’s personal life and poetic vision both seemed to have hit a similarly impossible nadir, he began a process of recovery that, by its conclusion, not only restored some semblance of stability to his life but also radically altered his poetic vision, yet his relatively enigmatic technique and poetic style would be kept intact. Accomplishing such a feat was probably not intentional on Eliot’s part, but that he did manage to do so makes a careful consideration of the relationship between the life and the work an extremely trying task.

Biography The temptation would be to see a before-andafter differentiation in Eliot’s output during this period, and yet in most ways, the poetry does not itself betray change so much as maturation. This maturation process did not result in Eliot’s “getting religion,” as his detractors both then and now often assert, so much as in his finding a foundation that could both sustain his creative endeavors and satisfy his personal needs. In the abstract, such a transformation could take any number of shapes for a creative intellect. In Eliot’s case, the foundation that he found happened to be an orthodox Christianity and his adherence to its doctrines. Still, such a transformation, as must be further expected, does not happen overnight. In Eliot’s case again, there were changes taking place on a number of fronts, each inexorably leading toward the momentous change that would take place with his formal conversion in June 1927. Vivien’s increasing ill health had, by 1925, begun to convince Eliot that the amount of time he was having to devote to his post with Lloyds was keeping him from giving her and their marriage the attention that they both deserved and required. An option was the consideration of a salary from Lady Rothermere. Failing that, Geoffrey Faber, who in 1923 had gone into a joint publishing arrangement with the firm Gwyer, a scientific publisher, had launched Faber & Gwyer as a general publishing house in 1925. In need of someone to act as literary adviser to the new firm, Faber interviewed Eliot and was so impressed with both his literary and financial acumen that Faber invited him to join the firm both as poetry editor and as a member of the board of directors, posts that Eliot would occupy for the remainder of his working life. He began to work for Faber in the autumn of 1925 on a five-year contract. Although his salary was less than he had been earning at Lloyds, Eliot had the added guarantee of having a publisher for his own work as well, an incalculable boon for any writer. In the meantime, Eliot had been thinking of launching a second periodical that would supplement the Criterion’s parochial literary interests by being more international in flavor and scope. With Lady Rothermere’s blessing and the added sponsorship of Faber & Gwyer, however, Eliot, in

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October 1925, launched the New Criterion instead, thus combining the two approaches in a single review. Within the space of a year, then, Eliot had managed finally to set his personal house, if not in order, then on the road to something resembling a permanent arrangement, at least on the professional front. Virtually from the time of his arrival in London in July 1914, Eliot had been making do by improvising a life and a career as circumstances allowed and conditions warranted. Now he had a clear course of action, all of it set on the literary front, and a career in business as well—it, too, literary in nature. Not that this new stability and respectability did not come at a price. He alienated the Woolfs by luring Herbert Read away from their Hogarth Press, and he himself left their literary stable when Faber & Gwyer published his most recent collection, Poems 1909–1925, in December 1925. This latest volume of his poetry would include the new sequence “The Hollow Men.” While his professional life was taking these turns, no matter how tenuously, for the better, his intellectual life was turning more and more toward the sort of conservative thought that had seemed to be an unfailing attraction to him all along. That same year, JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY had more or less accused Eliot, in a piece in the review Adelphi, of leading a double life by seeking an ordered universe in the midst of his disorderly creative life. Intentionally or not, Eliot seemed to second Murry’s assessment of him by now turning his critical attention to the French religious philosopher Jacques Maritain. In keeping with the equally conservative, reactionary French thinker Charles Maurras, whose Action Française had attracted Eliot as far back as his student days in Paris in 1910–11, Maritain was leading an intellectual movement harking back to the ordered Europe embodied in the orthodox theology of Thomas Aquinas and in the Catholic values expressed in Dante’s poetry, particularly the Divine Comedy. In addition, after launching the New Criterion in January 1926, a review that itself was proposing a “mind of Europe,” Eliot spent January, February, and March presenting the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, which were intended to be, in their focus on the metaphysical

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

poets of the 17th century, the first part of a nevercompleted trilogy to be titled “The Disintegration of the Intellect.” Clearly, Eliot, a raging radical when it came to poetic stylizing, was becoming more and more of an archconservative in his social, political, and religious thinking. Visiting with family in Rome later that same year, Eliot fell to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

CONVERSION AND NEW HORIZONS A process of conversion is never as sudden as it might ever seem to have been in hindsight, but this unmistakable entrenchment of Eliot’s in more and more conservative ways of thinking and believing finally became concretized when, early in 1927, Eliot asked Stead for his assistance in becoming confirmed in the Church of England. For a variety of reasons, it makes sense that Eliot would embrace so-called High Church Anglicanism, or Anglo-CATHOLICISM, rather than the more popular British practice of what was more typically called Episcopalianism or, at its far opposite extreme, the rigid dogmatism and foreign influences of Roman Catholicism. In later prose works such as The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1949), Eliot would articulate in general terms what must then have been the far more intuitive, personal, and inchoate motivations driving his decisions. Nevertheless, even as he acted on formalizing his conversion in utmost secrecy, his choice of faith and communion, once made public, was an understandable choice to those around him. If he was to be true to his own intellectual convictions, he could not have done anything less than seek what he regarded as the most ancient, most sacramental, and highest expression of the Christian faith that forms the indisputable basis for the culture and civilization of modern Europe. On the other hand, while that choice might have otherwise compelled Eliot to embrace in Roman Catholicism a pre-Reformation expression of that faith, his selection of such a transnational communion would nonetheless have countermanded Eliot’s own belief in and need for community, and community for him ultimately had to find itself

in a local expression of those essential values that constitute Christian doctrine. Anglo-Catholicism, with its allegiance to the old at the expense of its allegiance to the papacy in Rome, fulfilled for Eliot all these various needs and requirements. On June 29, 1927, Eliot was baptized by Stead into the Church of England at Finstock Church in the Cotswold. The next day, Thomas Banks Strong, bishop of Oxford, confirmed Eliot in that faith in the bishop’s private chapel. In November, the transformation, though most of the changes had already taken place, was completed when Eliot became a British citizen.

POETRY VS. PROSE The Criterion now operating as a monthly and Eliot providing his considerable expertise to Faber & Gwyer (the firm would not become Faber & Faber until 1929), Eliot the poet was fast becoming more and more Eliot the essayist and editor, particularly as his poetry continued to be meager in output throughout the extended dry spell following his publication of The Waste Land. The Criterion’s May 1927 cover had announced what the English-speaking literary world already knew—that the magazine was “edited by T. S. Eliot.” Lady Rothermere’s finally withdrawing her financial support from the Criterion late in 1927 only made it that much more Eliot’s exclusive editorial domain, since it would now be housed entirely with Faber, although the magazine was forced to return to a quarterly publication schedule as a result. His poetry, in contrast, moved ahead, like his marriage to Vivien, by fits and starts. Working on his literary material “at the office” now, he shared with her less and less of that essential part of his life and of their relationship, and they were spending less and less time together in any event as she took extended holidays and treatments in sanatoriums in deference to her deteriorating physical well-being, which seemed to be manifesting itself in episodes of increasing mental derangement as well. The editorship of the Criterion might have been a deterrent to his poetry writing in ways other than time constraints as well. Being free to publish his own poetry in its pages how and when he pleased might have undermined the necessary self-discipline that

Biography sustained creative endeavors demand. The poet’s necessary isolation through long periods of ostensible inactivity might seem like self-indulgence, but great art emerges out of great quiet or great turmoil, never out of the tedium of carrying on day-to-day business. Since The Waste Land, Eliot had completed poem sequences—“The Hollow Men” was an outstanding example, and “Ash-Wednesday,” “Coriolan,” and the Ariel poems were just over the horizon—but even those works, for all their apparent power and creative verve when viewed with the benefit of hindsight, were created more in the spirit of the inspired pastiche than as fully conceptualized executions to begin with. In 1926, he had tried his hand again at the long poem by translating the French poet St.-John Perse’s Anabase, but that effort did not proceed smoothly and, by early 1927, had stalled entirely. The dry spell was dispersed somewhat, however, when later that year Geoffrey Faber asked him to write a poem for promotional purposes. Each Christmas from 1927 through 1931, Eliot would publish a poem appropriate to the season as part of a series of illustrated pamphlets with holiday themes, to be released by Fabers as corporate greeting cards, called the Ariel series. Eliot published five poems in the series’ initial phase. (Faber would revise the series in the 1950s, and Eliot would provide “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” in 1954.) The last of these original five contributions was later incorporated into “Coriolan” as “Triumphal March.” The first four, meanwhile, including “Journey of the Magi” (1927), “A Song for Simeon” (1928), “Animula” (1929), and “Marina” (1930), were published under the collective heading by which they have since become known, the Ariel Poems, in Collected Poems, 1909–1935. Nevertheless, these considerable poetic achievements did not see widespread publication until 1936, and even then, “Coriolan,” like “Sweeney Agonistes,” would be included among work that was “unfinished.” Unless one was following the Criterion or was a devotee of limited editions, as the 1920s came to a close, it would have appeared that Eliot had not published poetry of any significance since 1925 and “The Hollow Men.”

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Developments in Eliot’s personal life were otherwise invariably taking his writing intellectually and spiritually into areas where his increasing interest in and commitment to the dimensions of faith and of the continuing need for ongoing spiritual traditions in the modern world could find expression. By that pivotal year, 1927, in his preface to the prose volume For Lancelot Andrewes, a 17th-century Anglican divine, Eliot had famously declared himself a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion, all of these positions quite anathema to the social and cultural agenda of modernist radicalism that his poetry seemed till now to have been advancing. For all intents and purposes, as the decade drew to a close, it would have been fair to conclude that Eliot had taken it upon himself to rest on the poetic laurels that he had already acquired and relegate his reputation subsequently to that of a minor poet, at least inasmuch as regular publication was concerned. Then, in the spring of 1930, Faber & Faber released a thin volume of poetry by him titled “AshWednesday.” Like many of Eliot’s other works from the period following the publication of The Waste Land in late 1922 and the notoriety that it had brought, the first three parts of “Ash-Wednesday” had already been published as separately titled poems in the years preceding the completed poem’s publication that spring. As in the case of “The Hollow Men,” there is no reason to conclude that Eliot had not necessarily been conceiving of these three separately published poems to begin with as pieces in a larger whole. In any event, Part II of the completed poem, “Ash-Wednesday,” first appeared as “Salutation” in 1927, Part I as “Perch’ io non spero” in 1928, and Part III as “Al som de l’escalina” in 1929, all in the Criterion. Each of those three earlier titles gives insight into Eliot’s intentions by identifying a particular literary source and figure. In the first case, the source was Dante’s La vita nuova, in which he celebrates both the beginning of his love for Beatrice and the introduction of the great theme of love into his poetry. That said, something of Eliot’s plan for the larger work was seen as well in the fact that the other two sections of the poem that were also first published as separate pieces, “Perch’ io

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

non spero” (Part I) and “Al som de l’escalina” (Part III), hark back, through Dante, to two other poets for whom Love was the theme—Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel, each of whom was closely connected with Dante in the troubadour or love poetry tradition that had originated in southern France and northwestern Italy in the 12th century. That tradition had also been an early field of study for Eliot’s dear friend and fellow poet, Ezra Pound. Eliot’s poetry might thus be seen as taking a turn toward the severe passion of devotion and love; however, the Eliots’ marriage was, by now, all but ended. There might nevertheless be parallels between the religious agonies of the poetry and the turmoil of an authentic love relationship that was now dissolving into chaos and recrimination. Poetry and the life were never more than tenuously related in Eliot’s case, yet to deny that they are related would be as foolhardy as to argue that they are nothing but that. Inasmuch as both the poetry of “Ash-Wednesday” and the dissolution of Eliot and Vivien’s 15-year marriage bespeak love’s pain and love’s worth, “Ash-Wednesday” is a personal poem, but it is unmistakably poetry, not autobiography.

A PARTING OF WAYS By the early 1930s, Vivien’s increasingly strange behavior and fits of jealousy had almost completely estranged her from her and Eliot’s mutual circle of friends. A break was inevitable, but that break was not finalized until Eliot seized an opportunity to force an extended physical separation between himself and her in the form of a lectureship back in America. On September 17, 1932, Eliot set sail from England to assume for the coming academic year the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at his alma mater, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The extended absence that this position would require would also enable him to make real a separation from his disastrously failed marriage to Vivien. Eliot had last been to America in 1915. In addition to providing him with another opportunity to renew family ties and youthful acquaintanceships, the fruits of his labors at Harvard would also bring in a princely salary. The lecture series would subsequently be issued under the title The Use of Poetry and the Use of

Criticism, allowing Eliot to summarize the drift of his critical thinking over the past decade and more. The terms of his employment at Harvard meanwhile gave him enough free time to lecture at various other venues, including University of California, in Los Angeles, in December and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, in February. In January, he revisited the subject of the 1926 Clark Lectures by presenting the Turnbull Lectures on the topic of “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry” at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and in April, he was invited to give the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In keeping with the terms of that lectureship, his remarks there were later collected and, in February 1934, published by Faber & Faber under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. In his preface to For Lancelot Andrewes in 1928, Eliot had promised to write three more books in which he would address contemporary issues, including what he identified as the topic of heresy as it was manifested in our time. After Strange Gods, no doubt, was that book or at least the best shot at it that Eliot could manage on a topic that was very likely to raise hackles no matter how adroitly he might try to shape the argument. He never lived down, nor should he ever live down, the apparently anti-Semitic comment on “free-thinking Jews” that he made in the Barbour lectures, and he never allowed After Strange Gods to be reissued after its initial publication. It can be assumed that that was his way of disavowing the entire venture, but, like many another literary artist and public figure, Eliot was wont from time to time to exclude from his canon, both poetic and critical, work that he later thought was flawed or pretentious in some manner or other, offering no further clarification than that. He never permitted the Clark Lectures to be published, for example, and he would later publish only the choruses from the 1933 verse drama, The Rock. Eventually, the physical and emotional distance from Vivien would enable Eliot, as he had intended, to undertake the appropriate legal action required to dissolve his marital union with her. Possibly as early as February or March 1933, Eliot was asking his solicitors back in England to prepare a deed of separation from her, although it appears that Vivien

Biography

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Eliot visited this English country home with Emily Hale in the summer of 1934. The visit was one of the inspirations behind “Burnt Norton,” a poem whose composition led to the Four Quartets. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

was not formally made aware of his intentions until July, after his return from America. While in Cambridge, he had also renewed his acquaintanceship with Emily Hale, his sweetheart from his Harvard graduate school years. Surely, no more than is fair should be read into this. The Eliots’ marriage had been foundering in one way or another almost from its inception. Still, the poet who would shortly be writing of doors not opened and paths not taken must have been startled from time to time by the painful contrasts between memory and desire as he revisited an America and friends that he had not known or seen in 18 years or more.

THE POET AS DRAMATIST Back in England, developments were in the works that would soon permit Eliot to intersect his longstanding dramatic talents and interests with his religious impulses. In 1930, George Bell, the Angli-

can bishop of Chichester, had turned to a young man named E. MARTIN BROWNE to reinvigorate the longstanding relationship between drama and religion in the English church, appointing him the diocesan director of religious drama. Browne and Eliot had first met at Bishop Bell’s episcopal palace in December 1930, during which weekend visit Eliot had read from his then just-published sequence “Ash-Wednesday.” By the time of Eliot’s return to England in the summer of 1933, Browne, an actor by training, was writing the scenario for a pageant play to aid a church building fund for the new London suburbs then springing up. Browne was working from a storyline that was based on historical episodes, themselves suggested by the Reverend R. Webb-Odell. Renewing their previous acquaintanceship, Browne turned to Eliot’s talents as a poet for the writing of the choruses and dialogue. The resulting pageant

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

play, The Rock, related the building of a church in London to the long history of struggle that the church had undergone in England from earliest Christian times, its story culminating in the difficulties that the modern church was encountering in the face of new, secular notions of the nationstate and of the increasing pressures that a rampant consumerism and materialism were forcing upon an all too willing populace. Obviously, these were themes right up Eliot’s alley. Eliot worked on the text well into the spring of the pageant’s performance, which was at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London from May 28 to June 9, 1934. Financially, the production was a great success, drawing some 1,500 in paid attendance. Far more significant in the history of English letters, however, was the fact that Eliot, whose work had always betrayed a bent toward the performative, had caught the theatrical bug. Though not entirely pleased with The Rock, from which he later published only the choruses, he moved almost instantly into another theatrical venture, Murder in the Cathedral. That celebrated verse drama would first be performed in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral the evening of June 19, 1935, before an opening night audience of 700 as a part of the Canterbury Festival. The idea for the drama was originally proposed to him, after the success achieved by The Rock, by Bishop Bell while Eliot was again staying as a weekend guest at Bell’s episcopal palace. After Browne and Eliot’s successful collaboration on The Rock, it seemed inevitable that, when Bell suggested to Eliot that he prepare an original work for that next year’s Canterbury Festival, Eliot should again turn to Browne for his expertise with staging and directing. Thus began a collaborative effort between Browne and Eliot that would continue for nearly another quarter century. As is often the case when one’s creative juices are set flowing in entirely new directions, old fonts of inspiration are renewed as well. In Eliot’s case, his effort at composing the poetry of Murder on the Cathedral combined with his renewed relationship with Emily Hale, who had begun to visit him in England on a fairly regular basis each summer to provide him with a launching point for his ultimate poetic masterwork, Four Quartets.

As a locale, Burnt Norton, the title setting for the first of the quartets, was little more than an otherwise obscure English country house that had burned to the ground in the 18th century. For the poet, it might have other significances, for it was located in Gloucestershire, the Eliot family’s ancestral region in western England. Even more significant, however, it was a locale that Eliot had visited with Hale in the summer of 1934. Those facts aside, nevertheless, the poetry of “Burnt Norton”—indeed, its opening lines—finds its source in lines that had been discarded from the just-completed Murder in the Cathedral. While Eliot was working busily on the composition of the play in early 1935, Browne convinced Eliot to eliminate the passage “Time past and time present / . . . both perhaps present in time future.” These lines would reappear several years later as the famous opening passage to “Burnt Norton,” when it was first published in Collected Poems in April 1936. Given “Burnt Norton”’s connection with Murder in the Cathedral, it is reasonable to assume, particularly since the collection brought together Eliot’s poetry up to 1935, that the poem was itself composed and completed in 1935. In any event, that would have seemed to be an end to it. Indeed, early in 1936, Eliot began work on a new play, one that he hoped audiences would accept as a contemporary drama. Despite Browne’s guiding hand, the result, The Family Reunion, was no doubt too topheavy with literary flourishes to fulfill Eliot’s wishes for it to succeed as popular theatre, but it was a further step in what was becoming a new career for him—writing for the legitimate stage. Eliot was reported to have personally regarded The Family Reunion as a melancholy play and a more pessimistic work than any other he had written to date. No one is likely ever to be disappointed by this assessment. Nevertheless, at about the same time that Eliot was composing the lugubrious verses and lessthan-uplifting plot of The Family Reunion, based as it was on Aeschylus’s bloody trilogy, the Oresteia, the poet was also putting the finishing touches to the whimsical collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which Faber would release in 1939. There had always been a streak of frivolous abandonment both in Eliot’s choice of themes

Biography and in his poetic style. Prufrock, the character, is as silly as he is somber and intentionally so. The quatrain poems, “The Hippopotamus” and “Sweeney Erect” being just two of the more outstanding examples among them, meanwhile, are for the most part exercises in the fabulously absurd, and The Waste Land is as comical in its assessments of human nature as it is serious and tragic. Then, too, there are the Bolo poems, those suppressed and salacious exercises in the scatological and sexually obscene that one might expect of an undergraduate humor magazine. They in fact were begun back in Eliot’s own undergraduate days, but their private circulation continued among his friends well into his adulthood. So, then, for all its apparently radical departure, Practical Cats, with its harking back to some of the other feline-inspired nonsense verse of “Five-Finger Exercises” from the early 1930s, was not as much of an aberration for Eliot as it might otherwise seem. Eliot might very well have needed these episodes of comic relief while composing his new verse drama. At the very least, writing The Family Reunion was a slow and painstaking task for him. A first draft was not completed until possibly as late as November 1937. At Browne’s urging, the play went through several more drafts and the usual revisions in rehearsal before opening at London’s Westminster Theatre on March 21, 1939, to a disappointing five-week run. In August 1937, in the meantime, Eliot had visited the Gloucestershire village of East Coker, even taking photographs of such sites as St. Michael’s, the village church in this Eliot ancestral home (and in which Eliot’s ashes would eventually be interred in a memorial in a rear corner near the side entrance). By the late fall of 1939, compelled perhaps by the outbreak of a new war among France, England, and Germany following the Nazi invasion and subsequent occupation of Poland in September of that year, Eliot began work on “East Coker.”

THE FOUR QUARTETS Eliot had already addressed his concerns regarding the deterioration of moral initiatives on the part of the Christian, Western democracies in The Idea of a Christian Society, a prose work that he had composed largely in response to British prime

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minister Neville Chamberlain’s acceding to German demands in September 1938 by yielding the Sudetenland in order to appease Hitler’s territorial ambitions. The Idea of a Christian Society, published in September 1939, laments the passing of the kind of world that Eliot was at the same time espousing and that East Coker had come to embody for him. It was a world not free from agony—no human condition is—but united nevertheless in a common moral and ethical foundation based on Christian values, not necessarily as those values are expressed in doctrine, but as a way of life, the way that Hinduism and Buddhism are ways of life as much as they are systems of belief. As war again enveloped Europe, that world, those values, and the way of life that that ancestral village represented for Eliot and that he had spent a creative and critical lifetime arguing to preserve must have seemed suddenly to be more in jeopardy than they ever had been before. He would then model the new poem that emerged, “East Coker,” on the five-part structure of “Burnt Norton,” whose own structure might have been modeled loosely on the five-part structure of The Waste Land. “East Coker” was completed in draft form by February 1940 and first published in the Easter 1940 issue of the New English Weekly. After the Criterion folded in 1939, it was this socially conservative newspaper, with which Eliot had begun an active editorial association in 1934, that would now be a publishing outlet for his articles and poetry during the next decade. When Faber & Faber published “East Coker” in pamphlet form in September of the same year, it sold 12,000 copies, a remarkable commentary on both Eliot’s renown as well as the poem’s capacity to embrace and express qualities that the reading public must have come to regard as quintessentially English. While he was composing “East Coker,” the further idea occurred to Eliot that he might compose four poems, of which “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” would be the first two. These four “quartets,” as he then called each individual poem, using a musical analogy as he had done from his earliest days as a poet, would be organized around the themes of the four elements and the four seasons. He set about composing the third, “The Dry Salvages,” which had

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

been titled originally simply “Dry Salvages,” during the rest of 1940, sending off a complete first draft to his friend and confidante John Hayward on New Year’s Day, 1941. The finished poem, which recalls his youthful summers on Massachusetts’s Cape Ann and pays homage, through the sea, to the element of water, would be first published in the New English Weekly in February 1941. All that remained now was for Eliot to complete the sequence with a fourth quartet, which he placed in Little Gidding, the site of a long-defunct religious community to whose remnant chapel Eliot had made a personal pilgrimage back in May 1936. As he now began, in early 1941, to write the poetry of “Little Gidding,” the quartet whose element would be fire, however, London and surrounding English cities were undergoing merciless air raids that were being carried on since the previous September on a virtually nightly basis by the German Luftwaffe, or air force. On May 10, 1941, for just one egregious example, 3,000 Londoners died as the result of one of these Nazi bombing raids. The destruction and

its attendant fear not just for one’s life but for the life of the people and nation permeate the lines and imagery of “Little Gidding” and might account for Eliot’s dissatisfaction with the first draft, completed in July 1941. He would not take up the poem again until August 1942, completing a final version on September 19, after it had undergone five distinct drafts. “Little Gidding” was published in the New English Weekly in October 1942, and the completed sequence, Four Quartets, came out in book form in October of the following year. By this time, Eliot, who, like many other affluent Londoners, had taken up wartime residence in the relative safety of the countryside, was nevertheless working from Tuesdays to Fridays in his office at Faber on Russell Square, where he also maintained a flat. He did his own part in assisting the war effort by taking up fire-watching duties on the roof of the offices. When the building was hit by a “flying bomb” in June 1943, although his town flat was rendered useless, he continued his duties as a firewatcher on a curtailed schedule.

Eliot had an office and small apartment in this building on Russell Square. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

Biography All during the war, Eliot kept up a busy lecture schedule as well. In 1942, he had made an attempt to write a short book on culture, a subject perpetually dear to his heart but an ambitiously optimistic topic nevertheless in view of the times. He abandoned this effort after writing only a few chapters, but in 1944, he would publish in three consecutive issues of The New English Weekly what he later called “a preliminary sketch” of the topic under the title “Notes towards a Definition of Culture.” Those preliminary notes were subsequently perfected into a longer paper, “Cultural Forces in the Human Order,” and published in a 1945 volume, Prospect for Christendom. They finally appeared as Notes towards the Definition of Culture in a booklength edition first published in November 1948. By now, Eliot was also able to incorporate into the text a revised version of a paper first published in The New English Review in October 1945, along with the text of three radio broadcasts which he had made, in German, to the German people in 1946. Aside from several subsequent collections of previously published essays, this was Eliot’s last major prose work, a measured but, for him, passionate testament to his belief in continuity and human initiative.

FAME AND HONORS Such productivity from Eliot in the realm of prose criticism and social commentary was hardly surprising, but his personal and creative lives were flourishing as well. With the end of World War II in August 1945 and the subsequent and gradual lifting of the austerity measures that had accompanied it in Britain, Eliot was able to think about moving back to London. He eventually took up residence, in 1946, with his old friend Hayward, who by now had been confined to a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy, in a spacious flat that permitted Eliot, for the first time in a long time, the twin benefits of privacy and routine as well as companionship. He would live there with Hayward for the next 11 years. In the same year, Eliot was also able to make the first of what would become more and more regular visits back to America, where he could renew again friendships cut off by the war, including with Emily Hale, and visit with family, particularly his brother, Henry, who was by now seriously ill. Eliot would

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travel there again in April 1947, this time because Henry was dying. Eliot did not return to England until June, after receiving an honorary degree from Harvard. Not all was well with him, however. He was beginning to fall ill easily, a prefiguration of the emphysema to come, and his dear friend Ezra Pound, for his wartime activities in Fascist Italy, first was charged with treason by the U.S. government and eventually was committed to St. Elizabeths, a mental hospital outside Washington, D.C. There Eliot visited him as frequently as he could and worked quietly behind the scenes to gain Pound’s release. In the intervening time, Vivien passed away on January 22, 1947, in the sanatorium where she had been sequestered since the late 1930s. Eliot was grief-stricken, as much by the loss of a person whose life had been inextricably interwoven with his own as by his remembrance of the tragic farce their life together had eventually become. Nor had Eliot made a graceful exit from that travesty, instead stealing away like a thief in the night by traveling to America in 1932. This collision of remorse with guilt might account for the theme of his next and most successful theatrical piece, The Cocktail Party. The end of the war had also revived London’s famous theatrical life, and Eliot benefited from this renewed interest in live theatre. A new production of The Family Reunion, which had experienced a disappointing five-week run when it first premiered in London in 1939, was successfully mounted at the Mercury Theatre in October 1946. Both that play and Murder in the Cathedral were selected for performances for the inaugural season of the Edinburgh Festival in 1947. Eliot was encouraged by these successes to begin to think in terms of another project for the stage, and by July 1948 he sent a draft of the first three acts of this new play, which he originally titled “One-Eyed Reilly,” to Martin Browne. A production of the play that finally resulted, The Cocktail Party, a social comedy in verse, was mounted during the last week of August 1949 at the Edinburgh Festival, where it was a great popular success. Unable to secure a theatre in London’s West End for its commercial premier, however, the producer Henry Sherek decided to premiere it

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

on New York’s Broadway instead. There it opened on January 21, 1950, in the Henry Miller Theatre. Eliot had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on December 10, 1948, in Stockholm, Sweden, an honor that had no doubt enhanced his worldwide celebrity. However, Eliot was trepidatious over the kind of reception The Cocktail Party’s very British storyline might receive in New York. He was pleasantly surprised when the New York production of his latest verse drama became a spectacular success both critically and commercially, as it would do subsequently in London later that same year. With its tale of a marriage gone ridiculously askew as a result of the lamentable self-centeredness of both the husband and the wife, Eliot finally proved to both himself and his public that he could write a play in verse with broad popular appeal. Indeed, it was largely because of The Cocktail Party that he was featured on the cover of Time magazine on March 6. He had more than “come home”; he had stolen the show. Eliot kept the creative juices flowing this time around by almost instantly turning his hand to another new play. The first two scenes of that play, The Confidential Clerk, were drafted by as early as May 1951, not long after The Cocktail Party had closed in London. Eliot’s plans were to premiere the new play at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1952, but he did not complete the play until February 1953, thus delaying its Edinburgh Festival debut until the following August, where it, too, was well received. The play opened at London’s Lyric Theatre on September 16, 1953, where it continued to experience great popular success. By the early 1950s, Eliot went from being a celebrated author in literary and academic circles, who could find himself a speaking venue or visiting lectureship on either side of the Atlantic merely by virtue of saying that he would be visiting the area, to a celebrity on the world stage, mobbed by theater fans and devotees of pop culture alike. His prim and proper figure (Virginia Woolf was said to have once commented on his “four-piece” suit), dignified and diffident and perhaps a bit too much to type, filled the pages of the daily press and weekly news magazines as much as not. The Waste Land was never far from the scene for this man who, to the vast majority of English-speaking people, had

Eliot in 1952, by which time he had become an influential and iconic figure, known worldwide as the author of The Waste Land, a Nobel laureate, and a celebrity playwright (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

come to embody an entire cultural age, modernism, while something in his scholar’s demeanor and banker’s reserve encouraged the contrary notion that poetry was not for everyone, especially if it was Eliot’s. The so-called Pope of Russell Square, Eliot had made being famous a social responsibility and had become a reasonably wealthy man of letters, generous to friends and younger writers. He had not yet achieved, however, what often comes most easily in life to those who seek it, and that was some species of domestic bliss. The by-now annual trips back to America, facilitated somewhat by international air travel, enabled him to lecture at Harvard and Princeton and in New York City, and they also gave him ever more frequent opportunities to visit with his two living sisters, with Hale, and with the novelist Djuna Barnes in the

Biography Boston area. Eventually, he would even make a triumphant return to St. Louis, speaking at Washington University, the institution that his grandfather had helped found, and later lecturing at St. Olaf’s College in Minnesota before thousands of enthralled undergraduates and faculty. In the autumn of 1954, Faber & Faber published what would be his last poem, “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” as a part of the revived Ariel series. His health, which had never been especially good, was now even worse, but he never failed to recover fully from his persistent colds and other forms of ill health, and neither Eliot’s career as a writer nor his life were hardly likely to come to an end any time soon. Nevertheless, he was often described at this time, the mid-1950s, as looking cadaverous.

THE AGED EAGLE Photographs of Eliot from March and September 1958 show, however, a markedly different man from the cadaverous elder poet. In one such photo, he is pictured arriving on the campus of the University of Rome, where he received an honorary degree. Students crying “Viva Eliot!” had lined the route of his entrance onto the campus, and in the photo, it is a decidedly jovial Eliot who greets their cheers. In another photo, though he looks a bit somber as the camera catches him dapper in evening clothes as he arrives for the opening night of The Elder Statesman at the Cambridge Theatre in London, he nevertheless appears for all the world to be in robust health although he was by now in his 70th year. The startling contrast with the man who had often been described as looking as if he were at death’s door a mere three or four years earlier could all be attributed to the person who is seen by his side in both photos—Valerie Fletcher, who on January 10, 1957, had become the second Mrs. Eliot. At 30, she was nearly 40 years his junior at the time of their marriage and had been Eliot’s personal secretary at Faber for the preceding eight years. The ceremony was carried on amid great secrecy at 6:15 A.M. in the very church, Eliot would learn later that same day, that his youthful idol, the French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, had been married many decades before. Aside from the happy couple

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and the presiding priest, the wedding was attended only by Eliot’s solicitor and the bride’s parents. By April, the newlyweds had moved to Kensington, and Eliot was reporting to friends that he was the luckiest man alive, one completely undeserving of such happiness. Before his marriage, Eliot had already drafted, early in 1956, the first two acts of his next play, The Elder Statesman, tentatively entitled “The Rest Cure.” It would be his last dramatic work and also his final major creative endeavor. He would not get down to the serious business of revising those first two acts, as well as completing the third act, until the autumn of 1957, after his marriage to Valerie. That genuinely dramatic change in the state of his personal affairs is generally thought to account for the play’s understated but nevertheless enthusiastic celebration of the benefits of connubial love. Indeed, his last published poem, “To My Wife,” provided his dedication to the play when it was published in book form. He was reported to have told a

Eliot and Valerie Fletcher in January 1957, newly married (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

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Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

friend, the British editor and critic Cyril Connolly, that, with that poem, he felt that he had finally written a poem about love and happiness. Though he had completed a first draft of The Elder Statesman by the end of 1957, the London production of the play, again under the direction of his longtime theatrical collaborator, E. Martin Browne, did not open until late September 1958 after premiering at the Edinburgh Festival on August 24. It was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Generally, the reaction was that the play reflected outdated theatrical conventions that would have been more in keeping with the playwriting typical of Eliot’s youth. The irony was, despite his being castigated for being behind the times, by now Eliot had perfected a format for the stage in keeping with his own theories of verse drama. With The Elder Statesman, Eliot had finally tamed the somewhat high-flown histrionics and literary complexities of Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion. Meanwhile, the somewhat listless verse of The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk had, in The Elder Statesman, found just the right balance of rhythmic continuity expected of the poetic line without sacrificing a naturalness of tone.

THE LAST YEARS Eliot was by now a 70-year-old man who had at last achieved a real measure of domestic bliss and a career of public honors and authentic adulation. He was not so much ready to rest on his laurels as compelled to, both by a desire to enjoy what time he had left and by increasing ill health that had finally been diagnosed as emphysema. Even that condition brought with it a certain boon, for he was now under doctor’s orders to take the clear sea air, leading him and Valerie to take extended holidays at Brighton and on the French Riviera and in Bermuda. He continued to keep himself busy at the writing and publishing end as well, although he primarily issued compilations of hitherto uncollected prose works in On Poetry and Poets in 1956 and To Criticize the Critic, not published until after the poet’s death in 1965. In 1964, he at last saw the publication of his 1916 Harvard doctoral dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Honors also continued to come his

way. In late May 1958, he was awarded the Dante Gold Medal at the Italian Institute in London on behalf of the comune of Florence, Dante’s native city. It was a fitting tribute to a man who had made the works of the early 14th-century Italian poet an integral component of Anglo-American culture during much of the first half of the 20th century. The Eliots spent the last years of the poet’s life enjoying the company of family and friends while taking frequent vacations south for his more and more persistent lung infections. The friends even of his adulthood were beginning to pass on, such as Father Eric Cheetham, with whom he had lived after his separation from Vivien, and Geoffrey Faber, who had given him an opportunity to turn his attention fully to literature. Ezra Pound, in the meantime, had finally, in April 1958, been released from confinement in St. Elizabeths Hospital, and by 1959 had settled in Italy. Eliot continued their friendship by frequent correspondence, commiserating with this friend of his youth on the problems attendant on aging. Eliot contemplated a new play in 1962 but never commenced work on it, turning his attention instead to preparing the dissertation for publication. The couple kept up a busy travel agenda as well. They spent seven weeks in late 1961 in America where he made a series of public appearances, the fees from which enabled them to take an extended holiday in Barbados following Christmas. They returned to England in March 1962. By the end of that year, however, he collapsed as a result of a particularly noxious episode of London’s famous “smog,” and he was hospitalized under continuous oxygen for the next five weeks. It was a setback from which the 74year-old poet never fully recovered. Much of 1963 found Eliot in and out of hospitals as his lungs and heart continued to deteriorate so that by September of that year, when the American poet Allen Tate visited him in London, Tate later reported that Eliot was so weakened with illness that he was barely able to get around even with the help of two canes, and he could not find the strength to wave goodbye to Tate. In November of that year, nevertheless, Eliot and Valerie made what would be his last visit to America, where they stayed in New York and he reminisced about his

Biography

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The memorial to T. S. Eliot in St. Michael’s Church in East Coker, the Eliots’ ancestral home. At his request, the poet’s ashes are also interred here. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

Missouri childhood. From there, the Eliots left for Nassau, returning to England in April 1964. In October, he collapsed at home and was hospitalized in a deep coma and with a paralysis on his left side. Though his team of five doctors did not imagine that he would survive the night, he recovered enough to be allowed to return to his and Valerie’s home. Shortly after Christmas 1964, he again lapsed into a coma, but this time his heart began to fail. Eliot died on January 4, 1965. The poet’s last utterance was his wife’s name. According to his wishes, his ashes were interred, in April, in St. Michael’s, the East Coker village church of his ancestors, where a memorial inside the rear entrance continues to honor an adopted son. On the second anniversary of his death, amid great ceremony, a memorial plaque was also installed in his honor in Westminster Abbey, where England crowns her monarchs and honors her greatest poets.

FURTHER READING Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Chiari, Joseph. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir. London: Enitharmon Press, 1982. Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 1, 1898–1922. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Giroux, Robert. “A Personal Memoir.” Sewanee Review [Eliot issue] 74 (1966): 331–338. Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford, 1977. ———. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, 1988. Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir. Edited by Donald Adamson. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971. Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadows: The Life of Vivienne Eliot. London: Constable & Robinson, 2001.

PART II

Works A to Z

After Strange Gods

After Strange Gods (1934) On September 17, 1932, T. S. Eliot set sail from England to assume for the coming academic year the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His extended absence would also enable him to make final his separation from what had become his disastrously failed marriage to his first wife, Vivien. He had last gone “home” to America in 1915. The fruits of his labors there now at his old alma mater, Harvard, in addition to a princely salary, would be the published lectures issued in 1933 as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. The visiting professorship would provide him as well with enough free time to lecture at various other venues, including the University of California, Los Angeles, in December and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, in February. In January, meanwhile, he would deliver the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Dealing with the varieties of metaphysical poetry, these lectures would be a somewhat revised version of the Clark Lectures, which he had presented at Trinity College, Cambridge, from January through March 1926. In April, he was invited to give the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and it is these addresses that, in keeping with the terms of that lectureship, were later collected and, in February 1934, published by Faber & Faber under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. In the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), Eliot had promised to write three more books in which he would address contemporary issues, including what he identified as heresy as it is manifested in our time. After Strange Gods, no doubt, is that book, or at least the best that Eliot could manage on a topic that was very likely to raise hackles, no matter how adroitly he might shape the argument. In any event, the resulting presentation is an odd collation, to say the least. On the one hand, despite its loosely discursive structure and tone, being essentially the transcriptions of his actual lectures, it contains some of Eliot’s most brilliant summaries to date of the intellectual and moral direction that

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his thought had been taking since at least the time of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” published in 1919 while he was still relatively young and not as widely known. On the other hand, After Strange Gods exposes what appear to be serious religious, ethnic, and professional prejudices whose awfulness may have been overblown in their reception, but that nevertheless delivered a serious and lasting blow to the image of the tolerant and humane figure that Eliot had been cutting in literary and critical circles much of his professional life to then. Since the Virginia lectures were not as tightly organized as the Norton Lectures at Harvard, which followed a carefully structured chronological development through the eight presentations, each with its own particular topic, the result is that After Strange Gods is laid out rather like a long conversation on a single topic—modern heresy. It is treated here in a like manner for which its nuances can be that much more easily accounted.

SYNOPSIS Introduction and Controversy Perhaps it was the result of the headiness of being back in his native land for the first time in many years and after many major changes in his own life and on the contemporary scene. At least, a sort of patrician American esprit de corps had apparently rubbed off on Eliot once he found himself in the environs of the old Tidewater—and slaveholding—aristocracy that had been antebellum Virginia, home of the Confederate capital at Richmond. Whatever the motivation may have been, Eliot, born and raised in ST. LOUIS, Missouri, his family’s long New England heritage notwithstanding, introduced himself to his Virginian audience as “a New Englander,” as if to imply that there was no one but a conspiracy of Yankees and Rebels around to hear his remarks. It would be easily forgivable if it had ended there, but Eliot went on in his preliminary remarks to suggest certain prejudicial attitudes that would haunt him the rest of his professional life and that have continued to dog his reputation long after his death. He would later claim that he was not well at the time. There should be no doubt, for example,

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that the emotional and pending financial strains of a legal separation from Vivien had taken their toll on his physical health—as they had, however, by most accounts for virtually all of their marriage. He would also later forbid republication of the lectures, as if that repudiation might absolve him of his errors in judgment rather than appearing to be an admission of guilt. The equally tragic thing is that, in the lectures, Eliot says much that is still of great value in his effort to differentiate between a literature that advances the possibilities of human belief and one that, while ostensibly celebrating spirituality, actually may be deadening its opportunity for renewal in succeeding generations. Perhaps, too, Eliot’s lapses in judgment were the result of the talent for mimicry and empathy that had rendered him capable of being such an accomplished imitator of point of view in his poetry whereby he could take on the personality, or so it seemed, of whatever characterization he might hope to be achieving. Similarly, it appears that once Eliot was among the sort of oldschool Southern gentlemen whom he regarded as comprising his Virginia audience, he suddenly took on all the values and, with them, the prejudices of that mentality. The trouble was that the “us” whom he addressed were those white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors had founded America and, therefore, seemed to have bestowed on their descendants a special claim to its authentic character, a selfanointed cultural elite of whom Eliot and his audience were card-carrying members, while the “them” was anyone else. Although the experience of these others also formed an undeniable part of the American experience, Eliot seemed to be declaring outright that their experience was not of the right pedigree to warrant the same respect and claims to authenticity as his and his Southern white audience’s. Otherwise, how can one explain Eliot’s speaking of the Civil War as a national catastrophe instead of as the tragic consequence of the South’s clinging to the institution of human slavery? Or his asserting that “a native culture,” meaning white and Protestant, has more hope of being reestablished in Virginia than in New York because Virginia has been “less invaded by foreign races,” meaning all

the recent immigrants from southern and central Europe, who were likely to be Jewish or Roman Catholic? Or his saying that tradition represents “the blood kinship” of a people? Or his stressing the importance of maintaining the homogeneity of the population, particularly with regard to preventing it from “becom[ing] adulterate”? Or, finally and most deplorably, his emphasizing the need for that unity of tradition to be backgrounded particularly by a common religion, to the end that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” on the American intellectual and cultural scene? At that time, it was common to hear blatant bigotry being expressed in such notions of blood and race and “undesirables,” and people of particular beliefs and ethnicities were effectively marginalized if not entirely excluded from their share in the life of a nation. (Indeed, such attitudes toward “outsiders” formed the very basis for the pernicious thinking behind the policies of Nazi Germany that led to the mass extermination of Jews and others deemed to be “undesirable” in the gas chambers of their concentration camps during World War II.) That Eliot was expressing these same attitudes, underscored by the same relativistic evaluations of a person’s worth, in 1933, when the Nazis under the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler were just then coming to power in Germany, is far more than unfortunate; it is tragic. Eliot’s overall poetic vision, if anything, espoused the cause of multiculturalism and racial and ethnic tolerance. DANTE ALIGHIERI’s Catholicism and the Upanishad’s Hinduism, to name but two value systems that would have been foreign to his own background and heritage, inform a great deal of his poetry to that time and would continue to do so. For some, it may not ever be possible to salvage Eliot’s reputation as a person, let alone as a humane man of letters, from the charges of xenophobia and especially ANTI-SEMITISM to which this display of religious and ethnic prejudice in the opening pages of After Strange Gods had exposed him. Context, nevertheless, is a consideration that modernism itself, as a liberating social and intellectual force, always encourages. Perhaps what at first blush sounds brutal in Eliot’s introduction to

After Strange Gods his topic, which is tradition and the deleterious effects on a culture when longstanding traditions are abandoned in the name of a free-wheeling and uncritical inclusiveness, may at least be reduced to nothing more than an overactive and embarrassingly inconsiderate defensiveness on his part. Since this is a matter that has always engaged and will continue to engage the practical viability of any human culture in its encounters with the new and the different, Eliot’s thoughts on the subject, particularly because they are so adamant in the position that he assumes, are nevertheless worth an objective attention and analysis, lest the reader fall prey to the same sort of attack on the man rather than a reading of his work, in which Eliot seems to be indulging. The question must be, Is Eliot opposed to foreign persons or to foreign ideas? If the former is the case, then certainly his own ideas are prejudiced to begin with, since they are predicated on judgments that have nothing to do with thinking itself. If, however, the latter is the case, then the question is what precisely Eliot finds so pernicious about foreign ideas that he thinks that a culture is required to defend itself against them. From this perspective, the term free-thinking, while it is not clear why Eliot applied it to Jews in particular, takes on an entirely different meaning, or at least potential for meaning. There is the possibility that Eliot has here succumbed to the typical but nevertheless historically reprehensible practice of his time of identifying the Jews as a people who, in their understandable efforts to preserve their own cultural, religious, and ethnic traditions after centuries of ostracization and marginalization throughout Europe and subsequently in the New World as well, resisted the encroachments on those traditions of any alien culture within which they found themselves. While such an explanation may not—and is certainly not intended to—rescue Eliot’s remark from the insensitivity and prejudice that it portends, it does illuminate the gist of Eliot’s overall point, which otherwise is overshadowed by the bigotry that imbues it. That he singled the Jews out for his particular invective does not mean that he is singling them out for being Jewish per se but for being a represen-

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tative example of those “foreign races” who have their own traditions and whose ways of thinking are not constrained by Anglo-American culture and its traditions, at least in Eliot’s view. There is no easy way to make this sound any less prejudiced than it most assuredly is on Eliot’s part. Still, in his own misguided way (which seems to have been the product of an effort on his part to establish an instant rapport with his audience, whom he apparently took to be wholly “American” in nature) and despite his unquestionably awful choice of words such as foreign, race, blood, adulterate, and undesirable, Eliot is trying to focus on how any people with their own traditional cultures and ways of thinking can negatively affect the culture and the ways of thinking of another people whom they then join and among whom they interact, particularly if the host culture to begin with is not itself coherent. Orthodoxy and Heresy as Metaphors It is worth noting once more that it seems to be foreign ideas, not the people themselves, against which Eliot cautions his own Anglo-American compeers, not because of his positive or negative evaluation of those other peoples’ own unique value and worth as differing cultures and ethnicities but because he is fearful that there is a crisis among the traditions of the Anglo-American culture that his own people represent. Unfortunately, had Eliot gotten right to the point, it would have been readily apparent that the focus of his analysis was the current state of AngloAmerican culture, which he considered dismal, not the influence of outside cultures on it. Instead, by trying to emphasize at the outset that the Christian, Anglo character and culture of America were being transformed from the inside out even as he speaks by the presence and interaction of other immigrant populations, he sounds as if he is about to propose a program of protectionism and of bullheaded and bigoted “nativist” ideology. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that, once more, is tragic. The essay that ensues severely criticizes what Eliot sees as a serious flaw in the ways of thinking that are becoming more and more prevalent in the dominant Anglo-American culture, and he criticizes that culture solely in terms

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of itself and its own shortcomings, as he sees them. This he had been doing for virtually all of his poetic and critical career, in both his poetry and his essays, The Waste Land providing the most outstanding example to date. Furthermore, he identifies what he takes to be these errors, these “heresies,” as he half-facetiously pronounces them, not because he fears the encroachments of other cultures and ways of thinking on the Anglo-American culture—from his Unitarian background to his liberal Harvard education, he was raised and trained according to the most progressive ideals of his time of intellectual, religious, and racial tolerance—but because he fears that his own culture is on the verge of imploding for lack of any coherent view of what its core values may be or of how they may be expressed and applied in public discourse, primarily literature. This is why, once Eliot is past the execrable racist and bigoted overtones of his first few pages, which are meant mainly for the consumption of his largely Southern, white audience, he gets down to business by mixing his metaphors among the religious, the literary, and the political. Specifically, Eliot sets the reader up with one set of anticipations both by the quasi-religious implications of the book’s title (especially his subtitle, “A Primer on Modern Heresy”) and by his emphasizing, early on, the importance of a common religious background in fostering a people’s tradition. (Incidentally, to define what he means by a people, Eliot uses Hegel’s definition, “the same people living in the same place,” which has the capacity for transcending ethnicities.) This emphasis on a common religious background in the case of the Anglo-American experience, Protestant Christianity, makes the motivation behind his opening comments about foreign races and the Jews that much more suspect. But it becomes apparent that Eliot is using the religious connotations of the title as much, if not more, in metaphorical ways. For despite all these religious markers at the outset, in order to emphasize that he does not intend to make the present series of lectures “theological” in nature, Eliot points out how he is using orthodoxy and heresy as his descriptors because those two dichotomies are “more funda-

mental” than that other old standby, classicism versus romanticism, which are normally reserved for literary and other artistic discussions. And lest his listeners and readers miss the point that he is trying to establish as many categorical reference points as possible, he then goes one step further by providing two other popular markers for defining extremist positions, drawing this time from the realms of political and social activities, namely, conservatism versus liberalism. What this should tell the reader first of all is that Eliot is not doing anything remarkably different from his previous position papers here (he had long since famously announced himself as a “classicist, royalist, and Anglo-Catholic,” which suggest classicism, conservatism, and orthodoxy), and second, that the real focus of his diatribe is internecine warfare of the Culture Wars variety, not an attack on foreign influences polluting Anglo-American culture. Even in this more closely defined arena, however, Eliot is not out to change the world that he knows in one fell stroke, merely to analyze it with an eye toward pointing out the pernicious deficiencies of the opposing camp of romantic, liberal heretics. He will get to his definition of heresy in this regard shortly, but he begins by pointing out what he finds to be “objectionable” about the heretic’s agenda. To appreciate his objection, it is necessary to understand that the opposing camp, as opposed to Eliot’s camp, which supports the maintenance and continuance of tradition, is always proposing reform and renewal of existing cultural, legal, and political institutions—in a word, change. Often that may, however, become change for change’s sake, and that is what Eliot not only objects to but fears. As he puts it, “[It] is not novelty or originality in themselves, but their glorification for their own sake.” That, from Eliot’s point of view, is morally, spiritually, and intellectually sloppy behavior, for it is uncritical behavior, and as he sees it, a community, a tradition, can neither advance nor survive without undergoing an unending process of self-criticism and self-evaluation. When it comes, then, to the life of a tradition, which is, for Eliot, the cultural life of a people, those forces that are arrayed on the side of continu-

After Strange Gods ity and of the furtherance of communal as opposed to individual values are those that Eliot defends, for all the reasons already stated. However, Eliot, after implying that the relationship among these terms of his that are arrayed along the positive side of the equation—that is, classicism, conservatism, and orthodoxy—makes them somewhat interchangeable, then offers a further qualification that establishes why he now believes that casting the controversy in terms of a conflict between orthodoxy and heresy, despite all the subsequent overtones of matters of belief that those two words may contain, is far more descriptive of the conflict’s essential character. To this time, Eliot had been generating a body of other critical commentary on the distinctions between poetry and belief that was among his most impressive work to date, most notably in the 1927 essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.” He had been doing this as his own poetry had been drifting more and more into that gray area where the distinctions between the life and beliefs of the poet, on the one hand, and the allusions to religious belief and to its ritual in the poetry, on the other hand, were beginning to blur in confusing ways. The poetry of “Ash-Wednesday” and of the Ariel Poems comes most immediately to mind, but even less ostensibly “Christian” poetry—“Gerontion” and “The Hollow Men,” for further examples—seems to be founded on an attempt to find a means of poetically assessing the lack of any viable basis for faith in the modern world. As a consequence, Eliot’s comments on poetry and belief were proving helpful because they were clarifications of what he saw as the differences between the one and the other. The Page-Barbour Lectures, for a particularly outstanding example, had come hard on the heels of his eighth and final Norton lecture at Harvard, which he had delivered on March 31, 1933. Throughout that series, which had commenced the previous November, he had been attempting to define exactly how poetry was neither philosophy nor belief nor religion and to prove that critical attempts from the likes of the early 19th-century English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the mid-19th-century English poet and critic MATTHEW ARNOLD to make poetry serve the function of other systems of thought were a benefit to neither

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poetry nor those fields of human endeavor with which it was seen by too many at present to be in an uneasy competition. If nothing else, Eliot’s critical literature on these matters went a long way for some, particularly those who might be interested, in admitting that there might be a pressing need to clear the air a bit, even if there was the added possibility that Eliot might be doing as much more for his own benefit than for the benefit of his readers and fellow critics and poets. His now casting the problem in the terms of a cultural and social crisis of the first order suggests either that he was abandoning that former effort toward clarity somewhat or ratcheting up the stakes, as it were. In fact, however, the critical attention that he had paid to the entire matter may simply have enabled him to see the conflict between poetry and belief and the consequences of its resolution as more crucial matters than could be adequately treated with in wholly literary contexts. Anyone has the right to modify his or her own previous points of view as experience and further thought on the matters require, but Eliot is unlikely to have changed his view so radically as to reverse it completely on the matter of the separation between the poet and the poem and between poetry and belief. Instead, the nuances of his argument must be approached with the same care as he takes in shaping them, and those nuances revolve around his wishing to speak now as if the conflict were indeed a matter, foremost, of conflicting belief systems, identified as the orthodox and the heretical. It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that for all the quasi-religious significances thus implied, as the argument continues, Eliot is always and only ever speaking metaphorically. First to his qualification, then. He decides that the fallback position of likening the conflict to one between classicism and romanticism no longer suffices for him. These conflicting categories had been occupying his own critical attention from at least as early as 1923 in the essay “The Function of Criticism,” but he now sees that such distinctions, in their applicability to contemporary literature, are chiefly “temporary and political” in nature. He regards those two terms as defining qualities that have meaning, in other words, only according to the

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After Strange Gods

prevailing tastes of the moment, and particularly as those tastes are defined by popular opinion—the press, perhaps—rather than necessarily by working artists and critics. Furthermore, those terms are not as exact as he would wish them to be, just as conservative and liberal shift and change meaning though maintain the semblance of an opposition. Eliot, in other words, uses those most dangerously loaded terms—orthodoxy and heresy—for the very reason that they imply the most serious kind of opposition, one between transcendent beliefs rather than between mere opinions or even popularly acceptable ideas. Still, that does not mean that Eliot is attempting to erase any distinctions between poetry and belief, only that he sees the matter at hand to be of the same order of importance as what might be called ultimate values, as distinct from “temporary and political” values. Indeed, to defend that sort of literature and those kinds of writers that Eliot believes are capable of fashioning the literature of his time into one that can effectively express ultimate values can be said to be the sole aim of After Strange Gods, in spite of all the apparent and ill-considered stress on the secular and racial with which the essay opens. Eliot’s aim has never been to see a particular belief or race flourish so much as to “purify the dialect of the tribe,” as he will eventually phrase the poet/ critic’s struggle—and humanity is his tribe. His definition of heresy may also suffice in providing insight into where he wishes to take his argument; he defines the word not as falsehoods but as “attractive half truths.” Here again the emphasis is not on the truth prevailing so much as on error not being perpetuated, and error is not defined doctrinally but in terms of “the absence of any moral or social sense.” That is to say, Eliot is not censoring ideas but rather encouraging their more responsible dissemination. The danger in his own time does not threaten correct thinking (which cannot be properly defined or defended in a modern democratic state in any case), he fears, but the correct expression of thought. And thought devoid of any reference to tradition and to the orthodoxies that it favors is dangerous, not because the tradition and its orthodoxies are sacrosanct and beyond challenge and criticism themselves, but because such

thought has no basis for continuance other than in the life of the poet and in the whims of public opinion and taste, to which poets are as susceptible as all the rest of humanity. It is a vicious circle, and Eliot sometimes seems to be arguing in circles in order to expose its perniciousness. Ignore tradition, he argues, and one falls prey to the fashionable; fall prey to the fashionable, and one ignores tradition. But how does the responsible artist discern the difference, one may well ask. Eliot responds, “Only by maintaining orthodoxy,” and that makes him sound like a proselytizing preacher or, worse, the bigoted racist of his opening remarks. His is a lose-lose situation, taking a stand that appeals only to the rabid, who neither understand him nor the wholly secular value of the cause that he is advancing, which is not religion but coherent moral values. (Bearing in mind that, in Eliot’s view, even CHARLES BAUDELAIRE advances coherent moral values of a religious nature, although they will not be espoused in any church, unless it is for the sake of proving how worthy of condemnation they are.) These none-too-subtle but nevertheless not easily grasped refinements on Eliot’s part are lost to most, it is certain to say, but so is much poetry and, perhaps, a great deal of religion. In the long run, the one thing that Eliot may have successfully accomplished on the topic of anything even only vaguely resembling or approaching the dual topic of poetry (or literature) and belief (or religion or theology), all of which designations may themselves be regarded as relatively interchangeable terms inasmuch as a popular lexicon is concerned, is to demonstrate that it is impossible so much as to touch on the topic without sounding as if one were either advancing the cause of one species of belief at the expense of all others or purposefully denying that there is—indeed, must be—an inviolable separation between poetry and belief, which, for most, amounts to the same thing. Nevertheless, in a later essay, “Religion and Literature,” which slightly broadens the arena but not the topic, Eliot makes the critical observation that it is not as if people hold religious opinions and read literature in two separate compartments of the mind. His aim is to make both contemporary writers and

After Strange Gods contemporary readers mindful of the inseparable sensibilities of each reader as a truth that, all the evidence suggests, was never previously questioned and perhaps was not even articulated. Words shape human behavior in the same way but to different ends. Eliot’s effort to do as much— that is, to discuss poetry and belief in the same breath, not as different ways of expressing the same thing but as two of the essential operations of the human intellect acting in concert—is to be commended because he brought the discussion to the table at a time when, in the face of the increasing secularization of public life, it most needed to be granted a hearing, if not find an advocate. Down to Cases As After Strange Gods continues, its linking of tradition with orthodoxy, and of orthodoxy with responsible thinking as opposed to right or wrong thinking, begins to become clarified as Eliot’s way of urging restraint on an unbridled individuality among contemporary writers that can often turn into a moral eccentricity for its own sake. Responsible thinking, on the other hand, requires the poet to be mindful of the power of his words and, so, of the need to keep the constraints of tradition operating so that that power is continually grounded in a common, communal good. Indeed, “[w]hat is disastrous,” in Eliot’s view, “is that the writer should deliberately give rein to his ‘individuality’, . . . and that his readers should cherish [him] . . . not in spite of his deviations from the inherited wisdom of the race, but because of them.” In Eliot’s view, there is a powerful tendency in the conditions of the modern world, where every idea is valued and none is sacred, for the “writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah,” one who will save us from our disbelief. Once Eliot gets down to cases, the reader gets the most clear idea of the particular spin he puts on his two terms, orthodoxy and heresy. As an example of an artist who is orthodox, Eliot uses the Irish novelist JAMES JOYCE, a choice that sends a clear signal that Eliot cannot possibly intend the term in some priggishly doctrinal manner. Joyce was, for one thing, notoriously daring in terms of extending the limits of taste and propriety in literature.

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His most successful work to that time, his novel Ulysses, was, at the moment that Eliot was speaking, banned for its perceived pornographic content from importation into the United States. Furthermore, although Joyce had been reared and educated in the Roman Catholic traditions of his Irish forebears, by his young adulthood he had publicly rejected those traditions in his first, largely autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Eliot would have been well aware of all this, so his selection of Joyce as a model of orthodoxy in literature is his way of making the nonreligious, nonpriggish nature of his distinction immediately apparent. “We are not concerned with the authors’ beliefs,” Eliot explains, having just quoted a passage from Joyce’s The Dead, a novella that concludes the collection of short stories Dubliners, “but with orthodoxy of sensibility and with the sense of tradition.” Joyce had done little more than to place his protagonist’s suffering in the broader context of all human suffering in order to win this seal of approval, further suggesting that Eliot had little concern for a fellow author’s doctrinal beliefs in order to declare him or her orthodox. Exactly how Eliot regards responsible literary endeavor, however, is exposed through the author whom he selects as a representative heretic, the contemporary English novelist D. H. LAWRENCE. Lawrence is exposed to the harsh light of Eliot’s critical scrutiny in this context of orthodoxy versus heresy, leading Eliot to condemn him in terms that to this day may sound too unforgiving unless the importance of his central thesis also be kept in view. Lawrence’s deserved celebrity as a novelist continues to be based on his daring treatment of human sexuality as a spiritual release from the pressures of modern social and bureaucratic institutions in their coldly impersonal attempts to make individuals conform to predetermined patterns of behavior. That would seem to be a thematic agenda right up the alley of the poet of The Waste Land with its condemnation of the modern, urban deathtrap. Nonetheless, despite this apparent similarity of interests and of themes, Lawrence is castigated by Eliot as a writer whose work reflects, for the very reason of Lawrence’s emphasis on singular solutions to communal dilemmas, that telltale

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After Strange Gods

absence of moral or social sense because his vision is not based on any preexisting system of human values. One need not pay homage to those values or even adhere to them, so much as acknowledge their presence as shaping forces. It may seem contradictory to take this attitude toward an author whose works many at the time thought were attempts to liberate individuals from the deadening effects of the modern industrial world. However, from Eliot’s point of view, Lawrence’s ostensibly beneficial effort was devoid of any grounding in responsible thinking, which is thinking that would take into account not the capacity of human willfulness to defy conventions but the dynamics of human social organizations to accommodate the nonconforming. Lawrence, by proposing radically eccentric solutions to a universal crisis in maintaining the integrity and dignity of individual identity in a world where the pressure to conform was virtually overwhelming rather than helping others cope, only accentuates people’s sense of alienation and isolation from each other and from their community. And so, as cruel as Eliot’s judgment that Lawrence is “heretical” may sound on the surface, it is actually a relatively measured and, according to Eliot’s principles, wholly critical conclusion that Eliot reaches. Eliot goes on to say that Lawrence’s “vision is spiritual, but spiritually sick.” Undeniably, Eliot could have said it better by avoiding a clever turn of phrase in order to take the matter down to the immediate issues at hand. Still, Eliot is merely maintaining that Lawrence has taken off all on his own, and that sort of behavior will not clarify the matter of the moral crisis at hand but only further confuse it. Lawrence is not alone, of course, in undergoing this kind of a critical lambasting from Eliot. Eliot is afraid that with the sort of moral blandness that has entered the literary universe in modern times come characterizations of humanity that “tend to become less and less real” and “more and more vaporous.” His good friend, the American poet EZRA POUND, is castigated for attempting a modern equivalent of Dante’s Hell that fails because “it is a Hell for the other people, the people we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one’s

friends.” The Irish poet W. B. YEATS is similarly chastised for having created in his visionary poetry, with its emphases on Irish myth and occult lore, a world that is not one of “real Good and Evil, of holiness or sin,” and Eliot concludes by declaring Yeats a poet who, in his maturity, has not achieved a genuine philosophy but has “at least discarded . . . the trifling and eccentric.” Nor will Eliot allow that the Victorian English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was by vocation a Roman Catholic priest and whose poetry had only fairly recently come into the public ken, was any more successful at producing a poetry of any genuinely moral or spiritual substance, seeing its achievements as more verbal in nature than religious. All these examples, Eliot insists, exhibit the crippling effects that not having been nurtured in a “living and central tradition” can have on the poet. He saves his most seething indictment, however, for those of his contemporaries who have fallen under the spell of what he calls a “diabolic influence.” A Bang of a Whimper Once Eliot has begun his third and final lecture, however, it quickly becomes clear that the reference to the diabolical was meant more as a teaser to whet his audience’s appetite for this last installment. At any rate, his topic turns out to be not writers whom he imagines to be susceptible to diabolical influences so much as those who engage freely in what he regards as blasphemy. Yet even on this topic Eliot proves to be very much a child of his time. He gladly admits, in so many words, that even blasphemy nowadays is not what it used to be because his is not so passionate an age of faith, if it is one at all, as to find individuals who may be injured by outrageous verbal assaults upon the sacred. “Where blasphemy might once have been a sign of spiritual corruption,” he argues, now it is thought of as an indication of a spiritual liveliness, so that contemporary writers, particularly novelists, feel more and more free if not in fact culturally obliged to “impose upon their readers their own personal view of life.” It is in expressing that personal view—the result, in his view, of “the aggrandisement and exploitation of personality”—that the writer, and his readers, succumb to a view of

After Strange Gods creation devoid of any overriding social or moral order, let alone a spiritual center. Eliot uses the example of the late 19th-century English novelist Thomas Hardy, whose novels portrayed characters who were the victims of indifferently random events and defects of character and personality, as an author who presents conflicts that are joined and resolved in a universe where any notion of the struggle between good and evil is completely absent. For Eliot, that struggle, like the idea of original sin, is very real, perhaps the most real component of the human spiritual landscape; therefore, it cannot easily be left out of moral equations without doing irreparable damage to the ways in which entire generations of human individuals see themselves interacting both with each other and with the world at large. D. H. Lawrence is once more brought to the stocks as one whose utter irresponsibility in this regard makes him, for Eliot, an outstanding example of the writer who is guided only by what Eliot calls the “Inner Light.” For a poet and thinker who has increasingly devoted his literary career to the defense of what he calls tradition and orthodoxy, there is no worse light for a “wandering humanity” than that one, “the most untrustworthy and deceitful [of] guides.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY In a nutshell, self-deception is an easy and welcome trap, and Eliot sees an adherence to tradition and orthodoxy—the so-called inherited wisdom of the race—as any person’s only hedge against falling under its spell. This is where Eliot’s abiding respect for a writer of genius such as he regards Lawrence to be comes so powerfully into play. Even such a master of words is liable, in deceiving himself by the feeble glow of the Inner Light, to deceive his readers as well. According to Eliot’s formulation, the danger of heresy is not that it is false but that it is composed of attractive half-truths. The times, too, can succumb to a blind reliance on the Inner Light; certainly Eliot fears that his age has. To combat the age’s tendency to fall into a self-congratulatory smugness regarding the correctness of its ways of thinking and believing—a smugness that he soon after

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exposed in the choruses from The Rock, a pageant play produced to raise funds to build new churches in London’s flourishing suburbs—Eliot offers the bulwark of tradition. Even there he proposes caution, however. By itself, he concludes, tradition is “not enough”: “it must be perpetually criticised and brought up to date under the supervision of what I call orthodoxy.” What he calls orthodoxy is not a slavish devotion to Christian doctrine at the expense of all others but clear thinking, wholesome feeling, and an abiding respect for the shaping power of words and ideas, all in keeping with the so-called core values of the culture and the community—which together constitute the tradition, for lack of a better word. It is, after all, communal culture that produces the individual artist and that the individual artist then addresses and reshapes in the literary work. It is undeniable that Eliot himself finds in the Christian tradition those checks on his own prideful human tendency to bask in the glow of his own Inner Light, and it is the same tradition that would have been shared by many if not most in his audience at the University of Virginia in April 1933. It is clear, nevertheless, that he does not recommend that culture and its traditions for everyone, although he does demand that contemporary writers recognize, particularly as they share their personal beliefs with others by whatever medium, that good and that evil exist and operate in our world. No doubt Eliot’s opinions, because of their conservative cast, were not widely acceptable in arenas where the most progressive thinking was welcomed. Yet Eliot’s thinking, in its effort to address the inevitable crisis of values and belief that was shattering individual lives in the modern world, can be quite easily regarded as no less progressive, even if it was not necessarily mainstream. Anyone who has ever been asked to take the negative in a debate is familiar with the phenomenon. Everything that he or she may say appears to be nothing more than disagreement, when in fact it is the very kind of contradistinction that is required if resolution is ever to be reached. At a certain point in his professional life, Eliot apparently made an agreement with himself that, for the sake of those causes to which he felt a personal commitment, he would

42 “American Literature and the American Language” happily be disagreeable, and nowhere is this more apparent than in After Strange Gods. Eliot’s intentions for the ideas expressed in After Strange Gods might best be summed up by the epigraph on the title page, a verse from the fourthcentury B.C. Greek playwright Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King. The king of Thebes, Oedipus has set out to discover the killer of his predecessor in order to free the city from a deadly curse. Unbeknownst to him, however, is the fact that he is the killer that he seeks. The words that Eliot selected for his epigraph are spoken to Oedipus by Teiresias, a blind soothsayer whom he has consulted in an attempt to learn the killer’s identity. Oedipus and Teiresias argue over precisely who the killer of the old king, Laius, may be. Teiresias knows that Oedipus is the killer, while Oedipus, except for Teiresias’s renown for never being mistaken in a prophecy, has no way of knowing that he is himself absolutely wrong. Loosely translated, Teiresias’s parting shot at Oedipus, and Eliot’s epigraph, is “You think me a fool, but your parents thought me wise.” The point that Eliot is aiming to drive home to his audience by his choice of just such an epigraph is pretty clear: He has cast himself in the role of a prophet trying to tell his readers something that they desperately need to hear, something that preceding generations would have given him no argument about. However, like Teiresias, Eliot is also telling his contemporary readers that he is no fool, so he hardly expects them to believe him or to trust the purity of his own motives as he goes about introducing his thesis that there is much that is wrongheaded in the thinking among his fellow poets and other writers of the time.

“American Literature and the American Language” (1953) During the year before his death early in January of 1965, Eliot was busily working on preparing a number of previously published essays and public lectures for publication in a single volume. This volume, To Criticize the Critic, posthumously

released by Eliot’s publisher Faber & Faber in 1965, brought together pieces from as far back in his career as 1917, but if they shared any particular feature, it was that they provided more commentary than was typical for Eliot on figures and topics connected with American literature, an area that did not often occupy his critical attention. Among them was the essay “American Literature and the American Language,” which had originally been presented as a lecture at Washington University in ST. LOUIS on June 9, 1953.

SYNOPSIS Eliot’s choice of topic that evening may have been made by his hosts, but whatever the case, it was certainly fortuitous. Not only is St. Louis located in the American heartland on a waterway, the Mississippi River, that carries the mythic pulse of the nation and its people, but the city was Eliot’s birthplace, where his family made their home well into his own young manhood. Furthermore, the poet’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had been instrumental in the founding of Washington University, the venue for the evening’s lecture. Everything about the event strained at the American experience that had shaped Eliot’s character and destiny, so it comes as no surprise that his lecture should focus on American literature and the idea of an American language, especially since Eliot had become a British subject back in 1927 and had been living in England virtually continuously since 1914. By now, he owed the literature of his native land more than a nodding acquaintanceship, and the time for a payback to the culture and nation that had given his early life and values all their impetus had come. In fact, Eliot begins his remarks by reminiscing about his St. Louis upbringing and the devotion to duty and service that were instilled in him through the model of the esteem in which his grandfather was held. “I am very well satisfied with having been born in St. Louis,” he concludes these reminiscences, “rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.” Eliot then ruminates on the literature and language that the American experience has produced, confessing that the differences between the Brit-

“American Literature and the American Language” ish and American versions of English as a common language are negligible. Still, he imagines that the influence of the one on the other, that is, of the American on the British, is much more powerful, partly as a result of the influx of Americans into England as a result of World War II, as forces massed in England for the eventual invasion at Normandy. As for American literature, Eliot is happy to say that the American experience has led to a national literature, to the end that “I believe that we are now justified in speaking of what has never, I think, been found before, two literatures in the same language.” However, he does not identify literature that is distinctively American as that of the New England writers of the postcolonial period, such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, because that literary experience, although it is most commonly associated with America in general, “remains representative of New England, rather than of America.” Eliot instead selects Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain as identifiably American. His major criteria for making that selection are not related to the authors’ influence, however. Eliot notes that Poe, for example, had no really discernible influence on later American poets, and Whitman’s influence on modernism Eliot finds to be exaggerated. Instead, Eliot consigns the three to this select list because they have “enjoyed the greatest reputation abroad.” That would indeed imply that they represent a more distinctive sensibility, one that can, nevertheless, be associated by outsiders with a whole people, not just a region. The other characteristic is that they all exhibit, to varying degrees, a “strong local flavour combined with unconscious universality.” Those features, of course, are more readily apparent in Whitman and in Twain than in Poe, and Eliot readily admits as much. Still, Eliot’s essential point is that those same qualities are not necessarily limited to what may be discovered by a wholly superficial examination. The last standard that makes for the identification of any national literature is that it is one that can enable a young writer to “be aware of several generations of writers behind him in his own country and language,” several of whom are “generally acknowledged to be great.” That would certainly have been

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the case with American literature up to the time just preceding Eliot’s generation. Since then, such a claim can be made with that much more authority and conviction, and it would be a false modesty on Eliot’s part to deny it. During the past 40 years, he proposes, the world has witnessed a “sudden mutation of form and content” in literature, not to repudiate the past, but to “have enlarged our conception of the past.” The revolution that Eliot is speaking of is modernism, naturally, a literary movement in which his own poetry and criticism played an extremely significant role recognized virtually worldwide. He is therefore justified in concluding that “the pioneers of 20th century poetry were more conspicuously the Americans than the English, both in number and in quality.” The suggestion is that the junior literature has overtaken its senior, except that when Eliot comes to describe his own experience with the burgeoning literary impulses that would result in modernism, he is forced to confess that none of his earliest influences were either English or American. Eliot first started to write poetry seriously during his final year as a Harvard undergraduate in 1909. Looking back more than 40 years later, he can now observe that both British and American literature looked pretty bleak to a young, aspiring poet like himself during those early years of the 20th century. In fact, he confesses, “I cannot think of a single living poet, in either England or America, then at the height of his powers, whose work was capable of pointing the way to a young poet conscious of the desire for a new idiom.” It is virtually axiomatic by now that T. S. Eliot was foremost among those young poets who were seeking a new idiom, and yet all that he remembered having was “the assurance that there was something to be learned from the French poets of the Symbolist Movement.” Aside from them, he finds the “starting-point of modern poetry” located in the imagist movement taking place in London in 1910. Whether or not the name derived from Pound or the young English poet and critic T. E. Hulme, Eliot credits Amy Lowell for having brought to the movement the renown it subsequently achieved in America.

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Anabasis

Therefore, although young American poets of Eliot’s time ventured to foreign sources for their inspiration, Eliot feels secure in asserting, as he brings his essay to an end, that while only Poe and Whitman can be singled out as American poets worthy of an international reputation in the 19th century, the first half of the 20th century, thanks to the modernist movement, has found “assembled a body of American poetry which has made a total impression in England and in Europe.” His point is inescapable: During the 20th century, American literature has come into its own as a global cultural force to be reckoned with and accounted for. It is too early to tell whether there is an American literary tradition distinct from an English one, but Eliot imagines that trying to define such a distinction would prove to be fruitless in any case. “The difference,” he concludes, “will remain undefined, but it will remain.” And because there are differences, “English and American poetry can help each other, and contribute towards the endless renovation of both.”

Anabasis (1930) Eliot undertook a translation of French poet St.John Perse’s book-length poem Anabase in the late 1920s, while he was struggling to conceptualize a poetic project of his own that might be a worthy successor to The Waste Land. Some of these efforts, though they would be preserved as unfinished works in the pages of Collected Poems 1909–1935, were nevertheless stillborn. These include the verse drama “Sweeney Agonistes,” begun in 1923 and abandoned in 1925, and the long poem “Coriolan,” of which only two parts, “Triumphal March” and “Difficulties of a Statesman,” ever saw publication, in the first case as one of Eliot’s contributions to Faber & Faber’s annual Ariel series. Otherwise, Eliot did complete “The Hollow Men” in 1925 and “Ash-Wednesday” in 1930, hardly meager achievements by any standard. Even they, however, seem to have been works conceived after the fact from thematic and stylistic directions discerned in his previously published, individual pieces that were themselves ostensibly composed for other pur-

poses originally. “The Hollow Men,” for example, emerges somewhat from “Doris’s Dream Songs,” lyrics composed with “Sweeney Agonistes” in mind. Entire sections of “Ash-Wednesday” also first saw the light of day as independently published lyrics. Eliot was not being nonproductive by any means. Nevertheless, his poetic aims were not clearly focused, and his poetic vision was adrift on a sea of possibilities that offered many prospects but no clearly charted course or safe havens. Eliot needed the anchorage of a project that was fully conceived and virtually executed to begin with. A translation of Perse’s complexly original Anabase filled the bill. Along with Eliot’s recognizing the Perse poem’s intrinsic value as great poetry, an assessment seconded by contemporaries such as the Italian modernist poet Giuseppe Ungaretti and the German poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the benefit of Anabase for Eliot seems mainly to be that it provided him with an extended and focused creative project when he was apparently unable, at the time, to come up with one on his own.

SYNOPSIS Perse first published his Anabase in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1924; it was published in book form later that year. The word anabasis—Perse gives the word’s Greek spelling a French spin— comes from the classical Greek and means a movement from a coastline to the interior or a march up country. Historically, the term is generally associated with Xenophon’s book of the same name. Xenophon, a fourth-century B.C. Athenian who was eventually exiled to Sparta, recounts in his Anabasis the Spartan march from Greece to Persia and back again from 401 to 399 B.C. to aid Cyrus in his effort to seize the Persian throne. The 20th-century poem by St.-John Perse, the pseudonym of French diplomat Alexis Saint-Léger Léger (1887–1975), has nothing to do, however, with Xenophon’s Anabasis and is instead a typically symbolical modernist piece that recounts the exploits of an improbable king and his kingdom. Eliot, who had to master a reading knowledge of French for his graduate studies at Harvard from 1911 to 1915 and had even tried to compose a handful of poems in French in 1917, began to

Anabasis work on his translation of Perse’s Anabase in the latter part of 1926. He shared the fruits of these labors with Perse shortly later, in early 1927. Apparently, Perse-Léger, a diplomat by profession, had a good command of English to begin with and assisted Eliot with the translation. Perse’s initial reaction to Eliot’s work, however, was sufficiently negative that it took Eliot another three years to complete and publish his translation, Anabasis, in 1930. Eliot would revisit that translation 19 years later when he published a second edition in 1949, incorporating further corrections suggested by Perse, whose English, according to Eliot, had improved sufficiently during the intervening years for him to find new cause for improving Eliot’s original work. Anabasis is significant in terms of Eliot’s career as a poet for the shaping influence it may have had on Eliot’s own poetry writing. Whether Eliot’s poetry writing benefited from the experience of translating a complex work by a fellow modernist and, in 1960, fellow Nobel laureate (Eliot had been thus honored in 1948) is wholly a matter of conjecture, of course. Nevertheless, to see one’s work through characteristic elements in the work of another author often provides a perspective from which new visions may emerge. That, at least, seems to have been the case with the effect that translating Perse had on Eliot. Eliot was, at the time of the initial translation, not quite as much the poet of the erudite allusion as he had been for the first decade and more of his poetic career, but that does not mean that he had totally eschewed making them, and others’ influence could still creep into his work unbeknown and therefore unacknowledged. “Ash-Wednesday,” for example, owes much of its potential for meaning to direct and largely acknowledged allusions to DANTE ALIGHIERI and to Guido Cavalcanti, as well as to the liturgy of the Catholic Mass and devotions. That poem was not published until 1930. The distinction among the direct borrowing, the subtle allusion, and the accidental resemblance is often a difficult one to discern nevertheless. There is in Perse, for example, a particularly idiosyncratic image, “. . . the mind shakes its tumult of spears,” that may or may not find either an allu-

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sion or a companion idea in the notoriously puzzling image of “Tartar horsemen shak[ing] their spears” that closes Eliot’s “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock.” The only problem, however, is that the Eliot poem was first published in 1924, several years before he undertook his translation of Anabase. On the other hand, the Perse poem was first published in 1924, so Eliot could have read it as early as that, but such a conjecture is admittedly a stretch. Commentators do see the influence of Perse’s poem’s oriental effects in some of the colorations that Eliot works into his own “Journey of the Magi,” a poem that he composed while he was working on his translation of Perse, but this similarity might be coincidental. The Magi, after all, are embedded in Christian tradition as three wise men or kings from the East, so why should Eliot not have employed oriental touches without any influence from Perse? On balance, it appears that the Perse poem does not figure outstandingly in any of Eliot’s poetry contemporary with his translating work. Naturally, influences and benefits need not be manifested in open or easily observable ways. It is far more possible that, more than any particular thing, Eliot’s work with Perse’s poetry may have helped clarify for Eliot the challenges that the long poem itself posed.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot had composed The Waste Land in an intentionally episodic fashion, as is now well known, and it was only his friend EZRA POUND’s extensive editing of the Eliot original that gave that text the tightness, and obscurity, of organization for which it subsequently became celebrated. That also means, however, that Eliot himself had never independently conceptualized and then executed a modernist long poem himself. Surely, “The Hollow Men” and “Ash-Wednesday” were successful efforts in that direction, although, as mentioned earlier, it is reasonable to assume that they were not thusly conceptualized to begin with but may have been derived from material already formulated for other purposes. One might well ask why the long poem would have been such an obsession for Eliot in any case.

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Anabasis

The matter is that whether the choice was inadvertent or not, with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot had set himself up as a poet capable of achieving a sustained and extended poetic work, never an easy task in any age and a particularly daunting one in modern times, with their apparent lack of community and coherence. Literary history does not record many significant extended poetic achievements. Dante’s Divine Comedy stands out, among other reasons, because it is such a rare achievement. Having accomplished as much himself with The Waste Land, Eliot was virtually condemned to repeating the performance, or at least he appeared to think so. What he has to say regarding the long poem, then, in his preface to the first edition of Anabasis, is of more importance to understanding and appreciating Eliot’s own present and future development as a poet than examining the actual translation of Perse can ever be. Eliot’s preface, as short as it is, is packed with significant insights that can be divided into two categories of interest: the method of the long poem required in the modernist era and the distinction between poetry and what might be called poetic prose, the latter being a key component in any extended poetic work. In the preface, then, after establishing that Perse’s poem has no relation to Xenophon’s memoir other than that they both are using the word anabasis in its literal sense, Eliot notes that the Perse poem is a “series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic waste, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the ancient East.” That said, Eliot, who admits that it took him six readings of the poem to feel comfortable that he had a grasp on it, announces that any obscurity in the poem is “due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain,’ of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram.” Those very words, as any frequent reader of The Waste Land or even “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” would know, can as easily be applied to an Eliot poem as to Perse’s Anabase. “There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts,” Eliot goes on to assert, and it is a logic that “requires just as much ‘fundamental brainwork’ as

the arrangement of an argument.” Although Eliot was still five years away from composing “Burnt Norton,” whose own “arrangement of images” continues to make for a challenging read, he was already the author of numerous other works whose liberties with commonplace order were by then nearly legendary. Eliot then comments on how Perse manages a poem that is composed as much in prose as in poetry, and this observation allows him to note that what often constitutes poetry, even when it may appear to adhere to those features commonly associated with prose, is, again, a “logic of imagery” whose “system of stresses and pauses” make not for prose, the surface details of the arrangement of words on the page to the contrary, but for poetry. This insistence by Eliot on the idea that poetry follows, and is supported by, a logic all its own, whose sense can be found in the relationship among its images and in the stresses and pauses of their arrangement as words on the page, makes not for a defense of modernism but for a new definition of what constitutes the poetic as distinguished from the prosaic. Eliot had had an immeasurable effect on changing the definition of what constitutes the nature of poetry. He had done so by mixing the traditional modes—lyrical, narrative, and dramatic—often within a single poem and by casting, as well, regular metrical lines and even uniform stanzaic length to the wind, so that a line of verse could be any length, and the next line any other length, ad infinitum. Now, Eliot reaches toward an even broader definition of the poetic in these remarks regarding his estimation of what Perse has accomplished as a versifier. If Eliot is right, being poetic will no longer be “sounding” poetic. Rather, it is seeing the world with a poetic sensibility that transmutes experience into the most expedient phrasing, without any concern for whether or not that particular way of putting it should sound, to the common ear, or look, to the common eye, poetic or not. Anyone willing to review the expansive ease and freedom with which Eliot, within a few years, conducted in “Burnt Norton” that commerce between the strange and the familiar, the new and the old, that poetry typified in the modernist epoch, will recognize in this

“Andrew Marvell” assessment of his of Perse’s achievement a blueprint for Eliot’s own.

“Andrew Marvell” (1921) Eliot twice alludes to the 17th-century English poet Andrew Marvell’s most rightly famous work, “To His Coy Mistress,” in works of his own that have become equally famous—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Readers should, then, be particularly interested in whatever Eliot, the literary scholar, had to say about this English neoclassicist who followed closely but not too particularly in the footsteps of another of Eliot’s favorite 17th-century poets, JOHN DONNE. Unfortunately, in the essay “Andrew Marvell,” Eliot pays much more attention to an analysis of Marvell’s technique than to a consideration of his vision or view of life. Still, even in that regard, the Marvell who emerges from Eliot’s critical pen has a predilection for wit and magniloquence that is mirrored in Eliot’s own tendencies in that same direction, at least during the early phase of his literary career.

SYNOPSIS Marvell, Eliot points out in opening, represents more the attitude of a civilization, of “a traditional habit of life,” while a Donne or CHARLES BAUDELAIRE or JULES LAFORGUE is more likely to be “the inventor of an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals.” There is a motivation behind Eliot’s citing the names of Marvell’s near contemporary Donne and two 19th-century French symbolist poets in the same breath while trying to characterize the sort of poet, and poetry, Marvell represents. That motive, however, has more to do with Eliot than with Marvell. For all the so-called wit that Eliot will shortly be attributing to Marvell, in other essays, particularly his essay, also from 1921, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot makes it clear that it is poets of Donne’s ilk who advance the dual cause of thought and of feeling. The metaphysical poets, of whom Donne remains the most outstanding example, did so by writing in a language that

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most approximated the vigor of the vernacular, and so it is they who garner the laurel. The two French symbolists were Eliot’s own near contemporaries, under whose beneficial influence he was still greatly laboring at the time. Eliot is admitting Marvell into this illustrious company not as their equal but as a different measure of the same impulse, which is wit. Where Marvell falls short is that his influences are, like John Milton’s, not English but Latin. Where Marvell is redeemed nevertheless, and Milton virtually never will be, in Eliot’s eyes, is that Marvell, once more, writes a poetry that evidences wit. Indeed, Marvell, as an educated and cultured man, was less caught up in the factionalism that the equally cultured and educated to which Milton became committed, and as a result, Marvell was, in Eliot’s view, “more a man of the century than a Puritan,” one who spoke “more clearly and unequivocally with the voice of the literary age than Milton.” It is primarily wit, which Eliot defines as “a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace,” that ultimately both separates and distinguishes Marvell from his fellow “Puritan” poet, Milton, who was otherwise as Latinate or “magniloquent”—high-talking—in his lexicon. Later, Eliot identifies wit as an “alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified),” and he once more associates it with the “dandysme of Baudelaire and Laforgue,” reenforcing his earlier assertion that Marvell’s poetry, with its admixture of the profound and the ridiculous, holds an affinity for Eliot. Indeed, by this time in his own poetic career he had already been experimenting with the deadly serious high jinx of his quatrain poems, such as “Sweeney among the Nightingales” and “The Hippopotamus.” The danger, as Eliot knew, is that cleverness can often seem to border on the absurd, and any element of a more serious intent can get lost in the shuffle. That is where wit—true wit—comes into play and, indeed, such a view of wit may define it well. To be witty, in this sort of high-stakes emotional and intellectual game, is to overstate and undercut simultaneously so that the reader gets the joke (which is often nothing more than copping an attitude or tone) without missing the point.

48 “Animula” In Eliot’s view, “Coy Mistress,” with its lover’s plaint cast in the conflicting tones of a musing upon philosophical profundities and so-called country matters—“Had we but world enough and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime”—shows a wit that, for Eliot, illustrates poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of the imagination as that skill to hold “in the balance or reconcilement of opposing or discordant qualities.” This is very high praise. The ultimate point, however, for Eliot seems to be that “this wit which pervades the poetry of Marvell is more . . . refined than anything that succeeded it,” explaining why, perhaps, as a budding poet, Eliot had to come upon it by turning to an alien poetry in a foreign tongue—the French symbolists. Wit, Eliot makes an effort to clarify, is not erudition, though he was conscious, no doubt, of how often his own cleverness has been confused with his flaunting his knowledge. Rather, wit involves “a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.” It is a quality more and more absent from poetry since Marvell’s time, Eliot contends, and he laments that absence, certainly in the present day. Nowadays, he feels, there is either “occasionally good irony, or satire, which lack wit’s internal equilibrium,” or there are “serious poets who are afraid of acquiring wit, lest they lose intensity.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY To find and to maintain a balance between levity and seriousness is assuredly no easy task, as a poet of Eliot’s character, caliber, and interest in ambiguity of intent could no doubt readily attest. The poet who seeks to portray such wit runs the risk of being dismissed by those who are troubled by an intensity of expression as much as by those who are put off by any attempt at levity in the midst of serious considerations. That Marvell had such a talent naturally commends his contribution to the tradition by that much more, since, in Eliot’s view, he still presents to the contemporary poet a model of how such a precarious balance may be not only achieved but maintained. “By whatever name we call it,” Eliot comments, speaking of that talent, “it is something precious and needed and apparently extinct.” There is good reason

to believe, nevertheless, that Eliot was himself attempting to revive it and make it current again at the very time that he was praising Marvell for having shown the way.

“Animula” (1929) The title of “Animula,” the third of Eliot’s poems in the Ariel series, means “little soul” in Latin. The term is used by DANTE in his great religious epic, the Divine Comedy, specifically to Canto XVI of the Purgatorio, as well as by the first-century B.C. Roman emperor Hadrian. Rather than the stark contrasts the first two poems in the series provide, here the reader finds what appears to be a sharp departure from that technique. This departure will, however, by the close of the poem, have come full circle so as to form a continuation of the presentation made throughout the series regarding the human encounter with miracle and mystery, faith and doubt. Instead of devoting the poem to a dramatic monologue spoken by a personage closely associated with the Gospel narratives of the Nativity, Eliot writes “Animula” in the third person, making for a more expository than lyrical presentation. In it he focuses, instead of on the concrete elements of a human experience such as the magi’s journey or Simeon’s encounter with the Christ child, on an elaborate trope for the nature of the human soul, comparing it to a little child. Granted, the commonplace associations of Christmas, as a holy day, with an infant’s birth and, as a holiday, with the joys of childhood do not make this particular choice of topics on Eliot’s part any less an appropriate one. That said, the further associations with the Roman emperor Hadrian that Eliot’s choice of title also calls up are themselves rather suspect. Whether or not it originated with Hadrian, the trope that compares the human soul to a little child has been credited to him, being taken from his self-composed epitaph: Animula, vagula, blandula Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula.

“Animula” [Fickle, winsome little soul, body’s guest, its boon companion, to what places will you now be gone, little, pale, blunt, and shorn?]

The wit of the epitaph is self-evident: When death takes the body, what is there left for the soul to do or to be—if, that is, there is a soul. At the opposite extreme, Hadrian’s epitaph is only a very clever way of framing one of the great imponderables, whether or not there is life after death. And that particular imponderable no doubt is of no little significance to anyone pondering the further significance of Christ’s coming into the world to save souls, as Eliot may be doing in his poem. In any event, through the title’s allusion to Hadrian, who died a bitter recluse after the death of his young, homosexual lover, Eliot may be, as he did in “Journey of the Magi” and “A Song for Simeon,” using a historical personage to give more specific focus to the theme of the poem. Hadrian’s own formulation of such a persistent question is, after all, a pagan one from very nearly the time of the historical epoch during which the birth and death of Christ had come to betoken for others a new and refreshing answer to that same persistent question. Furthermore, Hadrian’s is a famous pagan formulation to boot, and one that had had gained a new following among English-speaking readers in the decade of Eliot’s birth. Indeed, in the celebrated Victorian novel Marius the Epicurean—which was published in 1885 and set in the late second century B.C., and with which Eliot would have been familiar—Walter Pater uses Hadrian’s epitaph for both the title of and the epigraph to the chapter in which Marius’s dear friend, the poet Flavian, dies. Musing on Hadrian’s anodyne for our ignorance regarding the fate of the soul after death, Marius finds little consolation in it: “Even that wistful suspense of judgment expressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages of being still possible for the soul in some dim journey hence, seemed wholly untenable, and, with it, almost all that remained of the religion of his childhood.” That conclusion may very well suit Marius; an Epicurean is a person who does not believe in the immortality of the soul in any case. But whether it suits Eliot as well is another question.

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SYNOPSIS Clearly, if the reader follows Eliot’s breadcrumbs through Hadrian and back up to Pater, “Animula” may seem to be a poem whose tone and theme is more in keeping with the well-crafted but coldly abstracted skepticisms of his earlier quatrain poems such as “The Hippopotamus” or “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” Surely every arrow in the present poem thus far seems to be pointing toward its being an expression of the bookish and sophisticated faith of a man of the world, more in keeping with the magus than with Simeon. At this juncture, however, Eliot trundles Dante into his text to clarify the matter, if not save the day. (After all, this is a Christmas poem.) The poem’s opening line, which, like the opening line of “Journey of the Magi,” is provided in quotation marks, is virtually a direct translation from the Italian of the following passage from Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XVI, lines 85–90: Esce di mano a lui che la vagheggia prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia, l’anima semplicetta che sa nulla, salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore, volontier torna a ciò che la trastulla. [Out of the hand of Him who from the first longs for her comes one who, in the guise of a young girl that crying and laughing thirsts, Is the simple soul who knows nothing otherwise save that, moving from her joyful Maker, she fitfully turns to whatever she spies.]

With that for the set-up, the rest of Eliot’s poetry follows smoothly in a flood of accumulating details that add to but do not alter Dante’s master image yet that allow Eliot to paint his own particularized picture of the human soul in a scenery suitable to our own time, showing her “taking pleasure / In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree” or curled up “in the window seat / Behind the Encyclopedia Brittanica,” the endearing realities of a child who is a child but, like the soul, does not know it. So doing, Eliot portrays a Christian image of the typical human soul as a no less fickle creature than Hadrian’s, but as one that

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Ariel Poems

has nevertheless issued “from the hand of God,” a confidence that Hadrian, like Pater’s far more contemporaneous Marius, does not share. That distinction is all the difference, and it is the one that Eliot is clearly out to explore and to develop further. In “Animula,” then, Eliot is still continuing to contrast the mindset of the old dispensation with the new, exactly as he had done in “Journey of the Magi” and “A Song for Simeon.” A further consideration of the precise context in Dante in which the trope of the soul as a capricious child appears, however, shows that Eliot is exploiting that contrast far more critically in “Animula” than he had hitherto done in the earlier two poems in the series.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY In Canto XVI, as Dante guided by Virgil moves among the wrathful concealed amidst a thick, black smoke, he encounters Marco, who identifies himself only as a Lombard and then explains to Dante that the faults that lead to the suffering he has witnessed are not inherent in creation but are the result of our misguided human nature. To make his point, Marco describes the soul as a little child. Like that child, without guidance and direction, and free to do as it pleases, Marco explains, the soul can quickly and easily become lost in pleasures, distractions, and catastrophes all of its own desiring and making. For Marco, then, the necessary guidance is the moral and spiritual authority of the church; otherwise, Marco tells Dante, “Ben puoi veder che la mala condotta / è la cagion che ‘l mondo ha fatto reo, / e non natura che ‘n voi sia corrotta” [You well can see that misdirection / is the cause which made the world go wrong / and not that there is in you a natural corruption] (103–105). Dante had a bone to pick with the level of moral and spiritual guidance that the seated pope, Boniface VIII, was providing the flock, so Marco’s point is to condemn the church for failing in its mission to provide the proper guidance that the individual soul needs. Though Eliot would be unlikely to take as anticlerical a position as Dante’s, Eliot’s point must be taken in the essential spirit of Dante’s, and that is that the unbridled spirit cannot find its own way back to God for the simple reason that

God has made it free. But freedom, free will, has its price, so, as “Animula” continues, the simple soul that issues from the hand of God eventually and, without the benefits of any spiritual constraints and guidance from outside itself, inevitably must confuse itself with goals and objects not its own, becoming little by little something quite different and hardly recognizable, until “Issues from the hand of time the simple soul / Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame. . . .” This can be and, in Eliot’s view, is any one of us, so in the last stanza, though he makes it seem by the interposition of proper names—Guiterrez, Boudin, Floret—that he has specific individuals in mind, Eliot is really using a variety of names and interests to suggest that there all of us are in need of prayer so that we may find the way back to that joyful Creator God from whom we issued. Unlike “Journey of the Magi,” which ends with the speaker thinking that he “should be glad of another death,” Eliot, speaking now on behalf of all of us, closes “Animula” with his own prayer, itself a variation upon the closing words of the Hail Mary, substituting, however, “birth” for “death”: “Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.” That is one’s literal birth, of course, but it is also the moment of one’s rebirth, the hour, to cite a verse from “Amazing Grace,” that one first believes. Eliot is not pushing religion here, however, even though he may be pushing faith. It is not so much what one believes in as that one believes in something greater than the self and, more difficult, greater than the world itself as well.

Ariel Poems (1936) Each Christmas from 1927 through 1931, T. S. Eliot published a poem appropriate to the season as part of a series of illustrated pamphlets with holiday themes. Intended as corporate greeting cards, they were released by the London publishing house Faber & Faber. Eliot had begun a professional relationship with this firm, then known as Faber & Gwyer, as poetry editor in 1925 and would eventually become a director. While not necessarily

Ariel Poems instrumental in instituting the series, he certainly lent it a certain panache. In any case, Eliot published five poems in all in this initial phase of the series. (Faber revised the series in the 1950s, and Eliot, in 1954, provided “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees.”) The last of these original five contributions would be incorporated into “Coriolan” as “Triumphal March.” The first four, “Journey of the Magi” (1927), “A Song for Simeon” (1928), “Animula” (1929), and “Marina” (1930), were published as the “Ariel Poems,” the collective heading by which they have since become known, in Complete Poems, 1909–1935. See the individual entries on the above poems (for more information). Despite these particulars of the poems’ publication, they are not minor pieces. Eliot continued to give them their due prominence as a work set apart in Complete Poems, and they seem, as a group, to partake of other elements, especially images and themes, in keeping with other poetry that Eliot was working on at the same time, specifically “AshWednesday” and a translation from the French of St.-John Perse’s book-length poem, Anabase. Eliot seemed to have more than a casual interest either in their composition or in the place that he saw them occupying in his canon. The name Ariel brings to mind the capricious sprite whose unbridled willfulness contrasts with the stodgy earthiness of the no less willful Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which they represent the opposing extremes of human nature, the spirit and the flesh. While it would be tempting to imagine some particular significance to Eliot’s giving the four poems this overall title, then, the real story is a great deal less suggestive of any subtle literary intent on Eliot’s part. That real story, as Eliot would tell it some years later, is that Faber had used the Ariel designation for their annual holiday series, but after they had discontinued it, “[n]obody else seemed to want the title afterward, so,” according to the poet, “I kept it for myself simply to designate four of my poems which appeared in this way.” As is not unusual in the case of the potential for meaning found in Eliot’s use of literary allusions, however, even those relatively inadvertent ones, as this one is, have something of the serendipitous about them. The four poems in question certainly

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do point, in varying degrees, toward the desire of the spirit to be free of the constraints of time, the flesh, and the world. That is what “Animula” is all about. The problem is that such freedom is no freedom at all. It is, rather, confusion and bewilderment, boredom and botherment and madness. That can be said of much of Eliot’s poetry going back as far, no doubt, as the excessive wittiness that otherwise characterized the quatrains, “The Hippopotamus,” “A Cooking Egg,” and “Whispers of Immortality” being chief among them in this regard. Captains of industry and financiers have always been as likely to fall under Eliot’s witheringly witty scrutiny as self-righteous clerics and pedantic scholars, however. The entire matter of our human capacity for cultivating an attachment to transitory things—the flesh, wealth, power, glory, nations, fame, the fruits of the intellect, the humility of holy orders—at the expense of a complete spiritual self-contentment forms as well a large part of the thematic interests revealed in the complexities of The Waste Land. More to the point, the Ariel poems were emerging at the same time that, in his personal life, Eliot was undergoing a spiritual conversion that would eventually result in his embracing the religious traditions embodied in the Church of England. His poetry, meanwhile, that seemed by 1925 to have leveled off deep in the pits of a despair given voice in “The Hollow Men” and the abandoned verse drama “Sweeney Agonistes,” had begun to take on a tentative turn toward spiritual affirmation, however querulous and masked it may have been, in another series of poems that would eventually become his next major work, the 1930 “Ash-Wednesday.” In the Ariel Poems, Eliot found a poetic means to be himself and to be a poet—to speak out of his own experience, but not about it. This apparent emphasis on the personal would become more and more Eliot’s mode as his poetry writing, as opposed to his turn toward verse drama, continued. But the only danger for the interested reader will be to imagine that Eliot’s is now a poetry of faith or of belief, or, worse yet, expressions of personal faith and belief, rather than a poetry about faith and about belief. Those differences are but two prepositions apart, of and about, but the first case implies that primacy has

52 “Arnold and Pater” been accorded the poet’s personal impulse, whereas the second gives primacy to the poetry as an expression of permanent human thoughts and feelings, precisely as Eliot does in his criticism and precisely, too, as he consistently insists ought to be done. In his 1927 essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” whose ideas emerge from the same period that would produce the poetry of the Ariel poems and of “Ash-Wednesday,” poetry that seems to have a distinctly religious if not even orthodox Christian bias, Eliot addresses the issue of poetry and belief. “All great poetry gives the illusion of a view of life,” he writes; that is not because the poet is a thinker but because the poet reflects in his poetry the thinking of his time. Speaking primarily of Dante as opposed to Shakespeare, he proposes that Dante’s poetry benefits in comparison from having the more orderly thought of St. Thomas Aquinas behind it, “but that was just his [Dante’s] luck.” He concludes, “I doubt whether belief proper enters into the activity of great poet, qua [i.e., as] poet. That is, Dante, qua poet, did not believe or disbelieve the Thomist cosmology or theory of the soul: he merely made use of it. . . .” For all the subtleties of Eliot’s argument here, this is not a subtle distinction that he is making, but rather it is all the difference in the world when it comes to measuring the distance between the life and the work. Eliot, too, as a poet, does not believe or disbelieve the mysteries that form the bases of Christian doctrine: He merely makes use of them. As Eliot puts it best, perhaps, of all in another of his essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in the greatest poetry writing there must be a separation between the “man who suffers and the mind which creates.” The person—be it Dante, Shakespeare, or Eliot—may be many things and have as different a set of beliefs on Monday than on Friday, but the creative mind, the poet, is one single thing, whoever he or she may be, with one single purpose, and that is to make of the stuff of life not biography or philosophy or religion or even belief, which are for others to make, but poetry. The reader determined to make the most and to get the most out of Eliot’s poetry, especially in the quasi-religious phase that it entered following the publication of “The Hollow Men” in 1925,

would do well to keep in mind at all times Eliot’s admonishment from the closing pages of his essay on Shakespeare and Seneca: “Poetry is not a substitute for philosophy or theology or religion; . . . it has its own function. But as this function is not intellectual but emotional, it cannot be defined adequately in intellectual terms.” That is why, in the final analysis, the Ariel poems are just that: poetry. Beyond a doubt, read that way, they speak to any and all experiences that are human.

FURTHER READING Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Timmerman, John H. T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1994.

“Arnold and Pater” (1930) Originally published in an independently edited collection entitled The Eighteen-Eighties and subsequently included by Eliot among his Selected Essays, 1917–1932, in this essay Eliot comments on the significance and influence of two of the major critical voices in English literature in the latter half of the 19th century, MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822–88) and Walter Pater (1839–94). The essay, however, is neither an introduction to nor an appreciation of these two Victorian literary luminaries so much as an indictment of the consequences of Arnold’s and Pater’s shaping influence on the contemporary thought of Eliot’s own time. As such, their influence may, in Eliot’s view, be more fairly characterized as early manifestations of certain social and cultural trends, rather than as the instigators of these same trends. Those trends can be summarized in a single word: humanism.

SYNOPSIS Eliot’s continuing drift toward a more and more conservative stance with regard to the religious,

“Arnold and Pater” specifically Christian, foundations of European culture produced a great deal of critical dueling on his part throughout the 1920s. His essays “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt” and “Second Thoughts on Humanism” from 1927 and 1928, respectively, go as far as he would ever dare, however, in condemning secular humanism as a self-anointed substitute for religion while it was simultaneously and paradoxically degrading the religious impulse as a necessary feature of a human community. In “Arnold and Pater,” rather than his Harvard mentor Irving Babbitt, it is Arnold, as a 19th-century spokesperson for the burgeoning modernist, humanist movement, who takes the heat. Arnold, in fact, seldom fared well in Eliot’s hands as a critic and thinker until near the end of Eliot’s life and career as a critic himself. Then he was more liable to forgive anyone and anything except, perhaps, his own younger self. Till that point, Arnold was treated very much like a misguided high priest and icon of the enemy camp. Often, that is a case that Arnold deserves to have lodged against him because he indeed was a child of his own age and thus of intellectual modernism’s first, faltering stages, when it was not sure what of the past ought to be consigned to the rubbish pile of history and what ought to be preserved at all costs. Not surprisingly, religion, with its overtones of outworn superstitions, headed the secularists’ hit list for things to be discarded, and that done the sooner, the better. Eliot begins the essay by noting that, while his topic, in keeping with the theme of the volume, is essentially Pater, whose most influential work, Marius the Epicurean, was published in 1885, he wishes to trace the influence of Arnold on Pater. As a critic who expresses a “kindred point of view” to Pater’s, Arnold has not only experienced a revival of interest in recent time, according to Eliot, but enjoys a reputation that now exceeds that of other 19th-century notables, including Pater. Such an encomium does not mean that Eliot has nothing but unqualified praise for Arnold, however. Although his style gave “English expository and critical prose a restraint and urbanity it needed,” Eliot argues from the outset that Arnold’s thought does not stand close analysis and that his influence lies more in his rhetoric than in any organized sys-

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tem of thought. He is “at his best,” in fact, when he is offering an apologetics for literature. This is “a needed attitude,” yet unfortunately it is on that very front that “literature, or Culture, tended with Arnold to usurp the place of Religion.” Arnold, in his efforts to preserve, for its cultural viability, the more primal impulse that religion was otherwise viewed as possessing and nurturing, comes close to setting poetry up in religion’s place, and, in Eliot’s view, that does a service to neither and in facts distorts and defeats the separate purposes of each. Arnold’s actual aim was to recapture the cultural value of creative endeavors, particularly literature and the criticism of literature, from the encroachments of a rational skepticism on the one hand and a sloppy impressionism on the other hand. A certain measure of positivistic secularism was already taking root as well, turning the organizations of state into mechanistic systems divorced from moral valuations. While Arnold had been inculcated in those materialists views, he did eventually became passionately opposed to the increasingly rationalistic tendencies of the thinking of his times, while managing to maintain his own intellectual integrity and credentials. As a result of Arnold’s bias against the wholly rationalistic, however, there is much in his cultural criticism that commends itself to a spiritual bias instead. Eliot understandably attacks Arnold on those very grounds: that in Arnold’s effort to establish a new, less mechanistic foundation for assessing artistic endeavors, he reduced religion to the sum of its aesthetic components as well, thus giving humanism a leg up on spiritual considerations to which it had formerly been subsidiary at best. Pater went Arnold one better. If Arnold gave a new cultural legitimacy to humanism by coordinating its more sociopolitical attitudes with the high moral aims of serious literature, Pater took the whole field of endeavor, religious pursuits as well, off into the realm of aestheticism, where a thing mattered not because it was true or false necessarily, but because it made its appeal to our sense of beauty. Religion and religious art are important, in Pater’s estimation, not for their intrinsic value but because they fulfill humans’ need for beauty in their lives, and beauty

54 “Ash-Wednesday” alone. Here Eliot sees in Pater a misguided enthusiasm for preserving the religious impulse akin to Arnold’s enthusiasm for literary beauty.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot had already addressed a similar problem in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” published in 1928, when an Eliot alter ego in that essay had debated the idea that the ritual of the Catholic Mass can be justified on the basis of its aesthetic effects alone. In “Arnold and Pater,” Eliot makes his personal opinion on that question abundantly clear: It cannot be. For Eliot, religion serves a single impulse, the religious impulse, which is itself inspired by the individual’s awareness that there is some purpose to existence that cannot be satisfied or explained by purely social means. If from one point of view Arnold’s theory of art and of religion are harmonious, it is to satisfy a social, not a spiritual agenda, the net result of which “is to affirm that the emotions of Christianity can and must be preserved without the belief.” As a consequence, Arnold’s campaign to defend both religion and literature in the same breath in the face of an increasing scientific positivism that would reduce all human endeavor to the useful had the effect, realized more fully in Pater, of “divorc[ing] Religion from thought,” thereby giving impetus instead to those who, in Eliot’s own time, would divorce it from the life of the culture and the lives of the people. This “degradation of philosophy and religion” was, Eliot contends, subsequently continued by Pater, who had less of Arnold’s religious rigor but an “equally virulent” devotion to culture. As a result, Arnold’s humanism, which at least grants a place for religion as a foundation of culture, gives way to Pater’s aestheticism, in which the benefit of religion is solely to inspire art, which is itself the higher goal and true benefit. “The theory of art for art’s sake,” of which Pater was an initial proponent, “is still valid,” Eliot admits, but only “in so far as it can be taken as an exhortation to the artist to stick to his job.” It is not valid when it can be taken, as Pater would have it, as the enshrinement of art at the expense of the substance of the religion that had inspired it.

At the close of his essay, Eliot imagines that, in response to the increasing scientism of their times, Arnold and Pater, among others and each in his own way, became a part of the faltering confusions that resulted from the Victorian effort to retrench religion by allying it with art to enhance the social and cultural “usefulness” of both. The result was an injustice to both religion and art, however. “Religion became morals, religion became art, religion became science or philosophy,” but religion was no longer just itself. Nothing, in Eliot’s view, has ever been itself, or remained the same, since then. Quoting Pater on the early 19th-century English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Eliot concludes his treatment of these two Victorian cultural critics on the sentiment that their “discontent, languor, and homelessness . . . ring all through our modern literature.” It is an interesting way to honor and castigate Arnold and Pater at the same time. Theirs is, as Eliot would have it, an object lesson in noble goals fulfilled by narrow and short-sighted means, thereby short-changing the very aspects of the culture that they had hoped to serve and preserve.

“Ash-Wednesday” (1930) There is perhaps no poem of T. S. Eliot’s that is as deceptively complex as “Ash-Wednesday.” Like many of Eliot’s other works from the period following the publication of The Waste Land in late 1922 and the renown that it brought him, the first three parts of the poem that posterity would come to know as “Ash-Wednesday” (in keeping with Eliot’s own practice, the hyphen is retained here) were published as separately titled poems in the years preceding the complete poem’s publication in a volume of its own in the spring of 1930. As in the case of “The Hollow Men,” there is no reason to conclude that Eliot was not conceiving of the three separately published poems to begin with as pieces in a larger whole, just as there is no reason to conclude that he was. By now, he had a sufficient reputation as a major poetic voice, not to mention his publishing outlets as editor of the Criterion and as poetry editor for

“Ash-Wednesday” Faber & Faber, to publish works in progress easily, without having to think of them or introduce them as such, rather than as single, coherent pieces, as was the case with The Waste Land. In any event, Part II of the completed poem, “Ash-Wednesday,” would first appear as “Salutation” in 1927, Part I as “Perch’ io non spero” in 1928, and Part III as “Al som de l’escalina” in 1929. Each of those three titles gives some insight into Eliot’s intentions by identifying, through a direct allusion, a particular literary source and figure for each.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS

A Map of Allusions In the first case, “Salutation,” Eliot appears to be alluding to DANTE ALIGHIERI’s La vita nuova, a poem in which he celebrates both the beginning of his love for Beatrice and, with his love for her, the introduction of the great theme of love into his poetry as well. It is a theme that cannot be taken too lightly in the hands of a poet like Dante, who, for all the unique reputation that he holds as a man of letters now, in his own time would have been seen to be in the tradition of the school of love poets known as the troubadours. For them, love for a lady was both akin to and a deliciously mind- and spirit-opening rival to one’s love for the divine. That said, something of Eliot’s plans for the larger work that may then have been taking shape can be seen in the fact that the other two sections of the poem that were also published as separate pieces, “Perch’io non spero” (Part I) and “Al som de l’escalina” (Part III), hark back to two other troubadour poets, Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel, both of whom are also closely connected with Dante. In his typical fashion, Eliot provides his readers with literary cultural markers as parts of a clear road map toward his intended meaning, just as many other outstanding features of the eventually published complete work, too, virtually plead with the reader to accept that finished poem as the true bill of goods that it pretends to be. Indeed, as testaments to its own directness in its attempt at unabashed clarity, the completed poem sequence, “Ash-Wednesday,” despite its difficulties, offers the attentive reader a plethora of signposts for the

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poet’s intentions, making the poem surely something of a first for the self-made modernist Eliot, who hitherto had seemed to regard obscurity of intention as an obligation. In addition to the links to the troubadours, these signposts include the hardly obscure Christian liturgical observance identified without fanfare or embellishment in the sequence title, “AshWednesday;” the use of lines from devotional prayers and rituals of the Catholic Mass; and the poetry’s haunting but no less obscure overtones of, if not outright allusions to, passages from Scripture and from a major religious poet, Dante. Several commentators have also identified in the poem’s stress on exercising severe self-abnegation to achieve spiritual salvation the influences of the 16th-century Spanish Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, whose program of fleshy austerity had already played a significant role in Eliot’s epigraph to “Sweeney Agonistes.” John’s particular emphasis, in his Dark Night of the Soul, on a complete emptying of self through a denial of personal will and a renunciation of worldly pleasures for the sake of receiving God into one’s soul may play a role in the excessive purgative processes that the poetry of “Ash-Wednesday” proposes, particularly in Part II, in which the speaker is reduced to bones. However, there is more of a disciplining of the senses than a denial of them in Eliot’s approach, making the eroticism of Dante’s approach to expressing the spiritual in poetry seem to be the more prevalent model. Yet, despite this untypical effort on Eliot’s part not to cloud his general intentions, the poetry of “Ash-Wednesday” is often more troublesome for readers than the far more difficult, convoluted, and obscure poetry of The Waste Land, say, because “Ash-Wednesday” seems to demand a reading based on belief, not poetry. Matters of Belief The poetry of “Ash-Wednesday,” for all the constraints of its religious overtones, is as open to interpretation as any other of Eliot’s poetry. Still, the suspicion persists that “Ash-Wednesday” is quite different from anything that had come from his pen before. That, too, should not prove to be the case, however.

56 “Ash-Wednesday” Many contemporary followers of Eliot’s poetry had regarded him as a forceful voice of dissidence in his critiquing of the cultural and social status quo of the postwar world. Hearing of his religious conversion to the established Church of England, in which he had been first baptized and then confirmed in June 1927, these readers had then come to regard him as a turncoat and a lost leader. Those passions were of their own time and have passed, of course. Still, there are many readers to this day who, finding something companionable in the iconoclastic and despairing cynic of the earliest Eliot, are prepared only to be let down when the poet takes what seems to be his sudden turn toward a verse that is centered on longstanding traditions that are religious in nature. The cause for that disappointment may be laid at the door of the discomforts caused not so much by the religious content and context per se as by encountering in the poem what appears to be the revelation of an intensely intimate and private spiritual experience. The more “religious” such poetry seems to be, the more commonly it provokes discomfort. The key to this observation, however, is the distinction between the spiritual and the religious. The poetry of The Waste Land, for example, is highly spiritually charged. By that poem’s closing, as the reader hears the injunctions from the Upanishads in “What the Thunder Said,” there can be no doubt that the thrust of the poetry has been moved wholly into spiritual realms—but not the realm of what is normally perceived of as religion or the religious. The same can be said for “The Hollow Men,” whose poetry is contrived to express what ultimately can be regarded as nothing more than a spiritual paralysis in that poem’s collective speakers—but a spiritual paralysis is not a religious crisis. The same exception cannot be made for “AshWednesday,” however, whose entire focus seems to require the reader to acquire a particular religious bias in order to decipher the poetic moment. The majority of readers generally resent such a requirement, even if they happen to be strongly religious or perhaps even share the very belief system that is ostensibly being expounded. Since much of the rest of Eliot’s poetry from his conversion on is nominally religious in nature, such is a critical problem

that needs especially to be addressed inasmuch as his poetry is concerned. Readers have long been used to hearing poets lament a lost love or bare the innermost parts of themselves in their longing for beauty or human brotherhood or liberty or countless other common enough themes, but let a poet speak about events or feelings that give even a hint of the religious, as opposed to the spiritual, that is to say, and the level of both intellectual tolerance and aesthetic patience among readers drops dramatically. The believer already familiar with the religious tenets and devotions being expressed misses the value of their poetic function and wonders instead what the fuss is all about; the nonbeliever, meanwhile, imagines himself or herself wrongly being excluded from the experience of the poetry by virtue of its being channeled through religious experiences for which that reader most likely has no personal reference points. Either way, it is as if the poet has violated some unspoken rule of what topics and approaches constitute proper modes for poetic discourse. Whether the reader is a profound believer who resents the presumptions of the religious poet or is someone who feels that religion, particularly of a highly developed doctrinal and devotional nature, ought to be kept out of the bounds of serious creative literature altogether, both of these problems can be solved if one thinks first of the poetry. Then, if thoughts turn to the religious context at all, it is done not with an eye toward some sort of doctrinal classifications but toward what permanent human impulses the religious context allows the poet to explore and express. For the religious impulse, nurtured or ignored, fostered or rejected, is surely a far more common, dare we say universal one than romantic love or dreams of glory and conquest have ever been. At the very least, it would make sense that a poet whose career had been devoted up to this point to commenting on major social and cultural issues, as Eliot’s had, would eventually find himself addressing the matter of belief—both its personal and its socially and culturally structured dimensions—in his poetry, and as poetry. (Eliot himself commented, rather sagely, that belief in poetry ought be read as leading one not to believe but

“Ash-Wednesday” instead to feel like what it is to be a person who believes—experiences that are universes apart.) Not that Eliot’s poetry is ever simple, but it is always poetry, not religion or psychology or philosophy or even autobiography, for that matter. Regarded as poetry, “Ash-Wednesday” not only expresses a considerable and welcome advance in Eliot’s poetic vision as it had been shaping itself from the time of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to “The Hollow Men,” but represents the coming together as well of his experimentation with simplification. He had begun to experiment with a more direct poetic style as far back as some of the poetry in part V of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said.” Then, as now, he eschewed the aesthetically obscure for the sake of the spiritually clairvoyant. This effort toward a measured simplicity and directness is in keeping with and may have inspired the turn toward a more clearly pronounced thematic intent as well. Often poets can express their most profound thoughts and feelings only after they have found the simplest and most direct ways to express themselves. In the fifth and final section of Little Gidding, the last part of the Four Quartets (1943)—the last major poetry he wrote—Eliot speaks of what he apparently regards to be the characteristics of a perfectly balanced poetic style. He describes it as one wherein “every word is at home” and there is “[a]n easy commerce of the old and the new,” with common words that are exact but not vulgar, formal language that is “precise but not pedantic,” to the end that the “complete consort danc[es] together.” Students of Eliot know that this is a description of the style that he had been utilizing all along in composing the poetry of the four long poems that had become, finally, the Four Quartets. However, it was with “Ash-Wednesday” that this sweet, new style of his had first come perfectly and completely into its own, because he had finally clarified for himself a focus to his art that had until then eluded him. That focus, on the surface, may seem to be a sharp turn toward religious themes, whereas in fact it is a turn toward a faith in a communal rather than a personal foundation to individual salvation. That salvation need not be eternal (although, again, Eliot’s private inter-

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est may at this time seem to have taken a decided turn in that direction) as long as it be, at the very least, salutary to the spirit. “Sweeney Agonistes” had been Eliot’s last word on the philosophic mind that could live even remotely successfully alone, at a psychological distance from the rest of humankind. That is why Sweeney had failed himself, and the play, too, was a failure in the sense that Eliot never completed it. He had been exploring this possibility at least from the time of “Prufrock,” always with an eye toward assessing its shortcomings while nonetheless recommending the cynicism of its benefits at least as a coping mechanism in the impersonal urban landscape that the modern world seemed to be bent on becoming. Is it any wonder, then, that the putative hero/speaker of The Waste Land can finally only confess to a private revelation and achieve a Hemingwayesque separate peace (although Eliot beat Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms to that jump by at least seven years), or that, for all the rest of humanity, both “Sweeney Agonistes” and “The Hollow Men” end with the characters all waiting for what otherwise is the only hope of such hollow men, death? In “The Hollow Men,” however, Eliot had played that vein out, a conclusion implicit both in the spiritual overtones that that poem’s poetry assumes, as if groping for a key that the hollow men themselves cannot even begin to imagine, and, of course, in the further attempt at a turning that “Ash-Wednesday” blatantly announces. The turning is into a poem, and a poetry, that is, rather than a lament for the failure of vision, an expression of acceptance and communion with what vision there is that is available not just to the poet but to any mere mortal. If the poetry of “Ash-Wednesday” is in fact founded on Eliot’s own recent process of conversion, it is in this manner—turning his own personal spiritual agon, or struggle, into a richly poetic but nonetheless general commentary on the literature and culture of any individual’s personal spiritual struggle—that Eliot succeeds in transforming biography into poetry, exactly as he argues, in the 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that poets do. In a later (1932) essay on the 17th-century English playwright John Ford, Eliot is heard to

58 “Ash-Wednesday” observe that “a dramatic poet cannot create characters of the greatest intensity of life unless his personages . . . are somehow dramatizing, in no obvious form, an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet.” Imagining that the speaker of “Ash-Wednesday” is no more the poet than Prufrock or the hollow men were and is instead a characterization invented by Eliot for the sake of giving the poetry purpose and direction, then it would seem that the operative words there in Eliot’s observation are “in no obvious form.” Eliot had always been the dramatic, or at least dramatizing, poet. The strange, almost ritualistic action of “Ash-Wednesday,” as much as its religiosity may seem to point obviously toward events in Eliot’s own life, far more likely only dramatizes, for the sake of universalizing, not the process of Eliot’s personal conversion experience but the results of its effects upon his poetic outlook. “Ash-Wednesday” should be seen as a reflection not of Eliot’s beliefs but of his vision of the world and of the individual’s place in it. That harmony of soul, or balance, is what all great art and artists seek to achieve and to exemplify. Eliot, who until now had been the great poet of chaos and of disjunction and the fragmented, is trying to effect a new goal for his poetry, balance. Approaching “Ash-Wednesday” in this way, the reader can sort out the biographical from the poetical and thereby come to see how much the poem is not any break from but a continuance of issues and themes that Eliot had been essaying in his poetry all along. The Religious Observance In the Christian religious calendar, Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the 40 days of fast and abstinence preceding Easter. On Ash Wednesday, Catholic Christians, for example, receive ashes in the sign of the cross on their forehead as a reminder of the repentance and penitence that will be required of them as they prepare to celebrate the spiritual fullness of Christ’s coming resurrection from the grave and his triumph over death. The reception of ashes is also a way, however, for them to signal their recognition, through their faith in Christ, that the world and all its worth, including the flesh, is but dross, ash, in comparison to the

glory of God and of the individual soul’s eternal place with him in paradise. It is in this spirit of self-abnegation and denial of the world, the flesh, and the devil, despite its temptations, that Eliot’s poem will proceed, but so, for that matter, did The Waste Land. In that earlier work, however, Eliot felt free to make temptation obvious by casting it in sexual garb; thus he can depict the seductiveness of behavior that is both self-serving and self-centered in the flawed sexual adventurism of Lil’s friend and Albert, or the typist and the rental clerk, or the three game Thamesdaughters, or Sweeney and Mrs. Porter’s daughter, or the Archduke Rudolph and Marie, or Tristan and Iseult, or Elizabeth and Leicester. Sex serves as an emblem of the unbridled desire that binds us to this world at the expense of any focus on our hope for the other. But for that same reason, using sex is taking a pretty cheap shot at making a rather profound point and nowhere near as effective as the theme of love itself, as the troubadours well knew. Temptations that call the individual soul to sins of the flesh are as relatively easy to overcome as they are poetically to depict, after all, compared with temptations that ask of the soul nothing more than that it pay the world its due through the individual’s nurturing a love of created things. Resisting those temptations, however, the soul can run the risk of denying the fact that creation is a spiritual gift of God as well, a place in which the soul can come to know God through his creation. These are all far more complicated patterns of discovery and resolution, it should be clear, than sexual desire can ever properly delineate, requiring a poetry that does not cheapen and yet cannot bewilder either. It is this precarious tightrope act, balancing the demands of the flesh, and of love, with the demands of the spirit, and of love, that Eliot hopes to exemplify in the poetry of “Ash-Wednesday.” He is aware of the paradoxes in the lonely, because isolated, search for spiritual balance and worldly contentment. These must have a single focus, for the man a woman, and this woman must be both the objective and the mere emblem of the objective, the focal point and the pale reflection of the

“Ash-Wednesday” focal point. The objective is love. As much as these are relationships harder to portray, they are zones of reference in which it is difficult to make the true objective and point clear, and that is that one seeks union not with the beloved but with love. For as Eliot himself would soon write in his first completed verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, the worst sin is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

SYNOPSIS

Part I The famous opening four lines of part I of “AshWednesday,” in keeping with the poem’s theme of representing in poetic terms the human yearning for union with a love that is divine, combines two celebrated love poems by two celebrated love poets, as well as, by association, a third. To the uninitiated reader, the lines may express perfectly the sudden realization of the speaker that he has come to the end of a lifeline and must, if he wishes to go on, change his ways or at least his values. It can be referred to as a “veiled couplet” because the first four lines, two of which are truncated, can easily be seen to be reducible in fact to two: “Because I do not hope to turn again . . . / Desiring this man’s gifts and that man’s scope.” The speaker seems to be expressing a desire to reform his life by renouncing his former ways, but only because he has no other choice—“I do not hope.” While that desire is appropriate to the religious observance that the title has announced as the poem’s topic, each half of the equated impulse as stated owes its source to a poem of attachment, not detachment. The first half is a cleverly altered translation by Eliot of the first line and traditional title of a ballatetta, or short ballad, by the Italian troubadour, and Dante’s best friend, Guido Cavalcanti. In the original Italian, the line reads, “Perch’io non spero di tornar giammai,” and would translate into English as “Because I do not hope ever to return.” There is, of course, a considerable difference between turning, as in the sense of altering direction, and returning, which has to do with coming back to a place one has left. Eliot surely knew his Italian well enough to know that the Italian girare, not tornare, is the English equivalent of “to turn.” He must

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have wanted the line to serve his purposes of allowing the speaker thus to express an apparent lack of confidence in having the ability to change himself, without his, Eliot’s, sacrificing the richer meaning of the line in the context of the original Italian when its source is brought to bear. Cavalcanti wrote the ballatetta in question when he was in exile from his native Florence, a state of affairs brought about by the actions of his good friend and fellow poet Dante Alighieri. Without going into the details of Florence’s fractured civic life and factional strife during this period, Dante’s party, the Guelfs, of whom Cavalcanti was a member, was in power in the year 1300. So fractious were the festering rivalries, however, that the party soon itself split into two rival factions of its own, the Blacks and the Whites, to the latter of which both Dante and Guido belonged. To keep the peace, Dante was ultimately forced to exile Cavalcanti. The ballatetta is a love poem Cavalcanti wrote to lament that he can never return to the Tuscany where his beloved lives. It is one of literary history’s bitter ironies that Guido’s despair proved to be unfounded. He was in fact allowed to return to Florence because he had contracted in his exile a fatal case of malaria, from which he succumbed in August of that same year. There is a subtext to Dante’s querulous relationship with Guido that is carried on by implication into the second of the literary allusions with which Eliot opens “Ash-Wednesday.” That one is virtually a direct quote from WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s Sonnet 29: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” This may seem to be a rather circuitous route for Eliot in a poem that is supposed to convey a directness of treatment, to go from an early 14th-century Italian poet to a late 16th-century English poet back to a second early 14th-century Italian poet to make an elliptical point. But Eliot never misses the much more salient point that meaning in poetry is most often layered, even when it is not intended that way. The more the poet manages the layering himself, the more those layers of meaning matter. So, then, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, ostensibly addressed to a beloved unknown to history but alleged to be a young man, is, like Guido’s brave lament, another expression of hopelessness on

60 “Ash-Wednesday” the part of a speaker who also “all alone beweep[s his] outcast state,” but who is as well so displeased with himself and what he has become that he finds himself recklessly envying all others around him: “Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, / Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d, / Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, . . .” Surely, juxtaposing Guido and Shakespeare’s sentiments the way that Eliot does allows him very quickly to set a tone for “Ash-Wednesday” as a poem of self-abnegation if not self-degradation. However, there is a subtext involving Dante upon which Eliot may also be playing. Dante may well have suffered a grievous and possibly professional guilt for having been instrumental in bringing about the death of Cavalcanti. The notion of “desiring this man’s art” suggests an artist who recognizes a superior talent in the other. When the one and the other are creative artists, such as fellow poets, a recognition of that kind can often lead to tragedy. In its broadest conceptualization, Dante’s Divine Comedy is his “Ash-Wednesday,” a poem not only designed to take place at the very end of the Lenten season during Easter weekend but one in which the poet confesses to his sinfulness and his desire for repentance and salvation. These echoes back to both Dante and Shakespeare resonate, enabling Eliot to open “Ash-Wednesday” on a theme suitable to the liturgical solemnity of the occasion: guilt. Although Dante wrote his masterpiece nearly 20 years after his own exile from Florence in 1302, he sets the events of the poem in April 1300 so that its action will coincide with the Easter of his own 35th year. So, then, Guido, who was exiled in June or July and was dead by August 1300, would have still been alive and living in Florence at the time the action of the poem is supposedly unfolding. As a result, Dante’s fellow and doomed poet Guido Cavalcanti does not appear in Dante’s Divine Comedy. He is noticeably referred to, nevertheless, in a particularly telling episode in the Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, when, in canto X, Dante encounters Guido’s father, Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, in Circle Six. There the heretics, those who denied the immortality of the soul, are being punished.

In the worldliness that he still suffers from even in hell, Cavalcante wonders why his son Guido is not accompanying Dante, since as a parent he imagines that his son ought to be as worthy of such a distinguished honor as Dante is. When Dante tells him that Guido is not along because he, like his father, was not a believer in an Eternal Creator, Dante’s use of the past tense makes Cavalcante think that Guido must be dead. Considering that in April 1300 Guido was but months away from exile and death as a result of Dante’s actions, one must wonder what ghosts Dante was exorcising those 20 or more years later as he penned this scene, one in which it is suggested that Guido is as great a poet as Dante and in which, too, Guido’s death a short time later is rather dramatically adumbrated. Perhaps such a reading would be a bit too melodramatic for some tastes, but this is poetry, after all, and there are such things as the little murders, of self and of others, of dreams and of plans and of hopes, that every human being commits with regularity along life’s way, or so must it surely seem to the Dantes and Shakespeares and Eliots of the world. The common element binding all the historical and literary details in the opening lines of “Ash-Wednesday” is the restless spirit of factitiousness and competition, ambition and envy, and the poet seems to ask the eternal question of a mortal humanity: Where is there an end to it, and when, the ceaseless wailing of the disconsolate chimera? Thus, as melodramatic as it may seem, knowing Eliot’s propensity for the subtlest of insinuation, these opening lines of “Ash-Wednesday” can be seen as the speaker’s effort no longer to hide from or run from or excuse away those buried corpses of past sins and secret betrayals that also haunt the speaker of The Waste Land in part I, “The Burial of the Dead.” That “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” from “What the Thunder Said” may also come to mind here. However they be interpreted, each individual’s little, self-remembered acts of spitefulness and envy, betrayal and deceit that can never be recalled but are never forgotten haunt those two, bare lines: “Because I do not hope to turn again. . . / Desiring this man’s gifts and that man’s scope.” No wonder Eliot’s speaker, whatever the implications of the intricate web that the opening allu-

“Ash-Wednesday” sions have spun, does not hope to turn again. He has no desire to turn back to whatever he had to this time been, and he says quite clearly and boldly, “I no longer strive to strive toward such things.” So, then, on this Ash Wednesday, since he cannot turn back, he begins to make at last a forward motion into purgation and renewal, for there is no end to it, not as long as one is alive. “Why should the agéd eagle stretch his wings,” except that he must— especially if he has any hopes to move past the past and on to whatever vague promise of redemption the future may hold. And so this traveler, this pilgrim, fares forward. Nor are past triumphs spared. They, too, come under a withering scrutiny, for once the world and all its empty promises is seen for the sham that it is, it can never be seen again as anything real, although that world and life do go on. “The infirm glory of the positive hour” is no less a pain to be reckoned with than the pains of shame or guilt. The remainder of part I continues in this same vein of an emptying, a conscious process voiding the spirit of worldliness and vanity that is required if the individual is to be made open and ready for the acceptance of grace. This is a purgative process, after all, so for all the apparent resignation and despair of the tone, the speaker vacates his ties to the world with a methodical precision mirroring his determination to yield everything ultimately for the paradoxical sake of everything—the world for eternity. The speaker suffers no delusions, however: He can prepare himself, but he can make nothing happen. He knows that he shall not know “the one veritable transitory power,” which is that moment of grace—that he shall not drink, that place is only ever place, that he must renounce in order to accept. And so, surrendering the egotistical will, the self-centered vision, he nevertheless can rejoice just in “having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice,” which is what life still remains to him. Even that self-emptying can run too close a track to self-obsession, and as part I draws to a close, its energies at self-expression virtually winding down to a murmur (but not the hollow men’s whimper at least), he comes to see that he must renounce even the spirit of renunciation, for that will still

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require engaging the will, which is not openness to God’s will but attention to his own. The speaker prays to “forget / These matters . . . I too much discuss,” that the judgment may “not be too heavy,” that he may learn “to care and not to care,” to “sit still.” That is the most difficult of spiritual tasks: to relinquish even the passion for salvation, since it is impatience, and impatience is no less an unwillingness to yield and let be. And so, appropriately enough, part I of “Ash-Wednesday” ends not with poetry but with prayer. If Eliot’s last previous major poem, “The Hollow Men,” ended with a refrain taken from the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer to God admitting that his, not the world’s, is the kingdom and the power and the glory, then it is a significant indication of how humbled the speaker of “Ash-Wednesday” is in comparison that his prayer is from the Hail Mary, the prayer addressed to the Virgin Mary as the human mediator and advocate between God and his children. “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death / Pray for us now and at the hour of our death,” he repeats, throwing himself as he does so, like any and every other sinner, on the mercy of the court of heaven itself. Part II In keeping with this movement toward the feminine and maternal in the speaker’s seeking for succor, solace, and surrender—or, in a single thought, peace—the next part of the poem openly addresses her: “Lady.” The supposition, based on Eliot’s original title for part II, “Salutation,” when it was first published as a separate poem in 1927, is that Eliot is here echoing that passage from Dante’s La vita nuova (The New Life) in which he recounts the moment that Beatrice first greeted him. Such a supposition, however, requires that the layering of this transitional device be given its full due. Dante is thought to have begun to compose La vita nuova in 1293, although there is no precise dating of how long he was engaged in writing it. La vita nuova is a series of love lyrics framed by a continuing chronological narrative of Dante’s various encounters with Beatrice and their effect on his growth as a person who is consumed by a single passion, love. In keeping with the poetry of the troubadours that celebrated the traditions of courtly love that had

62 “Ash-Wednesday” originated in Provence, a region of France adjacent to Italy’s northwestern borders, in the late 12th century, such poetry requires that the beloved be worshiped from afar. Indeed, the less she knows of the lover’s ardor, the greater the salutary effects of the love on the lover’s spirit, although the greater too must be the lover’s pain caused by his secret beloved’s unintended whims and slights. To say that it is an ennobling and pure love is putting it mildly. It is surely earthly love ennobled and purified, as much as is imaginable, into a simulacrum of desire for union with the unattainable, which is the divine. While there is no doubt that there really was a Beatrice Portinari whom Dante knew as a young man and in whom he may have had a romantic interest, there may be some doubt that she was in fact a person whom the poet Dante loved in this extremely rarefied way. Dante was a poet, after all, and the testimony in La vita nuova of his love for Beatrice may be controlled more by the conventions of the literary tradition in which Dante was writing than by biographical fact. (Like a good investigative reporter, a poet will stop at nothing to get a great poem for his readers.) Nevertheless, that such a love had a profound effect on the poet is testified to by both La vita nuova and, more particularly, La commedia divina, wherein it is Beatrice in the spirit, she having since passed away, who guides Dante, by virtue of his lifelong devotion to love and by virtue of God’s will and grace, to the point where he might witness paradise. Surely, the psychology of this kind of love literature is all that matters finally, for it is the spiritual essence of the record that remains in the poetry, rather than the veracity of its details, that itself is capable of inspiring others. Furthermore, it seems to be the psychology of a self-denying love that attracts Eliot to this particular aspect of Dante’s life and work at this particular juncture in “Ash-Wednesday.” Dante’s foremost contribution to the literature of the spirit or inner person was not so much that he extended the language of romantic love; a number of equally notable Provençal poets had already done that before him, most important among them Arnaut Daniel. What Dante adds to that literature,

especially in La vita nuova, is his poignantly beautiful commentary on the power of love to transform the individual not just in terms of his devotion to the female object of his love, but especially in terms of his interaction with the entire world around him. So much, indeed, did Dante invent the discourse of love’s transformative powers that his language in this regard may seem commonplace nowadays. Eliot is sensitive enough to the lingering freshness of the original implications of Dante’s imagery and language as a means to exemplify the growth of the individual spirit that he reinvigorates that initial spiritual impulse of Dante’s in his own poetry in part II of “Ash-Wednesday.” In La vita nuova, the speaker, whom the reader has every reason to believe is in fact Dante, tells of how he first saw and fell in love with Beatrice when both he and she were but nine years old. The true turning point comes, however, some nine years later (Dante being always keen to note the numerological coincidences of the timing), when she actually greets him. This is the celebrated “salutation” to which Eliot apparently is making reference. Dante reports how, it being the first time that her words were addressed directly to him, he became drunk with their sweetness and, having retired to his own room to think about her, fell asleep. Sleeping, he had a vision in which a figure, who later turns out to be his master, Love, brings the sleeping Beatrice in his arms to Dante. She is naked, although her body is covered lightly with a crimson cloth. In one of his hands, Love holds a burning object, which he says is Dante’s heart, and then feeds it to the lady. For all the eroticism of the imagery, the meaning is clear and wholly pure: Love permits the self to be consumed in selflessness by virtue of a complete devotion to another. More, it is by that very awakening of the person to love through a selfless devotion to another that the soul is prepared for its own awakening to a selfless love for God. In the 11th chapter, Dante gives the most adroit expression to the transformation that her greeting exercised on his own animal nature, rendering him, in a word, human. He writes: I say that when she appeared from any side, out of hope for that wondrous greeting no one

“Ash-Wednesday” remained my enemy, in fact a flame of charity seized me, which made me pardon anyone who may have offended me, and whoever then may have asked me about anything, my response would have been only, “Love,” my features draped in humility.

In summary, Dante concludes, “[C]hi avesse voluto conoscere Amore, fare lo potea mirando lo tremare de li occhi miei [Who would know Love, could behold it tremble in my eyes].” Despite the liberties that Eliot, for the sake of originality, takes with Dante’s rendering of the moment when love for others seizes the human soul and re-creates out of its animal nature the divine image that it is capable of assuming, Dante’s La vita nuova is clearly there when Eliot’s speaker calls upon his own “Lady” to observe as part II of “Ash-Wednesday” opens. Just as Love fed Dante’s heart to Beatrice, three white leopards devour every consumable part of Eliot’s speaker, down to his bones. This is Eliot’s way of representing and expressing the same reductive and yet restorative effect of divine love, which reduces the person to the least possible remnant of his own being, thereby enabling him to find new life. Here the speaker echoes the question the Lord asks in 1 Kings 19 of Ezekiel, who also had sat down under a juniper tree in his flight from Jezebel and requested that he might die: “Shall these bones live?” And like Ezekiel, the speaker will find that they can live and more, a far cry from The Waste Land’s “rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones” but got nothing in return for the experience. This process of abandoning the self to the corrosive powers that inhabit the corruptible flesh leaves the speaker “[t]hus devoted, concentrated in purpose,” so that now, like his lady who “honours the Virgin in meditation,” the bones might do more than live; they might sing. Their song is not Ezekiel’s, however, for Eliot’s speaker is the child of a new dispensation. Instead of prophesy, there is the Christian fulfillment of “the Rose / . . . the Garden / Where all loves end.” In “Sweeney Agonistes,” Sweeney could neither imagine nor promise any earthly paradise where he and Doris could be in love and at peace “under

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the bamboo tree.” The hollow men, too, could see the “multifoliate rose” only as a distant star from the pit of their hollow valley, “the broken jaw of their lost kingdoms,” harking back to an image of bones again. How refreshingly life-giving it is, then, to encounter this different poetic landscape in “Ash-Wednesday,” where even though he has been reduced to nothing but, literally, a bare-bones reality, the speaker finds that the rose and the garden are near enough in spirit to be one’s song. Thus, rather than in “The Hollow Men”’s place of broken stone and bone, in “Ash-Wednesday” these bones—the self reduced by love to nearly nothing—may rest restored to life “[u]nder a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of the sand,” and that is better than nothing. As Part II ends, the idea is further expressed that, if nothing else, “[w]e have our inheritance,” a vast part of which, surely, is the continuing poetry of that love whose history has been recorded by Ezekiel, by Dante, by St. John of the Cross, and now by Eliot. While it may be a love that is far greater than any love mere flesh may know, it is one that can be experienced by creatures of mere flesh and blood and bone. Part III If it is Dante who continues as the speaker’s guide through his purgatorial ritual of “Ash-Wednesday,” exactly as Virgil had guided Dante, then Eliot is free to use the concept of Dante’s Purgatorio as the scaffolding, or rather staircase, on which to construct the rising movement that must now succeed the annihilation and reconstitution of self that has just taken place in Part II. The idea is that death of self is alone not itself the sufficient action. One is then left either like Sweeney, the embittered husk of his former self, or like the hollow men, about whose hope for fulfillment there is no question or doubt, since there will be none. The speaker’s self and its attachments and animosities, jealousies and envy, all having been extinguished by the flame of love, there must now be, if not resurrection or rebirth, at least the creation of a spiritual life for this new self to take up. This process of renewal or regeneration will be, in part III, represented appropriately enough by the

64 “Ash-Wednesday” speaker’s mounting steps “al som de l’escalina”—to the top of the stairs. When it was first published separately in 1929, part III was entitled just that: “Al som de l’escalina.” The phrase comes from remarks made to Dante in canto 26 of the Purgatorio by the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, the greatest of the French troubadours, who were Dante’s precursors in the poetry of courtly love. Indeed, that moment from Dante had already provided Eliot with a fitting note among the various “fragments . . . shored against my ruins” at the conclusion of The Waste Land, so it is especially intriguing that Eliot should feel obliged to revisit it here, at another critical juncture in a poem that seems to be putting the vision of The Waste Land, with its painful and painstaking search for a private mode of salvation, entirely behind him now. In the passage in question from the Purgatorio, Dante, still guided by Virgil, has continued to ascend the purgatorial mountain at whose base he had found himself on leaving the Inferno, or hell. Dante encounters a fellow Italian poet, Guido Guinizzelli, whom he finds suffering in the purgative or refining, as opposed to infernal or damning, fires, where he is being cleansed of the sin of a bestial carnality. When Guinizzelli inquires why Dante is apparently an admirer of his, Dante tells him that he admires him for his “sweet verses” that will be treasured “as long as modern usage endures.” Guinizzelli declines the compliment, however, and points out to Dante another poet suffering in the same fires for sins of carnality. He tells Dante that this poet, Arnaut Daniel, was “was a better craftsman [il miglior fabbro] in the mother tongue.” Since Arnaut Daniel was also a poet whom Eliot’s good friend and erstwhile mentor Ezra Pound, in the earliest phases of his own career as both a language scholar and poet, had studied and translated, Eliot had put himself in the position of Guinizzelli in his dedication to The Waste Land by complimenting Pound as il miglior fabbro, and Eliot then returned to the same section of the Purgatorio one last time in line 428 of The Waste Land. The line reads: “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina [Then he hid himself in the fire that cleanses them],” and with this line Dante ends canto 26. Eliot uses it, among others, in The Waste Land to signal the suc-

cessful closing to the arduous journey that crossing the waste land from start to finish had been for the speaker. Now, some eight years later in “AshWednesday,” Eliot alludes directly to the closing of canto 26, this time, however, to cite the words that Dante had first had Arnaut speak to him before that canto’s end (some of which Eliot had cited in his footnote to line 428 of The Waste Land). Upon Guinizzelli’s calling Dante’s attention to him, the figure in the purgatorial flames freely identifies himself as Arnaut. He is one “who sings and goes weeping,” he tells Dante, for he is spending this part of his time in eternity regarding past follies but looking forward with joy to that day when, purged of these remnants of his worldly sinfulness, he shall be joined at last with God. Arnaut sends Dante on his way with a plea common enough among Catholic Christians, that they should pray for the souls in Purgatory, telling him in his own native Provençal: “Ara vos prec, per aquella valor que vos guida al som d’escalina, sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.” [Now I pray you, by that valor which guides you to the topmost step, think at times of my own dolor.]

Just as Dante’s rhyme contrasts his own courage to change himself for the better while he still lives with Arnaut’s grief and sorrow for a life ill spent, so too does Arnaut’s arrested movement in the fire of his purgation—“Then he hid himself in the fire that cleanses them”—contrast with Dante’s forward movement as he now continues onward up the stairs cut into the purgatorial mountain toward the summit, where both the vista of paradise and his beloved Beatrice await him. As the speaker of “Ash-Wednesday” now begins, in part III, his own purgatorial ascent out of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, the reader is asked to be mindful of the contrast between Arnaut and Dante’s condition. (In “Little Gidding,” Eliot describes the choice between a worldly and a heavenly desire as one of being “saved from fire by fire.”) Since it is a spiral staircase that the speaker seems to be ascending, each turn brings a different vista on a journey that, fraught with danger though it may be, is nev-

“Ash-Wednesday” ertheless upward. Although the speaker’s direction is upward, at the first turning of the second stair, the speaker, rather like Arnaut, who remains as mindful of his past follies as he is of the eternal reward that awaits him once he has been cleansed of the last traces of his worldly attachments, finds his thoughts turning downward toward past mistakes and frustrations. This hesitancy is characterized as the “devil of the stairs” with his “deceitful face of hope and of despair.” The soul, like the bones, would awake and sing, but memory is a distraction that can derail the entire undertaking. Still faring forward, the speaker comes to the second turn, where the prospect is now, if possible, worse than the prospect of vacillation that had just assaulted him. Here there are no faces, only darkness, and beneath him suddenly yawns the pit of a pure, black despair (shades of St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul). Portrayed as an old man’s “drivelling” mouth or the “toothed gullet of an agèd shark,” it is characterized in images of a consuming force that would feed on and devour the speaker’s flagging hope much more cleanly than the three leopards of part II had reduced his fleshy self to bone. This despair, instead, is capable of swallowing him whole and leaving not a trace. There is, however, a reward in persevering, for as the speaker arrives at the first turning of the third stair, clearly a step up, the vista suddenly opens on blossoms and a pasture scene vested with a wealth of inviting colors—blue and green, lilac and brown—and there is the music of a flute. Even the architectural detail through which this vista is witnessed—a “slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit”—calls up the image of a pregnant woman about to give birth, in keeping with the processes of a spiritual rebirth which the speaker is undergoing. In the midst of this more than hopeful scene is the lady, both emblem of the attraction through the flesh to perfect otherness that draws the soul out of an obsession with self and toward God and the type of Mary, the perfect mother and second Eve in and through whom humanity experienced a second birth. Her back is turned to him, and she is not yet in Mary’s colors (that will come in part IV), but in the light that she brings, as if into a painting from the Renaissance whose own brilliance poetic

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visions like Dante’s had ushered in, the previous darkness and threats of defeat are dispelled. Filled with a “strength beyond hope and despair,” the speaker, thus inspired and refreshed, climbs the third step, intoning the words, “Lord, I am not worthy.” In the Catholic Mass, these words are the opening of the communion rite on which the Liturgy of the Eucharist draws to a close. As the priest raises the sacramental host, which in the Anglican rite would represent the body and blood of the Christ, the faithful, who are about to take communion, kneel to say some variation of the following prayer: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you. Speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.” This prayer is taken virtually verbatim from the words of the Roman centurion whose story is recounted in both Matthew 8:5–13 and Luke 7:2–10. Recognizing Christ’s divinity and miraculous powers to heal the sick and dying, the centurion comes to beg Jesus to heal one of his servants but does not want to presume upon Jesus’ time or scruples (as a Jew, it would have been unclean for Jesus to enter a Roman’s home). So, instead, the centurion tells Jesus: “Lord, I am unworthy that you should come under my roof. Speak but the word and my servant shall be healed.” Jesus found this man’s faith in him to be so remarkable that, in Luke’s account, he called it to the attention of the multitude gathered around him. It has become commonly accepted that faith alone is what is required to achieve salvation, for it is out of faith that all gifts flow. Part III ends with the speaker, who till now has been struggling as if in private for the conversion of his life away from sin and guilt and a turning toward God, making the same declaration of faith in the power of God to heal his soul: “but speak the word only.” Part IV “Ash-Wednesday,” however, is not prayer; it is poetry, though it may be poetry about prayer. Those are vast distinctions, nevertheless, and in parts IV and V, the two parts of the poem that were not published until the poem was released as a completed piece, the poetry brings together the personal and literary history with the history of the soul, the three divergent but complementary

66 “Ash-Wednesday” pillars of experience on which the entire poem has been constructed. By doing so, Eliot justifies not his vision—few poets have ever felt the need to defend what they see or how they see it—but his technique for accomplishing such an intensely religious vision in what remains nevertheless a poem. Throughout the poem, Eliot has been employing a technique that seems to run the risk of erasing the boundary between poetry and belief, whereas his is really a poem about the poetry of belief. Those, too, are vast distinctions. Part IV is virtually a hymn of praise to the lady, with whom by now the Virgin Mary has merged completely. There are her colors now, white and blue, just as the hawthorne of part III had signaled the coming of May, her month. The significance of this emphasis in the poem on the cult of the Blessed Mother in both Roman Catholicism and the High Church Anglicanism to which Eliot was drawn cannot be overemphasized. It is precisely Dante’s devotion to his lady as the embodiment of otherness and therefore of pure love that links her, in the person of Beatrice, to the Virgin in his Commedia. It is the Virgin Mary, after all, who, with a mother’s love for a desperate child, intercedes on behalf of the lost Dante as the Commedia opens, thus sending Beatrice to Dante’s aid, although Beatrice herself first must appeal to Virgil, as embodied reason, to guide Dante during the earliest parts of his journey toward spiritual renewal and rebirth. If thus far in Eliot’s own considerably abbreviated version of the same conversion process, Dante has been his Virgil, then Eliot’s Lady has to be not Beatrice but the stylized lady of the courtly love tradition on whom Dante’s adoration of Beatrice is itself based. By the same token, Dante finds Beatrice waiting to guide him on the remainder of his journey when he reaches the topmost stair at the end of the Purgatorio, and it is thus by virtue of her guidance, not reason’s, that he will be able finally to witness, as much as any mortal is capable, paradise itself, where the blessed have gathered about the throne of God centered within the multifoliate rose. It stands to reason that now that Eliot’s speaker has completed his own purga-

torial ascent, he should find awaiting him there, as part IV opens, the lady’s ultimate manifestation in the Virgin herself. To reiterate, Eliot’s speaker has no Beatrice of his own, only the abstract lady (although Eliot did dedicate the poem to Vivien, his first wife, from whom he was by then virtually estranged). The Virgin will not speak, although she does bend her head and make a sign to him, admitting his presence and, so, acknowledging his request. It is a request that is rather bluntly stated: “Redeem the time.” If Eliot’s speaker has already declared himself unworthy, it is not of salvation (that would be a presumptuous usurpation of God’s judgment) but, as a modern man, of the sort of vision Dante had been capable of having in an earlier age and time. Eliot explains this more fully in his essay “Dante,” published in 1929 during the period when he was completing his work on “Ash-Wednesday.” In this essay, Eliot comments on how Dante’s La vita nuova mixes what Eliot calls biography and allegory. He cautions, however, that it is a “mixture according to a recipe not available to the modern mind,” which he then defines as the minds of readers capable only of reading “confessions.” That is because ours is an age that thinks in terms of “facts as they are” and of “personalities,” he writes. He continues: “It is difficult to conceive of an age . . . when human beings cared somewhat about the salvation of the ‘soul,’ but not about each other as ‘personalities.’ ” Dante, Eliot contends, was the product of just such an age, and this accounts for a marked difference in how he combined personal experience, such as the encounters with Beatrice as he relates them in La vita nuova, with the very stuff of his poetry. For Eliot, a poet like Dante “had experiences which seemed to him of some importance . . . [not] because they had happened to him and because he, Dante Alighieri, was an important person . . . ; but important in themselves; and therefore they seemed to him to have some philosophical and impersonal value.” The astute reader may quickly observe that this premise could be applied to a poet like Eliot himself as well, at least if the position on impersonality in poetry that he had staked out some 10 years before in the essay “Tradition

“Ash-Wednesday” and the Individual Talent” was more than one to which he was simply paying critical lip service. Still speaking of Dante, Eliot concludes that for such a poet, the stuff of both actual or personal experience and of intellectual and imaginative experience, which he identifies as thought and dream, become modified into a third kind, which is neither: “If you have that sense of intellectual and spiritual realities that Dante had,” its “form of expression,” as Eliot puts it, “cannot be classed either as ‘truth’ or ‘fiction.’ ” It is with such an openness to the range of possible experiences that “Ash-Wednesday” has thus far organized into its poetry that the reader can appreciate the speaker of the Eliot poem when he speaks of “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme”—that is, a poetry of experience that is both intellectual and spiritual in the range of realities with which it deals. The silent sister cannot speak because people of Eliot’s time cannot “hear” her. They have, he explains elsewhere in his “Dante” essay, the capacity only to dream what he calls the low dream. He contrasts that with what he calls the “ ‘pageantry’ ” of the high dream of which poets and readers to at least the time of Dante were capable. Surely it is some vestige of that older kind of poetic imagination to which Eliot is either alluding or attempting to revive when, in part IV, the speaker continues by speaking of the “unread vision in the higher dream / While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.” What the speaker both misses and muses on is the “ancient” capacity of poetry, as the 17th-century English poet and cavalier Sir Philip Sidney once put it, to take our brass world and give us back a golden one in return. Till now, the speaker has been reaching upward toward the highest expression of the high dream, the human aspiration toward an understanding of the nature of the divine, of eternity. Child of the modern world that he is, however, he knows that he can hope only to be able to approximate the vision that once had seemed to flow as freely and easily as music from the poets’ lips. So, then, he proposes, “redeem the dream / The token of the word unheard, unspoken.” The words with which part IV end come from the prayer to Mary in her manifestation as the

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Queen of Heaven, “Salve, Regina” or “Hail, Holy Queen.” “And after this our exile,” in the prayer, alludes to humanity’s exile from the rewards of paradise following the Fall in the Garden of Eden. It is a fall from which, in Christian terms, Christ’s death on the cross redeems humankind, and that Good Friday event begins the close of the Lenten season that the observance of Ash Wednesday opens, all of it culminating in the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. No doubt, Eliot chooses those words from that prayer to end this part of “Ash-Wednesday” for that reason alone, but the words also connote what Eliot sees as the modern world’s exile from the ancient rhyme and high dream that a poet of Dante’s time could both know and convey so well. The prayer continues, “show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” though the poem does not. The yew, a tree traditionally grown in graveyards, has branches that both overhang and are nourished by all the past generations buried there. Like the voices of older poetry and a more vital belief in belief, such an ancient tree can offer a thousand whispers as the wind rustles its leaves, but to be able to hear those whispers is not in and of itself sufficient. One must also be able to decipher them, and be able to do that in his or her own terms, the terms of timeless vision. Part V How otherwise can the fifth part of “Ash-Wednesday” begin than with its great and ominous conditional clause: “If the lost word is lost . . .”? What may sound like paradox or circular reasoning or even nonsense makes perfect sense in the double meaning of “this our exile” that the closing of part IV has just established. Here, all are exiled from being in the perpetual presence of the Word, none more than another. In a poem that has had for its focus virtually from the outset two poets for whom exile became both a reality and a poetic theme, Guido Cavalcanti and Dante himself, the theme of humanity’s heavenly exile resonates as both a poetic theme and a spiritual reality. Dante and Cavalcanti, however, were, in Eliot’s view, not as much exiled in that other sense. Theirs was an age nearer to heaven because it was more in tune with the imaginative necessity of such an idea.

68 “Ash-Wednesday” They were far closer in their capacity for vision, if not in time as well, to a belief system and culture that supported and encouraged a poetry of faith in the supernal, whereby the use of metaphor to reach beyond the mere mundane without abandoning its accoutrements was recognized as a proper domain for poetry, perhaps even its only proper domain. From the time of Plato onward, poetry had been recognized as the most unique human endeavor for giving utterance to the otherwise unutterable, and voice to the soul’s great silence. So, then, echoing Lancelot Andrewes, the 17th-century English clergyman and prose stylist, the speaker acknowledges that the Word is always within the world and, though unspoken and unheard, remains a focus, a presence, a “centre” that the “unstilled world still whirled / About.” When the speaker asks, however, where the word will be found, he knows one thing emphatically and with a certainty that is far more desperate than reassuring, that it will be “[n]ot [be] here”—not be found, in other words, in his own time and place, where there is “[n]o time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.” The speaker’s, in simple terms, is not a time or age for poetry or the high dream. Rather this is the world of The Waste Land again, the landscape where the best are “hollow men” who have some knowledge of what they have lost but no will to find where it might yet be, content to moan in their collective misery, too spiritually inept to see, literally, their way out of their hollow valley except as if from a great distance. In this cultural context, the “veiled sister” becomes a trope for all that is mysterious and thus draws humanity out of the mere mundane with the tedium of its attractions, distractions, and demands. She is most certainly Mary, the most human of portals to the mystery of the Incarnation, but she is also the Lady, the ideal of love and otherness that frees the spirit from its prison of self, and she is most certainly the Lady Poetry, long regarded as the highest and most rigorous of the arts. The Lady is like Prufrock’s mermaids, who will not sing to him. The modern world recognizes but does not know her, not in the same imaginative ways that that old world did, so, she will not pray

for those moderns who stand tepidly always only “at the gate” of understanding, the gate into the imagination’s ancient and still green garden, aware of the traditions, but “[w]ho will not go away and cannot pray.” The modern world is one in which “there is not enough silence,” the speaker had earlier reflected, one too, for all the pride it takes in its having “lit up the night,” that “walks in [a spiritual] darkness / Both in the day time and in the night time.” Its failure, however, has to be a failure as much if not more of its poets as of itself. It must be they who, having somehow lost the capacity not only to dream the high dream but to express it effectively and suitably in verse, have been instrumental in leaving their brothers and sisters in darkness despite, or because of, all of our technological advances. Thus, echoing both Christ’s rebuke and the phrase with which Dante reputedly began a public letter to his fellow Florentines following his exile, the speaker seems to take the brunt of the failure on himself, but leaves open the possibility that the failure of a poetry that is capable of finding the means of expressing belief must ultimately be a failure of the culture itself: “O my people, what have I done unto you.” It is a double-edged question: What have I done to you? What have I done to deserve your reproach? The desert may be in the garden, but there must also be a garden in the desert. “Ash-Wednesday” is still Eliot’s poetry of drouth, as the critic Edmund Wilson titled a review of The Waste Land. It is, as ashes suggest, a poetry of waste, but the question must be: What has been wasted, and who has wasted it? For all the bitterness of the closing image of a mouth “spitting a withered apple-seed,” there is a hint of the garden still remaining, the fruit of the trees remaining on their branches yet. Part VI Eliot seems always to have had a talent for doing nothing easily, at least as far as the comfort levels of his readers might be concerned, but he always would argue that one does things as well as one is able and as much as one’s epoch requires and enables, nothing less, nothing more. The question “Ash-Wednesday” poses in Part V, as if the poetry

“Ash-Wednesday” has been heading toward just that consideration, is an important and a valid one: Is it still possible to write a poetry of belief, of the effects of the action of faith on an individual? Homer did. Virgil did. Dante did. It is fair, then, for Eliot to ponder whether the modern world can or cannot, and if it can, what it might look like. If from the time of Plato the Western imagination had held poetry in the highest esteem for giving utterance to the otherwise unutterable aspirations of the human spirit in its yearning for contemplation of and union with the divine, why should this same esteem and skill seem to be denied the imagination in the modern world? By the end of part V, the opening lines of “AshWednesday,” with their strong hints of a literary rivalry—“desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope”—take on a new range of meaning, too. The contemporary speaker seems to be all too painfully conscious, as the poem continues, that his is a lesser age than most, not for a lack of religiosity necessarily but for a lack of a poetics of sufficient clarity and vision with which to express the experiences of his time. Thus, the speaker’s every echo of their visions and expression expresses an overarching envy for the past poets whom he also seeks to emulate. By pondering this contemporary state of affairs aloud in his own poetry, however, the speaker also runs the risk of seeming to endorse, or at least lend his own efforts to identifying, the very lack that one is ostensibly hoping to remedy. However, instead of writing a poetry that merely laments the absence of a serious poetry of belief in his time, Eliot chose to write just such a poetry himself in part VI of “AshWednesday.” He very likely could not have gotten away with writing the sort of poetry that he writes in the concluding part of the poem, however, had he not, to this point in the rest of the poem, run the gamut of a poetry that muses about faith as a topic for poetry as much as, or even more than, it may express it, and muses as well about what sorts of conditions not just of self but of one’s culture permit the proper expression of belief in poetry. Indeed, because of the kind of double-think and double-speak that Eliot had exercised in his earliest poetry and had been exercising thus far in “Ash-Wednesday,” he is able, in part VI, to do

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the unspeakable. He frees his speaker to achieve the same sort of personal revelation regarding faith that the speaker at the end of The Waste Land also achieved. To do so, however, Eliot had to realize that, even for the poet, the task is to set one’s own house in order—to see the beam in his own eye, as it were—if he ever hopes to come to peace with himself and achieve a meaningful way to address the same doubts and struggles with faith that may well be afflicting everyone else. It is an old solution to what may be a new problem: When a problem cannot be solved, shift the focus. The only difference between Eliot’s and the poetry of belief of the past may be that he, through his speaker, feels compelled to analyze the problem of writing about believing rather than facing head-on the larger problem of writing belief itself. Again, his speaker resolves that problem in part VI finally by addressing the issue of belief in and of itself, but only after having muddied those waters in the preceding five parts by struggling with the devil of the stairs, which was as much an aesthetic, cultural, and literary historical problem as a spiritual and personal one. So, then, the “Because I do not hope to turn . . .” of part I has become, by part VI, “Although I do not hope to turn . . . ,” which expresses at the very least that such an event may not yet prove to be the case but is not an entire impossibility. There is also the suggestion, since these words now come immediately after the cultural critique of part V, that, along with turning himself away from the ways of the world toward the repentance that the Lenten season will require of him in keeping with its spiritual austerity, the speaker does not hope to turn the tide of the spiritual emptiness that he imagines to be assaulting the present moment in which he lives. Resigned to the fact that he can manage only his own affairs, he throws himself on the mercy of the court, as it were, to plead not his age’s but his own case in resigned self-abnegation. This, too, is in keeping with the great, tried-andtrue spiritual poetry of the past, particularly Dante’s. Dante may include an encyclopedic account of the figures and events of his time, indeed, of much of human history, in his accounting of his own

70 “Ash-Wednesday” spiritual trial as it is told in the Commedia, but its greatness as a work of art lies in the intensity of the personal and intimate tone he strikes by making himself the focus of his own dramatic struggle, just as he had done in his La vita nuova. The Commedia is not a treatise on the difficulties of writing religious poetry; it is a poem on the difficulties attendant upon seeking personal salvation. Self-conscious modernist that he is, Eliot’s speaker has till now felt more obliged to establish his literary credentials than to present the drama of his quest for redemption in poetic form. But perhaps having done so for the first five parts of the poem, he is now prepared, in the sixth, to do freely what he has imagined till now no child of his age can do: Use poetry to empty his heart of its longing for salvation. It is a typical Eliot “turning,” stealing that key term from his own present poetic lexicon, to go quickly from the place that one is not to the place that one wants to be, the kind of paradox he played on as, after “Ash-Wednesday,” he wrote more and more poetry in a decidedly religious vein, culminating in the great artistic achievement of his own Paradiso, “Little Gidding,” in 1942. That poetry is still more than a decade away, however, and in 1930 and “Ash-Wednesday,” the speaker calls up words and images that do not look forward but hark back instead to the critical turning point in The Waste Land, “Death by Water,” where the drowned Phoenician sailor, Phlebas, “[f]orgot . . . the profit and the loss.” It is between those same two extremes of worldliness that “AshWednesday”’s speaker wavers. They provide an appropriate reference to the pursuits of worldly gain and glory that plague the spiritual seeker “[i]n this brief transit,” an image that puns on both the shortness of a human life and the demands of commerce and other material enterprises. For the next few stanzas, images from earlier moments in the sequence—the lilac, the window, the rock, the yew-tree, the garden—are intermingled with yet more sea imagery and the movement of sails, the flight of birds, all of it calling more and more to mind not only Phlebas but the seashore and sailing imagery near the conclusion of The Waste Land’s fifth part, “What the Thunder Said.” (They also call to mind “Marina,” another,

more recent poem of Eliot’s dealing with one who was lost but now is found.) In The Waste Land, however, the spirituality was couched in the terms of an Eastern religious tradition, the Upanishads, whereas here the tradition in which the spiritual quest is rendered is wholly Christian and by and large Catholic in nature, in keeping, possibly, with the poet’s own reversion to his own orthodox roots in the years during which he was composing the various parts of “Ash-Wednesday” as apparently separate poems. The interjection of the parenthetical “Bless me father” into the second stanza, with its “dreamcrossed twilight” reminiscent of another intervening poem, “The Hollow Men,” calls immediately to mind for a Catholic the formulaic prayer of greeting and submission by which the penitent sinner begins his confession to a priest, which may also call to mind Arnaut Daniel’s farewell greeting to Dante “Ara vos prec” (“Now I pray you”). Eliot’s speaker, having survived the purgatorial passage that has brought him to this shore and having transcended the allure of “[t]he empty forms between the ivory gates,” which are, in Greek mythology, the gates through which false dreams come, is ready to stand in the “tension between dying and birth.” There dreams cross, seeking to know the dream that is true. (As Eliot had written of Dante, the high dream is neither “truth” nor “fiction” but rather an intensely personal admixture of both— primarily of experience with its greatest possible significance.) All that the speaker can ask by this point is some blessing on his own vision, that it may not prove to be wrong: “Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood”—the greatest danger being to accept what Eliot will call in After Strange Gods “attractive half-truths.” Those need not be only doctrinal matters. Indeed, if the poetry has revealed anything to this point, it is how intricately the spiritual, with its questions of belief, resignation, and acceptance, is combined with other considerations—the social, the historical, the cultural, the aesthetic, the public, the private. So virtually inextricably are these strands of thought and feeling, allusion and memory, hopefulness and despair, that constitute the individual existence intertwined in the poem, in

“Ash-Wednesday” fact, that to try to isolate any one of those elements from a consideration of the speaker’s state of mind and spirit leaves the poetry flat and, at times, almost pointless, little more than a series of rhythmic musings that seem to go nowhere. The poetry points instead in one direction, and that is toward completion and resolution. Its final moments are taken up, as they should be, with a consideration not of all of the details again but of what the religious call “final things.” Those can be nothing less than a consideration, by the speaker, not of his relationship with past literary figures or contemporary culture and society but with his creator, God, who, for a Christian, would be embodied in his Savior, Christ. It is absolutely fitting then that the poem ends in total humility as the speaker recites a key passage from the Anima Chisti (Spirit of Christ). Attributed to St. Ignatius de Loyola, the 16th-century Spanish priest who founded the Jesuits, these sentiments from this early 14th-century prayer crown the conclusion to “Ash-Wednesday” very much as the “shantih” of the Upanishads crowns the conclusion of The Waste Land. Similar again to The Waste Land and almost like a symphonic musical composition, as “AshWednesday” rolls to a close, the speaker continues to reiterate past themes, particularly from part I with its plea to “[t]each us to care and not to care.” Echoing Dante one last time, this time in the words of Piccarda di Donati from canto V of the Paradiso (suggesting that the speaker has made it, by poem’s end, at least that far past the Purgatorio passages recounted in part III), the speaker abandons falsehood and fixes his mind on a single truth: “Our peace in His will.” The poetry continues to summarize the quest, the spiritual ordeal, that has taken place to this point. In quick order of short bursts of poetic verses, there follow snapshot references to a place of rocks (a familiar enough spiritual terrain throughout Eliot’s poetry, always calling to mind, ultimately, the spirit of desolation figured in Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness), the female figure that is identified as both sister and mother and that has consistently represented the saving grace of an engagement with otherness, and finally the sea, age-old emblem of the rebirth and renewal that the speaker has been

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seeking, or at least verbally flirting with, throughout the entire poem. Then, from the Anima Christi, comes the closing plea to Christ that introduces the final two lines: “Suffer me not to be separated” (“. . . from you,” is how the Anima Christi concludes this sentence). To this plea the speaker appends the response of the faithful, “And let my cry come unto Thee.” On that note, “Ash-Wednesday,” itself a cry, a plea, a critique, and a lament, comes to an end.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY So much of “Ash-Wednesday” is self-reflective as poetry that much of the preceding part-by-part commentary on the poem has been itself a running critical analysis of the poet’s apparent intent. The poem, it seems, enunciates a stinging cultural critique while exposing nevertheless the speaker’s apparently genuine spiritual struggle as it undergoes its own step-by-step development. “Ash-Wednesday” thus becomes such an intensely compounded poetic, intellectual, and emotional experience that it would be invaluable for any reader to take final stock of the rich variety of options for meaning that the poem seems to be making available. As with any Eliot poem, there is the almost immediate temptation to read it autobiographically. A reader discovering that Eliot had undergone a profound spiritual conversion experience from 1926 through 1927, the years when he started composing the individual pieces that would eventually emerge in 1930 as “Ash-Wednesday,” might be all too ready to assume that the conversion experience is precisely what the poem is all about. From the preceding synopsis, however, the reader will understand that such a conclusion could not be further from the truth. But, then, what is the truth? Even to begin to approach a satisfactory answer to that question, it would be wise to begin by taking to heart that signal from Eliot himself regarding the distinction between the personal and the poetical whereby “truth” and “fiction” often meet and change places, first in that crucible that is the poet’s mind and then, more important, in the part of that process that finally becomes fixed and cast as the poem. The distance from the so-called truth that is autobiography to the so-called fiction that is poetry is an

72 “Ash-Wednesday” immense one once the reader regards the steps that it takes for the one, raw experience, to become the other, polished verse. So, then, although Eliot’s, like any other poet’s, biography can provide the reader with a cue, it hardly ever provides even so much as the trace of a satisfactory clue. It is, after all, by the intensification of personal experience—that “larger than life” quality expected of products of the imagination—that the poet makes the successful transformation of such experience into great art so that the personal experience that had apparently inspired the art seldom seems to measure up to expectations and virtually never provides more than the most fundamentally “useful” insight. Unfortunately, in art, the useful is seldom the purposeful. For genuine clues into the possible “meaning” of any work of literature, it would be wiser to turn to other cues, such as those that are provided by poetic and other conventions and traditions. Here, incidentally, Eliot typically proves to be generously unstinting, so much so as to make readers occasionally question the poet’s motives, perhaps rightly. Based on those kinds of cues, “Ash-Wednesday” falls conveniently into a genre of literary composition that is relatively common, being what might be called the spiritual biography. Even here it is necessary to distinguish between the idea of personal experience and the idea of spiritual experience. The emphasis in the term spiritual biography is on the spiritual, denoting that sensitivity to the inchoate to which mere biography gives order and coherence but not necessarily any factual basis. “Ash-Wednesday,” in that regard, makes far more sense as the spiritual biography of a carefully designed and delineated speaker, totally unrelated to the “real” T. S. Eliot. The same may not always be said of other examples of the genre, especially since there is no prescribed way of executing such a biography, nor should there be one. The English romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), for example, relied heavily on autobiography in his long poem The Prelude, which traces the progress of his moral and spiritual growth, while Dante Alighieri concocted, in The Divine Comedy, the most outrageously outlandish fiction—that finding he had lost his own moral and spiritual way, he was rescued

by the ghost of Virgil at the command of God—to lay bare a fairly true record of his own personal encounter with the shortcomings of his age. The Irish novelist JAMES JOYCE (1881–1941), Eliot’s contemporary, delved into the most fascinating aspects of an individual’s moral and spiritual growth by thinly veiling an autobiography of his coming of age as a young poet in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In every case, however, including Eliot’s, the critical and scholarly interest aroused is, as it ought to be, invested in the execution of the work, not the life that inspired it. Such works virtually always entail three stages of dramatic development, or, in the case of mystics such as John of the Cross, steps in the spiritual life, on which these literary works are often unconsciously modeled—the awakening, the purgative, and the unitive. The duration of each phase need not be equal, but all three are always present and generally in that order. In the first, the initiate quite literally awakens to the perilous state of his soul or the sorry state of his life, which is pretty much the same thing. Any sensitive reader can see this process taking place throughout most of parts I and II of “Ash-Wednesday,” where the speaker gives his life an unflinchingly realistic evaluation and finds it wanting. Here he comes to recognize his shortcomings and failings, which are by and large self-centeredness, so that by the end of part II, he has been reduced to little more than the remnant of his former self—bones picked cleaned by these remorseless leopards of self-analysis. Needless to say, the next phase, the purgative, has already begun once the speaker has been reduced to far less than even the figurative shadow of his former self. Memory, regret, doubt, and despair all persist, however, as in part III, the speaker ascends from those lingering elements of the self he no longer wishes to be toward the person that he fears he may, through a lack of courage and perseverance, fail to become. Rendered appropriately as the mounting of a circular staircase, this ascension is toward union not so much with the creator/godhead, although that is the ideal goal, as with the fulfilled self, who will have emerged successfully from the purgative process

“Ash-Wednesday” should the speaker overcome his former failings and shortcomings. For Eliot, this last phase, the unitive, is never quite achieved. The speaker instead divides himself, according to his interests, into three distinct parts, as it were. It is critical for him to resolve each part if he is to achieve the completion that the unitive phase requires, but no one of the three zones of interest is capable of being treated in coordination with the other. Therefore, it can be demonstrated that the literary historical analysis implicit in part IV, the reflections on the distractions of the modern world addressed in Part V, and the personal submission to God’s will and the mercies of Christ of Part VI each forms a part of the speaker’s needs for achieving a satisfactory spiritual resolution. Only the last of the three, however, is traditionally thought of as within the spiritual action normally required of the supplicant. It is this addition on Eliot’s part not of superfluous requirements so much as of his excessively objectifying what must remain, nevertheless, an essentially private spiritual process that makes the poem peculiarly modern while it ironically illustrates the very sort of fragmenting of focus that modernism entails and that the poetry decries. Read as an Ash Wednesday exercise, that is, as a penitential entry into a state of mind and spirit suitable for the Lenten season, with its overtones of mourning and death and requirements for abstinence and selfdenial, the poetry no doubt goes over the top and may be even regarded as a dismal failure. It is important to reiterate at this juncture, however, the earlier observation that “Ash-Wednesday” is not prayer, nor is it poetry about the need for prayer or to pray. Instead, it is poetry about what conditions are most conducive to the human capacity for prayer, and it finds those conditions lacking in the contemporary scene that the speaker inhabits. Regarded in that manner, “Ash-Wednesday” is a resounding success, though one that the reader cannot easily share in, since it requires an aesthetics of failure to achieve its aim. The poet succeeds by demonstrating that such poetry can no longer succeed. “Let my cry come unto Thee” is a plea, not a poetic resolution. It is as if Eliot has chosen to

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define the general problem of belief in the modern world—surely a worthy theme—by simultaneously commenting on the problem, partly through his literary allusions, while illustrating the problem through his speaker’s confusion and consternation with what appear to be his own personal spiritual concerns. Though not necessarily working at crosspurposes, this strategy, however, may finally have only deflected the reader’s attention from either theme. In a normal narrative or dramatic context, one can move such a dual agenda forward fairly easily, either by means of clearly plotted antagonistic elements or conflicting characterizations. In the context of what sounds to be a lyric poem, however, with a single and single-minded speaker, the alternating aims of Eliot’s project do not always lend themselves well to a well-defined clarity of purpose. That lack of clarity of purpose may have very well been Eliot’s purpose, however. If he is claiming that his is not an age easily given to the expression of the religious sentiment, he can hardly write a poem that will express that sentiment as if it were some ancient clarion call. Still, the poem works if the speaker is accepted as a fictive projection, no more real as a personality than, say, Prufrock or the hollow men or Gerontion. For then it is far easier to come to terms with this doubling effect whereby the poem and the poetry are both the working out of formal and thematic problems and an expression of the spirit of belief. Despite all the turn toward an orthodox, mainstream Christianity that his personal life had taken at this time, Eliot, forever the craftsman and poetic theorizer, might have been, at this point in his literary career, merely exploring in the various parts of “Ash-Wednesday” the limits of and limitations on religious expression in verse for wholly aesthetic and technical purposes. If so, the poetry shows him to be capable of forging out of his past technical triumphs, where he combined allusion with original statement, an effectively new and distinct poetic voice. It is a voice that served Eliot even better as he went on, throughout the rest of the 1930s, to turn his attention more and more directly to the theme that had occupied his attention throughout most of his poetical and critical career to this time:

74 “Aunt Helen” the crisis of order in the modern world. That crisis would take on new dimensions for Eliot as he now began to see in it the manifestation of a far deeper and far more pervasive spiritual crisis. Thanks to the labor of producing “Ash-Wednesday,” he developed a poetic tool, sharp and pliant and capable of accomplishing this more formidable task as before him loomed the disastrous economic, political, and military conflagrations of the 1930s and 1940s.

FURTHER READING Hinchliffe, Arnold P. The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday: An Introduction to the Variety of Criticism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante. London: Macmillan, 1989. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Unger, Leonard. T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966.

“Aunt Helen” (1915) Shades of Cousin Harriet from “The Boston Evening Transcript” must surely haunt this equally short poem, “Aunt Helen,” which not only followed the other immediately in Eliot’s Complete Poems but was published in company with it and “Cousin Nancy” in Poetry magazine in October 1915 and then collected along with the other two in Eliot’s first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. Taken as a sequence of sorts, the three poems together form a singular excursion on Eliot’s part into the somewhat stately and stale environment of the Eliot family’s Boston Brahmin antecedents, particularly if “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” be excluded from the list, which, in view of its own social ambiance, also gives the impression of being set among the tediously stifling rituals of polite society.

The three poems provide the speaker with a female blood relation for a focus. All three further suggest that the female relation in question is unmarried, thus hinting at the end of the family line, and all three offer the reader as a consequence a glimpse into a world of genteel rituals and assumptions, one that seems to be on the brink of extinction but is blissfully unaware of the fact. Furthermore, while these three short poems may seem on the surface to have all the earmarks of other Eliot poems from this period, during which he was still under the considerable influence of the French symbolists, notably JULES LAFORGUE, it is more likely that these three are among those early poems in which, consciously or not, Eliot was struggling to find his own voice and poetic territory, a world that he and he alone would know best.

SYNOPSIS The speaker’s maiden aunt, Miss Helen Slingsby, who had lived in a small but fashionable house in the “right” part of town with her four servants, died, and her life had apparently been so thoroughly proper that not only did both heaven and her end of the street, appropriately proper extremes, fall silent as a consequence of her passing, but the undertaker knew enough to wipe his feet on entering her house, even though its mistress had now gone to her proper reward. Not so her servants, however. That not necessarily unruly but nevertheless wholly human lot quickly took advantage of their defunct mistress’s absence. The footman not only dared to commit such an affrontery as to sit on the dining room table but went as far as to dawdle one of the maids on his knees as he did so—something that the young lady in question would never have allowed “while her mistress lived.” The humor of the situation, such as it is, is transparent, summed up in the old adage, “While the cat’s away, the mice will play.” In this case, however, there is no chance of the cat’s ever coming back, and it is that development that gives the Eliot poem a more tragically ironic twist. While the poem may have all the forthright and somewhat predictable bawdiness of an extended limerick, it also remarks in a slightly slanted way on the chang-

“Aunt Helen” ing of the guard in Boston and in polite American culture in general. Aunt Helen, who had no children, left much her legacy to her four dogs, the reader is led to believe, suggesting that hers and her kind are no longer making much of a serious effort at perpetuating their cherished social values in any case. Furthermore, as the behavior of the footman and the second housemaid suggests, new people, it is plain to see, are moving in, if not yet into her neighborhood, then at least into the remnants of her orderly and proper world. Not only that, but these new people, because they are a bit more in touch with their more healthy animal natures, will no doubt propagate. From that promised premise, it is a short step for the reader to the theme of “Cousin Nancy,” who, it will turn out, is the end of the (old) line.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY In a Paris Review interview in 1959, Eliot, looking back the nearly 50 years to when, as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1910 and 1911, he had first discovered the work of Laforgue and the much more renowned CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, would comment on how he had learned from each of them an appreciation for the poetic resources that he had there in his own American idiom and in the experiences of life in a modern, industrial metropolis. At the time, Eliot had likely been in the process of discovering his own unique background. The descendant of an old and illustrious New England family, he nevertheless had had the advantage of being born and raised in the same traditions and with the same sense of social rank and privilege but entirely elsewhere, namely, ST. LOUIS, Missouri. This literal distancing from the world of Boston society that Eliot had come to know in any event from boyhood trips with his family and from his student years at Milton Academy and then at Harvard might have given him the advantage of a psychological distance as well. He could view the commonplace values and realities of this exclusive social class, of which he was a part but not a member, and see the anomalies and contradictions that an insider would not notice at all. In poems such as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes,” he had already explored urban life

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for the challenges that it posed to those experiencing it at its fringe. These were poems from those earlier Harvard years and his subsequent student year in Paris from 1910 to 1911. He had also exploited that outsider’s view of polite society from an insider’s perspective to powerful effect in other early poetry such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady.” They, again, show something of Eliot’s uncanny ability to recognize a rich poetic resource in the tragicomic constraints imposed by polite society, an ability he owed to the influences of such equally foreign viewpoints and sensibilities as Baudelaire’s and Laforgue’s. Nevertheless, the manner in which Eliot ultimately addresses the particular quality of that social order is purely his own in poems like “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Cousin Nancy,” and “Aunt Helen,” a point that he seems to underscore intentionally by making his subjects not merely social acquaintances, as in the case of “Prufrock” and “Portrait,” but the speaker’s kin. That said, “Aunt Helen” itself is also one of the few Eliot poems that does not challenge the reader to imagine continually that the poem is changing form or direction or theme from one line to the next. Rather, it drives in a straight and perhaps too obviously satirical a line from start to finish, much as the slightly darker but no less readily accessible “Cousin Nancy” does. If any two words were often to be heard in conjunction when it came to describing the denizens of the capital city of Massachusetts at the beginning of the 20th century, it is that they were “proper Bostonians.” This phrase was meant to apply, of course, not to the vast and varied immigrant population of Irish, Italians, Jews, and other largely southern and central European ethnicities who then inhabited one of the major U.S. urban centers of the day, but to the so-called Brahmin, the descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon stock that had originally settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century. With their fabled Puritan rigorousness and Yankee ingenuity, they had virtually been the vanguard of American idealism and progressive thinking from the first days of the republic to the time in which Eliot was writing, but they also set the standards for taste and good judgment in their little corner

76 “Baudelaire” of the world, which, from their point of view, was the world. Members of this class of Bostonians were proper, then, not simply because they behaved correctly or because they knew how to behave correctly, but because they made a point of behaving correctly. And to behave correctly was, when it came to judging anyone else, to behave like them. By Eliot’s time, this legendary insistence on having just the right measure of self-respect to know exactly how to comport not only one’s person but one’s life in both public and private had become something of a running comic tagline for the rest of humanity, no doubt, but it remained no less a point of pride among proper Bostonians. This same inherited and by now largely intuited respect for order and dignity could, however, also impose crippling constraints on the very kinds of individuality that the Bay State still takes an equal pride in fostering. Surely one of the points of Eliot’s “Prufrock” is to depict a victim of such constraints in a poem whose title character and speaker finds it “impossible to say just what I mean” because he feels that he must only ever behave and converse “just so.” “Aunt Helen” does not take the matter that far in its sending up the cherished values and lifestyles of a typical “proper Bostonian,” but that is not Eliot’s aim here. Rather, here his aim appears to be to have fun with the vagaries of human nature and with the toll that time and tide take on all human institutions, including Boston’s code of absolute propriety. One should not be tempted to make more of a poem than the poet makes himself. Surely, Eliot does not go out of his way to suggest that “Aunt Helen” or its two companion pieces, “The Boston Evening Transcript” and “Cousin Nancy,” are major efforts. Still, they record, however lightly, the changing of the guard for the old Anglo-American culture that sired Eliot. Readers who notice this will be less surprised or puzzled by the cultural holding action in which Eliot seems to spend the better part of his own middle age during the 1930s and 1940s in works such as After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society, and Notes towards the Definition of Culture.

“Baudelaire” (1930) Precisely when Eliot became familiar enough with the poetry of the French symbolist poet CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, the unchallenged “bad boy” of 19thcentury European literature, for Baudelaire to have had an influence on Eliot’s own work is difficult to say with any precision. This 1930 essay provides some critical insight into Eliot’s high regard for the French poet at the very moment when his own work and thought were beginning to undergo serious readjustments. Eliot had become more and more firmly convinced of and devoted to Christian beliefs just as the 1920s and the heady optimism fostered by his generation’s faith in an aesthetic revolution that would save the modern world from itself, were drawing to a close.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS It was the French symbolists, Baudelaire chief among them, who virtually invented the modern urban nightmare as a topic for serious poetry. In their response to that topic, one unique to our time, they created a whole new tone for poetry that combined, in the place of the sentimentalities of a romantic overkill, the understatement of bitterness and resignation into an oddly celebratory aesthetic. With it, they reflected and reflected on the new, gas-lighted urban landscapes revealed only at night among an often sordid squalor in which was bred that brutalization of the spirit and a collective despair that were only just then beginning to assault the human psyche. Surely, then, there is more of Baudelaire than of that other major French symbolist influence upon Eliot, the dandified and plaintively witty JULES LAFORGUE, in those youthful, urban nocturnes of Eliot’s, of which “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes” are the most outstanding and memorable examples. Nevertheless, it is difficult to establish that Baudelaire in particular was one of Eliot’s guiding poetic spirits as early as the time of the composition of “Rhapsody” during 1910 and 1911. The French poet was not among the symbolists originally included in ARTHUR SYMONS’s THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, that famous

“Baudelaire” introduction to the work and vision of the French symbolists. It was this book, which Eliot read as a Harvard undergraduate in 1908 that had first introduced him to these recent trends in French poetry. (Symons eventually included Baudelaire in his groundbreaking study, but it was not until the revised edition of 1919.) That Eliot read Baudelaire fairly early on is nevertheless indisputable. The French poet’s work is included in a list of books that Eliot’s mother, Charlotte, in a 1920 letter to him, indicated were to be moved from their ST. LOUIS home. Eliot had not been in residence in the United States since March 1914, except for a brief visit in the summer of 1915, and that visit was to the Eliot family’s summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The Baudelaire volume had to have been acquired well before Eliot’s departure for England in 1914, then, perhaps even while Eliot was first in Paris in 1910–11. There is no doubt, however, that Baudelaire’s dark and forbidding urban vision, expounded in the volume Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), which contained a poetry infested with images of sexual license, physical decay, and self-loathing, helped dramatically shape Eliot’s early poetic vision as it matured. Eliot famously alluded to Baudelaire’s preface to Les fleurs du mal in one of the most apocalyptic of urban moments in The Waste Land, toward the end of the “Burial of the Dead,” with which the poem opens. Amid allusions to DANTE ALIGHIERI’s Inferno, another hellish landscape, a crowd of zombified urbanites crosses over London Bridge, and Eliot calls to his reader’s mind Baudelaire’s vision of the city beset with an all-consuming boredom. Indeed, in his 1950 essay “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot wrote that all of Baudelaire’s influence on him could be summed up in those two lines of the latter’s poetry, when he describes the city as if it were a seething anthill. These lines of Baudelaire’s Eliot paraphrases more than translates as he, at that point in The Waste Land, describes London as the “Unreal City.” By this time, of course, Eliot had already developed his own reputation as a daring innovator in both form and theme. Long after Eliot had outgrown the influences of Laforgue, he con-

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tinued to pay his poetic respects to Baudelaire more than any other recent poet, and less only than he honored Dante and Shakespeare. As late as the 1950 essay on Dante, Eliot singled Baudelaire out as an example of another kind of influence, different from that of Laforgue, whose effects were felt in his youth, or even of Dante, who had had a continuing influence as a lifelong master. There Eliot calls Baudelaire a poet from whom one can learn “some one thing.” Eliot goes on to tell his audience that from Baudelaire he had learned that “the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis . . . the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience . . . in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry.”

SYNOPSIS In this much earlier essay now under consideration, composed during the same period as his first extended essay on Dante of 1929, Eliot starts by commenting on the tendency to identify Baudelaire as a “fragmentary” Dante, explaining himself by observing that “many people who enjoy Dante enjoy Baudelaire.” Although for his own part Eliot makes it clear that he would prefer to think of Baudelaire as a “more limited” version of the equally great and far more recent German poet Goethe, Baudelaire is given his own due by Eliot ultimately for his having a unique sense of his age and for having engaged “the real problem of good and evil,” particularly as it was manifested in the “ennui of modern life.” To be sure, it is his “sense of his age” that, Eliot thinks, particularly sets Baudelaire aside. Eliot had already made a similar point regarding what he calls “the great poet” in his 1927 essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in which he argued that such a poet, “in writing himself, writes his time.” While it may not be exactly the same sentiment, in the 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot was careful to stress the importance of the poet’s having an awareness of his or her own time well enough to know its place in history. Indeed, at that time Eliot had been bold enough to declare that “historical sense . . . nearly indispensable” to anyone who would wish to continue to write poetry past his 25th year.

78 “Baudelaire” These emphases on a historical consciousness that both shapes and perceives the poet’s time were a reflection of a major concern on the part of Eliot, whose own poetry often seemed to be trying to bridge the vast temporal and cultural divides between one people and another, and one epoch and another. An acute historical consciousness definitely singled out for Eliot the great poets, those who, more than their own experience, objectified the experience of being alive in their particular historical moment. These would include Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare. For Eliot to include Baudelaire in this company, is to do him a great honor. These kinds of poets, after all, help mold what is for Eliot that all-important cultural tradition by continually adding to it even when they seem most to be flying in the face of it, and there is no reason to assume that Eliot did not, therefore, imagine that he might himself be thought of by later generations as one worthy to be included in their ranks. It is critical to observe, however, that by this point, Eliot had ceased to regard traditions of Western literature as if they were little more than a constantly improving or at least self-correcting mechanism, always altering but somehow remaining essentially the same. With a certain measure of cultural relativism that can easily pass for a moral absolutism, Eliot had increasingly come to recognize that not all historical epochs are equally as fertile pools for spawning great poetry—Dante’s compared with Shakespeare’s, for example— although this is not the same as weighing poets’ relative merits. Instead, it is as if, in this and like essays, Eliot tentatively tested ideas on the relationship between the tradition and belief. He gave such ideas their fullest hearing in 1933 with the lectures collectively titled After Strange Gods; he then effectively dropped them. In his 1930 essay on Baudelaire, Eliot is most assuredly beginning to address in his prose criticism what he takes to be the present conflict between order and chaos, a conflict that his poetry had been reflecting and, perhaps, addressing as well all along. If Eliot speaks approvingly of Baudelaire for having that sense of his age, the reader should not imagine that it is because Eliot admires Baudelaire’s values.

It is for the very reason that Baudelaire’s age is one that produced not great wisdom but what has become by now, in Eliot’s view, “outmoded nonsense” that Baudelaire’s poetry is of value to the present. His poetry reveals what becomes of poetic vision when the age that produces it has a distorted sense of proportion and perception. Though Eliot does not openly identify this “outmoded nonsense” that affected Baudelaire or its sources, it seems that he is alluding to the secularism and scientific positivism of Baudelaire’s time, the effects of which on the sensibilities of a perceiving mechanism as fine-tuned as a great poet’s were to compel Baudelaire to foster in his poetry, despite the sophistication of his age, a “theological innocence.” By “discovering Christianity for himself” rather than for reasons of fashion or social or political causes, Baudelaire is a case in point of the poet in a time of disbelief. Eliot’s, it must be admitted, is not an especially radical take on Baudelaire and his poetry’s significance as a cultural landmark, but Eliot does take it a step further removed from Baudelaire’s continuing reputation as an atheist if not Satanist. Eliot takes care to qualify his position, however; lest one get the wrong idea, he argues that Baudelaire’s “business was not to practise Christianity, but . . . to assert its necessity.” Eliot is not then implying, all of a sudden, that he necessarily regards Baudelaire as a Christian poet or his poetry as particularly religious, so much as that the crisis of faith that defines much of the experience of Christian Europe in the 19th century, following hard the period of social and political revolution that had characterized the 18th, finds its spokesman in Baudelaire’s chaotically moral vision that resulted from such evaluative chaos. That Baudelaire, to hear the phrase now, had “a sense of his age” means for Eliot that the confusion among the moral, spiritual, and secular value systems of Baudelaire’s time is, in Eliot’s view, carried without modification directly into the moral and spiritual confusion expressed in Baudelaire’s poetry. While admitting that just as it was once fashionable to treat Baudelaire as a Satanist, it is now fashionable to present him as a Catholic Christian, Eliot nevertheless stresses that that, once more, is not his point. Rather, what he wishes to demon-

“Baudelaire” strate is that Baudelaire is caught between rejection and acceptance, not necessarily of Christian doctrine, but of one of the principles on which that doctrine is based. That principle finds expression in the Christian belief that humans have a capacity for suffering. An ameliorative age, which imagines that social engineering can eradicate the pains of individual existence, denies that capacity for suffering any cultural validity. Thus, Baudelaire could find, neither in himself nor in his age, the power by which to transcend such suffering, and as a result he creates a poetry that seems to celebrate if not wallow in it. In Eliot’s estimation, Baudelaire becomes the religious victim which his age, with its rejection of religious solutions to human dilemmas, deserves. Whereas another, more religious age would have sanctioned Baudelaire’s suffering and made it its own (witness Dante), Baudelaire’s own age must only endure it since it has fostered it by removing those overt religious sanctions for human suffering. In that way, Baudelaire’s poetry “created a mode of release and expression for other men” of his own time, so Eliot sees Baudelaire’s primary concern as one that involves itself “not with black masses, demons, and romantic blasphemy, but with the real problem of good and evil” (“moral Good and Evil,” Eliot will call it for emphasis a few pages later). Rather than expressing either a Christian or a Satanist impulse, then, Baudelaire’s poetry expresses the more or less religious impulse, confused and conflicting, that emerges among individuals caught up in a contemporary bureaucratic setting, “a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reforms, and dress reforms”—a world, in other words, very much like Eliot’s own, the world of the modern. In such a world, Baudelaire discovers that one still is free to make great moral choices, even if they may be those that other, more theologically coherent epochs—Dante’s, for example—may, with its devotion to the orthodoxy of doctrine, very well have condemned. Eliot sees Baudelaire coming to recognize that “damnation itself is an immediate form or salvation,” since it is “salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at least gives some significance to living.” So, then, Baudelaire may

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indeed be “a bungler compared to Dante,” but as Eliot duly notes as well in an earlier comparison of his of Dante with Shakespeare, the poet must work with the material that the age into which he was born provides him, and that, good or bad, is just the luck of the draw. It is what a poet like Baudelaire then does with that material, almost in spite of himself, that enables him, if he is successful at merging the personal and the public in his art, to become the poet of his age. Baudelaire, in Eliot’s eyes, demonstrates that “it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot’s may seem to an odd way to come to Baudelaire’s defense, but only if the essay is thought of as a defense. If it is seen instead as a prescription for what a person of conscience must do in a conscienceless world, then it suggests that making moral choices in poetry is a requirement of great poetry, no matter what those moral choices may be. Paradoxically, those kinds of choices, blind and inchoate though they may be, keep the moral conscience alive and prepare the way for a new age in which moral choices may be not only required but evaluated. Eliot, no doubt, is talking about the climate of his own time when he talks about the climate of Baudelaire’s. Whether or not moral choices continued in Eliot’s time to be as desperate for the person of conscience depends to a great extent on how much the moral daring of a poet like Baudelaire may have opened the imagination to strategies for dealing, in a godless public world, with the demands that individuals nevertheless privately make on the divine as an implied presence in human affairs and as an implied portion of each person’s being. Eliot had by the time of his writing “Baudelaire” already moved well past the spiritual bleakness expressed in poems like “Gerontion” and “The Hollow Men,” as well as in such longer works as The Waste Land and “Sweeney Agonistes,” to the vague promise of spiritual contentment and acceptance found in “Marina” and in some parts of “Ash-Wednesday.” Otherwise, he was still trying to discover what a person, and poet, of conscience

80 “Ben Jonson” and conviction can do in a world inhabited more and more “by decent godless people,” and while he clearly rejects Baudelaire’s solution to seek salvation in damnation, he can at least applaud its efficacy, even if he does not endorse its application. The distance between poetry and belief becomes, for Eliot, shorter the more one focuses on the belief and not the poetry. In Baudelaire’s case, he is saying that there is no way to separate the two to begin with, since Baudelaire had no belief system to fall back on besides the one that his own day-to-day experience in a modern metropolis itself provided him with. As Eliot has outlined it here, the case of Baudelaire proves that such spiritually thin gruel, for a person of passionate conviction, can result in a poetic feast that may not be to everyone’s taste but is to everyone’s advantage.

“Ben Jonson” (1919) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

“Boston Evening Transcript, The” (1915) This short, satirical piece is one of three poems on Boston—or, more properly, the Boston social elite—that Eliot first published in Poetry magazine in October 1915 and subsequently collected in his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. While “The Boston Evening Transcript,” along with its companion pieces, “Aunt Helen” and “Cousin Nancy,” may seem on the surface to have all the earmarks of other Eliot poems from this period, during which he was still under the considerable influence of the French symbolists, notably JULES LAFORGUE, it is more likely that these are among those early poems in which, consciously or not, Eliot was struggling to find his own voice and poetic territory, by which one means, quite simply, that world that he and he alone would know best.

Far into his own advanced years, as late in fact as a Paris Review interview in 1959, Eliot would be looking back nearly 50 years earlier when, during his final semesters as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1910 and 1911, he had discovered the French symbolists. Singling out Laforgue and the much more renowned CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, Eliot would comment on how he had learned from each of them the poetic resources that he had there in his own American idiom and the experiences of life in a modern, industrial metropolis. Those topics, assuredly, may seem to constitute the very substance of a poem like “The Boston Evening Transcript,” but in fact it, like the far more deservedly famous early masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” comes much more directly out of Eliot’s own unique background. The descendant of an old and illustrious New England family, he nevertheless had the advantage of having been born and raised in the same traditions and with the same sense of social rank and privilege but entirely elsewhere, namely, ST. LOUIS, Missouri. The effect of this literal distancing from his roots was that it gave him a psychological distance as well from the commonplace values and realities of a class of society of which he was a part but not a member. It is a rich poetic resource, and Eliot may surely owe something of his ability to recognize his outsider’s view of things from an insider’s perspective, a view he exploits to such powerful effect in poems such as “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” to the influences of such equally foreign viewpoints and sensibilities as Baudelaire’s and Laforgue’s. The manner in which he ultimately addresses the Boston social order in the poem “The Boston Evening Transcript,” however, must finally be seen as pure Eliot.

SYNOPSIS The opening two verses quickly put the reader in an incongruous landscape in which people reading the Transcript, which would have at that time been the daily newspaper of choice among Boston’s affluent ruling class, such as it was, appear to be swaying in the wind “like a field of ripe corn.” While the juxtaposition of a crowd of urbanites reading a newspaper with a rural scene of ripened

“Boston Evening Transcript, The” corn blowing in the wind may not be anywhere near as startling as the evening sky and aetherized patient of “Prufrock” fame, it is nevertheless not quite expected. It surprises not so much for its shock value, as does the “Prufrock” simile, as for its being a non sequitur that works on many levels. The gritty image of printed pages with grimy black ink is contrasted with the yellows and greens of the corn stalks; the late evening gloom of a big city is contrasted with a sun-brightened farm field; the hectic pace of an industrial city in the Northeast is contrasted with the bucolic simplicity of the Great Plains farm belt. Maybe its all those nordic blonde heads of hair that one would be as likely to find in Boston as in Iowa that make the speaker digress so, but whatever it may be, the reader is not going to be quite himself or herself again for the remainder of the short poem. Stanza two begins just as ordinarily as the truncated first stanza, but this time there are no surprises until the end of the fourth line and the reference to La Rochefoucauld (or simply Rochefoucauld in less recent printings). Who, one may well wonder, is he, and what is he doing here on a residential street in Boston? The first question is relatively easy to answer. François, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) is renowned to this day for a volume of maxims that express the fruits of a lifetime spent cultivating the melancholic nature that permitted him to dispense his bits of worldly wisdom with an eloquently practical cynicism. For Eliot’s speaker, then, to describe his end-of-theday weariness as if he were bidding a long goodbye to someone of La Rochefoucauld’s dour pessimism standing at the end not merely of the street but of time itself makes the speaker’s weariness sound exceptionally wearisome.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY “The Boston Evening Transcript” is somewhat tongue in cheek, of course, although droll is a better description, since the idea that one is being amusingly odd, as everything about the speaker and his attitudes most certainly is, is peculiarly French in nature. Here Eliot’s speaker is hardly of the same ilk, for example, as other Eliot urban types, such as

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the terrified and terrifying sonambulist who walks the city streets of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” composed in March 1911, or even the spectral speaker of “Morning at the Window,” another poem composed in September 1914, much closer in time to the composition of “The Boston Evening Transcript.” The latter speaker seems almost vampirish in his ability to see into the “damp souls of housemaids” for no apparently worthy or worthwhile purpose. The speaker of “The Boston Evening Transcript” is instead a self-confessedly weary gentleman, tired, it may seem, of more than just the day’s tedium. Still, he remains kind and sociable enough to take the time to bring the Boston Evening Transcript in to his Cousin Harriet, for whom the arrival of the evening paper on her doorstep appears to be a part of the ritual of living in Boston, which at that time still took pride in referring to itself without any special blushes as the Hub of the Universe. Eliot, as the poet, is tipping his hat to such presumptions as well-off city dwellers make without offending their sensibilities, as a Baudelaire or Laforgue might have done, but nevertheless he does not commend their myopic provincialisms either. In summary, “The Boston Evening Transcript” may be a short poem, but it is not light verse. For all its undercut matter-of-factness, there is an uncomfortable quality to the speaker’s weariness, a suggestion that something more is at stake here than the fate of the speaker and his cousin. In this poem may be some of the first seeds of that despairing vision of contemporary urban life that sees not its seamy side, as “Rhapsody” and the “Preludes” had done, or its painful isolation, as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had accomplished, so much as its sickness of soul to the core. These are sociable people, after all. The speaker and the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript and Cousin Harriet, one and all, are the sort of people who might inhabit a novel or tale by Henry James—relatively decent, ordinary people whom the poet, if not the speaker, presents at the edge of a disaster that they do not see coming. It will entail the loss not of their little daily rituals, but of a vital community, and Eliot shortly became in writing The Waste Land, the poet

82 “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” who will remain most noted for having recorded that demise.

“Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” (1920) Everyone knows what a cigar is, but it is less likely that anyone other than scholars or travelers nowadays would know what a Baedeker is. In Eliot’s day, however, and particularly when he was writing the poem in question, Kurt Baedeker’s travel guides were regarded as indispensable to anyone who really wanted to see the sights. Covering any number of popular venues in Europe where curious travelers were likely to congregate and updated in annual editions, these guides offered in painstaking detail not merely descriptions but literally step-bystep directions to the sightseer, rather like today’s earphones that modern museums often provide. Baedeker is still in business, and in print, in a global economy where publications to help travelers, and traveling, have become a large and highly competitive business. As a publishing concept, nevertheless, Baedeker became and in some ways remains synonymous with treating certain historical places as if they were pictures on a wall, hung there for the passing enjoyment of sightseers, or, worse, pictures on a museum wall, hung there to be aesthetically admired but not otherwise engaged, making the past a kind of mental furnishings in a hotel lobby rather than a living part of the present. This may well be Eliot’s point. “A Game of Chess,” the second part of The Waste Land, depicts a middle-class couple whose apartment is decorated with images from out of the past, and he calls them “withered stumps of time” because the couple and their lives are no longer in any way connected to the significance of that past.

SYNOPSIS In the title “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” Eliot not only tells the reader that the poem will be peopled by tourists but that these particular tourists are here only to gape and other-

wise indulge their typical homegrown habits, as if what they are passing through is not a living present but a fossilized and catalogued past that, like Baedeker’s guides, presents photo opportunities at best, such as one might find in a museum. Then again, it is not as if Venice, of all cities, is still in a state of pristine innocence and glory. She has fallen on hard times if she must now rely on the kindness of strangers, tourists, for her livelihood. The reader need not wait until poem’s end and the posing of the question of who “clipped the lion’s wings / . . . flea’d his rump and pared his claws” to learn that the glory days of the Venetian Republic, personified in the purloined Byzantine lions of St. Mark’s, have long since passed. Indeed, though Venice is a far cry from the naval power that she once was, Eliot shows the old city-state still meretriciously trading on the decaying remnants of that long-faded prominence and power to draw those same gaping tourists to her waterways. The Epigraph In any case, that the attractions of Venice have by now become more reputation than reality is established by Eliot in the pastiche of the epigraph, combining views of Venice or things Venetian, as it were, from some six different sources, all unattributed and each presented successively without pause as if they were just so much flotsam in some sinuous canal wending its way through an old Venetian neighborhood. Indeed, the various allusions sweep past the mind’s eye exactly as the passing sights might be arranged in a rapidly succeeding order on the pages of a Baedeker or seen from the windows of a passing bus. Each allusion, taken individually, has its own particular significances, precisely as those objects viewed on a whirlwind tour are each worthy of a highly particularized attention that none of them will ever get from the experience-hungry tourist. “Burbank” is one of the so-called quatrain poems that Eliot was composing at the time, having been encouraged to do so by his good friend, the fellow American poet EZRA POUND. It is fitting, then, that the series of allusions in Eliot’s epigraph opens with a refrain from a poem by Théophile Gautier, the mid-19th French poet from whom Pound and Eliot borrowed the quatrain formula to begin with. With

“Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” their four-beat lines and four-line stanzas rhyming on the second and fourth lines, these quatrains lend themselves to the sort of verbal musicality and clever wordplay that might make even the most serious material sound lighthearted or frivolous. Eliot composed seven such poems between 1917 and 1919. While there is no precise dating available for “Burbank,” which was not published until 1920 in Ara Vos Prec, Eliot’s second collection, the poem definitely comes out of the same experimentations with the quatrain form that produced “The Hippopotamus” and “Sweeney Erect,” to name just two other outstanding examples. The next snippet in Eliot’s epigraph is the saint’s motto from a painting by Andrea Mantegna of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian that is now in a Venetian collection. The Latin motto tells the viewer that nothing except the divine endures, all else being smoke (a theme that Eliot will develop much further in “The Fire Sermon,” part III of The Waste Land). Then come fragments from a work by the 19th-century American novelist Henry James, The Aspern Papers; a masque by the English Elizabethan playwright John Marston; a dramatic monologue by the 19th-century English poet Robert Browning; and Othello by William Shakespeare—Othello being, along with The Merchant of Venice, the classic literary example of utilizing Venice as the standin for a sort of Renaissance Whore of Babylon. That echo of Othello also hints at a line from The Merchant of Venice, however, which also deals with the issue of prejudice and has a Venetian setting if not theme. Therein lies a potential allusion to the dangers of ANTI-SEMITISM, for while the play portrays Shylock as a merciless Jewish moneylender, he is also given the opportunity to make his celebrated defense of religious and racial tolerance in his “Has not a Jew hands” speech. If so, this oblique reference to the essential injustice of anti-Semitism found in the epigraph is a cautionary to which Bleistein, who is portrayed as a highly acquisitive Jewish person from Chicago, will subsequently play a disarmingly redundant foil. The idea of the epigraph ultimately is to portray Venice as a sort of scab on the human consciousness, a venue of delights, dangers, and derring-do,

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but largely decay. It is, after all, a city that floats on a mirror of water, always shimmering, never quite what it appears to be. Thanks in large part to the cynical 15th-century political treatise The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli, as well as to the fact that any major metropolis built on a series of swampy islands is liable to haunt the human imagination as a place of illusory and ephemeral beauty, Venice had long been synonymous with vanity, deception, betrayal, and, again, decay. The treatment that Shakespeare’s brave but gullible Othello gets at the hands of the villainous Venetian Iago illustrates vividly the iconic place as a city of lies and liars that Venice had assumed in the European imagination. The Poem “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” as the epigraph makes clear, simply continues the longstanding English-language literary tradition of corrupt Venice, but from the point of view of Americans, who have their own problems with the gaudy and ephemeral. Very shortly, in poems like “Gerontion” and especially The Waste Land, as well as in prose pieces, most notably “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and his review of Irish novelist’s JAMES JOYCE’s masterpiece Ulysses, titled “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” Eliot, a European-American, would apparently deplore the diminishment of the importance in which the achievements of Europe’s past were being held and regarded. To his generation, it must have seemed that a Europe that mere decades before had set herself up as the glory of civilization and crown of the ages was fast becoming caught up in the getting and spending of a frenetic commercial materialism, not to mention the awful destructiveness of World War I. What better venue to depict this contradictory conflict between past realities and present bewilderments than Venice, the city dedicated to Venus and to the license of the Carnival, where nothing is as it seems and everyone is seeking only one thing—personal satisfaction, often at another’s expense? However, “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” is a work from Eliot’s quatrain phase, when he seemed to be as uncertain about the direction that his poetry should take, or was taking, as he was unclear about whether the catastrophe that

84 “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” had become contemporary Western culture was a catastrophe of worldwide and historical proportions or simply a not very entertaining turn on a musichall stage. As a result, the poem is more clever than cautionary, and in a way that is as often offensive as it is difficult, occasionally, to make heads or tails of. Like the crowd of no-goods in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” the poet introduces into “Burbank” a madcap crew that, in addition to Burbank and Bleistein, includes a Venetian princess, Volupine, whose name is connotative both of voluptuousness and a fox (volpe in Italian), and another European aristocrat, Sir Ferdinand Klein. Just who they are supposed to be is not as important as what they represent. One of the Habsburgs, the last rulers of Austria-Hungary, had toyed with the idea of renouncing his title and becoming a commoner named Sir Ferdinand Berg; Sir Ferdinand, either way, represents an aristocracy in decline. (“Klein” means little in German.) The princess, meanwhile, is apparently of very old Venetian stock, since she is “phthisic,” or asthmatic, perhaps from generations of breathing in the city’s notoriously miasmal air. Added to the mix of those who had known better days are the Greek demigod Hercules and the 18th-century landscape artist Canaletto, renowned for his highly detailed vistas of Venice, particularly the Grand Canal. The puzzle is in figuring out just how all these various elements of characterization described through an over-the-top vocabulary while they are pursuing low-life shenanigans interact in formulating some order of thematic stability, but it becomes no puzzle at all once the reader realizes that the one thing that the persons of the drama, such as it is, all have in common is that they have fallen under the hallucinatory spell of Venice itself. Look too long from a rocking gondola into the lapping, garbage-strewn waters of the canals and one can become dizzy, disoriented, and deceived. Trash becomes treasure. In its own manner, the poetry mimics these effects. Surely, the American tourists Burbank and Bleistein are presented in abbreviated slapstick vignettes that abruptly contrast with totems of the rich cultural inheritance of the Mediterranean peoples, but then there are these contemporary Euro-

pean aristocrats to deal with. They seem to regard all commerce among cultures as an effort to be engaged in solely for the purpose of selling or buying in the skin trade. At the very least, Burbank has apparently fallen under the spell of these decadent Europeans who are living in the relatively dilapidated midst of their past splendors and present intrigues. He has fallen into the princess’s clutches as the poem begins, although she is coupled with Klein by poem’s end. While Bleistein finds more pleasure in a good cigar than in a liaison with a titled European courtesan, he too has been charmed, in this case by European art, at least inasmuch as it might fetch him a handsome resale value on the home market back in the States. Perhaps he is there to acquire things rather than adventures and social diseases, like his compatriot Burbank. That cigar and ethnic name, however, make him this poem’s Sweeney, who knows the value of a dollar and nothing else. But Eliot feels free to portray Bleistein in another, harsher light than one that is distinctive merely of the acquisitive crassness that the cigar suggests and that, in his own fleshpot manner, Burbank shares. Eliot also wishes to make it abundantly clear that Bleistein is Jewish: “Chicago Semite Viennese.” Virtually as a caricaturist might, Eliot further portrays Bleistein with “lusterless protrusive” eyes and as “protozoic slime.” Lower indeed than the rats that lurk under the pilings that hold the Venetian Rialto up is, in the speaker’s view, the “jew . . . underneath the lot”—which may mean that the Jew is beneath everyone else or behind every business deal in the auction houses where Canalettos and other masterpieces of Venetian art may occasionally be sold. Whatever else Eliot may be getting at here—there may be, for example, another oblique reference to Shakespeare’s Shylock in the phrase “[o]n the Rialto once”—it is difficult to account for the awful savagery with which Eliot identifies and then depicts Bleistein’s ethnicity. It is not as if any other characters in the poem fare any better, however, whatever their ethnicity may be. When last seen, after all, Burbank, a surname that may bring to mind Luther Burbank, the worldrenowned agronomist who introduced more than 800 new strains of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and

“Byron” grasses that helped initiate a revolution in agriculture and food production (but for whom the city of Burbank, California, is not named), is meditating on time’s ruins and the seven Noahid laws—the Jewish laws from God’s covenant with Noah to which even non-Jews are expected to adhere.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Luther Burbank, a personage with whom Eliot would certainly have been familiar, would only later—in 1926—become a celebrated freethinker, denying publicly the existence of any divinity or the soul’s immortality in response to the famous Scopes trial of 1925, when a high school teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwinism. But Eliot wrote his poem in 1919 at best. Perhaps this Burbank of Eliot’s is his poem’s token white AngloSaxon Protestant, or WASP, like himself. If so, he hangs suspended between, on the one hand, the evidence that Venice and St. Sebastian’s motto offer—nothing lasts forever—and the possibility, on the other hand, that there are nevertheless eternal laws by which humans are supposed to guide their behavior. If there are such laws, not even the Jewish Bleistein, hanging out with so many amoral nominative Christians, seems to be heeding them nowadays. In the final analysis, and as the overthe-top richness of the epigraph seems to suggest, Eliot seems to have tried to outdo himself with this quatrain, and it is a welcome conclusion that it may have been the last of them. As an attempt to render poetically a veritable pagan carnival of excesses, “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” rivals “Sweeney Erect” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” and as such it can be regarded as a minor sort of poetic achievement. However, those latter two quatrain poems, in their caricature of the Irish-Catholic hooligan Sweeney, also appear to step over the line of racial and religious bigotry. Perhaps one cannot expose bigotry without depicting it, as, for example, “Gerontion,” which also contains a blatantly antiSemitic sentiment, may be doing, inasmuch as it has for its speaker a person other than the poet. It is difficult, nevertheless, not to read Eliot’s personal values into the bigotries exposed in “Burbank” and the Sweeney poems. For a poem that carries pre-

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ponderantly the theme of a present that is squandering the riches of the past, among those riches Eliot has clearly placed Judaism, and among the squanderers he has put Bleistein. That is stereotyping, to be sure, but it is not necessarily anti-Semitism. Indeed, in view of its profound expression of belief in the divine covenant on which Judaism is founded, it may in fact be pro-Semitic.

“Burnt Norton” (1936) See FOUR QUARTETS.

“Byron” (1937) For those who know the name and its associations, Byron conjures up an era, a world, a universe of everything that is dashingly wild and reckless and daring—in a word, romantic. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1786–1822), the early 19th-century Scotch-English poet and adventurer, was the most celebrated figure of the romantic era, not only in the British Isles but on the European Continent as well. Handsome and swashbuckling and as cheeky as privilege and early fame might make a man, he was also a great champion of liberty and freedom, in keeping with the best part of the spirit of the age that spawned him and of which he became, in the view of posterity, the primary exemplar. Eliot himself, in a 1954 essay on another great literary figure of the same era, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), gives Byron the credit that is his due: “In Byron we have a poet who was the poet of an Age, and for that Age the poet of all Europe.” It is high praise, identifying as Byron’s alone a perhaps unequaled accomplishment in literary history. Yet in this much earlier essay of Eliot’s, from 1937, one which was included in a collection of essays, From Anne to Victoria, edited by Bonamy Dubrée, and subsequently reprinted in the 1956 collection of Eliot’s prose, On Poetry and Poets, Eliot has nothing but the most searingly negative criticism to offer regarding

86 “Byron” Byron’s achievements and contribution as a poet. The difference is, however, that in the first case, Eliot is acknowledging Byron’s indisputable place in history, whereas in the second, he is assessing Byron’s legacy as a poet.

SYNOPSIS By the time of Eliot’s first writing, Byron, who had been the undisputed titan of contemporary English verse throughout most of the 19th century and who appeared likely to continue to hold an equally unassailable place for centuries to come, had fallen into neglect among both scholars and readers of poetry. A great part of the cause for this neglect, no doubt, was the simple fact that someone who was so fashionable in his own time would be far more likely to fall out of fashion once the tenor of the times had changed—as they did radically as a result of such catastrophic events as World War I. In the face of such a vast and tragic debacle for what until then had been the much-vaunted primacy of European civilization, there seemed no longer to be a place in the cultural landscape for a man like Byron, a posturing sensualist and satirist and an old-style aristocrat to boot, full of high sentence but a bit obtuse. Although Eliot does not necessarily ignore that cause as the reason for Byron’s decline, he does slight it, however, for the much more critically astute observation that Byron was more a self-aggrandizing showman than poet—if to define poet one takes a cue from a later essay by Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” originally presented in 1953. There Eliot defined the first voice—what most would call the lyric voice, although Eliot claims to dislike the term—as that one wherein the poet engages in the constant struggle to craft the nuances of experience into words. That struggle never formed any part of Byron’s agenda, in Eliot’s view. Rather, Byron has “been admired for what are his most ambitious attempts to sound poetic,” Eliot says in his effort to account for the elder poet’s current neglect, and those attempts, on examination, have turned out “to be fake: nothing more than sonorous affirmations of the commonplace with no depth of significance.” That is a very serious, almost killing criticism. Eliot has virtually charged Byron

with being a dilletante and a charlatan—categories considerably lower than even that of being a lowly amateur. Actually, however, Eliot is praising Byron for accomplishing as much: “He was an actor who devoted immense trouble to becoming a role that he adopted; his superficiality was something that he created for himself.” It is, one must admit, an interesting thesis— that Byron is the poet of shallowness. Anyone who knows Byron’s poetry and his poetic voice well would not be quick to argue with the idea that Byron had raised being superficial to the level of an art. In essence, Byron’s poetry, whatever its ostensible topic, is about none other than Byron, “every inch the touring tragedian.” It aims always “to keep us interested in the story-teller himself, and through this interest to interest us more in the story,” to the extent that “the attraction of the personality is powerful.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Keeping in mind as well that Eliot was one of the foremost proponents of impersonality in poetry, the cult of personality that Byron helped engender in literary matters could not have pleased Eliot too much either. The end result, in Byron’s case, is a poetry that is all show and no substance, since its value is contingent on the reader’s knowledge of the poet’s personality, rather than any inherent merit of its own. “We have come to expect poetry to be something very concentrated, very distilled; but if Byron had distilled his verse, there would have been nothing whatever left.” The conclusion to Eliot’s praiseful condemnation of Byron in this, his one-note treatment of an otherwise eminent romantic, comes toward the middle of his essay. Byron, who poeticizes like “an accomplished foreigner writing English,” “added nothing to the language, . . . discovered nothing in the sounds, . . . developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words.” He was, in other words, not a poet. As an inventor of a public self in whom an entire epoch invested its meaning, “Byron made a vocation out of what for most of us is an irregular weakness”—total self-absorption. It is hardly praise, but, if read rightly, it is not criticism, either. The creative

“Catholicism and International Order” impulse can take many forms and pursue many outlets. Byron’s were indisputably creative ventures, but, for Eliot at least, they were not poetry—certainly not great poetry. As the living memory of the personality and celebrity fades and only the so-called poetry remains, it stands to reason that Byron’s greatness as a poet would decline too, as, by the time of Eliot’s writing, it apparently had. All that Eliot is attempting to do is to discern how and why that decline can, by now, be witnessed as the inevitable by-product of Byron’s meteoric fame to begin with. Having been built on and of air, that fame collapsed as easily and quickly.

“Catholicism and International Order” (1933) At first glance, particularly in our postmodernist environment of a widespread tolerance for multiculturalism and diversity on all fronts, Eliot’s title for this essay might raise both eyebrows and hackles. Originally delivered as an address before the Anglo-Catholic Summer School of Sociology at Oxford in 1933 and subsequently printed in Christendom, the article, which was ultimately collected, in 1936, in Eliot’s Essays Ancient and Modern, seems to be advocating what nowadays approaches the unspeakable—a religious foundation to international order. The volume, meanwhile, was a somewhat altered reprinting of an earlier collection, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Order and Style, from which he now omitted several older pieces and added several later ones, including the essay now at hand, and which itself had expressed Eliot’s disappointment with the spiritual state of the modern world.

SYNOPSIS The essay’s tone is extremely polemical, but Eliot is not necessarily proselytizing. True, Eliot says that “a Christian world-order, the Christian world-order, is ultimately the only one which, from any point of view, will work.” That may sound like Eliot is proposing the imposition of values and beliefs—which

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also happen to be his—on others who do not share those values and beliefs, and that very well may be the case. However, it is as likely, and therefore more likely, given Eliot’s own background as a broadminded idealist, that he does not mean anything like that. Rather than proposing a worldwide theocracy founded on Christian principles, Eliot may be proposing a foundation for international order that is based on a system of ideals that have a more long-range and enduring scope. The failure of the so-called secular democracies may eventually be that they are founded on nothing more substantial finally than the shifting sands of majority opinions and journalism. In contrast, what Eliot will shortly be calling a Christian society, in the 1939 work The Idea of a Christian Society, would not require the universal adherence to a particular doctrine so much as the general adherence to a universal doctrine. That, after all, is precisely what catholic means. Religious belief, even if it is not universally practiced and adhered to among a populace, gives shape, cohesion, and direction to a community, whether that be at the local, the regional, the national, or the international level. And it is this shape, cohesion, and direction that constitute order and tradition, Eliot’s cherished cultural safeguards. “All one’s views and theories, of course, have some ultimate relation to the kind of man one is,” Eliot observes, and he continues, “But only the Catholic, in practice, is under the manifest obligation to find out what sort of man he is—because he is under the obligation to improve that man according to definite ideals and standards.” The matter is not that people of other faiths are not under the same requirements, but that a people without any faith at all are not. Eliot had been attracted to Catholic political ideologies and movements such as Charles Maurras’s Action française as early as the student year that he spent in Paris as a young man in 1910 and 1911. While he would later repudiate Maurras’s overzealousness that led him to collaborate with the Nazis during the German occupation of much of France during World War II, it is not political action that Eliot is calling for even at this juncture. Rather it is a question of the attitude by which

88 “Catholicism and International Order” societies operate: “A really satisfactory working philosophy of social action, as distinct from devices for getting ourselves out of a hole at the moment, requires not merely science but wisdom.” That said, he can iterate what is the central premise of the entire debate: “I believe that the Catholic Church, with its inheritance from Israel and from Greece, is still, as it always has been, the great repository of wisdom.” In the final analysis, however, it is a matter of whether the individual is regarded and treated as a social integer to be manipulated and, so, possibly exploited by varying species of systems engineers and bureaucratic regulations, or, instead, as a spiritual being whose social needs must be addressed always in that larger context. In earlier essays from the late 1920s on the dangers of a too secular humanism, Eliot had noted that such ideas are posited on a view of the human as something little more than a very cunning animal. Rather, such vital foundational principles to the political and social order as the “conception of individual liberty, for instance, must be based upon the unique importance of every single soul, the knowledge that every man is ultimately responsible for his own salvation or damnation, and the consequent obligation of society to allow every individual the opportunity to develop his full humanity.” Lest Eliot’s attitudes be painted with too broad a brush, there is no doubt that his aim is finally “the conversion of the whole world” to Catholic Christian belief. He questions the efficacy of secular world bodies and governments such as the League of Nations portends, with its corollary assumption that all religious approaches are different but equal. “The only positive unification of the world,” he asserts, “is religious unification,” and that would mean under the ecclesiastical hierarchy, finally, of Catholic Christianity. His further argument that “cultural unity in religion” is not “cultural uniformity” is not the palliative that he must hope it to be. Here, again, Eliot’s views would be not so much modified as ameliorated and refined as the years passed, so that by 1948 and the publication of his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, he would limit his insistence on a wholly Christian basis to

culture to the European experience, which is indisputably Christian in its historical development. In 1933, however, Eliot sounds like the most rabid of Christian partisans and religious imperialists. The difference may be that in 1933 another worldwide conflict was already looming, whereas by 1948 it had already taken its awful toll. Eliot may be forgiven, then, for taking such a radical position when the aim, even if not fully articulated as such, is to offer a solution that, among other things, might avoid such another terrible human conflict. Eliot’s is perceptive enough to recognize that even the ostensible unity of culture that a union of belief may bring about is not any guarantee against human conflict, particularly between nations and peoples. Nevertheless, the issue for him is whether or not any other human solution can work so well as to justify the complete abandonment of a common faith’s being at least a solution, and one that serves a great number of social and individual needs as well. “Our duty,” Eliot contends, assuming, apparently, that societies must first and foremost be practical in their deliberations, “with regard to all purely secular attempts to set the world right, is to welcome them for what they are worth.” For Eliot, speaking as both a person of faith and a citizen, these attempts are not worth ignoring each individual as a spiritual being with an eternal soul and the need, primarily, to perfect that. One can argue, of course, that there are other means of addressing that need than the conversion of the world to a Catholic Christianity; but Eliot’s point is otherwise well taken. A reliance upon the secular, the rational, the scientific, as the solution to and panacea for every social, economic, and political ill results only in an endless parade of new but terribly similar panaceas as each new plan fails. For, like all things human, our purely secular solutions are imperfect and bound to failure. An increasing commerce among nations, for example, seems to make merely for increasing conflict, so that some “are beginning to suspect that internationalism can be the enemy of international amity.” Without a religious focus, a spiritual bias, furthermore, these tribulations take on more significance than they in fact have. When the world seems to be everything, nothing can suffice for too long as a satisfactory world, and reform

“Catholicism and International Order” becomes an endless process of tinkering with matters that cannot be perfected. In contrast, those who have an eye on eternity are saved from distraction and, so, can keep a sense of proportion, for “the Catholic cannot commit himself utterly and absolutely to any one form of temporal order.” That resilience is a hedge against tomorrow that is also a hedge against yesterday and today. Thus, the Catholic “may suitably give up his life for temporal causes, but never his sense of values.” As Eliot pursues his line of reasoning, his conclusion becomes more and more inevitable, even if not necessarily universally welcomed or acceptable. His particular brand of belief may not appeal, but his description of the problem is less difficult to resist. For who can gainsay the fact that the modern world is in as much trouble as the world has ever been, and yet modern thinkers claim that all those nagging issues that have plagued humanity for ages have been resolved in the rushing tide of intellectual and spiritual reform. Still, Eliot is hopeful. “There are, surely, ways of reorganizing the mechanisms of this world, which in bringing about a greater degree of justice and peace on that plane will also facilitate the development of the Christian life and the salvation of souls.” This is what Eliot will call the “middle way”—the ability to be in the world but not of it: to participate in the day to day but not succumb to the allure that it is everything. “The attitude of the Catholic towards any form of organization, national or international,” Eliot concludes, can and should be “a way of mediation,” as has just been described, “but never, in those matters which permanently matter, a way of compromise.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY It would be wise to recall that Eliot’s remarks were initially presented as those of a man of faith speaking to other people of the same belief system. The fervor and concern with which he expounds his opinions and stakes out the grounds of his convictions commend them to attention for that very reason. Sectarian interests and factors aside, however, it is important to cut through these more parochial aspects of the issue, not to dismiss or ignore them so much as to appreciate the importance of Eliot’s central premise.

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Eliot at the time, the summer of 1933, had been going through a lengthy retrenchment—although perhaps it was really only a clarification—of his conservative religious and spiritual views that had not yet either topped or bottomed out, depending on his detractors’ points of view. He had been acknowledged publicly since his 1927 conversion to AngloCatholicism as a Lost Leader of reformist ideas and a lost sheep as well, if the forces of a liberalizing secularism were to have their way and their say. There had always been a hardy traditionalist bent to Eliot’s intellectual, cultural, and even personal style, however, despite the radical innovativeness of his way with a poem. Indeed, when the chips were down, he was always liable to come down on the side of what he called orthodoxy—right teaching and, if the truth be known, right thinking, certainly inasmuch as he was concerned. Classicism—an adherence to the traditions of an inherited, absolutist body of thought and feeling—and Catholicism embodied these ways of thinking and behaving. Romanticism and a secular humanism, with their appeal to subjective authority and relativistic moralities, were, if not the enemy, then at least a present danger. Shortly, Eliot would be going as far as he possibly could in condemning what he regarded as the freewheeling liberalism of the contemporary social and cultural scene. In 1934, he would castigate its adherents one and all in After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, wherein he defined heresy not as falsehoods but as attractive half-truths, a state of affairs that makes them all that much dangerous, in his view. One can disprove a lie, but half-truths have a way of morphing into something else just as one has mustered his logic and is ready to go in for the kill. Readers, particularly those most inclined to find these views of his unsympathetic, are liable to do him a great disservice, however, if he and his views are looked on as nothing more than the narrowminded, perhaps even seriously bigoted ravings of a proto-Evangelical fundamentalist. Eliot had a highly trained mind, a scrupulously fine-honed sensibility, and a fair-minded conscientiousness. While he could, in the thick of it, be contentious, his arguments were always carefully thought out. On balance, “Catholicism and International Order,”

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for all the fascist overtones of its title, is nowhere near as outrageous a proposition as it may appear at first glance. That humanity now inhabits a planet on which international order is of a paramount concern is the indisputable premise behind his every thought and utterance. Horrific conflicts can no longer be confined to regions or nations or even continents, nor can the effects of economic and social forces and pressures for good or for ill. Eliot contends that the policies that organize those measures that govern the processes of what was fast becoming a global community even in Eliot’s time need to be founded on something more substantial than the vagaries of popular opinion manipulated by mass media and of the latest fads in the “most advanced thinking.” He proposes that that “something more substantial” be the tenets of Catholicism. For Eliot, that doctrine is founded on more than 4,000 years of human tradition, not to mention a scripture that the faithful regard as the revealed Word of God.

Choruses from The Rock (1934) No other poetry of Eliot’s is as unabashedly religious in both tone and substance as the choruses from the pageant play The Rock, and with good reason. The play was intended to call attention to the plans of the diocese of London to build 45 new suburban churches wherever there were notable increases in the local population. It had come as a surprise to many that the plan encountered opposition from among those who felt that there were already enough churches, thus exposing an increasing spirit of secularism and materialism in the sort of society that England and the modern industrial world in general were becoming.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS It would make sense that Eliot, one of the original “great lights” of the modernist movement with its radical reorganization of literature, would for that have been aligned with such “forward” and secular ways of thinking. However, he had more and more

begun to cast his social and spiritual lot with more traditional and orthodox ways of thinking. Still, it was a combination of fortuitous events that contrived not so much to put him in the center of this particular controversy as to give him the opportunity to execute a complete verse drama, even if the circumstances of its actual composition forced him very quickly to disown all but the choruses. Virtually from the start of his literary career, Eliot had had an interest in and a decided talent for dramatization. Whether under the tutelage by example of the poetic masks employed by one of his earliest known influences, the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE, or whether that influence itself was enabled by Eliot’s own instincts toward making up characters who would then speak their plight rather than necessarily his own, as in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot had, by the time of the 1922 publication of his first truly major work, The Waste Land, perfected a style of writing poetry that was almost totally dependent for its effectiveness on the copious employment of modulating voices that could then be contrasted with each other to achieve at least the semblance of meaning, rather like a chorus from an ancient Greek drama. By the mid-1920s, with a poem sequence such as “The Hollow Men,” which is in parts a choral chant spoken by a collective “we,” and with “Sweeney Agonistes,” which is an attempt at a verse drama, though left unfinished, Eliot’s chief mode of composition was by and large dramatic, albeit confined for the most part to poems that may otherwise appear to be lyrical, such as “Journey of the Magi” and “Song for Simeon,” but that are, in fact, dramatic monologues. This tendency culminated in many readers’ finding it impossible not to imagine that the first-person speaker of the short lyrics that compose 1930’s “Ash-Wednesday” could be the poet, so much had they become used to Eliot’s tendency to dramatize the speaker in his poetry. And indeed, Eliot had perhaps found a way to separate successfully the experiences of his own person from the creative processes required for the purposes of composition. This was the very kind of separation, as he had famously proposed in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that enabled the per-

Choruses from The Rock fecting of both the poetic talent and the poetic product. However, Eliot’s increasing interest in and commitment to the dimensions of faith and of the continuing need for ongoing spiritual traditions in the modern world were becoming both more pronounced in his prose writing and more public, too. In an essay as early as 1923, “The Function of Criticism,” Eliot had entered the socioliterary fracas of the time by coming out in support of Catholicism and classicism against the forces of secularism and romanticism. As both his celebrity and notoriety spread, his critical positions on social issues became more and more the grist for interest among other opinion makers, many of whom did not share his apparent conservativism and orthodoxy when it came to religion, and he began to respond to their criticism with an unabashed vigor. Using the editorship of the Criterion and his position with Faber & Faber as a publishing forum for these only somewhat extraliterary considerations, by 1928, in his preface to the prose volume For Lancelot Andrewes, a 17th-century Anglican divine, Eliot felt free to declare himself openly a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. All of these positions were anathema to the social and cultural agenda of modernist radicalism that his poetry seemed till now to have been advancing. In the meantime, another development was taking place that would soon intersect with Eliot’s dramatic talents and religious interests, to the benefit of 20th-century drama. Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism in June of 1927. In 1930, meanwhile, the Most Reverend George Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chichester, turned to a young man named E. MARTIN BROWNE (1900–80) to reinvigorate the longstanding relationship between drama and religion in the English church, appointing him to be the diocesan director of religious drama. In the late Middle Ages, this relationship had been a part of the bedrock for keeping the laity in close touch with the divine mysteries on which the Christian faith was founded. Bishop Bell’s intention was to make drama a tool for the church in the 20th century as well.

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Browne and Eliot first met at Bishop Bell’s episcopal palace in December 1930, during a weekend visit in which Eliot read from his just-published “Ash-Wednesday,” a poem sequence with a decidedly religious bent. Aside from it and the unfinished “Coriolan,” whose poetry, in “Triumphal March” and “Difficulties of a Statesman,” was more in keeping with Eliot’s social and political concerns, Eliot felt that he was marking time with his poetry writing and was once again convinced, as he had been at a number of other key junctures in his career, that he had “exhausted [his] meager poetic gifts.” Browne, an actor by training, had, in the meantime, turned his own directing abilities toward recreating from the 14,000 lines of the York mystery cycle, a 14th-century pageant play depicting the Bible from the Creation to the Last Judgment, a manageable production that is still used in performances to this day. Browne then agreed to write the scenario for a pageant play to aid the Anglican diocese of London’s church-building fund. Although he was himself working from a story line that was based on historical episodes suggested by another individual, the Reverend R. Webb-Odell, Browne turned to Eliot for the writing of the choruses and the dialogue. The resulting pageant play, The Rock, was performed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London from May 28 to June 9, 1934. It related the building of a church in London to the church’s long history of struggle in England from earliest Christian times, culminating in the present difficulties that the modern church was encountering. Along with threats from new, secular notions of the nationstate represented by fascism and communism, there were increasing pressures toward consumerism and materialism that a capitalist economy were forcing on an all-too-willing populace. Eliot was still working on the texts well into the spring of the play’s performance schedule, and it was reported that he was none too pleased at the rehearsals, the cast being composed of amateurs drawn from area parishes. He had to be aware, and concerned, too, that those friends from his avantgarde days would likely be troubled by this lowering of his creative sights, let alone his making his turn to orthodox religious values a public occasion.

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Financially, the production was a great success, drawing some 1,500 in paid attendance. For the drama, in addition to the choruses, Eliot had to provide dialogue for what amounted to a company of stock characters, in many cases merely identified by their roles and functions (the Plutocrat, the Agitator, the Unemployed, the Major) but even when identified by name (Ethelbert the foreman, Mrs. Ethelbert, Mrs. Poulridge, Millicent) mainly there to mouth conflicting ideas and values. While that may have given Eliot an opportunity, in fleshing out the roles and choruses with words, to give voice to his own longstanding opinions regarding the deadening effects of the modern urban environment, it also cast those ideas and opinions more in the tone of preaching and sermonizing rather than in the sort of presentation and demonstration required by the most rigorous standards of poetry, sharply diminishing any serious literary pretensions for the resulting finished work. In addition, his work was the result of a commission rather than of original intent on his part, forced as he was to work within a preconceived structure. After the pageant play’s initial publication as a complete work by Faber & Faber in 1934, Eliot demanded that his contribution—which in essence amounted to the text—no longer be brought out in print with the exception of the choruses. Beginning with Collected Poems, 1909–1935, readers will find only “Choruses from The Rock” among Eliot’s collected work, making it impossible for all but serious scholars to access the original text. It is with respect to that limitation and that wish on the poet’s part that the following discussion confines itself to the 10 numbered choruses that Eliot saw fit to bequeath to posterity as a portion of his own chosen canon.

SYNOPSIS Eliot may very well have welcomed, even relished the opportunity to flex his polemical muscle afforded him by the commission to flesh out the scenario for The Rock with words of his own choosing. Since the mid-1920s, Eliot had been moving further and further away from a poetry whose

ostensible theme, as opposed to meaning, was virtually impossible to discern. While he would not necessarily abandon the obscurities that a heightened erudition and density of verse line had made his stock in trade, that movement of his toward a clearer thematic agenda was perfectly understandable, for his poetic vision had changed radically as well, in keeping with his evolving social, political, and religious views. Still, those changes may ultimately have been only in matters of emphasis, for his primary concerns continued to focus, as they had from the beginning, on the dilemmas of the individual awash in the bewildering chaotic sea of modernist relativism, whereby, since every intellectual and spiritual approach was regarded as a valuable and viable alternative to some other, none was. So Eliot must have relished the chance to take off the kid gloves and say what he really meant to say to an audience who was prepared to hear it. The context of the choruses would not only have permitted him to address the root causes of spiritual distress that he had been analyzing in his poetry at least from the time of The Waste Land but to address what he regarded as the solution to that distress as well, that being a life based on some species of spiritual belief. The Rock of the title, then, is variously identified as Christ—as the hymn puts it, “the Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord”—or as the apostle Simon, to whom Jesus declared, “Upon this rock I will build my Church,” henceforth enabling the faithful to identify him as Peter, which means “rock.” In either case, or in any other that the human imagination might come up with in the fertile energy with which it devises spiritual and religious metaphors, the reader can see that The Rock is definite enough to have a readily identifiable meaning for devotees of Christian doctrine, yet it does not necessarily transgress the belief system of anyone else who may, whatever his or her faith or lack of faith, at least agree with the general premise that humans, and human society, cannot be sustained by the vanities of worldly pursuits alone. Eliot’s poetry in the choruses makes this essential and central point.

Choruses from The Rock Part I The first chorus begins with a general condemnation of the modern world’s love affair with its technological and scientific achievements, through which humanity has come to know more but understand less, with the result that the 20 centuries since the inception of Christianity have brought people “farther from God and nearer to the Dust.” Then the focus sharpens, and the immediate locale and circumstances are brought to mind for the audience. It is London, the “timekept City,” a reminder, perhaps, that the entire world now keeps the hour by Greenwich mean time, but the tenor of the times there in London now, according to the chorus, is that there are “too many churches, / And too few chop-houses.” This focus is clearly asking the audience at least to accede to the proposition that “man does not live by bread alone,” which one would find an abundance of, along with cuts of roast meat, potatoes, and sundry other edibles, in any good chop-house. The danger, of course, is that it is always easier to yield to the needs of the body, the flesh, than those of the spirit, and this is a riskier proposition, oddly enough, the more prosperous a community becomes. That there is no place in such well-fed, well-ensconced lives for the church to expand its interests, which are their souls, is the great danger when the countryside is “only fit for picnics,” the churches only for “important weddings.” Everything fits now into its social purpose, rather than its spiritual one. Into this kind of vacuity, where lives are led only for the pleasures of the moment (and even domestic bliss can become a vacuous experience in this scheme of things), The Rock appears, intoning the collective wisdom of the ages. Life is “ceaseless labor”; all things change; there is a “perpetual struggle” between good and evil in which all humans take part; the desert, age-old symbol of emptiness and aridity of thought and feeling, is “not remote in the southern tropics” but rather “squeezed in the tube-train next to you, / . . . in the heart of your brother.” The subtle, allusive, and fragmentary means by which Eliot had expressed these very same ideas in The Waste Land and other earlier urban poetry, with its crowd of hollow men passing

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listlessly over the modern city’s bridges on their way to work as clerks and typists in the modern city’s countless bureaus and offices, is here reduced to its most bare and direct immediacy. No one who has ever stood shoulder to shoulder with his or her modern urban compatriots in a subway train or on an intracity bus in the early morning hours or late at night can miss the poetry’s point: Life, which has always been ceaseless labor, may by now have become pointless labor as well. For what point is there to labor that serves only the passing moment and the body’s incessant desire to be satiated with food and creature comforts at the expense of the soul’s unspoken needs? And unspoken they shall be, for both the individual and the community at large, without the services of the church. If Eliot, as some critics of this poetry claim, has reduced the former power and rich complexity of his poetry in order to fit it more easily into the requirements of a broad audience and broadly public theme and purpose, he has nevertheless, inasmuch as he has not so much a message as a vision, found a new métier for its expression. These words are not intended for a literary audience, but for any audience. The ideas were always intended in that manner as well. Whether Eliot is, as a consequence, doing more here in this new theatrical venue by doing less or whether he is simply doing less, he is getting out the word as he sees and hears it, fulfilling the function of the poet who, as he says in his essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in writing as himself writes his age. Part I ends with Workmen chanting that they shall build this needed church brick by brick. There are then heard, antiphonally, the voices of the Unemployed, of whom there would at that time be many worldwide in the midst of the Great Depression that had commenced with the collapse of the U.S. stock market in October 1929, their voices lamenting the fact that they have no share in the creature comforts and chop-houses that many others enjoy. These voices make the point that the building creates jobs, after all. Eliot ends the first chorus with the Workmen welcoming from among the Unemployed more hands with which to “build

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the meaning”: “A Church for all / And a job for each.” Part II By the opening of the second chorus, Eliot has made his thesis perfectly clear: The church serves the needs of the community and the individual in more than just spiritual ways, although since the spiritual is the church’s focus, it is not as likely to let its commitment to either the community or the individual waver out of a commitment to other concerns, such as the profit motive or rank popularity. (It would do well to recall the central metaphor: The church is, after all, The Rock.) This point—“There is no life that is not in community, / And no community not lived in praise of GOD”—will sustain the rest of the poetry as the work continues, and as it continues, too, it takes on a decidedly sectarian point of view from time to time. It would be not only foolish for Eliot to deviate from the immediate parochial concerns of the pageant play at hand, but out of keeping with his own commitment to the local immediacies of the cause that he is promoting. Therefore, he openly refers not only to belief in Christ Jesus and in the Body of Christ incarnate, overt references that he would not to this point have made in his poetry, but to the British race as well (keeping in mind that at this time, “race” was used in a far looser and broader sense, encompassing ethnicities as well). Part III The third chorus takes up the contrapuntal chant again, this in quasi-biblical terms, as a lament is raised for all those who are enamored not of God’s work but of their own and of the passing accomplishments and attributes of their own day and time. “Decent godless people,” Eliot calls the vast lot of humanity, for whom “[t]heir only monument [will be] the asphalt road / And a thousand lost golf balls.” From time to time, Eliot achieves in these lines the brilliantly acerbic wit that had characterized the quatrain poems of 1917 and 1918, although in those there was no foundation of faith against which such caustic wit could be measured or through which it could find constructive purpose.

There is, too, the heightened rhetoric of prophecy, calling on the attention of those of his contemporaries “who turn from GOD / To the grandeur of [their] mind and the glory of [their] action.” Those are dangerous distractions in any age but particularly pernicious ones for the children of the modern age, who witness one dazzling human technological or scientific triumph after another but fail to see how temporary these triumphs, like all other human triumphs before them, are. Parts IV & V The next two choruses, calling up biblical analogues, stress how it must always be through struggle—“the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other,” “therefore some must labour, and others must hold spears”—that the temple can be built and rebuilt. It must be endlessly reconstructed for the purposes of human habitation in the House of God, which is also the world, and thus a fallen venue where the faithful “are encompassed with snakes and dogs.” Part VI In the sixth chorus, Eliot reminds the audience that Christians, too, have known what it is to be persecuted for their faith, that indeed “Faith has [not yet] conquered the world.” The rhetorical thrust here is an exhortation not to imagine that the battle is won. For that reason, more churches are needed. He iterates the reasons why “men [should] love the Church,” and these reasons all come down to one thing: The church is always there to remind the faithful that here good and evil wage war, so that there must always be saints and martyrs. Both realistically and metaphorically speaking, then, “if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps / We must first build the steps.” It is, of course, difficult to get the full effect and urgency of the dramatic energy of Eliot’s presentation without the actual dramatic action that must have transpired in the interval between each chorus. Yet, as the rhetorical argument carried on in quasi-biblical terms in each succeeding chorus moves the audience forward, the conclusion becomes more and more inevitable: If a community abandons the church, it abandons not only God but its own best instincts for the self-sacrifice

Choruses from The Rock and self-denial without which a community cannot grow and change. Part VII Just as the second chorus poetically summarizes British history, the seventh chorus recapitulates what is called Providential History, the passage of human belief from the moment of Creation in Genesis through all the varieties of religious experience that make up the history and culture of human beliefs, culminating in the coming of Christ, “the light of the Word.” Now Eliot sees a difference, however: “Men have left GOD not for other gods, . . . but for no god; and this has never happened before.” Instead, money, power, life, or race rule the roost now, so that when the worst has occurred, “[w]hen the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed,” the new trinity becomes “Usury, Lust and Power.” Part VIII The eighth chorus recalls the Babylonian captivity, the first great diaspora of God’s chosen people, the Jews, and the tragic travesty of destructive waste that was World War I. Eliot finds himself allowing for his own contemporaries’ timorous rapaciousness as they cling to what little any mortal has. “Our age is an age of moderate virtue / And of moderate vice,” and it is hard to take up the burdens that true faith requires. “Yet nothing is impossible, nothing, / To men of faith and conviction.” It may be praising with faint damning, to invert the common saying, but it is encouragement nonetheless, and the pageant play, if it must expose, exposes ultimately to inspirit and inspire, otherwise it fails in its aim to gain support for the church. Part IX In the ninth chorus, Eliot paints what on the surface seems to be a flattering picture of these same contemporaries as they go about their daily lives, “proudnecked, like thoroughbreds ready for races.” The idea that they are “proudnecked” implies that they are stiff-necked—set in their ways and reluctant either to hear God’s word or to keep his ways. It is an ironic picture, of course, showing them in love with their animal nature, with the corruptible flesh, “busy in the market, the forum”—pursuing all sorts of personal and economic and political aspects

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of community, but not the spiritual and hardly the religious. These kinds of activities, and not the “mourn[ing] in a private chamber,” cut individuals off, oddly enough, from the very sort of community that they imagine they should be serving. Rather, it is through service to what Eliot calls “the joyful communion of saints” that the individual fulfills service to both self and other and, through them, to God. The Rock becomes an edifice here built of stone, “the soul of man . . . joined to the soul of stone,” just as out of music and the “slimy mud of words” emerge “the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.” These are the gifts that are to be brought to the service of God, since they mimic creation itself, wherein and whereby both body and spirit serve and are served. As a result, the Temple is built, a “visible reminder of Invisible Light.” Part X The 10th and final chorus brings to bear the idea expressed by The Rock: Human lot is ceaseless toil. Though the temple, the Word made manifest that had begun as the Word of The Rock in the opening choruses, has now been built; there can never be enough of the Visible Church here, where “the great snake lies ever half awake.” The snake calls up the image of Satan as the serpent who polluted paradise, of course, but not without human complicity. So the snake is anything that clings to what is at bottom “the pit of the world,” where there lies the temptation to quit or to forget or to rest too soon from toil. The chorus praises the efforts of what Eliot, in a slightly earlier poem, “Animula,” taking his cue from DANTE ALIGHIERI, called the “simple soul.” The soul must rest, but not rest on its laurels; it must take comfort in such service to the light as it can manage, but not be blinded by it. Nevertheless, after a hymn of several stanzas in praise of that light that is “[t]oo bright for mortal vision,” the chorus and the entire sequence draw to a close on a note reminiscent of the tone in which The Waste Land had opened. There the speaker comments on how the spirit would rather remain cocooned in winter’s “forgetful sleep” than awaken with the rest of the natural universe to the call to life of spring in April, “the cruelest month.”

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Using the idea that the soul is like a child, Eliot rounds out the choruses by suggesting that there is a rhythm to our soulfulness, too, a drowsiness that must be periodically rekindled, which, too, is a part of the divine plan. “Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow,” the poet concludes, and for the “darkness that reminds us of light.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY In the long tradition of religious discourse and inspirational poetry, there is nothing that Eliot says in “Choruses from The Rock” that is startlingly new or puzzling. Given that Eliot was writing for a predetermined and well-defined context, purpose, and audience and that the writing was to appeal to the most common religious imagination and to the constraints of strict doctrine, it would be surprising if he had gone out of his way to break new ground in the area of devotional verse and religious commentary. Nevertheless, what is startling in these pages is how well Eliot succeeded in bringing the typical and commonplace to bear in a choral poetry meant for wide public consumption in a live, theatrical setting, without ostensibly sacrificing the complex vision of the modern urban, intellectual, and spiritual dilemmas that he had been developing throughout his own poetic efforts to date. In some ways, composing these verse passages for The Rock may have allowed him to advance and clarify that vision for his own purposes as a poet who, it is worth recalling, had thought that he had reached another creative dead-end. For the sake of a convincing comparison, one might turn to the poem “The Hollow Men,” which Eliot had composed nearly a decade earlier. (It was published in 1925, and several of its sections were discarded verse from the verse play “Sweeney Agonistes,” which Eliot had been working on as early as 1923.) That poem, which ends with the celebrated pessimistic negativism of the notion of the world ending “[n]ot with a bang but a whimper,” not only summarizes the arch modernism of the verse technique that Eliot had been perfecting to that time but strikes the note of withering despair that many had come to hear as the dominant characteristic of his and other modernist verse. What

may by now seem to be a clichéd reaction to the boredom and meaningless rote found in the modern urban experience was at the time of its composition a scathing indictment both of that sort of poetry and of the culture that could produce it. On the one hand, it suggested that there was little more that poetry could say that might enliven or ennoble typical human experience, that it had all been reduced to a charade lacking direction or purpose with nothing remaining for the serious poet to do except to lament in ways now witty, now dour, the pains and pangs of going on nevertheless. On the other hand, such poetry suggested that a more vibrant and engaged cultural environment, in which individuals were involved in something more than wholly material acquisition and consumption, satisfying nothing more than the most primal sorts of appetites, would enable more meaningful poetic expression. It is interesting to note, then, how Eliot utilizes the same metaphorical reference points but to an extremely different end in the closing of The Rock. In “The Hollow Men,” the whimper comes, the reader is led to imagine, because the “Shadow” falls between all human motives and desires and ideals and their fulfillment in action. In the last chorus from The Rock, by sharp contrast, the shadow and the darkness are, rather than halfheartedly cursed in a resignation to the futility of all human action, praised in measured terms for what such contrarieties and vicissitudes may reveal of the light. Again, it is not that Eliot has come upon a new way of configuring one of the major dilemmas regarding human intellectual and spiritual limitations; indeed, his “solution” is as old as metaphors of light and darkness. The point is that he has found it possible to introduce these more traditional modes of accounting for our shortcomings into his poetry. The reader has a right to wonder, then, whether Eliot has committed the cardinal sin of the serious artist that, it is reasonable to assume, he still took himself to be—to modify either his mode of expression or his point of view for the sake of appeasing the tastes or opinions of his audience. The fact is that the poetry found in “Choruses from The Rock” employs the old standbys of both consolation and exhortation typical of what can be called religious

Choruses from The Rock verse, but at the same time, more significantly, it does not abandon in the least those critiques of human behavior that Eliot regarded as unique to his time and place. It is where Eliot identifies the problem rather than proposes the solution that the voice and the vision that are distinctively Eliot’s burst through the poetry with the intense energy of their own light, and that perhaps is why Eliot, though he had every reason not to regard the characterizations and story line associated with the original scenario as his own in any way, was not about to orphan the choruses, into whose every line the poet of The Waste Land breathes life. The idea that the pursuit of happiness defined by satisfying one’s animal appetites is a blind pursuit and empty quest is an old one, but to that idea Eliot and other modernists, following the lead of their 19th-century precursors, foremost among them, in Eliot’s case, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE and JULES LAFORGUE, add a peculiarly modern twist: the idea that some deep part of each human creature knows this. The modern individual knows that a life lived without purpose is “waste and void”—as the seventh of The Rock’s choruses warns—because, in the surfeit of creature comforts that modern commerce provides, what individual can deny that such comforts are not enough, and never can be? It is there in each individual’s unconscious, unspoken possession of that knowledge, its weight on the soul, that Eliot finds the dead souls who inhabit the dead modern city, not in the essentially self-evident emptiness of their pursuit of temporal money and power and glory, pleasure, pride, and fame. For Eliot, that knowledge shows in the lack of enthusiasm with which his fellow humans now pursue those goals. It is as if humanity, at least in the so-called industrialized democracies of the West with their increasing reliance on the secular institutions of the state and social sciences to manage human affairs, have reached a level of sophistication hitherto unknown in human cultures. Modern individuals know and experience things that their ancestors never could have, so the modern ends up imagining that he or she must somehow be exempt from all the tragic failings of the past. The real differ-

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ence now, however, is not that humans have somehow been miraculously transformed but that there is nothing to counterbalance this new sophistication and its fatuous reliance on the day-to-day for order, purpose, and succor—nothing, Eliot says in The Rock, other than the capacity for faith and the institutionalized means for expressing that faith, both of which resources exist now. To Eliot, however, that very resource, which ought now more than ever to be embraced for the very reason that humans seem to have reached the end of the line in terms of a sort of post-Edenic innocence, is being abandoned in favor of the very sophistication that would require such recourse to the tried and true dictates of tradition. The impasse, expressed best among Eliot’s works in the unfinished verse drama, “Sweeney Agonistes,” is that the more sensitive individuals know that they cannot ever return to a lost Eden but have no idea where to turn instead. In “Coriolan,” Eliot had already amply illustrated that the public will not have much of either heroes or heads of states in a world controlled by “aethereal rumors”—a phrase from The Waste Land that seems simultaneously to invoke and to dismiss as insidiously ridiculous the rapid dissemination of information and opinions by the press and the newer media of radio and film. Coming full circle, the reader perhaps can see now, in the relative enthusiasm with which Eliot seized what must then have seemed to many an opportunity to commit professional suicide in public by writing the book for a religious pageant play, an opportunity instead for him to strike out more boldly into areas both of poetic technique and poetic theme that his poetry had been already taking him. Furthermore, this turn toward a more transparent and readable verse was not necessarily compelled by any particularly fervent religiosity on Eliot’s part, although he certainly was expressing what must have constituted his own religious convictions, but by a virtually overpowering sense of social commitment. Only that sort of a commitment would account for the similar movement toward powerfully opinionated social commentary that Eliot was by now engaging in on other fronts, particularly in After Strange Gods with its appeal for orthodoxy in ways of thinking for the sake not

98 “Christopher Marlowe” of stifling modernist thought but of clarifying its essential conflicts and potential solutions. As poetry, “Choruses from The Rock” will perhaps always occupy a marginal place in the poet’s achievement, although that remains to be seen. As an adventureous release of hitherto pent-up but no less focused sentiments, these choruses set the tone and direction for much of the rest of Eliot’s serious literary undertakings, not the least among them his first complete and successful verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, and his masterpiece, Four Quartets.

“Christopher Marlowe” (1918) Eliot begins this early essay on the English Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, whom most count second only to Shakespeare as the greatest tragedian of the English stage, by enumerating Marlowe’s strengths and shortcomings. As is typical of Eliot at this stage in his subsidiary career as a critic, he was wont to make daringly different judgments and assessments in order to cut as wide a swath as he could through contemporary literary criticism so that he might leave as indelible a mark as possible. Making a very loud splash can be a wise policy for a young person to pursue, but it can often be, for the subject at hand, an unfair one, as Eliot himself would confess a great many years later, in “To Criticize the Critic.” In the effort to sound right, one must make all previous assessments sound wrong and wrongheaded. Therefore, Marlowe is neither the father of English tragedy nor the creator of English blank verse nor Shakespeare’s foremost guide and teacher, as the 19th-century English poet Charles Algernon Swinburne would have it. What Eliot grants Marlowe instead is that he introduced “several new tones into blank verse,” thus enabling it to move away from the rhythms of rhymed verse that had thus far dominated English prosody. That in and of itself is no small accomplishment. As Eliot points out, after the “Chinese Wall of Milton,” blank, or unrhymed, verse in English became the language’s more and more standard poetic line. In the process, however, it has also

become more and more crude and “less capable of expressing complicated, subtle, and surprising emotions.” Readers of Eliot’s own verse, not to mention those acquainted with his critical comments on a phenomenon he termed the “dissociation of sensibility,” would know that this is a serious concern of his. In essays as late as “The Social Function of Poetry” in 1945, Eliot continued to comment on how the vitality of the language as a means for expressing ordinary emotions is contingent on poets keeping their poetic language supple and fresh. Any stultification of the latter can only result in a further diminishment of the former. Consequently, to commend Marlowe as a dramatic poet who extended the range of poetic discourse as an effectively expressive vehicle is no small recommendation. Eliot devotes much of the rest of the essay to stylistic analyses of Marlowe’s “rhetoric,” as Eliot here calls it. (In a later essay on Elizabethan translations of the classical Roman playwright Seneca into English, he calls it “Elizabethan bombast.”) Marlowe, he demonstrates, is what he calls a “synthetic poet,” one who, like Eliot himself, takes images and often whole lines from other poets and makes them into something wholly his own. At his best, Eliot concludes, Marlowe wrote a verse “always hesitating on the edge of caricature at the right moment.” This, too, may remind readers of Eliot’s own capacity, particularly in his earliest triumphs, to write a poetry perpetually hovering at the edge of self-parody. It is, he argues in these reflections on Marlowe, a style of poetry that hovers at the edge of greatness, too. All great art is the result of distillation, after all; the whole must somehow be reduced to something that is far less than itself, but still bear a readily recognizable resemblance. That is what caricature does. Eliot finishes this brief appreciation of Marlowe by musing on what he might have achieved with such a unique gift had he not died so tragically young. “Marlowe’s verse,” he concludes, “might have moved . . . toward this intense and serious and indubitably great poetry, which . . . attains its effect by something not unlike caricature.” Here Eliot’s appreciation of a fellow poet can be seen to hover itself on the edge of a general critical precept. Eliot seems to be saying that poetry—or

Clark Lectures, The 99 at least a certain kind of poetry—must hold up a slightly distorted mirror, in whose images we see not the perfect image of ourselves but the edges of our most salient moral features. Eliot’s own characters—Prufrock, Sweeney, Gerontion, and the hollow men—are that same sort of caricatures of the typical enlivened by language, so that the reader’s attention is drawn to those moral features that stand out that much more clearly; in the process, the full likeness is created for the moral imagination.

Clark Lectures, The (1926) Commencing on January 26, 1926, and concluding on March 9, 1926, Eliot presented a series of eight lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. For the lecture series, which was named in honor of Trinity College Fellow William George Clark, who had endowed the lectureship in 1868, Eliot gave an overview titled “The Metaphysical Poetry of the 17th Century, with special reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley.” By this time in his career as both poet and critic, Eliot had fallen afoul of a self-doubt brought on by an overwhelming, though not unearned, celebrity. The publication of The Waste Land in the fall of 1922 had transformed him from an innovative young poet admired by fellow avant-garde writers into an iconic public figure who seemed to embody and express the very spirit of modernism then sweeping through the arts. This celebrity seemed to have vanquished his creative sensibilities. Compelled to imagine that he must now produce new work equally as earth-shattering, he was reduced to regarding his talent for poetry writing as exhausted. Although “The Hollow Men,” his next major creative work, was published in 1925, it was, for all its originality, a pastiche of leftover poetry from the abortive verse drama “Sweeney Agonistes,” which Eliot had no sooner begun in 1923 than he abandoned by 1924. However, Eliot appeared to be resigned to the entire state of affairs, which gave him what must have been, in view of the industry with which

he embraced it, a welcome opportunity to shift careers. Already formally credentialed as an academic, with an M.A. in English literature and an all but completed Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, Eliot started to haunt the halls of academe. All the biographical evidence confirms that, by the mid20s, Eliot was well on his way toward becoming a full-time literary scholar, as opposed to the highly credible reviewer and critic that he had been since at least 1917. He was not abandoning poetry writing altogether, but along with the editorship of the Criterion in 1922 and his appointment as poetry editor and a board member with the publishing house Faber & Gwyer in 1925, Eliot took on more ambitious critical and scholarly projects. Specifically, he was intending to produce three highly scholarly works of criticism: The School of Donne, Elizabethan Drama, and The Sons of Ben. According to Eliot’s preface to the never-published School of Donne, “the three together will constitute a criticism of the English Renaissance.” Neither did the other two ever see the light of day. Perhaps as a result of his own shifting intellectual, creative, and spiritual interests, including most notably his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in June 1927, the intended volume on Elizabethan drama remained little more than a series of perceptive but otherwise disjointed essays on various dramatists published sporadically between 1918 and 1934. The most accomplished of these—“Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” and “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”—would all be collected in his Selected Essays in 1932, but a volume of criticism specifically devoted to the Elizabethan dramatists would itself wait until 1956 to see publication as Essays on Elizabethan Drama. Even then, in a brief headnote, Eliot admits that the book is more an extended selection of his much earlier criticism than a coherent study. The Sons of Ben, which was to focus on the early 17th-century English playwright Ben Jonson and trace “the development of humanism, its relation to Anglican thought, and the emergence of Hobbes and Hyde,” apparently never got any further than its conceptualization, lost somewhere on the road from For Lancelot Andrewes, from 1928,

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to The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism, published in 1933, and After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, in 1934. That Eliot should revise and revisit plans and concepts is within the prerogatives of any thinker and author, of course, as well as being subject to the unforeseen and serendipitous. The School of Donne is another matter, however. Eliot already had addressed the English metaphysical poets, JOHN DONNE the most prominent and accomplished among them, in his celebrated 1921 review of Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. In that review, Eliot had commended the English metaphysical poets for writing with a vigorous expression of both thought and feeling that could “devour experience,” whereas in subsequent times an increasing “dissociation of sensibility” had made English poetry less and less expressive of raw experience and more and more somberly reflective commentaries on it. Indeed, in a June 1923 Athenaeum review of a volume of Donne’s love poetry, Eliot asserted that Donne’s “interest for the present age, is his fidelity to emotion as he finds it.” Furthermore, Eliot wrote, “it is because he has this honesty, because he is so often expressing his genuine whole of tangled feelings, that Donne is, like the early Italians, like Heine, like Baudelaire, a poet of the world’s literature.” The astute reader may find, nevertheless, a subtext there; if Eliot makes it no secret that he is drawn to Donne, it is equally well known that he is also drawn to DANTE—an outstandingly overstated example of an “early Italian” poet—as well as to the 19th-century French symbolists such as CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. So, then, his identifying Donne with these other two periods in the development of European poetry has a more than casual motivation behind it. Simply put, Eliot is suggesting in this review that, with “his recognition of the complexity of feeling and its rapid alterations and antitheses,” Donne, like those others, is a poet writing within a sensibility that can by now be best characterized by a single word: modernist. “There are two ways in which we may find a poet to be modern,” Eliot continues, and he is forced to speculate that one of those ways is that there may

simply be “an accidental relationship between his mind and our own.” In any event, he has no doubt that “The age of Donne, and the age of Marvell, are sympathetic to us, and it demands a considerable effort of dissociation to decide to what degree we are deflected toward him by local or temporary bias.” Eliot concludes that “Compared with these men, almost every 19th-century English poet is in some way limited or deformed.” Eliot would modify this unbridled enthusiasm for Donne’s modernism somewhat by the time of his 1926 essay on the 17th-century English divine, and Donne’s contemporary, Sir Lancelot Andrewes, whose literary style closely resembles Donne’s but whose ideology represents for Eliot those older, less morally chaotic values and traditions, largely medieval and Christian, that more and more frequently would become the focus of Eliot’s critical attention and intellectual energy. That is not to say, however, that despite those increasing ideological differences, Eliot is ever any the less a devotee of what Donne’s work represents for poetry alone and its continuing vitality and validity. As Eliot prepared the Clark Lectures in late 1925, then, John Donne’s would be the pivotal age and the pivotal poetic style between those two other major influences on Eliot, the poetry of DANTE ALIGHIERI and the poetry of the French symbolists, Baudelaire among them, but particularly JULES LAFORGUE. If the lectures had a thesis, it was that there had been a disintegration of the intellect following the Renaissance and the advent of what would eventually become modernist thinking. The work of such late medieval poets as Dante represented that seamless union of mind and body, spirit and intellect, and the social and the religious in literature that had been lost to the modern world except in the metaphysical poetry of the “school of Donne” and later, in the 19th century, among the symbolists. The topic of the relationship between thought, or philosophy, in general and thought as it is expressed in poetry was never far from Eliot’s mind, particularly as he matured as a critic. Eventually, distinguishing among poetry, belief, and philosophy became a continuing effort in his criticism. As early as 1920, in an earlier essay titled simply

Clark Lectures, The 101 “Dante” published in The Sacred Wood, Eliot commented on the balance that must be maintained between a respect for philosophy as philosophy and poetry as poetry, but he was vehemently opposed to any notion that the twain should never meet. He writes: Without doubt, the effort of the philosopher proper, the man who is trying to deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who may be trying to realize ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time. But this is not to deny that poetry can be in some sense philosophic. The poet can deal with philosophic ideas, not as matter for argument, but as matter for inspection. . . . [P]oetry can be penetrated by a philosophic idea. . . . If we divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious impeachment, not only against Dante, but against most of Dante’s contemporaries.

It is, again, a matter of balance and intention. These older poets, the English metaphysicals among them, seemed to know that instinctively. In any event, their poetry manifested that respect. In the Clark Lectures, Eliot summarizes the modernist affinities with, and differences from, that earlier poetics in a passage in which he compares his own viewpoint with that of the critic and scholar Mario Praz. Praz had observed that, with Donne, the initiating impulse of a poem is broken suddenly “by an anticlimax of ratiocination.” The mind, in other words, is forced to defer to the primacy of sensation, yet it also interrupts that primacy (a modernist sort of conflation of the experiential and the commentative). Eliot agrees: “I would suggest that one of the reasons why we find Donne so sympathetic is that we [the modernists] also, provided with no philosophy which can assign a serious and dignified place to the original impulse, take refuge in the anticlimax of ratiocination; only, with us, the contrast is more conscious and complete.” The statement provides one of Eliot’s most pithy summations of the dilemma of modernism and the complexities of its stylistics. Unable to remain satisfied with half-truths, as it were, Eliot can content himself only with wallowing in the paradoxical, the contradictory, and the

inconclusive. Yet, unlike Donne, he makes the choice consciously and willingly. As might be expected, despite Eliot’s lack of formal academic affiliations, the lectures were well attended. It was more than the illustrious venue, however. After all, Eliot was by now one of the most celebrated men of letters in the English-speaking world, a contemporary poet of the first order whose critical pronouncements, in such essays as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), and “The Metaphysical Poets,” had helped create a corollary critical movement and methodology, impersonal and formal in nature, that would later be known as the New Criticism. Among those in attendance for the first lecture were Sir James Frazer, whose celebrated work on cultural anthropology, The Golden Bough, figured prominently in Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, and the Edwardian poet A. E. Housman, whose own slightly askew vision of the so-called Eternal Verities somewhat prefigured Eliot’s own cast of mind as a poet. On hand as well were intellectual and literary lights of the day from among the faculty, including the Elizabethan scholar E. M. W. Tillyard, the psychological critic I. A. Richards, and the modernist critic F. R. Leavis. The eight lectures produced a 184-page typescript, the original of which was kept at Cambridge; a copy was later resposited at Harvard. Eliot continually revised the manuscript, shared it with fellow scholars and critics such as Herbert Read and Praz for their suggested revisions, and even announced its pending publication in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes in early 1928. As other projects commanded his attention and his intellectual development continued, however, Eliot must have grown increasingly estranged from and embarrassed by the position he had taken. In any case, Eliot later called the lectures “pretentious and immature” and forbade the publication or even the citing of them or of their subsequent reincarnation as the Turnbull Lectures presented at Johns Hopkins in January 1934. The all-inclusive summary pronouncement certainly became less and less Eliot’s method of operating as his views and opinions matured, and in later years he often apologized for his youthful critical bravado (although it is for

102 “Classics and the Man of Letters, The” those more daring pronouncements that he will understandably be most remembered as a critic and scholar). The Clark Lectures and the somewhat revised Turnbull Lectures were finally published in a scholarly edition prepared by Emory professor and Eliot scholar Ronald Schuchard in 1993.

“Classics and the Man of Letters, The” (1942) Eliot may seem to be a writer who has frequently visited the topic of the classics—works of literature that are associated in the public mind with the old and venerable but that may also be dull and tedious. Surely, from the time of his earliest poetry, he displayed an erudition that often made others regard his as a poetry “written for a small and exclusive audience,” as Eliot later complained in the essay “The Classics and the Man of Letters.” True, too, he was involved in the classicismversus-romanticism debate of the 1920s. In another essay, 1961’s “To Criticize the Critic,” he lays the blame for his interest and partisanship on his old Harvard mentor, Irving Babbitt, as well as on his youthful dalliance with the politics of the French conservative thinker and activist Charles Maurras and on the English literary critic, T. E. Hulme. In that debate, which Eliot pursued into the mid-1930s, he famously and passionately took the side of the classicists, or those devoted to tradition, order, and some species of form. His traditional conservatism identified Eliot with the Greek and Latin classics, although the issue of the debate was not necessarily what kind of texts one enjoyed reading. Finally, during the 1940s and early 1950s, Eliot wrote several essays whose ostensible purpose was to define classic as a generic term. “What Is a Classic?” (1945) and “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951) come most immediately to mind as critical pieces in which Eliot sees a classic not necessarily as a work from the ancient or classical world so much as as a work of literature that crystallizes and

codifies its culture’s beliefs and language, assuming that they are ready to be thus crystallized and codified. In that category, Eliot could easily include Virgil’s Aeneid, which also happens to be a classic according to the criteria of age and venerability, but he also includes DANTE ALIGHIERI’s Divine Comedy, a comparatively “modern” work, which set a permanent seal on modern Italian as well as on the medieval worldview.

SYNOPSIS “The Classics and the Man of Letters” is about neither classicism as a literary movement nor the literary products of the classical age of Greece and of Rome nor even a classic in any purely literary sense; it is more particularly about the way education forms a writer or, in Eliot’s words, a man of letters. The essay was originally the presidential address presented before the Classical Association at Cambridge, England, on April 15, 1942, and Eliot presents his credentials in a self-deprecating manner, as will become more and more the case as his celebrity and reputation begin to precede him into virtually any venue. In this instance, he keeps his profile low. Although he may have at one time been a high school Latin teacher, he makes no pretense that he shall be making his case for the importance of Latin and Greek based on his experience as a scholar or educator, basing his interest in the topic rather on his being a man of letters. Well into the essay, he also makes it clear that his concern is not “with the teaching of literature, but with teaching only in relation to those who are going to write it,” hence the two sides of his title. Even there, however, he does not want to give the wrong impression. He freely admits that if literature were merely a succession of writers of genius, then readers would not be inclined to believe of any one writer that “he would have been a greater writer, or an inferior writer, if he had had a different kind of education.” That is why Eliot chooses to focus his attention not on writers of genius but on “men of letters,” thereby including “men of the second or third, or lower ranks as well as the greatest.” The continuity of a literature is a critical constituent of its greatness, and it is precisely these lesser

“Classics and the Man of Letters, The” writers, rather than those occasional geniuses, that account for that continuity. Eliot also does not want to give the impression that there is a prescribed degree or quality of grounding in the classics that might be required of a writer. Using WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and John Milton for his opposing models, he argues convincingly that, of Shakespeare, it can be said that “never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.” In the case of Milton, as with Dante, it can be said that “never has a poet possessed of such great learning so completely justified the acquisition of it.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The crux of the matter, as Eliot sees it, is to determine “what is likely to happen, to our language and our literature, when the connection between the classics and our own literature is broken.” This topic will occupy Eliot’s attention throughout most of the 1940s and had already, under the slightly different guise of tradition in his defenses of classicism and conservatism in general, been calling his critical attention from as far back as the early 1920s. It is his fear that the self-congratulatory shallowness of the times, coupled with an increasing rage for novelty that is being fostered by the commercial interests of popular culture, may conspire to cut off the general culture from its own vital roots in the past. In After Strange Gods in 1934 and in The Idea of a Christian Society in 1939, Eliot had sounded this same kind of warning with regard particularly to the social deterioration of any vital concern for England’s agricultural and Christian roots. By the late 1940s, in his Notes towards the Defintion of Culture, Eliot would focus this same conservative attention on all those other elements that constitute what is meant by culture. In “The Classics and the Man of Letters,” in 1942, as a second major European war within a 20-year period rages, that shift of Eliot’s attention to the broader significations of a people’s culture begins to take shape. Having linked the vitality of a national literature with the maintenance of its ties with its own classical roots, the question, for Eliot, becomes

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whether the importance that he can assign to a solid grounding in the classics ought “to be taken account of in our educational planning.” As Eliot sees it, “the truly literary mind is likely to develop slowly” and “needs a more comprehensive and varied diet.” Getting right to the point, Eliot proposes that the imaginative writer, whose skill involves a species of communication wherein “precision is of utmost importance,” “must know the various purposes for which language has been used; and that involves some knowledge of the subjects for the communication of which men have used language in the past”—in a word, the classics. Eliot stresses that his aim throughout has not been to propose a course of study for the literary genius so much as one in which such minds might not only flourish but also find among their peers other individuals who are qualified, by virtue of their education, to appreciate the learning that the production of great literature both requires and evinces. At the very least, Eliot insists that along with a proper grounding in the sciences and mathematics and at minimum one foreign language, “the maintenance of classical education is essential to the maintenance of the continuity of English literature.” Eliot will end his address with an appeal to those who feel that literature serves the purposes of a nation by doing more than merely producing good poetry and novels. It is the expression of the living link between a people and all of their past, but particularly with their inheritance of the traditions that their ancestors have drawn on and elected to preserve. Eliot’s appeal, he says, is to those who “believe that a new unity can only grow on the old roots: the Christian Faith, and the classical languages which Europeans inherit in common.” Considering again that Christian Europeans were, at the moment that those words of Eliot’s were being spoken, at each others’ throats in the third year of a war that would last another three years, his sentiments are as courageously hopeful as they are optimistically naive. Still, he imagines the “need of a cultural unification in diversity of Europe,” and he is right in assuming that that unification can emerge only out of the commonalities found in Europe’s shared Christian and classical heritage.

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Cocktail Party, The (1949) After the end of World War II in August 1945 and the subsequent and gradual lifting of the austerity measures that had accompanied it in Britain, The Family Reunion, which had experienced a disappointing five-week run when it first premiered in London in 1939, was successfully revived at London’s Mercury Theatre in October 1946. Then both that play and Murder in the Cathedral were selected for performances for the inaugural season of the Edinburgh Festival in 1947. Whether or not that renewed commercial success and public recognition of his playwriting abilities were the impetus, Eliot began to think in terms of another project for the stage. By July 1948, he sent a draft of the first three acts of the play, which he had originally intended to title “One-Eyed Reilly,” to his longtime theatrical collaborator, the actor and stage director E. MARTIN BROWNE. A production of The Cocktail Party was finally mounted at the Edinburgh Festival during the last week of August 1949, where it was a popular success. Unable to secure a theatre in London’s West End for its commercial premier, however, the producer Henry Sherek decided to premier it on New York’s Broadway instead, where it opened on January 21, 1950, in the Henry Miller Theatre. Although his recent Nobel Prize had enhanced his worldwide celebrity, Eliot felt trepidation over reception that The Cocktail Party’s very British story line might receive in the United States. He was pleasantly surprised when the New York production of this verse drama became a great commercial success, as it would do in London later that year as well. Eliot had finally proved to both himself and his public that he could write a popular play. Indeed, largely because of The Cocktail Party, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine on March 6.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS Still the erudite classicist and master of the literary allusion, in a 1950 lecture titled “Poetry and Drama” that was subsequently collected in On Poetry and Poets, Eliot fairly and understandably

crowed that he had made up for the mistake of badly adapting Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy in The Family Reunion, and had confounded the critics to boot by loosely basing The Cocktail Party on Euripides’ Alcestis. Not only had no one noticed the indebtedness until Eliot made this information public, but once it was revealed, no one had any great difficulty in both seeing and appreciating the connection. That Eliot had successfully concealed the adaptation was a coup for a poet who had won considerable celebrity over the years for borrowing liberally from classical sources. Presumably, however, had Eliot never revealed the connection himself, some Eliot scholar or another would have ferreted it out in good time, so obvious a connection is it once it is called to the attention of anyone familiar with both texts. The Euripides text, like Eliot’s, is basically a love story, not in the passionate, Hollywood sense of the term, but with regard to love as a social and spiritual phenomenon that can enable and enhance human individuality but also distort and demean it. Euripides tells the tale of Admetus, the king of Thessaly, who receives a special boon from the god Apollo. Admetus’s allotted time has almost come to an end, but Apollo arranges for Admetus to avoid his fated death—if he can find someone else to die in his place. The notion that anyone would be willing to die in the place of another lies at the heart of most definitions of ideal human virtue. Furthermore, for Eliot, that sort of action—the extinction of personal interests if not the self proper for the sake of the best interest of others—is the very essence of the ethic that he had been proposing explicitly in poem after poem. Since 1922, at least, in The Waste Land’s famous closing injunctions, borrowed from the Upanishads—to give, to sympathize, and to maintain self-control—Eliot had been espousing the notion, now practical, now traditionally Judeo-Christian, that freedom lay in self-surrender, and self-surrender came through a focused endeavor on getting out of the prison of self and selfishness. Indeed, considerations of this order form a constant theme in Eliot. From the 1909–11 composition of his first important work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” onward, and certainly in such later works as

Cocktail Party, The 105 “Gerontion” (1919) and “The Hollow Men” (1925), the living dead had been portrayed in Eliot’s poetry as those who, caught up in and by their own narrow-minded moral and spiritual constraints, cannot imagine a way out of the nightmarish isolation in which they blunder blindly. Worse are other Eliot characters like Sweeney in “Sweeney Agonistes” (1925) or Harry when he is first encountered in The Family Reunion (1939), who, while conscious of their isolation from the balm of otherness, suffer nonetheless the agony of being incapable of breaking out of the prison that a crippling if not paralyzing attachment to self-centeredness can make of human individuality. That same liberating ethical emphasis on selfabnegation and self-denial in Eliot became only that much more central to his work when he began to base his personal life on an orthodox Christian belief system. Then the concepts that freedom is found in surrender, nobility in humility, and peace in acceptance became foremost in his thought. These concepts form the basis for the code of conduct implicitly exemplified in the course of action that Thomas à Becket pursues in 1935’s Murder in the Cathedral and that Eliot himself espouses in the four extended poetic works, composed between 1935 and 1942, that became the Four Quartets. There they are explicit thematic elements repeated at critical junctures so that the listener or reader cannot possibly miss them, even if he or she does not grasp their central significance for Eliot. The idea of self-sacrifice therefore permeates Eliot’s poetic vision, which finds a significant parallel in a work like Euripides’ Alcestis. There, however, the focus is the melodramatic suspense created by Admetus’s situation, in keeping with a theatrical piece whose foremost purpose is to gain and retain the attention of an audience. In Euripides’ able hands, the story of Admetus illustrates these same propositions in ways that are instantly grasped because his dilemma, by virtue of its being so very far-fetched, makes its point clearly: Where death is, there must be a loss. The irony of Admetus’s situation, cannot be easily missed; surely it is not lost on Euripides. Even if it turns out not to be Admetus, someone must still die. As it turns out, although Admetus approaches

first his own parents and then his friends in search of a willing substitute, no one is willing to die in his stead until Admetus’s wife, Alcestis, happily consents to do so, both out of her love for him and so that their children will not be left fatherless. This only compounds the irony, of course, revealing another of the few truths that can be relied on to hold at any time and in any place: Death is a taker, not a giver. Admetus permits Alcestis to make her sacrifice on his behalf, but now he finds himself cast into an immense grief because his beloved wife has been taken from him by death. Into this tragic scene, in which Admetus’s entire household is in a state of profound mourning, comes Hercules, the great mythic hero, on his way to complete one of the 12 labors that he has been assigned as a penance for having slaughtered his own children in a fit of madness. All that Hercules seeks from Admetus is a place to rest before he continues his journey. It does not take Hercules long to discern, however, that the entire household is in mourning. Hercules graciously offers to seek other accommodations, lest he might disturb the grieving household, but Admetus, in keeping with the powerful social injunction to be hospitable under virtually any circumstances, insists that he stay. He leads Hercules to believe that the deceased is a female servant rather than his own beloved Alcestis. So that the mourning will not make Hercules feel uncomfortable, he has the hero put up in rooms far from the central area of the palace, where Hercules may feel free to do as he pleases. And that is precisely what the unsuspecting hero does. In keeping with his larger-than-life nature, and because Admetus has made it clear to him that his visit will not disprupt the household or be an imposition on their hospitality, Hercules eats and drinks to his heart’s content, which is considerable. The more wine he consumes, the more raucous and ribald his spirits become, until, intentionally or not, invited or not, he behaves in a manner that cannot help but disturb some of the grieving servants. Caring no matter for Admetus’s having hesitated to violate the laws of hospitality at such a tragically inopportune time, one of the servants finally has the cheek, and the courage, to call this inexcusable

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behavior to Hercules’ attention. Hercules protests, as well he might. Was it not only a female servant who had died? By no means, this bold servant assures him; it is in fact Alcestis, Admetus’s beloved wife, for whom they are mourning. Shamed by this stunning revelation, although his inappropriately rowdy behavior was through no fault of his own, Hercules now becomes that much more determined to repay Admetus’s overwhelming hospitality. Virtually on the instant, Hercules comes up with a plan worthy of such a hero. He will wait by Alcestis’s tomb, and when Death comes to claim his latest victim, Hercules will wrestle her away from Death’s clutches and bring her back, alive, to her grieving husband, who was too considerate in the midst of his own sorrow to turn a guest away from his door. As might be suspected, Hercules has no difficulty whatsoever in executing his plan, and he brings Alcestis, saved from the grave itself, back to her husband. Although Admetus first believes that it is all a trick, he very soon has no great difficulty in accepting the fact that the wife who had happily and willingly sacrificed her life for his has been miraculously restored to him. Such a wonderful story, with its blend of the myth and the fairy tale, lends itself to many powerful themes, not the least of which is the awful power that our consciousness of death plays in human affairs, not to mention the terrible emotional and psychological price that it exacts from each individual as he or she attempts to negotiate the ethical minefield that this awareness lays out before each choice that is made. That said, it for all the elaborate machinery of gods and heroes that Euripides manipulates, at its heart Alcestis tells the most simple story of all—a love story. It does not stop, however, merely with a moving exposé of the depths of romantic love that one individual may hold for another and of what such love is capable of achieving. It deals, too, with the love relation between parents and a child, a person and his friends, and masters and servants. Finally, and perhaps most important, it essays the love that the stranger must show for his neighbor, since that is certainly the lesson to be gained from the story of Admetus and Hercules.

Illustrated in every aspect of the Euripides text, but most effectively in the manner in which circumstances eventually compel Admetus and Hercules to treat each other, is a principle of human behavior, exemplifying in vivid terms exactly how a consideration for the needs and feelings of others should dominate the individual’s every move. It is this principle of behavior that guides Eliot’s hand as he limns the interaction of characters and events that make up his own comic drama, The Cocktail Party, based, he would reveal only later, on the Euripides play.

SYNOPSIS Act 1 Unlike The Family Reunion, which is top-heavy with plot and portentous meaning but little helpful exposition except for Eliot’s confusing use of Aeschylus, The Cocktail Party is very much character driven, with a plot that is no more difficult to follow than the setting, a casual social event, suggests. Complexities will come, but they will be the natural result of the tangles that intimate human relationships both create and require, rather than the result of the manipulation of characters and motivations for the sake of a preconceived theme. With this latest theatrical outing, Eliot appears to be willing to let the story tell itself. As act 1 opens, it is early evening, and the cocktail party of the play’s title is in session in the drawing room of the London flat of the hosts, Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne. While the guests, in particular Julia Shuttlethwaite and Alexander MacColgie Gibbs, known simply as Alex, seem to be tipsy enough to be absentmindedly loquacious, it comes as a bit of a surprise that there do not seem to be many people on hand for what would be expected to be well-attended, if not crowded, affair. In addition to Julia and Alex, Edward’s other guests include only Peter Quilpe and Celia Coplestone, as well as someone identified only as the Unidentified Guest. From the light banter that fills the opening scene, it is easy to identify the characters as an otherwise nondescript band of contemporary Londoners—youngish, relatively well-bred and well-heeled urban professionals—although Alex

Cocktail Party, The 107 and Julia seem to have more years and worldly experience behind them than the others. Furthermore, and still more odd, the hostess, Lavinia, is absent. Edward has been explaining that she was called away suddenly to attend to a sick aunt; later it will be revealed that that is a fabrication and that Lavinia has in fact left Edward. He had tried to cancel the cocktail party by calling the various guests, and those in attendance this evening were the people on Lavinia’s guest list whom he had been unable to reach—as well as the mysterious Unidentified Guest. This information in hand, it is clear how Edward is a sort of Admetus, acting the part of the welcoming if not distracted host despite his own personal dilemma. In that case, Lavinia is a sort of Alcestis inasmuch as she is the absent though not necessarily mourned wife. It would be premature, however, to begin to imagine who on stage might be fulfilling the role of Hercules. Nor is it possible to anticipate such one-to-one correlations too hastily or too precisely. In the way that a casual gathering of this kind usually breaks up, all the other guests eventually depart in short order, and Edward is left with the Unidentified Guest. The party that never really ever got started is now over, although as the scene continues, Eliot will milk some light comedy out of virtually everyone’s returning for the rest of the evening for one reason or another, in a sort of revolving-door skit worthy of a French farce. Julia and Peter will return, for example, because Julia invariably “misplaces” something that she always ends up having on her person. Peter, meanwhile, thinks that he has a romantic interest in Celia, with whom he has been having frequent social engagements, and returns to seek out Edward’s advice on the matter surreptitiously. Finally Alex shows up, resolved that Edward should not dine alone that night. Alex, for some comic relief again, prepares Edward an at-home “feast” out of nothing—plus a half-dozen eggs. Such “turns,” as they are called, make for imaginative stagecraft and good theater. Ultimately they serve as a running comedic backdrop to the central action of the drama, which is that Edward is tolerating the fact that when all the other guests

had initially left, the Unidentified Guest had not. Edward’s tolerance of this awkward social gaffe— after all, Edward does not know the man at all— underscores his willingness to be considerate of others at the expense of his own feelings, as does his putting up with the frequent intrusions of his “departed” guests. His running interview with the Unidentified Guest, carried on amid the already noted interruptions, suggests another possible motive, however, and that is that Edward does not care enough to mind. There follows in that interview the exposition needed to see but not necessarily understand Edward’s situation: that Lavinia has inexplicably left him for parts unknown, with nothing more than a note to confirm her intentions; that he tried to cancel the party that she had already arranged; that he has no idea whatsoever who the Unidentified Guest is; that that makes it all that much more interesting and mysterious when Edward and the guest, in the midst of all the other shenanigans, have a serious, quasi-psychological chat about what Lavinia’s precipitous departure might mean. Edward claims that he has shared such intimate details with the mysterious stranger just to get it off his chest. Bit by bit, however, it becomes clear that the guest knows both Edward and Lavinia well enough to start analyzing the situation, almost as if he were a marriage counselor. He tells Edward that Edward will begin to enjoy being independent and that life without Lavinia will enable him to find out “[w]hat you really are. What you really feel. / What you really are among people.” Ultimately, however, Edward insists that he wants Lavinia back: “I must find out who she is, to find out who I am.” At that point, the Unidentified Guest makes a shocking promise. He will bring Lavinia back—on the condition that Edward cannot question her as to where she has been. Equally as shocking is Edward’s relatively nonplussed response to the guest’s surprise revelation. At the most, he is left puzzling over whether his present desire for her return is his own impulse or a result of the guest’s suggestion. At this juncture, Julia makes one of her several reentrances on her apparently perpetual hunt for her glasses, allowing the guest to make an exit while singing a suggestive drinking song, “One-Eyed

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Riley.” Julia concludes that the departing stranger is a “dreadful man” and cannot imagine how Edward could have come to know him, but then again, Julia seems a bit too scattered to be making judgments worth hearing. When, a little later, Peter has his heart to heart with Edward regarding Celia, it is Edward who comes through sounding as clinically hard-nosed about relationships as the Unidentified Guest had been: “I congratulate you / On a timely escape,” he tells Peter when the latter confesses that Celia may have lost interest in him. (Later the audience will learn that Celia and Edward had themselves been lovers.) When they are interrupted by a phone call, Edward deflects the caller, suggesting that the person at the other end of the line may be the very person about whom he and Peter are currently speaking. If it is, however, the very idea of it escapes Peter, who extracts from Edward a promise that he, being “so disinterested,” will talk to Celia on his, Peter’s, behalf. Sure enough, the first scene ends with Edward, alone on stage now, picking up the phone once more and dialing Celia’s number. From his end of the conversation, it is clear that she has just stepped out. It is hardly a surprise, then, as scene 2 opens, to find Edward answering the doorbell. It is Celia, anxious to know if he is alone. As they parry verbally about whether it is wise for Celia to come to his house all by herself, it becomes apparent that the two of them have been having an affair. While Celia sees Lavinia’s absence to their advantage, however, Edward, perhaps as a result of his interview with the Unidentified Guest, is less enthusiastic and far more circumspect than she. The interruption of a call from Alex, along with Julia’s reappearance at his door for the third time that evening, do not help matters any either. To thwart arousing any suspicion on Julia’s part, Celia easily covers her presence there alone with Edward as motivated by the same meddlesome kindness and concern for Edward’s comfort and well-being as the others are showing him, what with Lavinia’s being away tending to her “sick aunt.” Once Julia, who fails to convince Edward to come out for dinner, leaves, he and Celia have a chance to continue their conversation. Edward

admits that his strange guest has persuaded him to want Lavinia back. When Celia expresses the opinion that such a decision may have been arrived at only to avoid unpleasantness, Edward makes it clear that, whatever his motives may be with regard to wanting to be reunited with Lavinia, the affair is over between himself and Celia. She had already suggested that Edward may simply be suffering a mental breakdown and may need to visit “a very great doctor,” whose name, coincidentally, happens to be Reilly. Now, however, Celia is quite genuinely hurt. She tells Edward that her time with him has been a dream, but in the light of his present confession, their parting is a more preferable reality. He counterattacks by bringing Peter’s romantic interest in her to her attention, as if to suggest that she may have been two-timing him, Edward, all along. As the tensions between them mount, Edward makes the strange revelation that it is in fact Celia, not Lavinia, whom he loves, and yet it is for that very reason that he now is choosing to return to Lavinia, as if what counts for freedom is not to love but to choose. Edward further reveals that he can now see himself for what he has become, “a middle-aged man / Beginning to know what it is to feel old.” He admits to Celia that while he does not imagine that he will be happy with Lavinia, he no longer expects happiness in any case. The self that wills, he concludes, eventually must come to terms, as he apparently has, with another self, “the obstinate, the tougher self.” Painfully and somewhat self-pityingly, he further admits to Celia that, although for some that other self may be a kind of guardian, Edward has by now come to the bitter realization that for him the other self is instead “the dull, the implacable, / The indomitable spirit of mediocrity.” Seeing a man whom she has loved so down on himself, Celia is both hurt and angered enough to tell him that she now pictures him as if he were reduced to little more than an insect—not what he is but what is left of what she took him to be. Before they can resolve this new tangle in their unraveling relationship, however, they are interrupted by a phone call from Julia, who is still hunting for her lost spectacles. This time they are at

Cocktail Party, The 109 Edward’s, and Celia, who had made plans to meet Julia for dinner in order to get her out of the apartment earlier, now offers to bring her spectacles to her. But Celia does not depart until she and Edward drink a toast to “the Guardians”—those tokens of the self that can hold its ground, as Edward had described them only moments earlier. The second scene ends with Celia musing only half-ironically that perhaps Julia is her guardian, and then leaves to bring the older woman her glasses. Scene 3 takes place the late afternoon of the next day. Edward answers the door to find the Unidentified Guest of the evening before. He is going to bring Lavinia “back from the dead”—a figure of speech (and allusion to Euripides) that Edward finds distasteful. Still, as the Unidentified Guest explains it, “we die to each other daily.” Truer words have never been spoken, particularly in this play thus far, where the characterizations have changed with as much frequency and yet as natural a logic, too, as the wind. The Unidentified Guest counsels Edward that, without forgetting anything about her and their relationship, Edward must meet Lavinia now as if he were meeting a total stranger— again because, in terms of the dynamics of human psychology and personal interactions, that is how individuals do renew their greetings to each other, whether the fact is acknowledged or not. Having brought Edward up to speed, as it were, the guest departs by the back door, enigmatically telling Edward that he must prepare to meet further visitors. When Edward questions his meaning, the guest explains that by visitors he means, “Whoever comes. The strangers.” Everyone and anyone, that is to say. Sure enough, the Guest is no sooner gone than Celia shows up at Edward’s door, telling him that she had been invited to drop over by a telegram sent to Julia by Lavinia. Puzzled enough by that, and by the further assurance that Julia is on her way to his apartment as well, Edward is next surprised to find Peter at his door with pretty much the same explanation. Lavinia has invited him by a telegram sent to Alex, who, like Julia, is also on the way over to Edward’s. Peter finds a moment to ask Edward privately to forget about the conversation that he had asked

Edward to have with Celia on his, Peter’s, behalf. In the meantime, Peter announces that, thanks to Alex, he will be going to California, and in the course of such pleasantries, Celia announces that she, too, will be “going away.” Before Peter can find out anything more about her plans, they are interrupted by Lavinia, who has let herself in with her own key, a marked difference from the others, of course, who have been gaining entry into the apartment and Edward’s life only by his “letting them in.” Lavinia is pleased to see Edward’s guests, since they are her acquaintances as well, but it does not take long to establish that she had nothing to do with inviting them to drop by and that it was all Julia and Alex’s doing. Lavinia is pleased, too, to hear of their various plans to go off in search of their futures. Celia seizes the opportunity to insist to Lavinia that, for herself, she “want[s] you and Edward to be happy,” though “not as in the past.” Whether or not that is Celia’s particular meaning, her sentiment underscores the Unidentified Guest’s advising Edward to think of relationships as encounters that are continuously recreating the individuals who are engaged in them. Julia’s arrival interrupts the proceedings, and Alex’s will again mere moments later. By now the guest list of the frustrated cocktail party of the evening before has been reconvened, with the exception that the previous evening’s missing hostess, Lavinia, has replaced the Unidentified Guest. They have no sooner gathered, however, than they begin to go their separate ways again, as if their meetings are reflective of the repetitive beats in the pulse of human social interactions. Peter leaves to fetch a taxi for himself, Alex, and Julia, and in the interval Celia departs. Once Peter returns to announce that he has a taxi, the other three depart as well. Lavinia and Edward, wife and husband, are left alone at last with each other in their flat. In keeping perhaps with the instructions that the Unidentified Guest had given him, Edward lets Lavinia do the talking. For her part, she is appropriately vague about where she has been and what she has done for the past 32 hours. Furthermore, she claims that she had simply forgotten about the party, whether Edward will believe or forgive her or not. But then she gets personal and ugly: “Since

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I’ve been away,” she tells Edward, “I see that I’ve taken you much too seriously.” Now, she tells him, she can see “how absurd you are.” By now, however, the almost constantly cruel frankness with which people react to Edward, particularly when they have known him intimately, as have Celia and Lavinia, is clarifying itself. He deserves it, almost welcomes it. Beneath Edward’s facade of the gracious host is a nearly absent and perhaps even extinct personality. As Lavinia tells him, people may have thought that he has always been considerate and unselfish, but it “was only passivity.” As she sees it, he only ever has wanted “to be bolstered, enouraged,” and when he asks to what purpose, she tells him that it is so he might “think well of [him]self.” The scene is hardly a cheerful reunion, but the fact that Edward more or less takes her apparent verbal abuse, even when she tells him that she has no idea why she came back to him, suggests that her criticisms may indeed be true and are, at the very least, to the point. It is as if Edward needs some sort of emotional shock therapy to jump-start his heart, thereby enabling his capacity to interact with others in authentically giving terms. He tells Lavinia that he has suffered enough humiliation in seeing himself as others see him to have changed, but Lavinia will not buy that. He must undergo a more radical change, she insists, back to a time “when you were real—for you must have been real / At some time or other.” When he confesses that there once may have been a door, but that he cannot escape his prison, a hell that “is oneself, / Hell is alone,” Lavinia, like Celia earlier, recommends that he may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and should get professional medical help. It is advice that he takes only under great protest and suspicion, but as scene 3 and the first act draw to a close, the final blow to whatever ego Edward may have left comes when Lavinia shares with him the news that Celia is going to California with Peter. Left in the clutches, such as they are, of Lavinia, whom he now characterizes as “the angel of destruction,” Edward is left to wonder if he must “become after all what you would make of me.” Between what he is and what others would make of him is a vast gap that Edward must close but is afraid to

approach. Lavinia’s return and Edward’s relatively blasé acceptance of it have set in motion events that will force change on him unless he seeks ways to effect it himself. Act 2 Through the introduction of a thoroughly modern character whose sole task it is to sort out inter- and intrapersonal tangles and complications, act 2 will sort out the complex of events and tangled personal relationships that all of act 1 has laid out before the audience. They now meet Sir Henry HarcourtReilly, who, although he may sound like a religious figure half the time and a stage magician the other half, is in fact a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. The audience, and the rest of the players, have already met him as the Unidentified Guest of act 1. This comes as a surprise for some, chiefly Edward, as the second act unfolds, but it mainly adds a necessary element of suspense to the drama. If the enigmatic Reilly was among the guests at the curtailed cocktail party with which the play opened, how he came to be there must give the audience as much pause as it will shortly give Edward. Was Reilly, for example, invited by Lavinia to size up Edward’s condition while he could still be caught unawares? Or had Celia something to do with Reilly’s being there? She, after all, had recommended him to Edward by name the night of the party. Or is this all Alex and Julia’s doing? Their dithering, fluttery, scatterbrained ways seem to be intended to conceal a clarity of motive and purpose, something that none of the rest of the characters seem capable of having. When the act opens, it is several weeks after the events of the opening act, and Reilly is organizing his morning sessions. Apparently there shall be some overlap among the patients with whom he will be consulting, for he is being careful to have them organized just so, so that they cannot possibly encounter one another. Alex makes a brief appearance to assure him that the first patient, who is obviously Edward, is anxious finally to see Reilly, since Edward’s main objective is to see a doctor, but not a doctor who may have been recommended by his wife. Alex departs and Edward arrives. He instantly recognizes

Cocktail Party, The 111 Reilly as his Unidentified Guest of several weeks earlier and, reasonably enough, becomes as quickly convinced that he has fallen into a trap set by his wife nevertheless, since the guests had all been selected from Lavinia’s list. Reilly assures Edward that while he has been seeing Lavinia as well, she had nothing to do with his, Reilly’s, being at the cocktail party. Furthermore, Reilly observes, if any or all of this had been a trap, there is nothing that Edward can do about it now. Edward buys into the inescapable reality of his situation well enough to open up to Reilly. According to Edward’s self-diagnosis, he is suffering a nervous breakdown because he has “ceased to believe in [his] own personality,” so that by now he has become “obsessed by the thought of [his] own insignificance.” The more he talks, however, the more apparent it becomes that Edward is really trying to escape from what he sees as Lavinia’s clutches. He thinks of her as someone who has “made the world a place I cannot live in / Except on her terms,” so that now he is experiencing the most horrible pain that he ever has, “the death of the spirit.” The melodrama of this self-diagnosis is diminished somewhat, however, when more practical considerations are brought to bear. It turns out that another, if not the real, cause of Edward’s present desperation is that he has been living at his club for the past several days, but that time is running out on the number of days that he can avail himself of those accommodations. Short of moving into a hotel, he seems to have been motivated to seek Reilly’s help merely so that he can be committed to a sanatorium, which will effectively make the choice for him by putting him out of Lavinia’s reach. Reilly trumps Edward’s self-serving plan, however, by now calling in “another patient / Whose situation is much the same as your own.” This patient turns out to be Lavinia, of course. After both get over the initial shock and, in Edward’s case, mild outrage at this turn of events, Reilly lays out his diagnosis. In his view, they have both been trying to impose their own diagnosis on him because they are both self-deceivers. In the process of Reilly’s making his own diagnosis clear, which is that they are a failure as a couple and, so, are “ill” together, it is revealed that Lavinia

has had a lover, too—Peter Quilpe. Although as a couple Edward and Lavinia appear to have fallen into the old trap of being no good to or for each other, Reilly convinces them that they are in fact “exceptionally well-suited to each other”; to wit, Edward is a “man who finds himself incapable of loving,” whereas Lavinia is a “woman who finds that no man can love her.” Neither is too pleased by Reilly’s bleak diagnosis, but Reilly assures them that “the best of a bad job” is all that any of us make of life, with the exception of the saints. Somehow, Reilly succeeds in convincing them to be willing to lower their sights but not their expectations. Expecting less, they may in fact obtain more; at the very least, they will cease to bring ruin on the others around them as a result of their own ruinous relationship. Edward and Lavinia head off together, hardly enthusiastically but a great deal less than reluctantly, and then Julia arrives. There is yet another patient that she and, presumably, Alex will have Reilly see. With his parting blessing to the Chamberlaynes and his cryptic exhortation to them to “work out your salvation with diligence” still ringing in the audience’s ears, Reilly is beginning to seem less like a physician and more like the high priest of a cult for which Alex and Julia are missionaries. The identity of this new “patient” comes as something of a surprise, for it is none other than Celia Copplestone, the young woman who had been Edward’s lover and was last heard of going off to California in Peter Quilpe’s company. Somewhat like the Chamberlaynes, she feels that there is something wrong in her life, something missing. Unlike them, she would rather think that that indicates a lack in herself rather than with the world itself. Indeed, for her, the latter possibility would be a much more terrible and frightening one. She identifies this lack in herself with a strong sense of solitude, of being incapable of not feeling alone, which is something that she has always felt. It is in her being able to make this admission that she unintentionally identifies how radically different her “disorder” is from the others’. For Edward, the solitude that is the natural state of human existence is hell, rendering him incapable of love. For Celia, it is an intuited reality. “[I]t isn’t that I

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want to be alone, / But that everyone’s alone,” she explains to Reilly. Worse, she suffers from a sense of sin, not in the usual way of having done something immoral, she says, but in feeling that there is something that she ought to atone for. In summary, where Edward is the self who is imprisoned by a selfish vanity, Celia speaks in Dantean terms of feeling like “a child / Lost in a forest, wanting to go home,” an image that distinctly echoes the opening of the Italian poet’s Divine Comedy. There DANTE ALIGHIERI, as the protagonist in his own poetic narrative, finds himself lost in a “dark woods.” Her condition is curable, Reilly tells her, but her treatment must be her own choice. By that, he is being much more literal than she could ever imagine, however. It will, in fact, be her choice and none other’s. For most, Reilly explains to her, there is at best the pleasant life with another, knowing they will never understand each other or be understood. While such an idea may bring Edward and Lavinia’s situation to mind for the audience, any such idea of a relationship leaves Celia cold. She cannot see how she can make a life for herself with anybody else. Reilly convinces her that that kind of a life is a choice, too, but it is a way that only faith can find. “Neither way is better,” he tells Celia. “Both ways are necessary.” Nor is either way any lonelier than the other, though those who choose the first way can forget their loneliness, he says. Celia elects to choose the latter, lonely, solitary course, the way of faith and isolation, and Reilly promises that he will make arrangements to help her achieve her goal. As Celia departs, Reilly again offers what is his apparently patent salutation—“Go in peace, daughter. / Work out your salvation with diligence.” This time, however, it sounds genuine rather than quasi-religious in tone. Julia returns, and she is not surprised to learn from Reilly that Celia has chosen to choose, as it were, although Julia is equally sure that Celia will suffer for her choice to follow the path of isolation. As for Lavinia and Edward, Julia feels that they at least now have someplace from which to start. Alex reappears. Echoing the end of the second scene of act 1, in which Celia and Edward toasted

the Guardians, act 2 ends with Reilly, Julia, and Alex ostensibly drinking toasts to Lavinia and Edward and to Celia, toasts that themselves sound more like charms or spells, maybe even prayers. One last note is struck before the act is over, and that regards Peter Quilpe, who, aside from the revelation of his relationship with Lavinia, has been conspicuously absent from the unfolding drama of act 2. The threesome cannot yet raise words on his behalf because, as Reilly explains it to the other two, Peter’s life “has not yet come to where the words are valid.” Act 3 Aside from disposing of Peter Quilpe’s fate, which will wind up being closely entangled in a surprising way with Celia’s, act 3 is more or less anticlimatic. It is two years later and the Chamberlaynes are busily putting the last few details of the last social event of the season together. It is to be another cocktail party, and it is readily apparent that the Chamberlaynes’ marriage has much improved. There are still rough edges that come through as they chat with each other during the remaining quiet time before the festivities begin, but they are of the sort to be expected in the give and take between any two people sharing a life and interests. For the most part, then, Lavinia and Edward are more than cordial with each other; indeed, they are courteous and considerate, quite friendly in fact. There being nothing left to do to get ready, Edward suggests that Lavinia seize the opportunity to stretch out, which is precisely the cue that is needed, of course, for a handful of unexpected guests—four, to be precise—to start to show up in quick succession to great comic and, ultimately, soberingly poignant effect. Julia is the first to appear, and she has brought along Alex, who has just returned from one of his frequent junkets to faraway places. In this case, it is the fictional country of Kinkanja, where the monkey-worshiping natives have been in conflict with the Christianized, monkey-eating natives, to the final result that an insurrection has broken out. Some of the Christian natives who had been eating monkeys, thereby outraging the monkey worshipers, have been persuaded to renounce their newfangled ways so that they are now eating Christians

Cocktail Party, The 113 instead. As for the Europeans caught up among the victims of this violence, they are suffering worse fates than being eaten. Alex is just about to tell of just such a horrible death when, suddenly, Peter Quilpe arrives, interrupting Alex’s story. Peter is bubbling over with excitement and enthusiasm for his new position in the American film industry, which has permitted him to return to his native England to scout out a suitably decayed English country house that can then be reproduced in Hollywood for a film that he has personally scripted. As he goes about parading his success and dropping names, he expects them all to become as wrapped up as he is in the importance of his activities. Although they do not recognize the names he drops or quite grasp the scope of his film project, out of politeness the rest try to share in his enthusiasm. These proceedings are interrupted by the sudden arrival of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, ostensibly at the invitation of Julia. After the disruption caused by Reilly’s arrival has subsided, Peter resumes the tale of his successes, and he suggests that he now is in a position where he might be able to help Celia, who had always wanted to get into films herself. He inquires if any of them might know how he would be able to contact her. At this point, with Julia’s encouragement, Alex, sadly, resumes the story that Peter’s arrival had interrupted. Alex had just been about to tell them that among those European Christians killed in the native uprising in Kinkanja was none other than their own Celia Copplestone, who had gone there as the member of a very austere nursing order. Refusing to abandon her native patients in a small, Christian village, she was captured by the rampaging insurrectionists. “It would seem that she must have been crucified / Very near an ant-hill,” Alex reports of her horrible fate, after having already commented that there had been no more than traces left of her body. Peter is most affected by such a shockingly tragic account, for it exposes to him, rightly or wrongly, the vanity of his own pursuits and successes over the last few years. “I suppose I didn’t know her, / I didn’t understand her,” he realizes for himself, apparently feeling petty in the face of such suffering

and sacrifice. His real conclusion—“I understand nothing”—strongly suggests that the young man who at the end of act 2 had been described as someone who was not yet ready to understand is now capable of opening himself to the same sort of examination of motive and purpose to which all the other individuals in the play had been or had need of being exposed. There is for Peter, in other words, hope that he may now be able to begin to work out his own salvation, as Reilly had put it earlier to Lavinia and Edward as a couple and to Celia as a solitary soul. That, however, is for the future for Peter. For now, there is only the necessary initiating insight on Peter’s part that “I’ve only been interested in myself”—an insight true at virtually every level of meaning. The play ends with its three pivotal characters—Edward, Reilly, and Julia—being given a context for philosophical comment in the wake of this news not just of Celia’s death but of how she had chosen the way of her living and dying. Reilly had earlier emphasized that it is not what the choice is that matters but that the individual recognizes the choices and then chooses. In that light, it was for Celia a choice “to choose the way of life / To lead to death,” since it is where each life leads in any event. Julia seconds the notion. “Everyone makes a choice, of one kind or another, / And then must take the consequences.” Edward gets the opportunity to summarize what he thinks they—and, perhaps, the play—mean. If “every moment is a fresh beginning,” he reflects, then “life is only keeping on.” To which Reilly adds, “It is your appointed burden” to accept the obligation to keep on. Besides, as Reilly now assures Lavinia, this time their party will be a success. Peter, sobered by the news of Celia’s death, has already exited, and now Alex, Julia, and Reilly depart as well. Edward and Lavinia are left to themselves, sharing a few last domestic moments before the doorbell rings and the cocktail party can, at last, begin.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot’s later acknowledgement of his indebtedness to Euripides’ Alcestis aside, while it would be difficult to deny that The Cocktail Party, well into

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the second act, is Edward Chamberlayne’s, or at the very most Edward and Lavinia’s story, by play’s end Eliot has managed to make all the other players equally significant and important characters in the unfolding drama. In fact, it would seem to be Eliot’s intention that their respective fates are seen to matter just as much by the time the final curtain falls. Such a surprising turn of events occurs when Celia turns up at Reilly’s office, not as a foil to or in contrast with Edward and Lavinia’s situation but as a necessary complement to it. The unexpected intrusion of Celia’s personal identity crisis, as it were, thus comes to form what emerges by play’s end as the very core of Eliot’s primary theme: When it comes to being confused about who, or what, or why we are, we are all on the same page, and it is heavily blotted with a variety of scenarios, none of which ever seems to suffice for very long. Celia is shown to be as much in need of assistance as Edward and Lavinia, perhaps more. Mere moments before that revelation, meanwhile, the audience had learned that Lavinia is in need of assistance as much as Edward. Eliot is not out simply to exploit these quick-order reversals in order to surprise his audience for greater dramatic or even comic effect, however. Rather, his whole aim is to establish a commonality among his characters, one that he views as a commonality among all individuals. People are most remarkable not in those spectacular differences by which they seem to call attention, or to have attention called, to themselves, but in the similarity that all individuals bear to one another. Each person shares the same ceaseless quest to understand himself and his place in the scheme of things, a vast moral and spiritual and ethical vista. Individuals for the most part undertake that quest in terms of how others see them, but even then there are a few who sooner or later become aware that one is seldom if ever seen for the person that one truly is or, at best, thinks himself to be. However, no one can really ever know that much about himself either without the benefit of how others see him. It can all become very confusing, particularly the more one tries to gain clarity and insight, and that seems to be what The Cocktail Party is all about—gaining clarity in the midst of chaos and confusion.

True understanding, particularly once the window of self-perception, as in Dante, opens, is, in other words, pretty much a lose-lose situation. Most individuals, in happy ignorance, go through life inhabiting one of those voids or the other—the botch that others make of defining each one of us, or the botch that each one makes of it all by himself. The trouble is that all those personal interactions—friendships, marriages, romances, selfless service, professional duties, acts of kindness and concern—take place within one or the other or both of those voids. These activities constitute the social roles that enable individuals to imagine that they are being defined and are defining themselves in concrete terms rather than by the standards of transitory whims and vague impressions. But such activities are still only all functions, not the substance of one’s being. And it is easy, a poet like Eliot knows, eventually to mistake the role for the person, and the person for the self. Sorting through the confusions in the hopes of arriving at an authentic selfhood is a delicately balanced and potentially dangerous game for any individual, especially one involved in a couple relationship, to be sure, but it generally works. It works, at least, as long as no one breaks the rules by admitting that he or she does not really know the other person in the couple at all—or does not even know his or her own self, the one who is doing the knowing. Or, worst of all, that he or she likes neither. Such is the rule that has been broken by Edward and Lavinia as Eliot’s play opens. Perhaps they have simply grown tired of each other. Perhaps they were never all that compatible to begin with. Whatever led to their estrangement, they each have turned the root cause or causes inward enough to see only a failing in themselves as individuals, a failing that they cannot easily gloss over or leave to time and chance to rectify. In that way, the fissure between them opened another fissure, as it were, in the social universe that they quite comfortably had previously inhabited, requiring readjustments in interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships all around until things could all be comfortable and at ease with each other all over again. Even if an Edward and a Lavinia can somehow be reconciled, however, how can Celia go about

Cocktail Party, The 115 reconciling her idea of herself with her true self, an entity that she can never possibly know? All, then, that Celia’s situation later illustrates is that the individual does not really ever know herself any better than others do. Based on the premise that it will tenuously explore the tenuous nature of human relationships, the plot of The Cocktail Party may, as a result, be somewhat flawed dramatically. The play never seems quite able to resolve whether it will confront the immense question of what constitutes individual identity in spiritual terms, in psychological terms, or merely in interpersonal and social terms. Still, it leaves no doubt in the audience’s mind that that is the theme that it is tackling, and that is the play’s triumph. For there is no denying as well that as a theme, it is a major, perhaps even the only genuine theme to which drama is uniquely qualified as an art form to address itself, and Eliot put himself at great risk by trying to “explain” in a few hours of theater what reams of philosophical, religious, and psychological discourse often fail to reveal satisfactorily. Worse even than questioning how individual identity can possibly constitute and maintain itself within the maelstrom of the social dynamics that the typical individual encounters on a virtually nonstop basis is the further and far more philosophical problem of whether there is any consistency of personality from one moment to the next, except as individuals continue an unspoken agreement to treat each other, for the most part, as if constant change is not a part of the dynamics of all continuing relationships. Eliot’s play vividly confronts this practical reality as well. The rapid-fire comings and goings of the players in the first act, for example, for all their potentially comic effect, mainly in fact mimic the rhythms of those larger social patterns in which individuals cross each other’s paths repeatedly never quite as the same people but always trying to behave and interact as if they are. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heracleitus, to whose wisdom Eliot had already had recourse in his epigraphs for “Burnt Norton,” is famous for saying that a person cannot put his hand in the same river twice—a beautifully vivid and simple way of illustrating the fact that change is the only constant in the physical universe. Most people grasp the sig-

nificance of Heracleitus’s maxim on the instant, but if one were to present them with its social corollary—that each of us never encounters the same person twice—it would take a great deal of further example and explanation to prove that that idea is as much of a truism as the Heracleitean original. In any case, it is on such an idea that Eliot founds the social dynamics that constitute the interactions that form the basis of the plot for The Cocktail Party. Eliot builds his plot on the premise that nobody, including the cherished ego identity that most individuals cling to, is the same person from one moment to the next, let alone for week after week, year after year. In a psychological or spiritual crisis, thrown back on oneself, the honest individual would have to admit that he can find no one there. At least that is how Eliot would have it. For the playwright who believes this state of affairs to be an inescapable though hardly obvious truth, the critical question must be how to go about representing such a truth on the stage. As a start, Eliot began with a character who is neither powerfully engaging nor particularly engaged but who may at first seem to be that way simply because no one and nothing has ever come along to challenge his lack of any real passion for living. It comes to be more and more clear as the action progresses that what had passed in Edward Chamberlayne as a consideration for others and their comfort at his own expense as the play opens is really nothing more or less than a lack of any genuine consideration for anyone or anything, himself included. Consciously or unconsciously (very likely the latter), Chamberlayne is a man who has always taken the easy way out, letting the proprieties of polite society conceal a sincere lack of attachment to other people or to ideas. In essence, he can smile and yet be absolutely no one, and a no one he had been able to remain until a crisis in his marriage required him to be somebody real, and he found no personality there. In a sense, in creating a character like Edward Chamberlayne, Eliot exposes the inner workings of a character like Euripides’ Admetus, as if to see what could possibly make such a counterproductive self-centeredness tick. While the idea of a man who has the gall to ask someone else to die in his

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place may make for a great classic myth or timeless fairy tale, the fact remains that it also portends an almost pathological psychological makeup, someone who has become so used to thinking only of himself that he has, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist as a social reality. Not that Eliot needed to consult Euripides to conceive of the self-imprisoned and, so, socially immobilized individual. Eliot had been essaying just such a type consistently from the time of his own earliest characterizations. J. Alfred Prufrock may be foremost among them, but they do not stop there. Eliot created a parade of ineffectual personalities wallowing in their inability to affect anything or anyone: the tiredness of Gerontion; the vacuously meaningless musings of the hollow men, lost in the desert valley of their own spiritual lassitude, lacking the will or ability to make a commitment of self to anyone or anything; and the ironic vanities of the magus remembering his approach to glory in “Journey of the Magi.” Indeed, in the modern period, the type had become almost exclusively Eliot’s trademark character, so adept had Eliot always been at capturing the very essence of the essence-less, those walking dead inhabiting the modern urban landscape who, going through their paces, occupy time and space but otherwise have ceased to make a difference to or for themselves or others. Eliot did not invent the type but merely had become famously able to identify him. For a playwright, the problem remains, nevertheless, how exactly to depict rather than merely present or comment on such a type, who, in Eliot’s view, is far more common than we may care to imagine. In a nutshell, how does one make an Edward Chamberlayne come to see who and what an Edward Chamberlayne is—a man devoid of love but married, of attachments yet surrounded by friends, of passion yet with a mistress? Eliot centers his story around the notion of such a person’s undergoing a therapeutic process, whereby his flawed viewed of things has to be exposed so that he may be “cured.” Solving that medical problem, as it were, for Edward Chamberlayne gives the entire drama its motive to expose the problem as universal, which is precisely what it is and precisely what is accomplished by play’s end.

In the first act, however, while no one in the audience is yet aware of which way the story may be going, Eliot does not miss opportunity to let them in on Edward’s awful secret, a secret kept even from himself: that he is one of the hollow men. Eliot does this by making frequent allusions, not in this case to great works of literature from the past, but to his own previous and, by now, celebrated poetic inventions, so that his own take on Edward’s character cannot fail to make an impression. As might be imagined, these allusions are to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and to “The Hollow Men,” and they occur with remarkable frequency and clarity in the opening act while Edward’s “condition,” so to speak, is being clarified for him through his interaction with the other characters. No sooner has Reilly, in the guise of the Unidentified Guest, gotten into the details of Edward’s problems with Lavinia (which, it should always be remembered, are Edward’s problems with himself and with matters of self-esteem and self-perception), than he, Reilly, is using analogies to Edward’s being a “subject . . . stretched on the table, / . . . a piece of furniture in a repair shop,” to “masked actors,” and to playing the fool. All of these analogies call up associations with similar imagery from “Prufrock,” such as its famous opening image of the etherized patient on the operating table, the mask that one prepares to “meet the faces that you meet,” and Prufrock’s thinking of himself as the Shakepearean fool. Later, indeed, in their long exchange in the third scene, Lavinia, too, will accuse Edward of being fully capable of carrying on by conning a suitable role: “[Y]ou’ll . . . find yourself another little part to play, / With another face.” Celia, in the scene in which she “sees” Edward for the first time as the weak and ineffectual person he has apparently always been, says that he has not a voice now but makes “only the noise of an insect, / Dry, endless, meaningless, inhuman,” calling to mind the “dried voices . . . quiet and meaningless” of “The Hollow Men,” as well as the withered and dessicated imagery that appears throughout Eliot’s most celebrated work, The Waste Land. Other memorable images from that Eliot poem also find their way into The Cocktail Party. When, for example,

Cocktail Party, The 117 Lavinia accuses Edward of being fully capable of adapting to change in order to fit each new situation, he counters that bickering like this is at least preferable to “passing the evening . . . listening to the gramophone.” His alluding to such typical avoidance strategies is reminiscent of the behavior of the uncommunicative couple in “A Game of Chess,” the second part of The Waste Land, or of the promiscuous typist following her act of perfunctory sex in “The Fire Sermon,” the third part. In summary, having been one among the handful of outstanding poets writing in English who had personally shaped, in his poetry, much of what his audience would take to be the very nature of the modern sensibility, Eliot is free now to reference that sensibility quickly and easily in The Cocktail Party by having the characters echo his own poetry sparingly but to great effect. Thus, all of Edward’s shortcomings as a person can be exposed in terms already familiar to the audience, since their sensibilities have already been formed by the poems of Eliot’s to which he is alluding. Too, it saves the drama from the turgidness that might have resulted had Eliot, say, felt compelled to draw on the technical lingo of clinical psychologists instead. Once Edward’s condition has thus been described and defined in this readily accessible manner for the audience, it is then fairly easy for Eliot to widen the circle of the debilitated until it includes most of the play’s small cast of characters. For Eliot’s real aim, once more, is to show that the debility is not uniquely Edward’s condition but the human condition. All are afflicted by an inability to love or to be loved, at least in Eliot’s view, and coming to terms with one’s life and identity is, for him, ultimately coming to terms with the paradox that human relationships are simultaneously too shallow for words and yet too important to be taken for granted. Rely on others too much, and the self is lost. Rely on the self, and the necessity for self-sacrifice as a prerequisite for personal salvation is lost. It is in that manner that Edward’s “case” naturally leads to Lavinia’s; that Lavinia and Edward’s situation naturally leads to Celia’s “case”; and that Celia’s “cure,” as it were, her martyrdom, leads Peter to becoming aware that he has a “case”—all of these events occurring more or less independent

of each other except through the intervention of the likes of Alex, Julia, and Reilly. Each of the four “troubled” characters—Edward, Lavinia, Celia, and Peter—who undergo a radical transformation in the course of the play had to undergo a radical transformation or die. Not physically (that would have been a blessing), but spiritually. Whether or not they understood that, Julia, Alex, and Reilly did. Determining what those three consequently represent, as if they must necessarily represent anything, is not as much of a problem as it may appear at first glance. Much of the charm of the play, in fact, can be measured against how these three characters develop from their first appearances to their last. The Cocktail Party must first be a social, a domestic comedy, after all, filled with the sorts of waggish understatement, petulant insult, and witty repartee that any play in such a genre would have to deliver. But it is also a comedy by T. S. Eliot, who can, as has already been witnessed, trundle in analyses full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse, because any audience would expect something more serious and profound even in a comedy when the playwright is the famously obscure poet of The Waste Land. Eliot works the likelihood of these expectations to his advantage first, as noted above, by making generous use of allusions to his own earlier, darker poetry. However, he also alludes to hints half understood—the reference to the Guardians, for example, bringing to mind perhaps his use of the Eumenides from Aeschylus in The Family Reunion. For all that they seem to be at the center of things by play’s end, Eliot uses Reilly, Alex, and Julia because they are actually peripheral characters whose enigmatic presence casts a cloak of mystery around the proceedings. First there is the introduction of Reilly as the enigmatic yet knowledgeable Unidentified Guest. Then, once he is reintroduced as Reilly, a physician of some sort, Julia and Alex are insinuated into his sphere of reference, thus giving them an aura of mystery that makes them appear to be nothing like what they had appeared to be at first. Finally by making them act as if they are members of some cult or secret society or, even more mysterious, perhaps even supernatural presences or

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influences, Eliot manages to keep the social drama sprightly, if nothing else, by increasingly suggesting that there is more going on than meets the eye, an old theatrical trick aimed at keeping the audience engaged but off guard. By play’s end, nonetheless, it is not all that difficult to see these somewhat surreptitious instigators, each one, for exactly what they are—Reilly as a caring and highly skilled counselor and Alex and Julia as two individuals who have some years of experience behind them. When it comes to the crises that Edward, Lavinia, Celia, and Peter are facing or soon will be, Alex and Julia, through the offices of their physician friend Reilly, easily assume, in secret, their labor of a detached beenthere, done-that interference on behalf of the others. The “spells” that they intone with the doctor are nothing more or less than hopeful blessings and wishes of good cheer for the success of their kindly interferences. For in the final analysis, it should be clear, the theme of The Cocktail Party, with its own connotations of conviviality and good cheer, as well as of hair let down and inhibitions scuttled, is the theme that had begun to obsess Eliot virtually from the time of “Ash-Wednesday” and “Marina.” It is the great theme of love and of its healing power to make graceful the stumbling human effort to understand and to be understood. It is the theme of having confidence in love’s power to heal and make whole.

FURTHER READING Browne, E. Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Donnelly, Mabel C. “The Failure of Act III of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.” CLA Journal 21 (1977): 58–61. Donoghue, Denis. The Third Voice. Modern British and American Verse Drama. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959. Jones, D. E. The Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Confidential Clerk, The (1953) Eliot had the first two scenes of The Confidential Clerk drafted as early as May 1951 when The Cocktail Party was just opening for London audiences. His plans were to premiere the new play at the Edinburgh Festival the summer of 1952, but he would not complete the play until February 1953, thus delaying its Edinburgh Festival debut until the following August; it was very well received. The play opened at London’s Lyric Theatre on September 16, 1953, where it continued to experience great popular success. Although Eliot viewed it as his most profound play, its success may be attributed to its somewhat light and breezy manner, almost as if Eliot allowed the characters greater verbal space in which to express themselves and expose their relationships, more as if they are real people following the prerogatives of their own impulses to interact rather than being mere persons of the drama fulfilling preconceived patterns of behavior in keeping not with their own but with the playwright’s purpose and motives. This is no less an illusion, of course, but it is an illusion that permits a more natural flow to the action, so that the effect is one of life itself transpiring, rather than that of a play that is unfolding. Furthermore, for his story this time, Eliot’s lack of daring pays off. Hints of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s Pericles, a play that had earlier influenced Eliot’s “Marina,” can be found in Eliot’s play’s use of such timeless theatrical standbys as mistaken identities and surprise recognitions in order to keep the drama rolling. Otherwise, among his works The Confidential Clerk makes the least use of the classical and literary allusiveness (and, some might say, pretentiousness) for which Eliot had long since become duly celebrated if not notorious. At the risk of implying that there was no opportunity for originality in Eliot’s longtime practice of structuring meaning from copious reference to past authors and literary masterpieces, the dramatic consequences of such borrowings tended to make the plays too literary for audience taste. In the case of his two earlier, completed contemporary dramas, The Family Reunion and The Cocktail

Confidential Clerk, The Party, for example, he had gone as far as to adapt his story line from classic plays in the Greek repertoire, Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Orestia, and Euripides’ Alcestis, respectively. The Cocktail Party, whose allusion to Euripides was not discovered until Eliot himself revealed it after the fact, was a great stage success, realizing some 734 performances in London and New York. Incorporating the machinery and thematic baggage from Aeschylus into a drawingroom drama, however, made the stagecraft in The Family Reunion, a far less successful production, so cumbersome that even Eliot himself made fun of it years later in his essay “The Music of Drama.” Whether or not Eliot had thereby learned his lesson, The Confidential Clerk nevertheless owns the distinction of being a wholly original work virtually devoid of anything but the most conventional theatrical antecedents or models. That does not make it an inherently better or more effective work by any means, but it does make the drama more selfreferential. Rather than being encouraged to find parallels with previous theatrical pieces, the audience is required to do little more than to accept the fictional universe created by the play wholly on its own terms, and when it comes to establishing the verisimilitude necessary for action on the stage to succeed as drama, that is requirement enough.

SYNOPSIS Act 1 The first act, which opens in the business room, or office, of the highly successful financier Sir Claude Mulhammer’s London home, establishes both the tone and the story of the play and introduces all of the characters with the exception of Mrs. Guzzard. Sir Claude’s confidential clerk, or personal secretary, of more than 30 years’ standing, introduced simply as Eggerson, is in the process of retiring, and Sir Claude has hired a young man, Colby Simpkins, to replace him. As the action begins, Colby, as he will be called, has been sent on business for Sir Claude into the City, permitting Eggerson and Sir Claude to go over certain critical details regarding Colby. Colby, it turns out, has not trained as a private secretary but is in fact a failed musician, an organist. Eggerson remains on hand this particular morning to go to the airport to pick up Sir Claude’s

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wife, Lady Elizabeth, who is just now returning from the Continent, where she has voluntarily undergone outpatient psychiatric counseling. Sir Claude wants to maintain control over exactly how and what and in what order Lady Elizabeth will learn of his new confidential clerk. It seems that she can be rather meddlesome, though scatterbrained, so the news of Colby’s hiring must be broken to her in a calculating way, since she had had no part in it whatsoever. There is a subtext to these maneuverings as well, however: Sir Claude is apparently hopeful that if he and Eggerson proceed just so in bringing Colby to her attention, she may come to accept the young man as the child that she had “mislaid” years before, having lost track of the child’s whereabouts because of his father’s death. There is also the suggestion that Colby does have a parent-child relationship close to home—but rather than to Lady Elizabeth, it may very well be to Sir Claude. Colby returns from his mission to the City, and Sir Claude excuses himself, giving Colby an opportunity to express certain misgivings to Eggerson about finally meeting Lady Elizabeth. Another character in the drama, B. Kaghan, whose opinion Eggerson dismisses out of hand, has nevertheless “alarmed” Colby about what to expect from Lady Elizabeth. Eggerson assures Colby that once her ladyship sees how cultured Colby is and musical, she will take to him a great deal better than she has ever taken to the highly likable but, in Lady Elizabeth’s view, “undistinguished” Mr. Kaghan. Colby is not particularly reassured, but then Kaghan himself arrives on the scene, in the company of his fiancée, Lucasta Angel. Lucasta, it seems, has just lost her position, and she has dropped by to get some cash from Sir Claude to tide her over until she finds a new job. Eggerson informs her that he no longer has the authority to offer her an advance and that she will have to speak to Sir Claude himself in that regard. She and Colby are apparently meeting for the first time, and he is both shocked and fascinated by her brazen forwardness and a certain cheeky familiarity that she maintains toward Sir Claude and the members of his household. For example, she refers to Lady Elizabeth as “Lizzie.”

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After Kaghan and Miss Angel depart, Colby admits to Eggerson that Lucasta “did make my head spin.” Eggerson again assures Colby that he has nothing to be worried about. Lucasta’s father, Eggerson explains, was a friend of Sir Claude’s, and he treats her as if he were himself her father. Colby can conclude only that he has “never met anyone like Miss Angel,” suggesting that there is as much of attraction as of repulsion in his response to her. The discussion about Lucasta enables Colby to inquire further into what he might expect Lady Elizabeth to be like. She, Eggerson tells him, is much more unusual even than Lucasta. Indeed, Lady Elizabeth is a regular grande dame, which is what Sir Claude admires about her, but she is very absent-minded as well, especially as a traveler. Sir Claude now reappears to remind Eggerson that it is time that he head off to fetch her ladyship at the airport. These proceedings are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Lady Elizabeth herself, who not only had rearranged her entire return itinerary but made it to her own door unassisted by anyone, including the kindly and highly competent Eggerson. Although her ladyship has a reputation for being entirely helpless as a tourist, she explains to a startled Sir Claude and Eggerson how she not only managed to get herself home all on her own but had changed all her other travel plans as well, including her choice of clinics, and has evidently been quite improved by the selection. The real problem is that the best-laid plans of the apple cart that Sir Claude and Eggerson had carefully arranged in order to expose Lady Elizabeth to Colby’s existence in small, measured doses has now also been completely upset by Lady Elizabeth’s sudden and unexpected arrival. Once she has had the opportunity to notice Colby’s presence, thinking out loud that “[h]is face is familiar,” Sir Claude and Eggerson begin a nervous explanation of who Colby is and why and how he has come to be there. They need not be anxious, however, about how well she may take the news, for despite her apparent “cure” her ladyship’s absent-mindedness continues unabated, at least as far a this young man is concerned. Rather than being surprised or befuddled by Colby’s presence as a member of the household

staff, Lady Elizabeth is instead instantly convinced that he is the very young man that she has personally interviewed and proposed to Sir Claude to be hired as Eggerson’s replacement. Since her colossal misconception plays right into Sir Claude’s plans, neither he nor Eggerson say anything to dissuade her from this misguided conviction. As it turns out, her ladyship has a penchant for arcane lore and the occult, so she starts to admire Colby’s aura and commenting on the auspicious numerological significance of the number of letters in his name. She concludes by bringing to bear her knowledge of the spiritual benefits of color symbolism to recommend the precise shade of yellow that they should paint the apartment that Sir Claude is having redecorated for Colby’s use. She concludes by inviting Colby to tea the very next day, and then she takes her leave. Once Eggerson and Sir Claude have had an opportunity to discuss her ladyship’s changed condition, such as it is, Eggerson takes his leave, and Sir Claude and Colby have a private moment now in which to clear the air in the wake of these recent changes in their plans for introducing him into the household. All in all, Sir Claude is pleased. “[S]he’s taken a fancy to you / And so she lays claim to you,” he explains to Colby, and that fits their plan that she accept him as her lost child. Colby protests that despite its being such an apparently positive development, he feels as if it would be “building [his] life upon a deception” for Lady Elizabeth to accept him as her son. Sir Claude does not agree. If she accepts Colby as the kind of man her son might have grown up to be, then “it wouldn’t surprise me if she came to believe / That you really are her son, instead of being mine.” This revelation now made to the audience, Colby persists in expressing a reluctance to see any of them having to “live in a world of make-believe,” such as Lady Elizabeth, in her own eccentric way, always has done. In view of Sir Claude’s revelation regarding Colby’s true identity, Colby’s protest takes on a particularly poignant significance. Again Sir Claude disagrees. “If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms / Upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you,” he tells Colby, giving the drama its thematic focus.

Confidential Clerk, The As a child, Colby had been sent to Canada during the war to live with his aunt; he and Sir Claude barely know each other. Now Colby is in the process of becoming Sir Claude’s son, but it is being done in a manner that is making Colby feel that he is becoming a “different person,” rather than the organist that he had been hoping all his life to be—until, that is, he realized that he was not talented enough. Sir Claude understands, using his own experience to illustrate to Colby what he had meant about accepting life on its terms, not one’s own. Sir Claude had not started out life with plans to be a financier either. “I wanted to be a potter,” he tells an astounded Colby. The life he has instead, although it is not in that sense real, has become real enough. “It begins as a kind of make-believe / And the make-believing makes it real.” Such are the compromises with life that he had spoken of earlier and that he is now asking Colby to make. The saints and men of genius may be able to unite the two worlds—the world where real interests lay and are satisfied and the world where compromises must be made—but others “have at best to live / In two worlds—each a kind of make-believe.” “That’s you and me,” Sir Claude concludes by way of further explanation to Colby. Though Sir Claude can collect and appreciate pottery as if he were a potter, he will never be one, just as Colby has the heart and ear of a great organist but not the talent to succeed as one. Colby accepts Sir Claude’s analysis of their respective situations; he asks only that his new position in Sir Claude’s household not “be, in any way, a make-believe.” As the first act ends, Sir Claude assures Colby that that will not be the case. Rather, they “must simply wait to learn / What new conditions life will impose on us.” Act 2 The second act, though it runs virtually the same length as act 1, involves little more than a series of important revelations and reversals that will set the action up for resolution in act 3. The entire act takes place in the sitting room of the apartment that Sir Claude, with Lady Elizabeth’s guidance, has had entirely redecorated for Colby’s use. It is several weeks after the events of the opening act. As this next act opens, Colby has been

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entertaining Lucasta, who dropped by unexpectedly, by playing pieces for her on the piano. It is one that Sir Claude has seen fit to provide to accommodate the frustrated musician that Colby has by now become. Naturally, Lucasta, who confesses to knowing very little about music, thinks that Colby’s playing is heavenly, whereas he demurs, although he admits that he very likely plays better now since he has determined that he will never be a musician. Lucasta and Colby then talk of their first meeting, and Colby is bold enough to suggest that Lucasta may have been trying to make an impression on him during that earlier encounter at Sir Claude’s. She does not deny it, and he tells her that her pushiness is the result of a defensiveness that she need not maintain. For her part, she had found him insecure as well, as a result of his failed vocation. Now, however, she can see that “it’s only the outer world that you’ve lost: / You’ve still got your inner world,” and that world is his secret garden, a world that is more real. Colby does not agree, for in such a garden, he tells her, he is alone, and that is not real. “Eggerson’s garden,” he says of the flower garden to which his predecessor is now able to devote himself in his retirement, “is more real than mine.” The more the young couple chat, the more they share details of their private lives, until they get to a matter about which Colby tells Lucasta he is not free to be forthcoming, and that regards his parentage. Suddenly, the boldly forthright Lucasta is back. She can talk freely about her parentage, she proclaims, and then she blurts out that, contrary to what she takes to be the common belief that she is Sir Claude’s mistress, she is in fact Sir Claude’s illegitimate daughter. She continues by describing her mother as a drunken and abusive parent who, despite an allowance from Sir Claude, still plied the trade that had apparently resulted in her pregnancy. When Colby expresses shock over Lucasta’s revelations, the audience understands that it is because he has been led to believe that he is Sir Claude’s son. The sudden idea that Lucasta may be his sister completely discombobulates Colby. However, his shocked response leads Lucasta to imagine

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that he is ashamed to know someone of such disreputable breeding. Before Colby can explain his reaction by revealing the information about his own relationship with Sir Claude, information that Colby has pledged to keep hidden, Kaghan arrives on the scene. With his usual volubility, Kaghan takes over the conversation, turning the attention on himself under the guise of complimenting Colby’s character. Kaghan tells Colby that he sees his new friend as a self-sufficient person who is not obsessed with respectability, since he was born to it, whereas Kaghan never knew his own parents, having been adopted as an infant. Parentage has become a topic on everyone’s mind to one extent or another when, just as Kaghan and Lucasta are about to leave for dinner, Lady Elizabeth arrives on the scene equally unexpectedly. She is there ostensibly to see how Colby’s apartment has turned out, but it becomes quickly apparent that her real interest is in Colby, whom she continues to find eerily familiar. Once Lucasta and Kaghan have gone, Lady Elizabeth begins to interrogate Colby about his parentage. He informs her that he never knew either his mother, who died when he was born, or his father; that his birth was illegitimate; and that he was raised by a widowed aunt, a Mrs. Guzzard of Teddington. The more Lady Elizabeth hears, the more she becomes convinced that this Mrs. Guzzard was the very person with whom her first husband had left their own infant son. That first husband’s subsequent death in Africa had prevented her from ever being able to verify the infant’s whereabouts, because of her notorious absent-mindedness. Sir Claude arrives, and Lady Elizabeth shares with him her “discovery” that Colby is this long-lost child. Although Sir Claude had been hoping that his wife would eventually accept Colby into the household as if he were her lost infant, he had not expected it to become such a literal reality for her. The enthusiasm with which Lady Elizabeth now embraces Colby as her flesh and blood forces Sir Claude to see the damage that his innocent plan has done. He now determines to save the day by revealing his own hand, gently explaining to Lady Elizabeth that, while it is understandable how

she may have fallen victim to the delusion that Colby is her son, he cannot in fact be hers because “Colby is my son.” He apologizes for having kept this information from her these many years. His explanation is that, after having confessed to Lady Elizabeth that he is Lucasta’s father, he was afraid that should he have confessed to yet another illegitimate child, Lady Elizabeth might have begun to think that there would be no end to it. Sir Claude further explains how Mrs. Guzzard had kept Colby and cared for him when his mother, who was Mrs. Guzzard’s sister, had died. Lady Elizabeth remains adamant, however, in insisting that Colby is her son. She argues that this same Mrs. Guzzard, left with Lady Elizabeth’s child and with no way to contact the parents, had then deceived Sir Claude by palming Colby off on him as his own, since Sir Claude, for reasons of his own, would not have been surprised by her claim to have a child of his in her safekeeping. Whatever the case of Colby’s parentage may be, things are so confused and entangled by now that there seems to be no way to settle the matter. The unassuming but ever attentive Colby has been listening to this debate about his parentage and putative identity with mixed feelings. He feels numb, he tells them, because what difference would it make now in any case, since he had never known either of them as a parent when it would have mattered. Whose son he is, is “merely a fact,” and by now it is a dead fact out of which “[n]othing living can spring.” While Lady Elizabeth proposes that she and Sir Claude can both accept Colby as the child that they never had, Colby concludes that he can live with a fact or with a fiction, but not with a mixture of both. “I want to know whose son I am,” he concludes. Both Sir Claude and Lady Elizabeth are forced to agree, and as act 2 draws to a close, it is further agreed that only by consulting Mrs. Guzzard herself can they accede to poor Colby’s wishes and settle the matter of his parentage once and for all. Act 3 The third act, like the first, takes place in the business room of Sir Claude’s London home. It is several days later, and Sir Claude is busy arranging the seating under the watchful eyes of Lady Elizabeth. He wants to make certain that Mrs. Guzzard, who

Confidential Clerk, The is expected to arrive shortly, will not be intimidated by the setting so that the “investigation” can proceed without any hitches. In the midst of their chatter, Sir Claude reveals to Lady Elizabeth how he had always wanted to be a potter rather than a wealthy financier. Rather than laughing at such an unlikely ambition, as he had feared she might, she wonders instead why they had not shared such personal details until now. The chat turns into a heart-to-heart in which each admits to having imagined him- or herself quite differently from the person the other has come to perceive. Now, as Sir Claude and Lady Elizabeth wait to discover exactly whose child Colby is, air that had never seemed to be clouded between the two of them before has nevertheless been cleared. Lady Elizabeth, whose nimble confusions of details in the first place had necessitated this meeting with Mrs. Guzzard, now is able to resolve that “it doesn’t matter what Mrs. Guzzard tells us, / If it satisfies Colby.” No matter what, Lady Elizabeth concludes, Colby “shall be our son.” Eggerson arrives, and they fill him in on the purpose of the interview that is to take place shortly. Like Sir Claude, Eggerson is not convinced that this Mrs. Guzzard could ever had had any dealings with Lady Elizabeth. He offers an alternative reading to Lady Elizabeth’s scenario: There could have been two babies at Mrs. Guzzard’s. Obviously, this explanation does not go over any better than any of the others, perhaps even less so. Matters now sufficiently confused, there is little more to do than to wait for Mrs. Guzzard. But the situation is further complicated when Lucasta shows up unexpectedly, hoping to speak to Colby. In the process of her revealing that she will be marrying Mr. Kaghan, as everyone had been expecting, she also reveals to them her now dampened interest in Colby, and that added revelation requires Sir Claude to explain to her that Colby is her brother, at least as far as he knows. Her plans to marry Kaghan now confirmed, Lucasta has it out briefly with Lady Elizabeth, who Lucasta has always felt thinks Kaghan to be too common for her tastes. On this day of reckoning and rectifying, her ladyship, her self-perception as a liberal person shaken by Lucasta’s accusation of a prejudice against Kaghan,

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promises Lucasta that she regards the younger woman as a stepdaughter and will happily accept B. Kaghan as her son-in-law. Eggerson suggests that Lucasta and Kaghan should wait downstairs till Mrs. Guzzard’s visit has ended so that the couple can be properly welcomed into the family. Colby now arrives on the scene, however, enabling Lucasta to offer her apologies to him personally, as well as to acknowledge that since they appear to be brother and sister, they will have to get to know each other in a different way as time passes. Lucasta steps out, only to step back in shortly to explain that Mrs. Guzzard has arrived but that there is no one to show her up. They settle on B. to perform that service, and, at last, the interrogation is set to begin. Sir Claude had already determined to let Eggerson conduct it, so as not to force any issues. Under Eggerson’s delicate questioning, Mrs. Guzzard is very gracious, if a bit stiff, in her responses, particularly after Eggerson explains the confusions caused by Lady Elizabeth’s suddenly revived, and revised, memory of events. Yes, Mrs. Guzzard clarifies, there was a child. Yes, he was very well connected. Yes, his support suddenly ceased. All goes swimmingly as Mrs. Guzzard’s answers seem to strengthen Lady Elizabeth’s case, but then, understandably, Mrs. Guzzard takes umbrage at the suggestion that she may have deceived Sir Claude by daring to pass off Lady Elizabeth’s child as the son of Sir Claude and Mrs. Guzzard’s sister. Eggerson suggests that everyone’s feelings can be spared if Mrs. Guzzard explained what eventually became of the child. She explains that once the payments stopped, they allowed some neighbors to adopt the child—a family called Kaghan. The more Mrs. Guzzard reveals, the more it appears that the child whom she had cared for and who Lady Elizabeth is convinced is her own, rather than being Colby, is in fact none other than B. Kaghan. Though details must still be verified, Colby goes out to fetch Lucasta and Kaghan, who is then questioned about his adoptive parents. He is, indeed, the abandoned child whom Mrs. Guzzard had allowed her neighbors the Kaghans to adopt when, unbeknownst to her, Tony, the boy’s father, had died and, as a result, the payments for his care had stopped coming. And this is the very child of

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whom Lady Elizabeth had lost track. Lady Elizabeth is not as pleased with this outcome as she might have been had the more refined and cultured Colby turned out to be her mislaid child. Nevertheless, she accepts the fact that the, in her view, vulgar Barnabas Kaghan is her son, to whom she will henceforth be Aunt Elizabeth instead of Lady Elizabeth and shortly will be mother-in-law as well. And now Mrs. Guzzard, almost as if the entire inquiry were her idea to begin with, turns her attention to Colby, to ask if he too is pleased with the results, considering that it was his true parentage that had been meant to be uncovered originally. Colby answers in his typically elaborate and overly considered way, coming to the conclusion that, if he truly could choose—had “his wish”—then since he never knew his real mother in any case, he would prefer to have a “dead obscure man” for a father rather than Sir Claude. And then, to Colby’s utter surprise, and Sir Claude’s considerable consternation, Mrs. Guzzard announces that Colby shall have his wish. Colby, she explains, is her own child by her now longdeceased husband, who had been, like Colby, a frustrated musician. Sir Claude is outraged that there is a deception of some order in this latest revelation, but Mrs. Guzzard convinces him that it was his own presumptions, not anything that she had ever particularly told him, that had convinced him years ago that Colby was his child by Mrs. Guzzard’s sister, who died before she gave birth to her and Sir Claude’s child. Whatever the truth may be, Colby embraces the idea that his father is a man he never did and never can know. “I must believe you,” he proclaims to Mrs. Guzzard. “This gives me freedom.” On that note, Sir Claude, without conceding that it is the truth, yields as well to Mrs. Guzzard’s version of the circumstances surrounding Colby’s birth. Sir Claude makes the mistake of thinking, however, that nothing else has changed with regard to his and Colby’s relationship, one that had from early on in the play seemed to be marked by a spiritual kinship typical of a father and son. That bond between them had been the common experience of a scotched ambition requiring each of them to settle for second-best career, though in Sir Claude’s

case, the world might have honored him all the more for making the lesser choice. Colby, however, sees his own spiritual kinship as lying instead with his putative biological father, Mrs. Guzzard’s long-deceased husband. For Colby can understand his love of music not as an ambition but as a natural vocation, and as a result he plans to leave Sir Claude’s employ to become a church organist, since achieving great public success as a musician no longer forms a part of his goal. Sir Claude virtually begs Colby to reconsider these new plans, but Colby insists on following through with them. Now that they have both been enabled to abandon their ambitions and their illusions about each other and about themselves, Colby explains, it would be wrong to perpetuate the charade, even one as innocent and well-motivated as their own. “All that’s left is love,” Colby explains, and love requires that they let each other be. Frustrated, Sir Claude turns to Eggerson to dissuade Colby from his new plans, but Eggerson only reenforces them by not only proposing that Colby might apply for the position of organist that has just become available at the Eggersons’ parish church and offering him a room in their home, but by going on to suggest that he sees a call to the ministry in Colby’s future. The play ends with Sir Claude’s being forced to accept his fate. As Mrs. Guzzard explains it as she prepares to take her leave, her services no longer being required, she and Sir Claude had each had their expectations—their wish—fulfilled 25 years before. Sir Claude got a chance to fulfill a sense of obligation to a son he would otherwise never acknowledge, and she would obtain help in raising her child. “[B]ut,” she concludes, “we failed to observe . . . / That there was a time-limit clause in the contract.” More bewildered than broken, Sir Claude is left to ponder if he might ever again see Colby, who has departed with Mrs. Guzzard, his “Aunt” Sarah, to call her a taxi. Both Lucasta and Kaghan, his daughter and future son-in-law, as well as his wife’s son, are there to comfort and reassure him, however. The younger man explains to Sir Claude that “we all made the same mistake” by wanting Colby to be something he was not—Sir Claude’s son and con-

Confidential Clerk, The fidential clerk, and then Lady Elizabeth’s “son” as well. Lady Elizabeth, who says a mouthful when she admits that “[o]ne does make mistakes,” promises that she will try to do better in the future. And for his own part, Sir Claude, although he happily accepts Kaghan and Lucasta’s protestations of love and affection, ends the drama by asking Eggerson if he “really believe[s] her,” apparently meaning the now departed Mrs. Guzzard. The curtain falls on Eggerson nodding, “Yes.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Although Eliot sticks to tried and true theatrical conventions to make The Confidential Clerk the most conventional of his plays to date, that does not mean that the poet who staked his earliest reputation on being inscrutably ambiguous is not up to many of his own old tricks. Amid the plethora of stock characters, mistaken recognitions, and revelations and reversals galore, the same artist who, in The Waste Land, had made disillusionment a bona fide virtue and who had then proposed, in the Four Quartets, that life is ceaseless exploration with skills and tools at hand that are always inadequate and forever deteriorating has hardly lost his edge, his intellectual passion, or his cleverness. He tells the story of a young man who is content to discover at last that by being no one at all, he is left free to be himself. Admittedly, however, as much is not readily available at first glance. At first glance, rather, The Confidential Clerk signals a marked change in Eliot’s interests and techniques not merely as a dramatist, but as a poet. A reader who, having just read Eliot’s first effort at a verse drama, the unsettlingly modernist but never completed “Sweeney Agonistes,” then turns to The Confidential Clerk must be left wondering how any writer could have managed to convert the creative energies of his writing talent so much and so entirely as to have crossed the divide from the one play to the other, so much would the two plays, if read back to back, seem to be products of an entirely different writer if not literary epochs. Such a startling contrast of range and interests cannot easily be found in any other writer with a reputation for innovative genius comparable to the one that Eliot had deservedly achieved. Yet

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a reader who had followed Eliot’s career all along would not be at all surprised coming upon The Confidential Clerk for the first time and would feel Eliot’s unmistakable mark and talent for limning the personal and social consequences of human fallibility in every line and phrase. There is a genuine progressive development to be found in Eliot’s playwriting, a development that parallels developments in his poetry writing. At the more obvious level, there are Eliot the playwright’s persistent to-and-fro adjustments that he made from one play to another in perfecting what he regarded as the requirements for an effective and yet unobstrusive dramatic verse. In that regard, one could follow, for example, the development from his placing too heavy an emphasis on the poetically histrionic, as he feared that he had done with Murder in the Cathedral, to his evidencing too keen a regard for the prosaic, a flaw that he would later identify in the spare verse line that he incorporated into The Cocktail Party. There is also a no less significant but perhaps far less obvious development from those early works like Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion that relied heavily and demonstrably for their dramatic quality on the ritual of classical drama, filled as they were with choral interludes and the like and on a high seriousness of tone and theme. What then followed were more contemporary works, beginning somewhat with The Cocktail Party and then continuing most assuredly with The Confidential Clerk, in which both the verse and the plots, despite certain complications of motive intended to keep up dramatic suspense and audience interest, are hardly distinguishable from the light fare associated with drawing-room dramas and comedies depicting the peccadilloes of the well-to-do. It is not clear whether this particular progress is a forward one or merely the result of Eliot’s setting his theatrical sights on achieving a popular success rather than literary masterpieces on a par with the rigid critical standards of modernism, standards that he himself had had a great deal of influence in establishing and setting. What is clear is that, by the time of The Confidential Clerk, Eliot’s playwriting had become a great deal more accessible. Accessibility had been his constant goal virtually from

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the time of his poetic contributions to the pageant play The Rock in 1933, so, if nothing else, The Confidential Clerk should be recognized for the personal professional triumph that it represents for Eliot. Arguably, there is the critical problem that, in achieving this level of accessibility in his stage productions, one of the 20th century’s most justifiably complex and profound poets may have compromised, if not his considerable talents, then at least the necessary complexities of his considerable poetic vision for the sake of reaching a wider and more varied audience. On the other hand, it should go without saying that the pursuit of popularity for popularity’s sake did not form any part of Eliot’s intention. The poet of The Confidential Clerk is the same man who, in 1934 in his Charles Eliot Norton lectureship at Harvard University, from which emerged his critical work The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, had pronounced the stage to be the most suitable medium for poetry in the 20th century. Eliot had held in subsequent remarks found scattered throughout his late masterpiece, the Four Quartets, that the primary function of the poet is to keep the language solvent, as it were, and it is this man who had, in a manner of speaking, put his money where his mouth was in a verse drama of the caliber of The Confidential Clerk. By running the risk of a public failure in a capricious and volatile medium, the legitimate theater, for the sake of extending the possibilities of the common language in his time, Eliot was also extending poetry’s ability to address common human needs for order and for a sense of purpose in everyday experience. However one views it, there is an unavoidable irony in finding one of the most obscure of the early modernists, for which literary tactic he was often excoriated for being an elitist, ending his poetic career by attempting to make poetic discourse tantamount to common speech and capable of addressing what he viewed to be the pressing psychological and spiritual issues of ordinary, contemporary life. That these issues may appear to some to have been presented by Eliot, in his later verse dramas, in ways more closeted or more exclusively reflective of the difficulties facing the upper middle class than is typical does not diminish their importance or,

for that matter, account for these plays’ general popularity, beginning with The Cocktail Party. Eliot, nevertheless, fulfilled his own aim as poet more than as social commentator or moral arbiter by letting audiences hear the poetry of everyday speech and hear how their everyday speech could be both the stuff of great drama and, more to the point, of great poetry. It will be left for subsequent generations to determine whether or not Eliot succeeded in his effort to achieve on the stage something that was authentic and honest and that was of our time as well. That he did achieve, in The Confidential Clerk, a verse drama that was uniquely his own and yet entirely successful as popular theater is a comment, if nothing else, on Eliot’s thoroughly disciplined professionalism as a literary artist. So, then, the travails of Sir Claude and Lady Elizabeth, Colby and Mrs. Guzzard, even Lucasta and Kaghan and Eggerson, are far more real and far more common than they may at first appear, and yet once they are recognized for what they are, they are the same travails that have haunted the pages of Eliot’s verse from the outset. For one thing, Eliot has always been one drawn toward the theatrics of human interaction. His youthful attraction to JULES LAFORGUE, whose poetry introduced him to the possibilities of a self-deprecating self-dramatization, resulted in J. Alfred Prufrock, a character who could agonize over having to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” This idea that individuals, consciously or not, wear masks that conceal the unknown but real personality carries all the way into The Cocktail Party, in which the protagonist, Edward Chamberlayne, is forced to confront the vacuous relationships that he has been maintaining throughout his adult life with others, his wife, Lavinia, in particular. In the same way, but in more subtle or, at the very least, less obvious terms, all of the major characters in The Confidential Clerk wear a mask as well. The rub is that they do so quite consciously in order to achieve their relatively innocent and well-meaning ends. Sir Claude, for example, pretends not to be Colby’s father, and Colby is forced to pretend not to be Sir Claude’s son. Mrs. Guzzard has lived a life pretending to be Colby’s aunt, meanwhile. It is Eliot’s way of dramatizing, nevertheless, the

Confidential Clerk, The psychological and certainly spiritual fact that no one is who he or she appears to be for the simple reason that identity is a social construct, not a true state of being. That may sound far too complicated than it should, except that theatrical conventions, themselves based on play-acting and make-believe, thrive on concealing and then revealing this sort of truth, enabling Eliot to exploit the commonplaces of the medium in order to insinuate what would otherwise be the complexities of the particular theme of appearance versus reality. It is a simple task, then, for Eliot to make theatrics his gambit. Kaghan, for example, has a habit of entering a scene saying, “Enter B. Kaghan.” By doing so, Eliot has fun with his audience but also is demonstrably representing a “fact” that will indeed become clear to everyone by play’s end—that the man who has been B. Kaghan for the better part of his life has in fact been playing a role, since he is really the son of Lady Elizabeth and her longdeceased first husband, Tony. The particular irony, of course, is that that person who B. Kaghan turns out “really” to be is no more real than the person who he is not. Again, these are Eliot’s ways of using the old standbys of dramatic plot devices to expose the absurdities that can result when too much faith is placed in the social construct that is personal identity. Similarly, athough not much of it is made by the other characters, there is something rather comically touching, but also a little cruel, in the fact that the class-conscious Lady Elizabeth, who becomes convinced that Colby must be her biological child, discovers that B. Kaghan, whom she has previously found to be vulgarly “undistinguished,” is actually her child. Eliot is out to convince his audience of far more than the old nature versus nurture conundrum. He seems to argue that a rose by any other name might not in fact smell as sweet, so much are we conditioned to respond to the appearance—what a thing is “named”—rather than to the reality—what a thing is. As Sir Claude successfully convinced Colby early on in the play, one must accept life on its terms, so that a rose is a rose is a rose is not the answer either. Life’s terms, the play proposes, are never quite that clear either, and they are capable of chang-

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ing moment by moment. Colby was content to be Sir Claude’s son and confidential clerk, so it cannot be that he is embracing a better life by accepting the fact, at play’s end, that he is the son of Harold Guzzard instead and, like him, an otherwise unsuccessful musician. Indeed, what Colby is embracing is not necessarily even a more authentic life so much as a life that he is suddenly free to choose. Eliot is too great a poet to lie to or cheat his audience. In the hands of any other playwright, the standard denouement would have made Colby’s choice of life the dramatic resolution, whereas Eliot makes it clear that it is not so much what one chooses as that one embraces the freedom to choose that counts. It is by this device, and through the eccentric vehicle of Lady Elizabeth’s interest in the occult, that Eliot is able to bring the spiritual aspects of his theme to bear as well. By the time of his writing The Confidential Clerk, Eliot has learned that the spiritual and religious can be introduced perhaps more effectively by his not referencing, in keeping with his personal belief system, its more orthodox Christian manifestations, as he had done, as a matter of necessity, in Murder in the Cathedral and, in less specific but no less traditional terms, in the episode of Celia’s sacrifice and martyrdom in The Cocktail Party. Rather, in The Confidential Clerk the voice for spiritual matters is given to Lady Elizabeth, with her far from orthodox interest in numerology, spiritualism, and other manifestations of the so-called occult. Since Eliot astutely attunes the audience to expect to hear from her the most outrageous sorts of spiritual theories and opinions, Eliot is able to slip almost imperceptibly into her dialogue the most perceptive of the spiritual observations made in the play. During her interview with Colby in act 2, she comments on how she believes in reincarnation, but that behind it all, ultimately there “isn’t just heredity, / But something unique . . . straight from God.” Ultimately, as Eliot has seen it virtually from the time of The Waste Land, the root causes of all human distress are spiritual in nature. We are here all parentless, inasmuch as, like the child of “Animula,” we have been “orphaned into life.” Too, as the prayer to the Blessed Mother to which Eliot alludes in “Ash-Wednesday” reminds the faithful,

128 “Conversation Galante” as those poor children of Eve, we are all exiles from paradise suffering here on Earth. Finally, we are all the sons and daughters of the same earthly father, Adam, whom Eliot identifies as the “ruined millionaire” in the Four Quartets, whose primal mistake cost us our birthright. In that way, and in that same kind of spiritual context but now without its Judeo-Christian points of reference, The Confidential Clerk compels us to regard our “parentage,” as well as the alienation from that primal source, as the conditions for our “making do” in the world. Eliot’s audience, after all, is composed of the same Lucastas and Colbys and B. Kaghans who inhabit the play, all of them lost children born out of that spiritual wedlock that, like the animula or little soul, binds the soul of each directly to his or her creator, seeking in some way to make atonement to or connection with a parent that, here, none can ever truly know in any case. In the absence of that peace, each individual has an inner place, be it Colby’s secret garden or the prison cell of self that an Edward Chamberlayne inhabits, or the monkish cell of those rarer creatures, the Celias and Thomas à Beckets of the world. They, too, like the garden in “Burnt Norton,” have been standard poetic motifs for Eliot for a long time. It is also the abode of Prufrock, from which human voices wake the anguished self seeking, in pointless reverie, moments of distracted peace. It is the prison whose locking door haunts the speaker of The Waste Land in the closing moments of “What the Thunder Said,” compelling him to sympathize. It is, as mentioned, the garden in the opening of “Burnt Norton” from which the taunt of children’s laughter issues. It is the paradise that Adam lost and the prison that self-centeredness makes to protect the individual from being consumed by a world of otherness that makes constant demands that he or she conform to ceaseless social needs and constraints. In The Confidential Clerk, then, Colby finds his freedom in coming to terms with—indeed, by happily and consciously accepting—the paradox that each individual is a self-created social construct in a world that is not the same from one minute to the next, let alone eternal. He has a rare opportunity, one that most of us can never experience. Free

to choose his parentage, he chooses the parentage that most conforms with the person that he has become. In his end is his beginning, to quote the paradox around which Eliot constructed the poetry of “East Coker.” Colby’s choice, however, leaves a noticeable loose end. Colby and Sir Claude are kindred spirits. So much is true, leaving Sir Claude to puzzle why Colby cannot then accept the possibility that Sir Claude is in fact Colby’s biological father. The point is that in the vast and most generous scheme of things we are all kindred spirits, and that is what Eliot seems to want his audience to see. Sir Claude and Colby are kindred spirits not because they are father and son but because they are brothers, in the sense that all men are brothers. As Colby puts it, once all the confusions are sorted out (as if they ever will be), what is left is love, and that ought to be more than more than enough. Eggerson seems to agree when he accedes to Sir Claude’s questioning whether or not he “really believe[s] her.” Still obsessing about the truths and falsehoods of Colby’s parentage, Sir Claude no doubt means Mrs. Guzzard by “her,” but there is a good possibility that Eggerson hears him meaning to mean Lucasta, who has just offered Sir Claude her love. Love is right under Sir Claude’s nose in the daughter he has failed to acknowledge fully while he frets over the son who rejects his acknowledgment. None of us is perfect, Eliot seems to be concluding, but love is no judge of character or motive.

“Conversation Galante” (1916) Though it was not published until September 1916 in the same issue of Poetry magazine that also contained “La Figlia che Piange,” “Mr. Apollinax,” and “Morning at the Window,” “Conversation Galante” was written in November 1909. Indeed, the version that has come down, which was also included in Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, published in 1917, is virtually unchanged from the original undergraduate version except for the title, which was originally “Short Romance.”

“Conversation Galante” This poem, then, is vintage Eliot from the year when he first fell most powerfully under the influence of the French symbolist dandy and wit JULES LAFORGUE. In fact, while it is a loose adaptation, “Conversation” is nevertheless borrowed virtually intact from Laforgue’s “Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot” (“Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot”). The Laforgue original is more purely speculative, while Eliot’s imitation sounds as if it is, as the final title suggests, the record of an actual conversation. Both Laforgue and Eliot play on the moderately humorous and self-deprecating idea that it is impossible for a gentleman to please a woman because such men—galantes—are too self-effacing to begin with.

SYNOPSIS In each of the three stanzas, Eliot’s speaker tries to engage a young lady in what he apparently regards as meaningful conversation. That, of course, may be his mistake to begin with—and some of the source of the humor. It is not that he is being comical or humorous in attempting a conversation with her but that his idea of a meaningful conversation, rather lame to begin with, is set up for failure. He starts off by trying to be extremely witty, even clever. The moon is not simply a “sentimental friend;” it is “Prester John’s [‘fantastical’] balloon,” a wild enough notion given that Prester John was a quasi-legendary 12th-century Christian king in the Far East about whom much was heard but nothing ever learned—a fantastic creature, in other words, who likely would not have known a balloon had he ever seen one. That is to no real point, of course, since the speaker’s aim is to be fantastically charming and witty himself, and his next, trite comparison—of the moon to a battered lantern—fails equally. In any event, her response is to charge him with digressing. For his next gambit, he tries to be romantically sentimental in the old, more tried and true ways. He calls to her attention someone, real or imagined, playing an “exquisite nocturne” on a piano, all for their delight, although his wit gets the better of him—one of the dangers of being too clever— and he remarks on how the music mirrors their own “vacuity,” which seems to be their inability to

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connect. She is prepared to be offended, but he gallantly confesses that he meant his own inanity, not hers, by that remark. Manfully, he gives it one more shot. He lets out all the stops, praising her coolness to high heaven. She is the “eternal humorist,” a strange way to compliment a singularly humorless individual whose every whim, nevertheless, takes his turns of phrase to “twist” them to her own “indifferent and imperious” ends, defeating his “mad poetics.” Expectedly, although the speaker seemed not to have anticipated it, she now reverses course and wonders if they now should be “so serious.” More than expressing the idea that the speaker cannot win when it comes to trying to convince his lady of his own rather coolly detached ardor, no matter what guise or guile he adapts, the poem reconstructs the entire idea of the love poem into something strange, even if not necessarily rich.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The notion that the lover must walk through fire to gain the beloved’s attention is hardly a new one, but previous to Eliot’s model, Laforgue, it was made to seem to be worth the effort. What Laforgue did—and the youthful Eliot mimed perfectly—was to make the lover an insipid fool, willing to play the clown if it meant that the lady in question would at least pay attention to his inanities with her own icy detachment. Modern love becomes not a verbal tryst that ends in an embrace but a fencing match in which the opponent, the beloved, is hardly willing to spend the energy to respond. That she does so at all, even if it is disparagingly and always only to her own advantage, seems to be for the Laforgue-Eliot speaker more than victory enough. He has been chastised and humiliated, but at least he has had some moments of the lady’s undivided attention. It is perfectly understandable why Eliot not only eventually published this early effort but also kept it among his complete poems throughout his long and illustrious career as a poet. The unblinking precision with which Eliot, at age 21, adopted the tone and style of his literary mentor and idol, who was himself only 27 when he died of tuberculosis in 1887, the year before Eliot was born, bespeaks the

130 “Cooking Egg, A” profound literary and perhaps even spiritual kinship that he must have felt for Laforgue and would comment on many years later. More than that, however, it reveals how astute Eliot’s ear was even this early in the game. He was capable of translating more than a concept to the page from the Laforgue original—an entire state of mind if not being. A new kind of character had entered the literary universe, and the young T. S. Eliot was enough a child of his time and a poet of genius not only to recognize that but to have the courage to emulate it unabashedly in his own poetry. Finally, inasmuch as his genius was his own, as it ought to be, Eliot was able as well to take what he learned from Laforgue to the level of great poetry in his own first masterwork, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The reader who can hear the clownish self-deprecation with which the gallant in “Conversation” approaches the woman, just so that she will take the time to dismiss his nonsense, catches the first hints of a Prufrock who doubts, by the time he steps onto the stage less than two years later, in July 1911, that the woman will listen to him at all. Within the space of a few years, Eliot would take the bathos that Laforgue did so well and raise it to nearly tragic proportions in the selfrevelatory confession of a man, Prufrock, to whom no one will listen because he has given up all hope of ever being heard.

“Cooking Egg, A” (1919) The earliest criticism of “A Cooking Egg,” one of the seven mockingly serious (as opposed to mock-serious) quatrain poems that Eliot composed between 1917 and 1919, focused primarily on trying to discover the identity of Pipit, the erstwhile companion whom the speaker identifies in the second line of the poem. Eliot composed “A Cooking Egg,” according to most estimates, sometime during 1919. In light of the overt references in the text to academic, literary, and banking interests, all of which would all have been matters occupying Eliot’s attention around that

time, there can be no doubt that some details of the poem, as with much of Eliot’s poetry throughout his poetic career, may have had their origins in personal circumstances and issues. By the same token, imagining that a poetry as densely compacted as this poem’s might be little more than an exercise in thinly disguised autobiography begs the question. If Eliot were aiming only toward autobiography, it is reasonable to assume that he would have done so in terms much more direct than those of “A Cooking Egg.” By this time in his life, Eliot was employed by the venerable banking and insurance firm, Lloyds of London. His college days were behind him, but he was still, by virtue of his activities as a literary journalist, always in touch with the leading academics and intellectuals of the day. Eliot was already enjoying a modest but significant reputation as one of the new, young poetic talents in English who were then emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. There is much to recommend “A Cooking Egg” as a poem largely inspired by Eliot’s own personal experiences. Nevertheless, Eliot himself would argue, in a famous essay published several years before “A Cooking Egg” was composed, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that any benefit a reader might obtain by correlating a poet’s life with his poetry is patently spurious and therefore deceptively misleading. For example, it would be impossible for any reader to determine what particular “fact” is behind each apparently factual detail that the poet had in mind, let alone decide on its significance. So it would seem that more purpose for and meaning of “A Cooking Egg” stand to be revealed if Pipit remains as anonymous as the poet would have her be. Whether she is, as has been variously argued, a spinster aunt or child-care giver or even a friend remembered from the poet’s own childhood, the reader is called on to focus his or her attention on the immediate present in which the poem is being composed and the speaker is speaking, a present in which both the speaker and Pipit have grown, if not both up, then certainly at least older.

SYNOPSIS That “A Cooking Egg” is a poem reflecting on the passage of the individual from innocence into

“Cooking Egg, A” experience, a common enough literary mode and theme, is supported by the epigraph. Though it is, in typical Eliot fashion, both unattributed and untranslated, the lines, in the original French, are from the Testament of François Villon, the roguish 14th-century Parisian vagabond and poet. Loosely translated, the epigraph reads, “By the 30th year of my life, / I have drunk up all my shame.” Eliot would have turned 30 in September 1918 and may himself have been feeling the last, fleeting flickers of his own only somewhat carefree youth. While he had led a relatively sheltered life as the last child of a comfortably upper-middle-class couple and gone to the best schools, he had also been away from home at school for the better part of his life since his teen years. Under those circumstances, he could still have sown some wild oats without becoming an utter wastrel, and there is no doubt that Eliot, like any young person, may have sown his share. In Villon’s case, his admission, as much in keeping with his reputation in history as a delightful rogue, is straightforward enough to be quickly understood: After the excesses of a profligate youth, there is little left for Villon to be embarrassed about, although he may have some regret that those headier times have passed. The accepted meaning of the title of the Eliot poem also supports this notion that it will be an unabashed looking back, a taking stock of what the passing years have cost the individual and of what recompense, if any, experience has returned for that cost. A cooking egg is an egg that has passed its prime but has not yet gone bad. It can still be used in cooking, but one would not think of using it in the preparation of a separate dish, in an omelet, for example. The poem opens with Pipit and the speaker keeping each other company in some manner or another, but not particularly intimately. They are in the same room, but she is “some distance” from where he is sitting. The references to daguerrotypes, an early form of portrait photography, and silhouettes, another method of executing likenesses, primarily of the very young, in earlier times, betoken the inexorable passage of time as do any souvenirs of those “olden days” that most humans cherish because they are now gone. Whatever other purpose the two books, Views

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of Oxford and An Invitation to the Dance, may serve as details, their titles, too, suggest reminiscences of youthful pursuits and rites of passage—debutante balls and finishing school cotillions, as well as college days. In contrast with those anticipations, however, the books may, like the old likenesses, be merely there to betoken milestones that have passed. (Eliot, for example, had had a visiting fellowship at Oxford’s Merton College in 1915.) The scene set, the reader is encouraged by this focus on Pipit, who is the subject of the speaker’s attention, to conclude that, whoever she may have been, she has by now been changed by the passage of time, as has the speaker. The fact that she is knitting, a relatively sedate activity more associated with a sober adulthood than with the exuberant activities of childhood and youth, adds to the impression that, now that their youth has just passed, she and the speaker have already entered into the mood of a more somber maturity both with the world and with each other. That note of seriousness soon seems to be invalidated, however, as a new stanza, following a series of periods to indicate a section break, begins. Now a note of an almost bitter and certainly self-deprecating irony, in which images of the speaker’s present situation are invoked, enters the poem and will continue to stanza six. A sort of litany of vain renunciation, quasi-religious in tone, follows, and the personal tone of the poem’s opening two stanzas, with their strong hint that a measure of shared intimacy had been developed among the speaker, Pipit, and the reader, now rapidly declines into an extended exercise in befuddlement. The reader encounters relatively obscure or startling allusions and rhymes that forsake advancing meaning for the sake only of a cleverness that seems to be purposefully empty of meaning. Of course, that may be the “meaning.” As already mentioned, “A Cooking Egg” is one of the quatrain poems composed between 1917 and 1919. In them, although the form was derived from the popular mid-19th century French poet Théophile Gautier, Eliot contrived to use a poetic tone that was still highly influenced by the later French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE, a tone intended to bewilder the reader with its mixture of cold-hearted wit and

132 “Cooking Egg, A” plaintive sentimentality. As with “The Hippopotamus” and “Whispers of Immortality,” which among Eliot’s quatrain poems most resemble “A Cooking Egg,” in this period of Eliot’s own development as a poet, the wit is there not to undermine or ridicule the sentiment so much as to make it valid and acceptable. This is the somewhat tried and true technique of “laughing lest one cries” that Laforgue himself essayed well enough, too. More so, however, in this instance, the opposing duality of Eliot’s tone and approach makes for a tension that enables the sentiment to seem less excessive by further allowing the speaker to establish and exercise a capacity for cynicism at the same time that he is exposing his heart and its vulnerabilities. To rhyme Sidney, the surname of the 16th-century swashbuckling English courtier and love poet, Sir Philip Sidney, with kidney, for example, is a nearly unforgivable travesty of tone and mood unless the reader recognizes that the deprecating, and self-deprecating, attitude that the speaker has now adopted toward all notions of worldly success is used to enhance the validity of the tenderness with which the speaker is recollecting those earlier days and times of his with Pipit. The loss of the objects of that sentiment has meaning and impact only in comparison with what has replaced those objects. If the relative innocence of his past youth is embodied for him in Pipit and their relationship together, then what replaces both her and his youth is the speaker’s present circumstances, and the tone that he sets implies that he does not find in those a fair exchange for what he has lost. Instead, now he finds himself, if not bored by these present circumstances, then at least unconvinced that they are worth his and Pipit’s lost youth, let alone their childhood innocence. While the figures to whom Eliot alludes in stanzas three through six may seem to be all over the cultural and historical map, they actually have a few features in common. As is usual with Eliot’s allusions, finding that core of commonalities often reveals as well a common core of derivable meaning (or at least implication). The reader encounters, along with the aforementioned Sir Philip Sidney, Coriolanus, Sir Alfred

Mond, Lucretia Borgia, Madame Blavatsky, and Piccarda de Donati. Of them, Lucretia Borgia is probably the most notable if not notorious, being the murderous sister of the equally unsavory 16thcentury Italian wheeler-dealer Cesare Borgia. He was the individual to whom Niccolò Machiavelli addressed his famously cynical treatise on the maintenance of secular power, The Prince. Of that same ilk would be Sir Alfred Mond, an industrialist and political force in then-contemporary England whose father, originally trained as a chemist, had amassed a fortune by discovering a process for extracting nickel. Coriolanus, meanwhile, is a legendarily ne’er-do-well hero from the days of Rome of the fourth century B.C. A patrician—a descendant of one of the city’s founding families—Coriolanus, after having saved Rome from a foreign enemy, tried to use his newly won authority and a grain shortage to undermine the power of the common people, or plebians. His efforts were thwarted, and as a result, he went over to the side of the enemies whom he had earlier vanquished and, with them, made war on his own native city. Thus far, Eliot’s speaker, playfully imagining what his “eternal reward” will be for having given up the world that Pipit represents, has been cynically aligning himself with individuals of wealth and social rank who made their mark wielding temporal power, in several cases cruelly or ineptly. The addition of Madame Blavatsky, another contemporary figure, may seem to take the list in an entirely different direction. She was the founder and guiding light of the Theosophical Society, which focused on advancing the cause of occult spiritual lore and ritual. An acquaintance of W. B. YEATS and EZRA POUND, Madame Blavatsky’s presence in this litany may seem to break the mold of an emphasis on worldly pursuits inasmuch as her concerns were otherworldly. The same may be said for the presence of Piccarda de Donati, who appears in canto III of DANTE ALIGHIERI’s Paradiso, the third, last, and heavenly section of the Divine Comedy. On balance, however, Blavatsky was not much different from those other wheeler-dealers already named; she simply wielded her influence among those who were more spiritually inclined. Piccarda, too, though she led a holy life and was content with

“Cooking Egg, A” her fate, has nevertheless been relegated, by Dante, to the lowest of orders of the blessed in heaven for having neglected her vows as a nun. That such lukewarm spiritual guides like her and Madam Blavatsky will conduct our speaker in heaven suggests that he, too, shall not get very far past the heavenly gates. It is also Piccarda, by the way, who speaks the words that Eliot will cite later in his criticism as the best example of Dante’s greatness as a poet: “His [God’s] will is our peace”—further suggesting, as a maxim, how much the speaker, by instead seeking only such worldly models as these to guide his spiritual success, is lost to begin with. In every case, then, the figures alluded to by Eliot’s speaker remind the reader of an adult world where worth in honor, rank, wealth, power, influence, and glory are measured, even in Heaven apparently, by degrees of self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. If Eliot’s speaker expects, in this tongue-in-cheek catalog, to find that a group such as this one will be welcome company in Heaven, then at least the poet is making it clear that such a heaven, rather than the one that Piccarda de Donati finds on the lower rungs of Dante’s Paradiso, would be more like a hell—that is, more like Dante’s Inferno instead. No wonder that the speaker can suddenly shift both focus and time, returning to some moment in the past when he and Pipit, two children then, it appears, had hidden behind a screen to share a sweet. There is the hint here that there might also have been a forbidden fruit to share as well, the sweets, that is, of sexual play—but that is really beside the point. It still would have been innocent, so it serves now as a painful reminder of how much one gives up in order to grow up. From the vantage point of these empty adult vistas and prospects, there is for company only “redeyed scavengers,” dissipated drunkards like Villon, who haunt the edges of their lost hopes and dreams and dwell only in disillusionment—“where are the eagles and the trumpets,” the vaunted rewards and honors of adulthood. Meanwhile, Pipit’s own quiet activity, knitting, that was described in the first stanza, the speaker finds enviable in comparison and, for most, unattainable as well, inasmuch as

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it suggests, as opposed to the speaker’s cynical disgruntlement, a quiet acceptance of whatever the succeeding years may bring. The ghost of Villon, whose most famous line is, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” reappears one last time in the final stanza through veiled allusion wherein the adult world and all its empty promises, and their fulfillment, are buried beneath deep Alpine snows—that is to say, pretty deeply. In place of the stolen sweets of yesteryear, a hungry multitude—shades of those who are waiting for something to believe in—now eat their lonely breakfasts or afternoon teas of “buttered scones and crumpets” in franchise restaurants, which is what A.B.C.’s were in London at that time. That reference to the A.B.C.’s should remind the reader, as it certainly must the speaker, of its more familiar use as a shorthand for grammar school, where children learn the alphabet, thus calling to mind those lost days and hours of the comparative innocence of childhood that the speaker had spent in Pipit’s more active and formative company. It is a note of sufficiently poignant, even if somewhat heavyhanded, irony on which the poem ends.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The conclusion of “A Cooking Egg” vividly echoes the epigraph from Villon: By a certain point in life, even shame abandons the individual to his own devices. Eliot’s speaker’s device in “A Cooking Egg” is not to let the past go but not to kid or deceive himself into pretending that it has not gone in any case, leaving nothing, not even Pipit as she had been, in its place. She too, like the speaker, has changed and continues to do so, unto death. The “cooking egg” of the title may take on another meaning, ultimately being just that—an egg that is slowly cooking and thereby having all its freshness boiled or fried away as it changes into something else that is surely something less than what it was initially. The idea that the years bring with them not wisdom but regret, not glory but boredom and shame, is not unique to Eliot, of course. However, he is one of the few poets who will continue to develop this theme and to render it poetically well into his own later years in such masterworks as “Burnt Norton”

134 “Coriolan” and “Little Gidding.” In those poems, parts of the Four Quartets, images of roads not taken and of knowledge and effort that have not flowered continue to assault the poet/speaker as he struggles to make sense and order out of the maelstrom of human experience that is both past and present. From that vantage point, although no one would have been capable of recognizing it at the time, “A Cooking Egg” achieves a position of some importance in mapping the future course of Eliot’s work. Even if the quatrains as a group seem to have been more of a creative holding action on the poet’s part until some more important work came along, their technical virtuosities provided him with a way and a means to keep busy and practiced until a poetry on the order of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” might inspire him again—as it shortly would in poems like “Gerontion” and The Waste Land.

“Coriolan” (1935) “Triumphal March” was first published in Faber & Faber’s Ariel series in October 1931, yet it has little in common with the other four poems in the same series that had preceded it—“Journey of the Magi,” “Song for Simeon,” “Animula,” and “Marina.” Each of those four is much more subtly poetic than “Triumphal March” in both tone and style, making for a radically jarring contrast that Eliot seemed to endorse when he gathered the four of them together under the collective heading Ariel Poems in the 1935 edition of Collected Poems, to the exclusion of “Triumphal March.” Instead, by 1932 Eliot was combining “Triumphal March” with a second poem, “Difficulties of a Statesman,” which, too, had been published independently in the 1931–32 edition of Commerce. The two poems were the first two parts of a projected four-part poem inspired, Eliot would claim, by Beethoven’s “Coriolan Overture.” The project eventually languished, a victim of Eliot’s year abroad in America lecturing in 1932 and 1933, while he sought to separate himself once and for all from his increasingly unhappy marriage to his first wife, Vivien. He acknowledged those earlier intentions by giv-

ing both “Triumphal March” and “Difficulties of a Statesman” separate billing under the present collective title, “Coriolan,” in the 1935 edition of his Collected Poems, including them there along with “Sweeney Agonistes” as “Unfinished Poems.”

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS In the closing section of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said,” Eliot had already had recourse to using the legendary Roman traitor Caius Marcius, who had once been honored by the Romans with the epithet Coriolanus for his bravery in battle against the Corioli, as a model of the selfdestructiveness of pride. In a passage that is intended to illustrate the concept of dayadhvam, or to sympathize, from the Upanishads, Eliot’s speaker calls to mind a “broken Coriolanus” whom “aethereal rumors” revive. Since the real Coriolanus did not survive the disgrace of his betrayal, for the sake of class pride, of all that he held sacred, Eliot even then was apparently alluding to any public figure whose failing career had been resurrected by the right application of press agentry. “Aethereal rumors,” after all, seems to be a reasonably clever circumlocution for gossip and innuendo spread by such relatively modern means of electronic communication as the telephone and radio. Whatever the case may have been in The Waste Land, Eliot clearly uses the Roman patrician to make political commentary in the never-completed “Coriolan.” The example of Coriolanus remains one revealing both the great virtues and incredible snobbery of the Roman patrician class, of an inherited nobility in general, and by extension, of any and all artificial distinctions and social barriers among humanity. The question of character, in both its sociopsychological consequences and in its isolation in ennobling or degrading actions, had formed the bedrock for much of Eliot’s poetry from the time of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” onward. Coriolanus therefore is a fitting case in point for the sequence at hand, another two poems whose purpose is to explore the catastrophe that selfhood entails whenever it is elevated to untenable heights by either the mob or personal vainglory. At this moment in both European history and the history of the poet, however, there

“Coriolan” were other issues that may have been equally as responsible for bringing Coriolanus to the forefront of Eliot’s creative interests, even if he would eventually abandon the project entirely. The Contemporary Background During the time that Eliot was casting about for another suitable topic for a long poem, which he intended “Coriolan” to be, the Western democracies were undergoing increasing political crises out of which aristocrats and quasi-aristocratic types— so-called strongmen—were beginning to emerge as autocratic rulers. Meanwhile, the world had sunk into the throes of the Great Depression, an economic catastrophe that was making formerly stable Western societies, still tottering in the aftermath of an expensive world war, increasingly unstable and ripe for the political picking by demagoguery. Dictator Benito Mussolini’s rise to power on a wave of conservative, or Fascist, social reform in Italy in the early 1920s was only the beginning of a trend that would see other strongmen take over fledgling postwar European democracies, most notably Adolf Hitler in Germany, by the early 1930s. How much these immediate sociopolitical concerns underlie Eliot’s “Coriolan” is none too difficult to gauge. At this time, Eliot’s prose criticism was turning more and more to direct commentary on the public scene in long essays such as “Thoughts after Lambeth,” an extensive criticism of the current state of the Church of England, and After Strange Gods—tellingly subtitled “A Primer of Modern Heresy”—that had been presented as a series of lectures in 1933 and then published in book form in 1934. By the decade’s end, he would publish the social and moral criticism contained in The Idea of a Christian Society. There was an increasing emphasis on ostensibly public commentary in his poetry as well. “Gerontion” in 1919 may seem to have opened the door to a certain historical immediacy in Eliot’s poetry following the disaster of World War I, but one had to read between the lines to find it in that poem. Now the immediacy was very much the point of some of his poetry. In addition to “Coriolan,” Eliot, in 1934, would also turn his hand to fleshing out the choruses and dialogue for a pageant play, The Rock, intended

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to arouse public interest in a plan of the diocese of London to construct 45 new churches in the growing suburbs of Middlesex. Within a few more years, Eliot, in his first completed verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, depicted an instance of the conflict between character and power that was much closer to home, the deadly struggle that Thomas à Becket waged with King Henry II in the 12th century. The question of what a person of moral character and spiritual conviction was to do in the face of the short-term interests of political necessity was not a parochial one, by any means. The Story of Coriolanus Certainly it seems that for now Eliot, seeking to make his art more of a public forum, had found for these purposes a fit subject by turning his attention once more, but this time far more ambitiously, to Coriolanus. It is for what the strengths and weaknesses of his character might teach others, after all, that the Roman historian Plutarch uses him for a subject, and it is from Plutarch that any subsequent author draws his information. Although this legendary figure celebrated in Plutarch’s Lives is also the title character of one of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s tragedies, it is clear from the uses to which Eliot puts Coriolanus that he sees him as a paradoxical model of the statesman rather than as any tragic, literary hero. At the very least, Eliot sees in him an opportunity for both character study and for a social analysis of the nature of a powerful public personality who both shapes and is shaped by the prevailing values of his day. In summary, Coriolanus is not intended to be regarded as a literary allusion but as a quasi-historical phenomenon. Most obvious of all, there were to be found in the story of Coriolanus parallels with Eliot’s own time, in which working-class unrest had led to the violent overthrow of the Russian czar in 1917 and to labor violence in England, the United States, and other industrialized powers. Caius Marcius lived in the fifth century B.C. at the moment in Roman history when the plebeians, or common citizens, revolted against the high-handed economic and social abuses of the patrician hierarchy. These patricians, descendants of Rome’s founding fathers,

136 “Coriolan” as their name suggests, jealously guarded their right to all positions of power and wealth in the still fledgling city-state, while the plebeians, as they perceived the realities of their social status, did all the work. In what was probably one of the most significant early labor strikes in human history, one day they quit pretty much en masse, until the patricians had the sense to propose a compromise whereby the plebeians would gain some measure of political representation and power through the institutionalization of the tribunes as the guardians of the plebeians’ public interests. By and large, the patricians, who retained their original authority through the consulships and were hardly any less still the ruling class in all other respects, went along with this reform—with the legendary exception of Marcius. As a patrician who had already made an impressive name for himself through acts of bravery and self-sacrifice on the battlefield, Marcius, according to Plutarch, felt that despite this political accommodation with the plebeians, it was up to the patricians “to prove that they were superior to them, not so much in power and riches, as in merit and worth.” Marcius felt that he and his fellow patricians did not simply deserve their privilege but were entitled to it by virtue of their being inherently better than the plebeians. Although the chronology varies, Marcius went on to obtain even greater renown in battle by virtually single-handedly seizing the town of Corioli, a stronghold of the Volsci, a central Italian people who at that time were making war on the Romans. For his valor, he was awarded the name Coriolanus. As Coriolanus, he became an honored and respected leader among the Romans, but because of his earlier politics he was more favored among the patricians than the plebeians, whom he continued to make no secret of despising. When, however, he used a grain shortage to attempt to force the plebeians to surrender the power that they had gained through the tribunate, he inspired a popular revolt that drove him not only from power but into banishment and ultimately into an alliance against Rome with his former enemies, the Volsci. As a Volscian general, he was successful in waging war against his native city

and his own people. His family eventually prevailed upon his patrician heritage enough to encourage him to try to fashion a equitable peace between Rome and the Volsci, whereupon leaders among his former Volscian allies conspired to murder him in fear of the power that he had become capable of wielding in both camps. Whether Eliot used Plutarch or Shakespeare for his source, he very likely knew both well, and Shakespeare’s own source is Plutarch in any case. In history and legend, Coriolanus becomes the model of the individual who is noble by nature, virtuous and self-sacrificing in all the ways that his culture defines those values, yet who falls prey, nevertheless, to his own petty motives and prejudices, themselves the products of his pride of place and rank. Had he not thought the plebeian Romans to be inferior human beings who were not entitled to the same sympathy and respect that he accorded members of his own class, he may have been a powerful unifying force in the Rome of his day. Instead, he ended up serving neither himself nor his people, so that the great good that he could have otherwise accomplished became polluted by and eventually completely lost in the tragic diminishment of his own natural goodness and greatness. There is, however, a far deeper tragedy here, and that is the one that Eliot will ultimately explore. For Coriolanus’s tragedy, as Eliot must well have known, also exposed a tragic flaw in the social order that had produced him. Eliot—the child of a democratic culture and, far more important in his own eyes, a convinced Christian who compassionately embraced the idea of the essential equality of all humans in their creator’s eyes—clearly knew that he had in this otherwise relatively neglected classical model a perfect example of the public servants of his own day, men of rank and privilege, too, who had apparently become neglectful of the rank-and-file citizens whom they equally apparently “served.” And yet there was the contingent irony that it was these common citizens who created the hero worship that might make a presentday Coriolan too great for his own good, to which the emergence of figures like Mussolini and Hitler was bearing testimony.

“Coriolan”

SYNOPSIS “Triumphal March” The Roman tradition of a triumphal march honoring a conquering hero upon his return with all his booty and captives is both the central metaphor and the central reality around which Eliot constructs the first part of “Coriolan.” The trappings of power and glory, not to mention military prowess, do not change much from one generation to the next, so that even in an age of modern mechanized warfare, Eliot can slip in the totems and details that would have been as common to a parade in Roman times as to a parade in his own time, without giving the impression of being anachronistic in the least. Eliot was also writing during a historical period still marked by the public awareness of and pride in Britain as a worldwide empire, for which the standard of excellence would invariably be the example of Imperial Rome. (That does, however, result in a slight anachronism, inasmuch as Coriolanus comes from the time of the early days of the Roman Republic, a good five centuries before the imperial mentality sprang into being with the accession to undisputed power of Caesar Augustus.) Thus, the stone and bronze and steel, horses’ heels and eagles, oak leaves, trumpets, and flags are as emblematic of ancient Rome, for the most part, as of an England on whose flag the sun never sets. The equally famous Roman mob is interchangeable with contemporary Londoners with their stools and their sausages, enjoying the day’s festivities all paid for out of the public coffers to the greater glory of the state. Eliot’s speaker takes the part of one of the mob, adopting a tone of breathless excitement to both mirror the pageantry and, perhaps, mimic the excitement of young Cyril, the child whom they have apparently taken to see the parade. There lurks in Eliot behind this façade of worldly vainglory the long shadow of another “triumphal march,” Christ’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The impatient “Is he coming?” of the speaker, waiting to catch a glimpse of the star of the show, has for an ironic counterpoint the implication that if Christ were to return in a Second Coming, all this pomp and circumstance would be rendered useless, if not totally meaning-

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less. But this shall not result in the Second Coming, not today at least, for the “natural wakeful life” of the ordinary person with his sausages and stools (an easy pun there) is “a perceiving,” where each is engaged in seeing what he wants to see. Although elements of the Passion continue to linger unseen, “hidden,” in the garden world that lingers at the edge of consciousness—“the dove’s wing . . . the turtle’s breast . . . the palmtree at noon”—and in the sacrifice that will shortly take place on a Roman cross, the speaker, be he or she an ancient Roman or a contemporary Londoner, remains rooted in the pageant of the present. There, even the reference to Easter, which completes the implicit liturgical allusions begun by Palm Sunday, becomes instead an opportunity to relate a humorous anecdote about young Cyril’s mistaking the communion bell, calling the faithful to partake of the body and blood of the Risen Savior, for the bell of a street vendor selling crumpets. That the speaker does not even think of it as the bell but “a bell” suggests how little connection these beliefs, which have become the elements of empty ritual, bear to the lives of ordinary people any longer, at least when the rituals are competing for attention with affairs of state or Junior’s unabashed exuberance for breakfast rather than for the bread and wine that is the mystical sacrifice of the Mass. In the modern impersonal state, as in the ancient impersonal state, where all power becomes embodied in a single man on whom the mob dotes, the profane has become the sacred, the secular the spiritual, so that in the midst of plenty the mob starves, fed sliced bread instead of the bread of life. Eliot can make impressive the litany of armaments that is recited by the speaker with detailed accuracy and breathless ease—“What a time that took!”—taken straight out of German field marshal Erich Ludendorff’s only recently published account of the weapons that Germany was forced to dispose of as a result of the Treaty of Versailles that formally ended World War I. For ordinary folk, meanwhile, it is thrift that will, as usual, win the day: “Don’t throw away that sausage, / It’ll come in handy.” For like an army, a mob, too, marches on its stomach. When a request for light comes, it is not one to expel their ignorance but a match to light a

138 “Coriolan” cigarette, and “Triumphal March,” a poem that suggests that glory that comes not from God is a sham, ends with Eliot making an inverted epigraph of a direct quote, in the original French, from the tail end of a journalist’s account of all the important people who had attended some otherwise forgettable public event. Translated, it reads, “And did the soldiers make the hurtle? They did make it.” It is a sentiment no less nonsensical than all the rest of the show. Throughout a reading of “Triumphal March,” so effective is Eliot’s use of voice, with its effusive and perhaps even infectious enthusiasm for the scene unfolding before the speaker’s incredulous eyes, that it is possible to forget that behind all the glitter of pomp and circumstance is the celebration of death and destruction. There cannot be a triumph, particularly a military one, without someone else’s defeat, and defeats, like victories, are never purchased by anything less than bloodshed. So, too, Christ’s residual presence in the poem—just whose “temple” is it anyhow?—as the victim whose blood sacrifice was meant to redeem humanity from their own bloody nature underscores the ultimate moral failure that is success defined in this manner—as a consequence of conquest. “Difficulties of a Statesman” The passage from “Triumphal March” to “Difficulties of a Statesman” is made smooth by the focus on what triumph costs. The ambivalent play on crying as the second section of “Coriolan” opens pulls the reader in two opposing directions: Is this a tone of distress or, coming hard upon the excited tone maintained more or less throughout “Triumphal March,” one of continued excitement? The answer may be provided in the next line, which introduces the old standby of wisdom literature: “All flesh is grass.” The idea is one of those neatly packaged truisms that adhere on both a literal and figurative level: Flesh is like grass, which rises only to be mowed down; flesh is grass, inasmuch as that is what one will find growing in any graveyard. Either way, this sentiment, which is apparently what the speaker is wanting to cry—especially inasmuch as the question is repeated periodically throughout the remain-

der of the text—is frequently cut short by other, more pressing matters than our mere mortality. There are, after all, the important people with their ranks and titles and honors; there is the need to organize, or at least appear to. In the midst of these “crises of state,” meanwhile, the young Cyril of “Triumphal March” has himself come of age sufficiently to join such illustrious ranks and deliberations, albeit as a lonely telephone operator in the ministry. But one must begin somewhere. Ever so smoothly, just as Eliot does in the first section of “Coriolan,” the speaker becomes not some officious modern bureaucrat but someone of Roman times. The change of both venue and historical period might easily be missed if the reader so much as blinks. This is Eliot’s way of emphasizing that when it comes to statescraft and the incredibly overblown importance it assigns to itself—and that journalists and the general populace assign to it as well—there is generally not much difference between one period and another. Here, nevertheless, are suddenly Coriolanus’s Volscian allies and other efforts toward “perpetual peace.” (Recall that the massive destructiveness of World War I was somewhat justified, after the fact, as the “war to end wars,” which it did not.) So, too, onto the scene again, as that persistently nagging but otherwise only residual presence, comes Christ and his fate in the Crucifixion. The reference to “guards [who] shake dice,” as the Romans were reputed to have done at the foot of Christ’s cross, effectively reminds the reader, if he or she recognizes the allusion, of another level of the catastrophe that humans find the prospect of perpetual peace to be. Human societies advance not through harmony but through conflict, after all, and to drive this point home, the next line calls to mind the great poet of Roman, and all future, imperialism, Virgil, “O Mantuan,” with his ancestor worship that, in the Aenied, raised Augustus to the status of a god destined by the gods to rule the known world. But the speaker quakes nevertheless, reiterating the constant plea: “What shall I cry?” In the torchlight, with its visual and verbal echo from the “torchlight red on sweaty faces” in opening lines of “What the Thunder Said,” the fifth and final

“Coriolan” part of Eliot’s The Waste Land, comes as well, as Eliot will phrase it more than a decade later in “Dry Salvages,” the “hint half guessed, the gift half understood” of God’s Incarnation in the person of Jesus. But it is only perceived as the true solution to worldly conflict by the speaker, who begins to sound more and more like the speaker of “Gerontion” as his resolve crumbles more and more in the face of crises that will neither stay still nor identify themselves: “I a tired head among these heads.” Whether this is Coriolanus urged on by his mother and wife to forge a peace between the Rome he loves and the Volscians he serves, or a modern statesman trying to mollify his constituents, his supporters, his detractors, and his enemies all in one fell swoop, he does not know what to cry in a world without focus or purpose, only meaningless actions repeating themselves ceaselessly throughout human history, giving the illusion of greatness within the only apparent constant, itself the specter of catastrophe and conflict. Gone from this second part of “Coriolan” is at least the self-congratulatory tone of “Triumphal March,” where there is safety in being a spectator to history. Here there is only the fear that one may be wrong, that one may not be up to the task, and that everyone else may know that already, a reality that the poem’s ending line seems to confirm: “Resign Resign Resign.” This demeaning echo of the quite different ending of The Waste Land, which would have been Eliot’s best-known poem to date by far, is both unmistakable and telling here. There the thrice repeated, two-syllable closing word calls the protagonist to an inner peace: “Shantih Shantih Shantih,” which the poet himself translates for his readers, in his notes, as the “Peace which passeth understanding.” Here, at the end of “Coriolan,” the initial reaction to the thrice-repeated command to resign is quite different, if not absolutely at the opposite extreme, in its implications. There is only the clear implication, in the call, of failure and defeat, fulfilling the image of “a broken Coriolanus” who is himself distinct from the conquering and triumphant hero of “Coriolan”’s first part. But surely Eliot has not brought his reader all this way merely to suggest that worldly pursuits come to their end in worldly betrayal and in what the poet

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W. H. Auden once called “human unsuccess.” That is no lesson at all, which is not to say that the poem ought to provide one but that the speaker deserves one. Of course, there is a double meaning to be found in that parting shot, a resolution that is both the one that is imposed by others and also one that can be discovered by the speaker for himself and to his own credit. Whereas on the one hand these apparent cries for the statesman’s resignation betoken nothing less than the shame of ignominious defeat and utter rejection of himself as a person, there is an ironic counterpoint contained in the chant. The idea of resignation, after all, also has within it the notion of a stoical acceptance of things as they are, as in the sentence, “He resigned himself to his fate.” Surely a poet of Eliot’s continuing modernist subtleties and sensibilities would have intended just such a double entendre in the closing line of “Difficulties of a Statesman.” The cry points both ways: on the one hand, toward the surrender of self-defeat, on the other hand, toward the wisdom of self-fulfillment. Indeed, at that extreme, in which the speaker comes to see his way out of the whirlpool of measuring his self-worth by the standards of an impersonal and unforgiving world, is to be found the same peace that surpasses understanding that the speaker of The Waste Land apparently achieves, or at least has been rendered capable of achieving by the experience of his quest for meaning (which is not the same as finding meaning).

CRITICAL COMMENTARY There is a good possibility that Eliot, despite his collecting “Coriolan” among his unfinished poems, may have nevertheless regarded it as a completed dramatic action as it now stands. There is, for sure, a reversal from the opening with its powerfully evocative emphasis on the vanities of worldly success—can a triumphal march be anything less?—to the conclusion where the shame of defeat masks, for the worldly, the birth of wisdom for those who are capable of seeing how vain and fickle worldly success can be. In terms of those same Roman parallels that Eliot draws with the poem’s modern moment through the overarching allusion to Coriolanus, the reader is allowed to see the mob in action, eating out of the hero’s hand one day, hanging on his every

140 “Cousin Nancy” word and gesture—living vicariously the life of the nation through his wholeness and well-being—yet then castigating and betraying him, banishing him if not actually butchering him the next. That same fickleness not only of fortune but of human opinion and evaluations is underscored with the simultaneous parallels that the poem also draws to the road Christ traveled from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the degradation and death on the cross of Good Friday. On that score, keeping in mind that “Triumphal March” was the last of Eliot’s contributions to his publishing house Faber & Faber’s first series of annual Christmas poems, the Ariel series, the idea of resignation on which the completed “Coriolan” ends echoes profoundly the words “Thy will be done” with which Jesus surrenders himself to his mission in the midst of his agony in the Garden of Gethsemene. Indeed, if there is a keynote to “Coriolan,” it is agony, making it particularly intriguing that the other unfinished poem with which “Coriolan” is paired in “Sweeney Agonistes.” Agony implies struggle and conflict, just as triumph implies the overcoming of struggle and conflict, but the triumphal march that the Eliot poem portrays offers a false resolution to the agony of conflict, since it depends on the defeat of another. The poem’s coming full circle by its end supports the notion that Eliot is out to expose the futility of imagining that there is any way for humanity to get off the wheel of success and failure, the profit and the loss, triumph and defeat—that is a wheel of its own making. Just as “Sweeney Agonistes” exposes the futility of attempting to find redemption from fear and boredom in empty and superficial sexual relationships, “Coriolan” shows that the road to worldly success is paved with the very stones that the crowd will finally hurtle at the hero, a “broken Coriolanus.” There is a suspicion that Coriolanus acts more as a sort of poetic red herring for that very reason. Thanks to Plutarch and Shakespeare, he had become a hallmark for a certain kind of human failing—the proud and noble man whose motives become polluted by his own human weaknesses and pettiness. But then the reader may fail to see himself mirrored on the page, and that is where young

Cyril comes in. Is it any wonder that he grows up to be a civil servant? The ironic poignancies of that somewhat ambiguous designation barely conceal the fact that Coriolanus was a civil servant, too, inasmuch as he was a slave to the needs and the whims of the body politic, the mob, and the world, which is as likely to raise one to undreamed-of glory and honor one day as to break one’s back and will and spirit on a cross the next. That Eliot keeps the Christian elements of his poem and the Christian solution to this dilemma well in the background, more as hints, intonations, and insinuations than as open points of reference that are there for the reader to miss or to discover, comments both on his tremendously skilled discipline as a poet and on the poem’s power to demonstrate rather than to tell. Concealed within the poetry, but not in any manner that should make it difficult to find, is what Eliot regards as the key to human salvation. But that key, despite Eliot’s occasional detractors in that regard, is not that all humanity should accept the orthodox fundamentals of Christian doctrine that he himself embraced as the way, the truth, and the light. Rather it is that one should forgo one’s worldliness and the attachment to power, fame, and glory at the expense of the comfort and welfare of others that such an addiction requires, since such an attachment is as likely to poison those others as to betray the one whom it has exalted. The betrayal that “Coriolan” exemplifies is the betrayal neither of the hero nor of the mob. It is the betrayal that action without reference to eternity subjects all humanity to throughout human history. The Irish modernist novelist JAMES JOYCE in his masterpiece, Ulysses, a work with which Eliot was quite familiar and for which he had great admiration, called history a “nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.” T. S. Eliot’s “Coriolan” is merely an episode in that nightmare.

“Cousin Nancy” (1915) If shades of Cousin Harriet of “The BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT” fame haunt another equally

“Cousin Nancy” short poem of Eliot’s from the same time period, “Aunt Helen,” then Aunt Helen’s ghost surely must be somewhere lurking on the rolling hills of eastern Massachusetts across which Cousin Nancy rides to the hounds in this third piece in Eliot’s meager but witty trilogy on the demise of the so-called proper Bostonian. “Cousin Nancy,” along with the other two poems, was first published in Poetry magazine in October 1915 and later collected in Eliot’s first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917.

SYNOPSIS All three of Eliot’s Boston poems, to give them a category, provide the speaker with a female blood relation for a focus, if not topic. All three suggest that the female relation in question is unmarried, thus hinting that the family line is coming to an end. And all three offer the reader as a consequence a glimpse into a world of genteel rituals and assumptions that seems to be on the brink of an extinction of which it is blissfully unaware. The source of its lack of perspicacity is the last laugh, however, for in Eliot’s view, it is its very notion that it is simply too good for this world in any case. Thus, “The Boston Evening Transcript” finds its delight in poking gentle fun at how set in their ways these proper Bostonians, a potentially dying breed, have become. Meanwhile, “Aunt Helen,” which tells of a Brahmin household that literally goes to hell upon the death of its elderly spinster mistress, finds its only slightly tasteless humor in suggesting that a more sexually active people will inherit such maiden aunts’ fashionable addresses if they are not more careful. The theme of “Cousin Nancy” turns out to be that this formerly ruling class of proper Bostonians is more or less about to see the end of the (old) line anyhow, especially if the thoroughly modern Nancy Ellicott has her way. The reader’s first image of her is of a larger-than-life colossus who very quickly becomes a behemoth crushing everything in her path. Rather than mastering the nature through which she strides and rides, she dominates and breaks it. Yet these are “barren” hills, suggesting that nothing fruitful will come from her or from them any longer. If she rides “to hounds / Over the cow-pasture,” the image that comes to mind

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is not of someone in touch with nature and with those natural processes of a nurturing new life that pastures and dairy cows portend, but of mindlessly arrogant forces that are beating that nature and those processes down to suit purposes that are not even very productive in and of themselves. If Cousin Nancy were nothing more than a great horsewoman—if she were nothing more than an emblem of an old-world landed gentry in the midst of a New England that had given birth, somewhat, to notions regarding human liberty and the rights of man, as democratic principles were then called—she could be forgiven somewhat, perhaps, for clinging to these aristocratic ways of hers on America’s egalitarian soil. But the problem is that Nancy is not even true to her class. She smokes, she dances “all the modern dances,” and there can be no doubt that they must be scandalous, at least for the likes of the Boston-Evening-Transcript–reading Cousin Harriet and Aunt Helen. Even if, since Nancy is one of their own, her aunts “were not quite sure how they felt about it,” “they knew that it was modern”—as if that not so much forgives as explains everything. The poem ends with the notion that the ideas from earlier in the 19th century—like those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gave the first shape to an American philosophy of life based on selfreliance, and Matthew Arnold, who warned against the dumbing down of culture—can be a bulwark against the catastrophe that Nancy’s aimless energy betokens. But that notion is offered only for its mocking contrast with the real state of affairs. Nothing is unalterable, let alone the socalled “laws” another, earlier generation may have proposed. The last line of the poem is taken verbatim from a poem by another 19th-century writer, the poet and novelist George Meredith, titled “Lucifer in Starlight.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY In a Paris Review interview in 1959, Eliot told how, as a Harvard undergraduate in 1909 and 1910, he had first discovered the work of the French symbolists JULES LAFORGUE and CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, from whom he had learned to hear and see the

142 “Cousin Nancy” poetic resources that he had in his own American idiom and in the experiences of life in a modern, industrial metropolis. While the three short “Boston” poems may seem in their satirical bent to have all the earmarks of other Eliot poems from this period, during which he was still under the considerable influence of the symbolists, however, in these poems Eliot can be heard to be finding his own voice and poetic territory. The world of Boston high society was just then beginning to show the cracks that increasing waves of immigrants and the encroachments of a modern urban culture were creating in its comfortable view of the universe, and it is a world that Eliot would know better than any other. As a descendant of old New England Yankee stock who had nevertheless been born and raised in the Midwestern city of ST. LOUIS, Missouri, Eliot very likely enjoyed during his boyhood visits and later years as a young man at Harvard in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston’s exclusive Beacon Hill district, a unique perspective on the old family stomping grounds that were so much a part of both American history and of the Republic’s original Anglo-American culture. With the perspective of an outside insider, Eliot could understand the prerogative of Boston’s social elites but also judge their shortcomings. He had already explored Northeastern American urban life as the challenge it was to those experiencing it at its fringes in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes,” poems from his earlier Harvard years and his student year in Paris from 1910 to 1911. He would also exploit to powerful effect that outsider’s view of polite society from an insider’s perspective in other early poetry, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady.” Nevertheless, the manner in which he addresses the particular quality of that world in poems like “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” and “ Cousin Nancy” is pure and unadulterated Eliot, a point that he seems to underscore intentionally by making his subjects the speaker’s kin, not merely his social acquaintances. If any phrase was often to be heard in conjunction with the old Anglo-Saxon stock who in Eliot’s youth still inhabited and dominated the social,

commercial, economic, political, and intellectual life of the capital city of Massachusetts at the turn of the last century, it was “proper Bostonians.” These so-called Boston Brahmins, with an allusion to the highest social caste among the Hindus, were so named because their reputation for being highly cultured and educated and otherwise well heeled was matched only by their reputation for being socially exclusive. Their chief claim to fame and to social rank was that they were the descendants of the English families who had originally settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century and then had, with their fabled Puritan rigorousness and Yankee ingenuity, virtually become the vanguard of American idealism and progressive thinking from the first days of the Republic to the time in which Eliot was writing. They were also, of course, quite wealthy and very well placed. (Rank, as they say, has its privileges, as Eliot himself would have been well aware.) These Brahmins, at least of the Boston variety, were also quite proper, not simply because they behaved correctly or because they knew how to behave correctly, but because they made a point of behaving correctly. By Eliot’s time, this legendary insistence on having just the right measure of self-respect to know exactly how to comport not only one’s person but one’s life in both the public and private spheres had become something of a running comic tagline, however, as both Boston and America underwent the rapid social and economic change being brought about by ever-increasing immigration and industrialization. The idea that it was somewhat comic to puncture the pomposity of impossibly dignified Boston old-school stuffed shirt was one with which Eliot seemed determined to have his own fun. There is, however, a great deal more going on in “Cousin Nancy” than social satire of the so-called horsey set, although to accept as much would require the reader to be aware that Eliot is not some working-class poet releasing the spleen of his outraged social conscience by exposing the genetic shortcomings of the ruling class as they ride over the backs of the common folk, whose labor supports their leisure-class lifestyles, and so forth. That is one possible, though narrow, reading of the poem,

“Cultivation of Christmas Trees, The” what with its barren hills and cow pasture subdued by Nancy’s self-indulgent excesses, perhaps. Such a reading, however, would not acknowledge that for Eliot, the Aunt Helens and Cousin Nancys of the world are not caricatures of capitalists prigs but his very own people. Their failings and failures represent not the sorry comings and goings of “them,” the Establishment enemy that is falling to ruin under the weight of its own good fortune, but representatives of the class and ethnicity of people who formed at the time that he was writing the bedrock of whatever culture the Anglo-American experience had introduced into the world. Good, bad, or indifferent, Eliot saw that culture as one in a state of decline. In poems such as “Cousin Nancy,” “The Boston Evening Transcript,” and “Aunt Helen,” as much as in more ambitious works such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, Eliot is recording the stultification of his people’s traditions under the pressure of their own social stagnation and of the outside forces constituting the radical transformation in moral values and class structure brought about by that cultural shockwave known as modernism.

“Cultivation of Christmas Trees, The” (1954) Following the great critical success of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot’s career as a poet was hardly moribund, but it was not flourishing either. He seemed to be constantly seeking for a fitting project that would be a suitable successor to The Waste Land, but the net result was that he seemed to be scattering his energies instead into piecemeal efforts. He abandoned his verse play “Sweeney Agonistes” in 1925. Published that same year, “The Hollow Men,” as powerfully effective as its poetry was, was cobbled together out of individual pieces, some apparently discarded from the aborted verse drama. A translation from the French of St.-John Perse’s book-length poem Anabase gave him a worthwhile project beginning in 1926, but he was stymied by Perse’s disgruntlement with the quality of the translation.

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And then, in early 1927, Geoffrey Faber, who had, in 1925, already rescued Eliot from a life as a banker by giving him a position as editor and board member with the London publishing house Faber & Gwyer, came up with the idea for a series of annual Christmas poems that might be used to promote the firm’s venture into literary publishing. This was the famous Ariel series, named in honor of Shakespeare’s airy sprite from his mature comedy The Tempest. As a result, each Christmas from 1927 through 1931, T. S. Eliot published a poem appropriate to the season as part of this series of illustrated pamphlets with holiday themes. Intended as corporate greeting cards for Faber, Eliot published five poems in all in this initial phase of the Ariel series. The last of these five would be incorporated into “Coriolan” as “Triumphal March.” The first four, “Journey of the Magi” (1927), “A Song for Simeon” (1928), “Animula” (1929), and “Marina” (1930), were published under the collective heading by which they have since become known, the Ariel Poems in Collected Poems, 1909–1935. Faber & Faber reinstituted the series in the early 1950s, and this time Eliot’s single contribution, and his last independently published poem, would be “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” which was released in a limited edition in 1954.

SYNOPSIS One cannot help but imagine the effect of Eliot’s revisiting in his seventh decade, when thoughts of final things were nearer at hand, a publishing project that had been initiated back in his youth. Then so much have must have seemed to be still before him that he could not have failed, these decades later, to have conflicting feelings and thoughts and doubts on sundry items, the fate of one’s individual soul hardly the least among them. Each of the present poem’s four stanzas builds, almost like a single sentence and certainly like a single thought, toward an ending that is itself, appropriately enough, about endings and beginnings. The poem moves as well from the outside in, taking the reader from the general to the particular, from the public to the personal, and from the secular to the spiritual, exactly as the Christmas

144 “Cultivation of Christmas Trees, The” season is an invitation to come in from the cold and the darkness outside. As do at least two of the five earlier Ariel poems, “Journey of the Magi” and “Song of Simeon,” “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” also deals in direct terms with the holiday season. Now, however, Eliot addresses the season with more specific attention to its popular devotions and rituals than ever before. To hear from one of the three magi details of a journey that he took once without being aware of its full significance, or to witness Simeon bear witness to a mystery whose fulfillment he can never fully grasp—these are Christmas poems, perhaps, but only in a profoundly theological sense. However, in its contemporary observation, Christmas for many, but most of all for those who participate in its festivities out of a sense of devotion to its religious meaning, is a season not of heavy theology but of cheer and good will, a season meant to express the genial warmth and joy that Christ’s coming into the world is meant to inspire. It is this aspect of Christmas that Eliot addresses now, looking back from the vantage point of his 66 years at the time of the poem’s composition. It appears to be the Christmases of his own childhood that are brought to mind for both himself and his readers. It is, after all, to the eternal child of the soul that the Christian mystery of God’s incarnation as a human infant is meant to appeal. Eliot had already touched on this somewhat in two of the earlier Ariel poems as well. One of those two, “Animula,” is constructed on the metaphor, found in DANTE ALIGHIERI that the individual soul is like a joyous but wayward child sent forth from its maker-father. The other, “Marina,” tells of the miraculous reunion of a lost child with her despairing father. In “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” however, the speaker is an elderly man recalling a primal innocence by recapturing his own childhood moments anticipating Christmas morning. What child who has ever experienced such an unbearable anticipation can ever forget the breathless giddiness of that morning’s coming, Eliot seems to be suggesting, and he thereby urges the reader to contemplate in comparison the meaning behind the practice. “The child,” unlike the jaded adult

who has been deprived of an attachment to such a simple joy, “wonders at the Christmas Tree: / Let him continue in the spirit of wonder.” There is, the third stanza continues, a purpose to that prayer: “So that the reverence and the gaiety / May not be forgotten in later experience.” Otherwise, later experience may bring in its train only boredom and fatigue, an awareness of death and failure. The reference to St. Lucy at this juncture recalls the third-century Christian virginmartyr whom the soldiers sent to arrest her could not move and whom their fire could not burn. This steadfastness of faith, the poem urges, is the proper posture of piety, whereby by “the eightieth Christmas / . . . meaning whichever is the last,” the accumulation of such a devotion to absolute mystery may be “concentrated into a great joy / Which shall also be a great fear.” The difference is that this is not a worldly fear or fear of worldly things, hence the allusion to St. Lucy. In her belief system, the punishment that all the might of Rome may have meted out is not even the sting of a gnat compared with the promises of an eternal God. But there is as well a source for a fear far greater than that that any Roman emperor and all his armies could ever instill, a fear akin to that which came “upon every soul” when Christ first came into the world. It is a fear for the fate of one’s immortal soul. The beginning—the infant birth—“shall remind us of the end,” says Eliot, and that is the dreadful martyrdom of Christ’s death on the cross, just as “the first coming” will remind us “of the second coming.” Joy and fear are somewhat, then, the same emotion, just as birth brings death and death rebirth.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY On the surface, “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” may seem like a lightweight effort, coming from one of the most celebrated and complex English-language poets of the 20th century, T. S. Eliot. Yet with his equally characteristic talent for wry understatement, the poem in question may in fact turn out to be exactly what it is: Eliot’s last comments, in poetry, on the most

“Dante” profound of mysteries—the mystery of life itself and its purpose. Christmas betokens the fact that the same mystery that brings majesty and the child’s wonder also brings the world and the soul to judgment and to their just deserts. With the Baby Jesus also comes Christ the Tiger, he who comes, in “Gerontion,” with the spring. “Us he devours,” that poem famously warns. But for the devoted Christian, it is a far better thing to be devoured by Christ than to be devoured by the distractions and empty promises of the world and of life. Joy brings fear, but the fear brings joy. With “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” Eliot has simplified, perhaps even domesticated, the great divide between the promise of eternal life and the terror that that promise must entail for anyone who takes it seriously. That divide, the ultimate paradox at the heart of virtually any faith system, had sustained much of Eliot’s finest poetry from at least the time of The Waste Land, with its notion of being suspended between memory and desire, winter and spring, hope and despair. In this last independently published poem, Eliot heals the rift by accepting its necessity. The child’s joy is the adult’s fear for the same reason, so the prayer is that the child’s joy, which “having been must ever be,” may continue in the adult as well, since it is his to begin with. In the face of the imponderable, the soul must both recall its origins and remember its end. For the Christian, they are one and the same, so the poet, the speaker, “cultivates Christmas trees” by keeping them forever fresh and ever green in his memory. There, both mystery and wonder, in the midst of the growing fear that is life, may be permitted to flourish, a constant reminder, like Lucy’s, of how meager the world is, in both its glory and its power, in comparison with the possible significance of that infant’s birth in Bethlehem.

“Cyril Tourneur” (1930) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

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“Dante” (1929) Eliot’s first essay devoted completely to the great late-medieval Italian poet DANTE ALIGHIERI is a treatise on the literary accomplishment that his masterpiece, La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), constitutes, but it also contains Eliot’s key observations on the nature of poetry and of that equally elusive creature, the poet. Eliot was always painstakingly careful in his attempts to distinguish poetry from all other fields of human literary endeavor with which it is often confused. The list would include history and journalism certainly, the chronicling arts, but more detrimental to any true appreciation of poetry, in Eliot’s view, would be the frequent associations that are made between poetry and philosophy and poetry and autobiography. As his own poetry would later take a turn toward more and more ostensibly religious themes, he would also take pains to distinguish poetry from theology and other kinds of statements typically associated with belief. Eliot’s aim was never to foster a contemplation of the poetic act divorced from the individuals who executed it and the times in which they lived. Eliot would be the last to deny the principle that he asserts in his 1919 essay on Ben Jonson that the “creation of a work of art . . . consists in the process of transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense, the life of the author” into the personality expressed on the page, or that such characterizations must be seen as essentially dramatizing “an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet,” a point he later made, in 1932, in an essay on another 17th-century English dramatist, John Ford. But none of this admission of the obvious—that the experience of the poet becomes transformed into poetry—precludes his most famous formulation of the proper balance with which to regard the relationship between the life of the poet, including his religious and philosophical beliefs, and the poet’s work. That formulation is the one he makes in his landmark 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he argues for a separation, as he puts it, “between the man who suffers

146 “Dante” and the mind which creates.” Those two categories present a critical distinction for Eliot, since when one recognizes the distinction between dayto-day experience and the transformative processes of the creative intellect, one can also recognize in the poem those features that constitute poetry qua poetry, as he would call it—poetry as itself and not as philosophy or autobiography or any other species of human discourse. To illustrate this distinction and the critical differentiations that it requires, Eliot often turns for examples to the work and accepted reputations of the great poets, Dante and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE being foremost among them. Dante, however, holds a special place in Eliot’s heart as a poet, for reasons that he announces in this essay, his first full-length treatment of a poet who had influenced his work from its earliest days.

SYNOPSIS Part I The essay contains one of Eliot’s more memorable, and surely more quotable, observations regarding the tenuous relationship between poetry and meaning, when he writes that genuine poetry “can communicate before it is understood.” Eliot makes this observation early in the first section of his essay, one that is ostensiby devoted to the Inferno, the first part of Dante’s poem, and he is understandably careful to qualify his meaning. To say that Dante is easy to read, a point on which Eliot also insists, has not to do with the complexities of Dante as a source of informative meaning. Eliot is willing to admit that there are lines of verse in Dante that require a paragraph of elucidation and a page of notes. But the issue of content is not the matter of Eliot’s point or, by extension, the matter of what he calls “genuine poetry.” It is rather the matter of a certain universality of language to which Eliot calls his readers’ attention as he attempts to explain what he means by “easy to read.” By universality, Eliot first notes that Dante, though he is using the vulgate, is writing in Italian, a language closer to the lingua franca of scholarship that had emerged in medieval Latin than, say, Shakespeare’s English, an idiosyncratic hybrid of

German and Norman French, might ever seem to be. While there may be a temptation in these times to rail against Eliot’s apparent Eurocentric parochialism by presenting Italian as a “universal” tongue, his point is not lost, and its continuing value is much better appreciated if he is seen to be speaking in relative terms himself. Eliot’s point is that, by writing in a language so near to Latin, Dante is writing within a much more stable and long-lived literary tradition that permits him to be inventive without sacrificing clarity. Arguably, Eliot is correct in asserting that the centuries-old legacy of Latinate literatures and culture as a unifying language base in Dante’s time gave him simultaneously more constraints on what he could say but a freedom to say it as he pleased, so that the distance between Dante’s vocabulary and Dante’s meaning is a much shorter one than the distance, even for a native speaker, between what a character in Shakespeare might actually say and what those words might mean. On balance, it would not take much to convince someone with a fundamental knowledge of Italian that Dante’s Italian, as old as it is, is Italian, whereas it is often difficult to convince individuals very adept in English that Shakespeare’s far more recent English is English. Eliot, however, has another reason for singling out the great accessibility afforded the reader by Dante’s poetry, and that is its allegorical quality, whereby the thought or idea is expressed with extreme care to its dramatic, its figurative, its visual manifestation. Here again it is difficult to gainsay Eliot, who proposes that Dante’s imagination was chiefly a visual one and that to have visions, or even a vision, can create mental habits that cut to the chase, as it were. “Dante’s attempt is to make us see what he saw,” Eliot notes, so he can employ a simple language and allegory to present his vision. In the remainder of this first section of his essay, Eliot provides numerous examples of this feature of Dante’s poetry, which Eliot reckons to be foremost in rendering that poetry capable of communicating before being understood. These examples include the celebrated episode in which Dante meets, in Circle Two among the lustful, the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, whose unembellished story

“Dante” moves him to tears, and of Brunetto Latini suffering among the sodomites on the burning plain in Round Three of Circle Seven, a sinner whose dignity is nevertheless maintained in Dante’s image of him as one who, in a noble competition, “seemed the one who wins and not the one who loses.” Ultimately, however, for Eliot the best example of the visual power of Dante’s poetry combined with the simplicity of his language comes in the episode in Circle Eight, in which Homer’s Ulysses, suffering there for having led his men and himself to perdition by virtue of false counsel, tells of his reckless sailing past the Gates of Hercules into the treacherous and uncharted zones of the Atlantic. In particular, the 19th-century English poet Alfred Tennyson had famously and fairly recently used the same passage from Dante as the dramatic moment around which to construct his own dramatic monologue “Ulysses.” That leaves Eliot free to discuss the comparative merits of either treatment, allowing him to make a convincing case that Dante’s, in the vivid spareness of Ulysses’ narrative, not only has more vigor and verisimilitude as an act of language but keeps readers more mindful of the “further depths” illustrated allegorically by Ulysses’ transgression. Parts II and III Eliot begins the second part of his essay on Dante, in which he will deal with the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, the second and third canticle, respectively, of Dante’s three-part poem, by reiterating his primary observation—that Dante consistently demonstrates how “the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words.” For Eliot, Dante employs an equal austerity in his use of all sorts of literary and rhetorical devices by which poets are traditionally tempted to show off their wares and their talents, often at the expense not just of clarity but of the reader’s ability to comprehend and appreciate the essentially poetical effect of the work at hand. Beginning a consideration of what there is to be learned about poetry from a painstaking attentiveness to Dante’s technical achievements in these latter two sections of the Divine Comedy, Eliot encroaches on the more tenuous grounds of expres-

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sions of religious faith in poetry, since here the categorical distinction between poetry as statement and poetry as meaning is much more difficult to draw and to assert. Eliot is himself mindful of this different level of difficulty, so he calls a comparison of Dante to Shakespeare to bear again in order to clarify the range and scope of Dante’s particular kind of vision. The task before Dante in the Inferno was the task that any poet faces, and that is to render experience in some sort of equivalent terms. The closer one comes to giving the reader a sense of the real through language, the greater the poet. Fair enough, but the problem is that the real can cover a wide range of experiences, not all of them easily rendered in concrete, sensory terms. There is, for example, the philosophical, just as there are states of blessedness. In Dante’s capacity for rendering those kinds of experiences as great poetry, which is what Eliot sees Dante doing in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, respectively, Dante does not outstrip Shakespeare so much as accomplish something entirely different, so that each writer stakes his own claim to a particular kind of greatness. While Shakespeare can bring to bear “a greater extent and variety of human life,” Dante offers readers “deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.” These, too, are well within the range of human experience, even if more rare, and they require a great poet, too, who is, for Eliot, Dante. This, however, requires readers to grasp in Dante “the whole from idea to image,” especially as they approach those more and more rare, and rarefied, philosophical and theological conditions exhibited among Dante’s encounters in purgatory and in heaven. For Dante’s poetry, the question of belief—of the belief system that underlies it—may suddenly seem to be paramount, but as he did in his 1927 essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” Eliot labors to separate the poetry, and the poet, from those same beliefs, lest the one become totally subsumed in the other and Dante, instead of great poetry, become second-rate religion. Thus, Eliot first asserts that, while the reader “cannot afford to ignore” these expressions of belief in Dante, readers are not themselves “called upon to believe them.” Rather, like anything else in the poetic experience

148 “Dante” that results, Dante’s beliefs come down to being, for each reader, “a matter of knowledge and ignorance, not of belief or scepticism,” so that, as far as any appreciation of Dante’s poetry is concerned, it should not matter whether the reader is a Catholic or an atheist. And then Eliot takes the argument a step further: “Furthermore, we can make a distinction between what Dante believes as a poet and what he believed as a man.” While Eliot doubts that such great poetry could have been composed by Dante without some measure of personal conviction, “his private belief becomes a different thing in becoming poetry.” Eliot, who often goes to great lengths to try to explain this key difference, perhaps does his most effective job of it when he once more compares Shakespeare’s greater scope with Dante’s greater depth. The challenge facing Dante as poet, particularly after the palpably real experiences of the Inferno are left far behind, is to “make us apprehend sensuously the various states and stages of blessedness,” so that Dante “has to educate our senses as he goes along.” That, once more, is a poetic, not a philosophic or theological process, and it is precisely in his fulfilling that requirement where Eliot sees Dante’s enduring greatness as a poet, pure and simple, lie. In establishing this distinction, Eliot is also laying the critical groundwork in his own time to enable others to differentiate between his poetry and whatever species of belief that it may be found to be expressing, and this is, of course, entirely his prerogative. Beginning as early as 1927, with the publication of “Journey of the Magi,” which, for lack of any better designation, could be called a Christmas poem, Eliot’s compositions had begun to take a noticeable turn toward the religious, although it could easily be argued that such themes were there as early as Prufrock, with its allusions to Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Lazarus, not to mention an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno. This attention to matters associated with belief in Eliot’s poetry does not abate in the 1930s; indeed, if anything, it increases. It would be shortsighted, however, to dismiss as solely self-motivated Eliot’s continuing critical commentary on poetry and belief. For one very real and compelling reason,

much great poetry deals with the human experiences covered by the general topic of belief. Witness Dante’s Divine Comedy, for just one outstanding example. Eliot’s consistent point, however, is that it is their poetic qualities, not their philosophic or religious ones, that make such works great poems, although he does not deny that it is often difficult if not well nigh impossible to divide the one from the other. Still, he tries to lay a constant emphasis on how effectively those values associated with belief are communicated to the reader as a part of the total poetic experience, not whether they are adequately imparted as beliefs and beliefs alone. That is why he can insist that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood, since the aim of poetry is to communicate the totality of the experience, not merely impart information. Eliot’s focus is on clarity, economy, and vividness, and his point is that Dante can achieve this even when his subject matter does not lend itself well to those three criteria, which is the case when he is dealing with philosophy and religious beliefs. Eliot attributes this skill in Dante to his age’s still having the capacity for vision and for a belief in the validity, as experience, of poetic vision. Seeing visions, Eliot had argued earlier in the essay, had once been “a significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming.” As he approaches the end of the second part of the essay, he goes even further. Dante’s capacity for vision, he says, “belongs to the world of what I call the high dream, and the modern world seems capable only of the low dream.” Herein lies Eliot’s ultimate distinction between works of the poetic imagination that communicate and those lesser experiences that require understanding. For his examples in this case, however, Eliot turns, in the third and final part of his essay, to the masterpiece of Dante’s comparative youth, La vita nuova, or The New Life, that delightful mixture of prose narrative, lyric poetry, and literary criticism that recounts the events of Dante’s erotically Platonic love affair with his lady, Beatrice Polinari. La vita nuova presents a strange mixing of “actual experience . . . and intellectual and imaginative experience,” of the autobiographical with

“Death of Saint Narcissus, The” the conventions of troubadour love poetry, and the combining of the inspired if not impassioned imaginativeness of vision and allegory with the formulaic requirements of art. Though La vita nuova is a lesser, and less mature, work than the Comedy, Eliot believes a modern reader can acquire from it Dante’s “sense of intellectual and spiritual realities” enough to realize that his vision poetry “cannot be classed either as ‘truth’ or ‘fiction.’ ” The modern mind cannot easily grasp that there are categories, indeed, whole realms of experience between those two extremes. Dante’s age could, and that freed Dante’s intellect for the creation of a poetry that was neither philosophy nor religion nor autobiography but could nevertheless make convincingly authentic use of all three.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY There is no real way of determining what drew Eliot to Dante in the first place. It may have come from his mother Charlotte, who had an un-Protestant devotion to the Virgin Mary and was interested enough in Italy of the early Renaissance to have written a book-length poem on the 13th-century Italian religious fanatic Savonarola. Eliot would himself admit many years after the fact that his Italian was mainly self-taught, primarily for the purpose of reading Dante. It is highly likely that Eliot’s exposure to Dante during his undergraduate years at Harvard was of the first order, for Harvard took great pride in having led the way in introducing the study of modern languages into the university curriculum in America. At Harvard, less than a century earlier than Eliot’s arrival on the campus in 1906, George Ticknor had started a trend away from the prevailing academic emphasis on teaching as literature only the Greek and Latin classics when, in 1818, he became Harvard’s first professor of modern languages. In that position he was succeeded, in 1835, by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who would publish the first translation of Dante by an American. In 1881, he also would help found, along with the poet James Russell Lowell and Harvard art history professor (and a distant cousin of Eliot’s) Charles Eliot Norton, the Dante Society of America, the second-oldest such organization in

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the world. Norton himself would be a later American translator of the Divine Comedy. This distinguished history at Harvard of emphasizing the study of more contemporary developments in literature and language, and of Dante in particular, no doubt rubbed off on the young Eliot. In any event, he would use a passage from Dante’s Inferno as an epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the earliest years of his career as a serious poet, and while other early influences such as the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE and the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century would gradually fall by the wayside as the maturing poet developed a more and more distinct voice and style of his own, he would continue to allude to and model his poetry after the great Italian master all the way up to 1942, the time of his own most mature masterpiece, “Little Gidding,” the fourth and final part of Four Quartets. Indeed, in the long essay on Dante, Eliot would observe that, unlike most other poems, which one inevitably outgrows, Dante’s masterpiece “is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.” Eliot claims to regard the final stanza of the Paradiso as the “highest point that poetry ever has reached or ever can reach.” For all these reasons, it is vital for any student of Eliot’s poetry to come to the fullest appreciation of Eliot’s estimation of Dante possible in order to appreciate the depths of the elder poet’s influence on Eliot. The problem is that influence is itself very likely inestimable.

“Death of Saint Narcissus, The” (1920) A poet’s wishes should be respected. In the case of “The Death of Saint Narcissus,” Eliot’s wishes were very clear. Although the poem had been accepted for publication in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry in 1915, apparently in the same issue that would first introduce the reading public to Eliot through his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot elected to

150 “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, A” withdraw “Saint Narcissus” from consideration at the last minute. Since the text of the poem had already been typeset, a galley proof has fortunately been preserved. Why Eliot changed his mind is a matter for speculation. Perhaps he had come to view the somewhat autoerotic nature of the poem’s primary conceit as a source for future embarrassment. Narcissus, after all, is not a saint in any religious sense of the word but rather a figure out of Greek mythology who becomes so enamored of his own image reflected in a pool that he dies gazing on it. There are also homoerotic impulses expressed in the poem’s phallic imagery in which Narcissus merges, at poem’s end, with Saints Stephen and Sebastian, who were both slain by arrows and became favorite subjects for Renaissance male nude paintings. With its further hints at masturbation, hermaphrodism, and gender blending, the poem is indeed a case study in what, in keeping with the middle-class morality of Eliot’s day, would have been regarded as the psychopathology of human sexuality, a fit subject for physicians, perhaps, and the emerging field of psychiatry, but hardly a fitting topic for poetry. On the other hand, Eliot’s second thoughts could have been the result of purely technical considerations. Even a very young poet is mindful of posterity. Eliot may simply have come to see the poem as not a worthy enough effort to enter his official canon, which is exactly what formal publication would have accomplished. Most significant, however, and the reason that “The Death of Saint Narcissus” cannot simply be ignored, Eliot appropriated the imagery of the first seven lines of the poem, beginning with the command to the reader to “[c]ome under the shadow of this gray rock,” for incorporation virtually wholesale into lines 26–30 of The Waste Land, beginning with the parenthetical injunction, “(Come in under the shadow of this red rock).” That that passage from The Waste Land, which has its own none too subtle sexual subtext, finds its source in an earlier poem of Eliot’s that is rich in sexual suggestiveness and erotic detail may point readers in a particular direction, particularly since the “Hyacinth girl,” another gender-bending image with homoerotic implications (the god Apollo had fallen in love with

Hyacinth, a young man, because of his great physical beauty), comes within the lines of the passage borrowed from “Saint Narcissus.” Good poetry does not come easily, and Eliot was always one not to let a good line, or three or four or more, go.

“Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, A” (1928) One has to read far into Eliot’s 1928 essay “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry”—indeed, nearly to the end—to come to a concise statement of its subject, “the possibility of poetic drama.” Elsewhere in this long and necessarily discombulated essay—it is presented as a rambling conversation on drama among individuals identified only as A, B, C, D, E, and F—the point is also made, “[W]hat great poetry is not dramatic?” That had certainly been the case with his own poetry virtually from the beginnings of his poetic career. With works like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” first conceived in 1910 and 1911, and continuing through other notable works such as “Gerontion” in 1919 and “The Hollow Men” in 1925, it is easy to see how Eliot frequently conceived of poetry in dramatic terms—that is, with a made-up character or characters doing the speaking, rather than the poet. Nor does that list include Eliot’s most famous work of all to that time, 1922’s The Waste Land, with its variety of voices both ancient and modern, all allowed to speak for themselves and without comment from the author, in good dramatic fashion. In fact, some time before this essay, which was published as an introduction to John Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie, Eliot had, in 1923, already tried his own hand at composing a poetic drama, “Sweeney Agonistes.” Though he would abandon that effort in 1925, it is equally intriguing how much of Eliot’s literary criticism from this period focuses not on poetry but on poetic dramatists. While Eliot remains most renowned as a poet whose critical theory and commentary are most related to issues of thought and belief in contemporary literature, it is worth noting that he was

“Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, A” writing on poetic drama as early as 1919, in the essay “ ‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama.” When the two lengthy essays “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” and “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” and quite a few related, shorter pieces on individual dramatists are also factored in, the essays on drama and dramatists far outnumber essays on poetry and poets in Eliot’s celebrated 1932 prose collection, Selected Essays. Indeed, one of his most celebrated critical formulations, the objective correlative, comes from an essay on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Hamlet and His Problems.” All this background information emphasizes how much Eliot always showed an interest in the dramatic nature of poetry and in the possibilities of poetic drama in the modern world. They are not mutually exclusive interests by any means, and yet Eliot would not hit his own stride as a dramatic poet until midcareer, and then only after a series of fits and starts, including the abortive “Sweeney Agonistes” project and the chance occasion that involved him, in 1933, in composing choruses and dialogue for a religious pageant play, The Rock.

SYNOPSIS A survey of the misgivings expressed in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” may suggest why Eliot was simultaneously reluctant to compose a play of his own and yet almost obsessed by the creative possibilities offered by the form. By its very nature, an essay of this sort is an exercise in testing ideas and balancing opinions without appearing to give either or any side a privileged position. By the same token, no writer can take several sides in an argument without revealing somewhere along the way which position he favors. The drift of Eliot’s multifaceted “dialogue” on the possibility of poetic drama “in our time” sorts itself out, ultimately, into two diametrically opposed attitudes toward the purposes of drama, neither of which appears to be satisfactory. At the first extreme, articulated early on in Eliot’s presentation, is the idea that the only purpose that drama— or even literature in general—serves any longer is as a public amusement. “Our literature is a substitute for religion,” says B, “and so is our religion”—a little too dry and witty, perhaps, but nonetheless

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not too far removed from the central crisis. Eliot is taking a jab here at the so-called humanists of his time, thinkers who, following in the footsteps of such 19th-century English literary critics as MATTHEW ARNOLD and Walter Pater, were seeking to resurrect literature and the humanities in general from the bane of the useless by proposing for those more aesthetic kinds of human endeavors a moral function that had previously been the sole preserve of the religious. In Eliot’s view, such an accommodation did no service to literature or religion. By the same token, however, no one would deny that drama seems to thrive in cultures where a common body of belief flourishes. In summary, without a real devotion to faith, without a faithfulness among a people, drama of any sort is impossible—except as an entertainment. Serious drama must assume that serious matters are at stake, and those matters are ultimately expressed in terms of faith and addressed by religion. So then, B, who apparently sees little of either real religious faith or meaningful literature in the contemporary scene around him, can assert, by way of a rhetorical question, “What is the purpose of theatre [in our own time] except to amuse?” E, and C and D, will have none of B’s cynicism, however, although they do not have much better notions of the purposes of drama with which to answer B’s objection except to argue that perhaps the drama is not “merely a matter of established morals,” which it then must otherwise uphold or deride. As E would have it, there is the question of the drama as a matter of form instead. He uses the Russian ballet, which is certainly good theatre, as his model: “Here seemed to be everything that we wanted in drama, except the poetry.” As such, it “did not teach any ‘lesson,’ but it had form.” E argues that form is what distinguishes prose drama from verse drama. It may seem that the argument, such as it is, is getting somewhere. The reader should note, nevertheless, that at bottom the dynamics of the argument appear to be doing nothing more than opposing one kind of moral aridity with another: Drama as amusement versus drama as form. This dilemma comes to a head shortly when E and B start discussing the High Mass of Catholic Christian devotion as representative

152 “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, A” of “the perfect and ideal drama,” although it too remains one otherwise devoid of any devotional or liturgical significance for the equally ideal audience, which is described as one capable of enjoying such an intensely religious event only as sheer spectacle. B rightly insists that that attitude is confusing the “Art of the Mass” with its purpose. For the believer, he further insists, the Art of the Mass is made manifest only when its religious import is poorly conveyed, and then that art is something that distracts rather than draws one’s admiration. A Mass that can be viewed as great drama, in other words, fails in its true dramatic function, which is to engage the audience in the profound mysteries that the ritual can merely portray. This association between the real nature and purpose of the drama of the Mass and the nature and purpose of drama itself permits some clarity through the intentional smokescreen of his ambivalent “dialogue.” The aesthetic difference, B points out, is between someone for whom the Mass, or drama, is mere spectacle—something to be watched—and someone who is a participant in the drama—something in which to be engaged.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The gist of Eliot’s argument throughout the essay is that the entire issue of drama as amusement versus drama as form must be not resolved so much as transcended. If the one or the other of those two possibilities is, to paraphrase “The Hollow Men,” gesture without meaning, Eliot now offers a positive contrast in a third approach. This involves the notion that drama, by engaging the audience and making them participants in what the ancient Greeks called its agon, or struggle, can provide for the possibility of a poetic drama that can succeed even with a modern audience. How that may be achieved is explained by Eliot in another of his commentaries on poetic drama, this from the last of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1932 and 1933, subsequently published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. There, remarking on an unnamed verse drama of his that is generally taken to be “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot imagines that drama is the only means of effectively addressing a modern audience and that it

can achieve this effectiveness by being presented in such a way that some members of the audience will recognize themselves on the stage and thereby share the depths of the protagonist’s inner turmoil. The further idea is that the only means for accomplishing such a potent connection between the drama and the audience is through poetry, since it alone can enable the sort of intensification of thought and emotion that great drama requires. “[T]he modern world is chaotic, and . . . its lack of social and moral conventions makes the task of the dramatic poet difficult,” Eliot proposes toward the conclusion of “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” but so was the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, he can insist as well. While it may be true that “there is no precedent for a nation having two great periods of drama,” Eliot imagines that “the craving for poetic drama is permanent in human nature.” The question is how to get it. Dryden, whose own speculation on poetic drama is the cause for Eliot’s, is called to bear witness. Dryden thought his an inferior age as well, yet the old verities of stagecraft worked for him. Appealing to the unities of place and time, Eliot sees a need for concentration: “A continuous hour and a half of intense interest is what we need.” As might have been expected, such a free-ranging free-for-all ends without having really come to any genuine conclusions, but it has raised a number of serious questions and considerations. “The Unities do make for intensity,” Eliot admits, “as does verse rhythm.” From that point on, the rest is all speculation. Eliot and the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. YEATS would both try their hand several times at composing verse dramas, in English, for a contemporary audience, although only Eliot would try continuously to succeed on the popular stage. With The Cocktail Party in January 1951, he would achieve the goal that he had apparently set for himself: a verse drama that was a popular and commercial success. But whether he had thus advanced the cause of poetic drama in the modern world, or merely cashed in on his reputation as a literary lion remains to be seen. The form of the drama, one of Eliot’s mouthpieces had proposed earlier in the pages of “A Dia-

Elder Statesman, The logue on Dramatic Poetry,” must “vary from age to age in accordance with religious assumptions of the age.” An age without order and stability in public places might require the counterbalance of the sort of rigid form on the stage that only poetry can provide, D concludes, but that does not resolve the more critical matter of what that poetic form should be. And that may be the rub. Eliot’s hope was that the popular theater might again take on a poetic form in his time, but his own experiences with the example of the Elizabethan stage ought to have told him that that is a proposition of fits and starts. Aside from his own efforts, the drama of our time written in English remains largely drama written in prose.

“Dry Salvages, The” (1941) See FOUR QUARTETS.

“East Coker” (1940) See FOUR QUARTETS.

Elder Statesman, The (1958) Eliot had drafted the first two acts of this, his last dramatic work and, so, too, his last major creative endeavor, early in 1956. However, he would not revise those first two acts, as well as complete the third act, until the autumn of 1957, thus capping a literary career of nearly a half-century in length. The fact that his marriage to Valerie Fletcher intervened between the time he first conceived the play and the time that he could take up his pen again in earnest to complete it is generally thought to account for the play’s understated but nevertheless enthusiastic celebration of the benefits of connubial love. Indeed, his last published poem, “To My Wife,” provided his dedication to the play when it was published in book form. He is reported to

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have told a friend, the British editor and critic Cyril Connolly, that, with that poem, he felt that he had finally written a poem about love and happiness. By the end of 1957, he had a completed draft of the play, which he had originally intended to call The Rest Cure. When he learned, however, that that title had already been used, he elected to call his verse drama The Elder Statesman instead. The London production of the play, again under the direction of his longtime theatrical collaborator E. MARTIN BROWNE, opened in the Cambridge Theatre in late September 1958. It was neither a critical nor commercial success. Generally, the reaction was that the play reflected outdated theatrical conventions that would have been more in keeping with the playwrighting typical of Eliot’s youth. At the very least, the story displays with a straightforward simplicity the conventions of older drawing room dramas that were more the rage when Eliot had first started writing for the stage in the 1930s. The irony is that, despite his being castigated for being behind the times, by now Eliot had perfected a format for the stage in keeping with his own theories of verse drama. With The Elder Statesman, Eliot tamed the high-flown histrionics and literary complexities of Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, while the somewhat listless verse of The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk found just the right balance of the rhythmic continuity expected of the poetic line, but without sacrificing a naturalness of tone. The play’s theme, meanwhile, if it were to be hastily summarized, could be called the redemptive power of love. It is ironic as well that, for all its commonplaces, The Elder Statesman may be Eliot’s most successful commentary on the age-old conflict between individual choice and social responsibility. Reduced to a question, the play asks when a person is obligated to confess that he has committed crimes, even if the entire legal system as developed through the ages would not necessarily find him guilty of any wrongdoing. While it was not necessary for Eliot to bring the question of original sin to his audience’s attention, The Elder Statesman comments on the role of goodness in a fallen universe and concludes that it can be achieved.

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SYNOPSIS Act 1 As the first act opens, Monica Claverton-Ferry and Charles Hemington are having a conversation in the drawing room of Monica’s father, Lord Claverton’s, London home. It is time for tea, and Charles is disappointed that he will not have Monica all to himself. She will be leaving on Monday to provide her father, who has recently retired, with her companionship during an extended stay at Badgley Court, an exclusive rest home in the countryside. Charles had hoped to have Monica’s undivided attention for the entire afternoon, but they spent it shopping instead. He has something that he is desperate to tell Monica. They have not had the privacy that he would have liked at a luncheon engagement earlier that day, and now he has just learned that Monica’s father will be joining them for tea. Charles sees no reason for staying, since he feels that what he has to say to her is private, and now those plans have been dashed entirely. She convinces him to tell her nevertheless. He tells her that it is not just that he is in love with her, something that he has apparently shared with her before, but that he believes that she loves him as well. She confesses that she does. Her admission catches him somewhat by surprise, and he happily confesses that his asserting that she loves him has been a blind gambit on his part. The two now engage in a more profoundly intimate dialogue that is virtually a love duet, so transformed have they both been by their mutual protestations of love. Now, “[i]n our private world,” Monica happily proclaims, “the meanings are different.” That scene is quickly interrupted and its mood of a magical privacy broken, however, by the entrance of Lambert, the butler, with preparations for tea. Lord Claverton not yet having arrived, Charles presses his advantage, insisting that Monica should explain to him why, rather than marry him, she must go off with her father to keep him company during his convalescence. She levelheadedly provides Charles with several good reasons. Lord Claverton has just retired amid some fanfare from a long life in the public eye as a person of great prominence and authority, first as

a politician and subsequently as the chairman of major companies. He is not used to being alone, Monica explains, nor does he want to find himself at the mercy of strangers, no matter how professional the staff at Badgley may be. Her third reason, however, is the most telling of all. Although he is only 60, his lordship has already suffered one stroke. According to his physician, Monica tells Charles, Lord Claverton does not have much longer to live, although he has not himself been told as much. Their discussion is now halted by Lord Claverton’s arriving for tea. He has his engagement book and cynically broods over the fact that, though he does not miss the frantic pace of the public life that he has now left forever behind him, the empty pages of his engagement book remind him of the emptiness of the sort of life that he now has before him. Despite Monica’s loving admonition that that kind of a life is just what the doctor has ordered for him, Lord Claverton protests: “I’ve not the slightest longing for the life I’ve left— / Only fear of the emptiness before me.” Though he never gives the least hint that he suspects that he may be dying, Claverton reveals himself as a man with no zest for life, only the restless capacity to endure it. For him it has become “waiting, simply waiting, / With no desire to act, yet a loathing of inaction.” In his own eyes, having stepped off the public stage while still reasonably active, he has become the ghost of his own former greatness, as both it and he fade quietly into a past that no longer exists in a present that has nothing attractive about it except for a dull sameness. Lambert then announces that an unexpected guest has arrived. He is a “foreign person,” Lambert observes, but one who speaks English quite well. The gentleman, Lambert goes on to report, feels certain that Lord Claverton will agree to see him, once he reads the note that the gentleman has written on his calling card. When Claverton reads the note, he does agree to see his visitor privately in the drawing room. Once the guest, a Señor Gomez, is announced, Lambert, Monica, and Charles take their leave, leaving him alone with Claverton. Claverton queries Gomez as to whether or not he is a friend of a Mr. Culverwell, which is appar-

Elder Statesman, The ently the gist of the note that Gomez had written to gain access to Lord Claverton. As it then turns out, however, although it takes Claverton some time to realize it, Señor Gomez is not a friend of this Culverwell, a man whom Claverton had befriended in his youth. Rather, Gomez is Culverwell. The details of their complicated story emerge as soon as Dick Ferry—for that was Lord Claverton’s name before he added to his the name of Claverton, which belongs to his wife’s more influential family—recognizes Frederico Gomez for his old Oxford buddy, Fred Culverwell. Though the brighter of the two, Culverwell was also the poorer, so they had curried each other’s friendship for self-serving motives. Culverwell made social connections that he could not have otherwise through his friendship with the wealthy Ferry, and Ferry was flattered to have the friendship of someone as bright as Culverwell. The upshot of this strange alliance of theirs, nevertheless, was that Culverwell could not keep up the pace of both his studies and the social life of a wealthy young rake like Ferry. Culverwell ended up ruining his prospects by leaving Oxford and being forced to take a “miserable clerkship” while still being saddled nevertheless with the expensive tastes that he had acquired during the time of his friendship with Ferry. Culverwell now holds Lord Claverton responsible not only for all that, but for the further fact that Culverwell, to maintain his expensive lifestyle, ended up committing forgery, for which he was subsequently imprisoned. Dick Ferry/Lord Claverton protests that he cannot imagine that Culverwell/Gomez truly believes that all his distress was the result of his having fallen under Ferry’s influence. At the very least, Lord Claverton points out, he had helped by coming to Culverwell’s assistance after his release from prison, enabling him to leave England. Indeed, that was how Culverwell had finally managed to make an entirely new life for himself as Frederico Gomez in the fictional South American country of San Marco, so that by now, 35 years later, he has become a happily married man and a great financial success. Culverwell/Gomez will have none of Dick Ferry’s attempts to expiate his own guilt. Although Gomez is almost pathologically cool-headed in the

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manner in which he lays out his case, he makes it clear that he continues to hold the respectable Lord Claverton responsible for the shambles his own life had become. Despite his material success, Culverwell points out, he has been an exile from his home and the life that he could have had these many years, thanks in large part to Ferry’s “assistance” in helping him leave England for good. Such help, Culverwell now asserts, was provided for no other reason than to get him out of the way. There is yet another twist in their complicated relationship, one that Culverwell now reveals. As it turns out, he is the only witness to a hit-and-run accident that Ferry had one night when they were driving back to Oxford together. “You never lifted your foot from the accelerator” after hitting an old man, Culverwell charges, and he further impugns Ferry’s motives for not stopping by reminding him that it would then have implicated some young women whom they had just been visiting. Lord Claverton attempts to hold his ground. He does not deny the charges but insists that the entire matter is not as awful as Culverwell makes it sound. Besides, who would believe it after all these years? Culverwell is not impressed, however. It is not a matter of his word against Lord Claverton’s so much as what the story can do to besmirch not Lord Claverton’s name but his peace of mind. In fact, Culverwell’s plan is much more insidious than mere blackmail. He assures Claverton that he will not go to the press with the story, nor does he want money. “[Y]our secret’s safe with me,” he confides to Claverton, although “I might give it to a few friends, in confidence.” The rub is, Culverwell tells Claverton with a barely concealed glee, “you’d never know to whom I’d told it.” When Claverton realizes that, rightly or wrongly and with or without justification, this is payday, he presses Culverwell to tell him what he wants. “I’m a lonely man, Dick, with a craving for affection,” Culverwell tells Lord Claverton. “All I want is as much of your company, / So long as I stay here, as I can get.” And then Culverwell adds menacingly: “And the more I get, the longer I may stay.” Claverton charges Culverwell with having given him only his “envy, spite and hatred” in return for the friendship that he had offered him those

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many years before, but nothing will change the fact that Culverwell has apparently decided to make tormenting Lord Claverton his hobby for as long as it gives him pleasure and satisfaction. “[W]e can begin just where we left off,” Culverwell ominously assures him as he makes his exit, and act 1 ends with Monica returning to find her father, an ailing man who desperately needs his rest, worn out and anxious and brooding following his interview with “Señor Gomez.” Act 2 The curtain rises on the second act to find Lord Claverton and the Monica enjoying the morning sunshine on a terrace at Badgley Court, the convalescent home, several days later. Monica is scolding her father for not taking this opportunity to relax, since that is the whole purpose of his sojourn there. He complains with the common complaint of the self-driven person that he cannot let himself relax. “What is this self inside us, this silent observer, / Severe and speechless critic . . .?” he wonders. Matters are not helped when Mrs. Piggot, the director of the facility, arrives on the scene. She tends to be very talkative, so that all her efforts to make as important a “guest” as Lord Claverton feel comfortable and at ease succeed only in making him more restlessly irritated. This time however, Monica shares his discomfort and sympathizes with him. Perhaps it is indeed impossible for any person as prominent as her father had been ever to find rest. Once Mrs. Piggot has had her say, Monica convinces her father that he should try to rest nonetheless while she goes off to explore the grounds. “If you spy any guest who seems to be stalking you / Put your newspaper over your face,” she tells him, so that he will appear to be pretending to be asleep. That is precisely what Lord Claverton does, yet the strategy fails miserably when the first person to come along and take the chair beside him on the terrace interrupts his feigned rest by apologizing for doing so. Clearly irritated by an intrusion over which he has no control, Lord Claverton reluctantly enters into a conversation with his new neighbor, Mrs. John Carghill, who, it turns out, had been in an earlier incarnation Maisie Batter-

son, another ghost from Claverton’s past. She later took the stage name Maisie Montjoy, and it was under that name and by virtue of that sort of suggestive reputation that she and Claverton had had a youthful fling, after which she filed a breach of promise suit against him. Though she eventually settled the suit out of court on the advice of her attorney so as not to scuttle the young Dick Ferry’s burgeoning political aspirations, Maisie genuinely loved Claverton and appears to continue to do so. Indeed, although her friends had warned her about Claverton, identifying him as a man who was “hollow,” she assures him now that he was worth the trouble. She resembles Gomez somewhat in her present behavior and earlier unpleasant associations with the young Dick Ferry. Unlike Gomez, however, although Maisie can also accuse Claverton of “shabby behaviour,” she does not seem to seek vindication, nor does their meeting here many years later seem to be anything more than the result of pure chance. None of that means, of course, that her presence at this “rest” home may not yet turn out to be a cause of further irritation and embarrassment to him. She reads his old love letters every night, she tells him. While she claims that she would never do anything with them publicly, despite the great fame in life that Claverton has subsequently achieved, she does offer “to bring the photostats tomorrow morning, / And read them to you.” Lord Claverton clearly does not need this added excitement, and Mrs. Piggot unwittingly now comes to his rescue, politely driving Mrs. Carghill off so that their famous guest can take the rest that he has come to Badgley Court to get. However, Mrs. Piggot then keeps him occupied with one of her rambling monologues, which is cut short by Monica’s reentry into the scene. Not knowing the half of it, Monica is pleased to have saved her father, who appears to be as ruffled as ever, from Mrs. Piggot’s onslaught. That relief is extremely short-lived, inasmuch as Monica is herself the bearer of bad tidings. Monica’s brother and Lord Claverton’s ne’er-do-well son, Michael, has shown up for a visit, and Monica must tell her father that she is afraid that “something unpleasant has happened.” Michael himself appears. After a great deal of extemporizing and deflecting of blame

Elder Statesman, The and responsibility, Michael admits that, as a result of running up a heavy gambling debt, he has lost the position that his father’s influence had obtained for him. His solution, and why he has come to his father, is to go abroad where he might lead a life free of the burden of being Lord Claverton’s son and, so, held to a higher standard than most people. Lord Claverton endures his son’s cheekiness, taking Michael’s insults and insinuations as well as he earlier took Gomez’s. In essence, like Gomez, Michael accuses Lord Claverton of being responsible for making a wreck out of his, Michael’s, life simply to satisfy his own vanity and lust for eminence and authority. Claverton tries to convince Michael that running away—becoming a “fugitive from reality”—will not solve his problems. “When you reach your goal,” Claverton tells the younger man, “[y]ou will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.” Monica, who had stepped away to let father and son talk, returns to the scene and tries to soothe the bruised feelings and egos on either side of the divide. Her efforts at being a peacemaker, however, are thwarted by Mrs. Carghill’s arrival back on the scene. She has brought a despatch case that is apparently filled with all those photostats of Dick Ferry’s old love letters to her. Whatever her plans had been, they are put on hold because she is so taken with happening on Lord Claverton’s two children. Indeed she makes much of Michael, who, she insists, is the very image of Lord Claverton when he was that age and he and Maisie had just met and, apparently, been lovers. But then she, too, is interrupted when Gomez shows up on the scene exuding his snake’s charms from every pore. He has “persuaded” his doctor that he is in need of a rest cure, too, he explains, and now here he is at Badgley Court. Because he is introduced not only as Señor Gomez of San Marco but also as a college chum of Claverton’s from their Oxford days, Gomez and Carghill hit it off famously, particularly in view of their mutual acquaintance with Lord Claverton in his youth. Now that he, too, shall be a guest at Badgley, Mrs. Carghill extracts a promise from Señor Gomez: He will permit her to question him about the Dick Ferry that he knew back in their Oxford days.

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Gomez happily agrees to the request on one condition: “That you tell me all about Dick when you knew him.” Patting her trusty despatch case, Mrs. Carghill agrees. “Secret for secret, Señor Gomez,” she crows, sealing their somewhat suspect pact. Monica, who has been watching all this transpire, now steps in. Her father needs his rest, she insists both to him and to those present. The other three leave, making various plans to meet again, and Monica is once again alone with her father, as she had been when the second act first opened. “I want you to escape from them,” she tells him, not making it clear just whom she may mean by “those awful people.” “What I want to escape from / Is myself, is the past,” he tells her, realizing as quickly that he had just finished giving his son, Michael, strong advice to the contrary. Resolving that it is not too late not to “try to escape from his own past failures,” at the end of act 2 Lord Claverton hopes that there is time for him to help his son, Michael, learn that same lesson. Still, as the curtain falls, Lord Claverton must ask, “[H]ave I still time? / . . . Is it too late for me, Monica?” Act 3 The third and final act opens on late afternoon of the following day. Charles is visiting with Monica on the terrace at Badgley Court. Having observed Gomez and Mrs. Carghill the previous day, Monica has sent for Charles out of a concern that these two strangers are blackmailing her father. In the meantime, Lord Claverton enters the scene unobserved by them and, overhearing Monica expressing her fears to Charles, then feels free to address the matter with them openly. In response to Monica’s earlier expression to Charles of her puzzlement over how anyone could possibly find anything worthy of blackmail in the life of a man as virtuous as her father, Lord Claverton observes that all of us have our shortcomings. A person may never have broken the law but could have secrets leaving him vulnerable nevertheless to the likes of Gomez and Mrs. Carghill. Lord Claverton’s real mistake, he now realizes, was not trusting enough in Monica’s love to reveal his “secrets” to her. He confesses to having lived

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his life “trying to forget myself. / . . . to identify myself with the part I had chosen to play.” Now, he hopes, Monica loves him enough to come to know him for “the broken-down actor” he really is. He admits that Gomez and Mrs, Carghill may very well be blackmailing him, but it is only in a manner of speaking. “If people merely blackmail you to get your company, / I’m afraid the law can’t touch them.” True enough, Charles agrees, but why not then just leave Badgley Court, he asks Lord Claverton, since it is his being there, exposed, that makes him susceptible to their torment. Claverton then explains that leaving would be no escape at all. “[T]hey are not real,” he says of Señor Gomez and Mrs. Carghill. “They are merely . . . / Spectres from my past.” Since the two of them, Gomez and Mrs. Carghill, as real as they may be otherwise, are nothing more than the moral debts that anyone may incur as the result of a life lived in a moral universe, Lord Claverton feels that only by accepting the “debts” that they impose on him, rather than trying to escape them, can he overcome whatever power they may be hoping to wield over him and his peace of mind. That said, it is also easy for Lord Claverton to reveal his sin in each case to Charles and to Monica. Culverwell, he explains, had let his admiration and envy for Dick Ferry tempt him into a lifestyle that he could ill afford, but Claverton can see now that it was his own youthful vices that had tempted Culverwell. As for the hit-and-run accident, it was discovered later that the elderly man whom he had run over had already died of natural causes, but that does not alter the fact that, in the heat of the moment, Dick Ferry did not stop and someone else was later accused of causing the old man’s death until an autopsy proved otherwise. In Maisie Montjoy’s case, meanwhile, Lord Claverton admits that he succumbed to a powerful physical attraction for her, leading him to woo her far beyond the scope of what would have been reasonable, and without any regard for the fact that she, apparently, was genuinely in love with him. There his failing was much more serious—“. . .we should respect love always when we meet it,” he explains—but hardly, again, intended to do ill to

the other person. That neither of them seems now to be capable of forgiving him, he thinks of as their problem and as an opportunity for him to repent of those youthful indiscretions. For, Claverton asks Charles, who does not have things in their past that may be neither crimes nor sins but for which nevertheless he or she may feel quite ashamed? Having had the chance to confess his secrets to someone whom he loves, Monica, Lord Claverton feels that he is now well on his way toward exorcising these ancient ghosts, as it were, and it may seem that the moral dilemma in which Lord Claverton has unexpectedly found himself has nearly resolved itself. But then a new and equally unexpected wrinkle arises. Mrs. Carghill shows up, followed almost immediately by Gomez in the company of Claverton’s son, Michael. The long and the short of it is that, at the instigation of Mrs. Carghill, Gomez has offered Michael a “position,” though one that is otherwise undefined, back in San Marco. The financial and social well-being that will result from this largesse on Gomez’s part, it is argued, will solve all the younger man’s present problems back in England. Since these are the very problems, it should be recalled, for which Lord Claverton had shown little sympathy only the day before, Gomez’s actions are clearly capable of driving a wedge between Michael and whatever relationship he may still have with his father. Claverton appeals to Michael’s good sense to persuade him not to commit himself to such an extravagant venture without knowing all the details, for Michael seems to be determined to take Gomez up on his offer. Even Claverton’s finally resorting to revealing Gomez’s real identity as his old “friend” Fred Culverwell to Michael has little effect. Apparently having anticipated Claverton’s determination to stop him, Gomez has already made this admission to Michael himself. Monica tries her best to dissuade Michael as well. “[Y]ou can’t abandon your family / And your very self—it’s a kind of suicide,” she protests. Charles, Michael’s future brother-in-law, tries his powers of persuasion, too. “Can you really feel confidence,” he asks Michael, in someone who is using him “to gratify . . . / His lifelong grievance against your father?” Though they each make a case, it is to no avail.

Elder Statesman, The Even Monica’s last-ditch appeal to her brother to remember their childhood, although they were never very close, fails to do anything more than to get Michael to agree that he will always be fond of her, too. Gomez and Mrs. Carghill, intentionally perhaps, act equally obtuse with regard to the momentousness of Michael’s decision. He will be leaving for San Marco almost instantly and should be able to visit England again within a mere five years, Gomez assures them all, and there is always airmail, even if it is a bit slow. Mrs. Carghill, who earlier made it clear that she regards Michael as the son that she and Dick Ferry would have had if they had married, suggests that all Michael ever really needed was someone to understand him. On that score, Lord Claverton finds it difficult to disagree. “I see now clearly / The many many mistakes I have made / My whole life through,” he admits, as the last vestiges of his previously comfortable life appear to be caving in on him. Still, his fear that he might not have time to rectify his life, a fear that he had expressed at the end of act 2, is now being ironically realized. Though he cannot save Michael either from himself or from the clutches of those who would get to his father through him, this series of crises has enabled Lord Claverton to save himself. Once Michael and Gomez and then Mrs. Carghill have departed, Monica tries to reassure him that “it’s not you and me he [Michael] rejects, / But himself.” Such words reassure him somewhat, but Lord Claverton seems suddenly to be mindful of his own mortality and of the ill health that forced his retirement and this retreat to Badgley Court in the first place. In the first act Monica had intimated to Charles that her father did not have much longer to live, although he was not aware of it. All during this confrontation with Michael, however, Lord Claverton has been implying that he will not be around long enough to see Michael’s return to England. It will be for Monica and Charles, Claverton now suggests, to see to it that Michael does not feel estranged when and if he does return. Monica is alarmed by these hints, whereas Charles continues to insist that what Lord Claverton must do is leave Badgley Court. Claverton

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counters by assuring them that “I feel at peace now. / . . . the peace that ensues upon contrition.” More, having rectified what he could of his relation with Monica and Michael by admitting to his earlier vanities and mistakes, he feels as well that “I’ve only just now had the illumination / Of knowing what love is,” which would be thinking of the other’s welfare, and not of his own. Having been rejected by Michael, Lord Claverton can now also reject that part of himself that has been wholly self-serving, a role that he had played all his life, and winds up feeling “freed from this self that pretends to be someone.” Instead, “in becoming no one, I begin to live,” echoing young Colby’s resolve at the end of The Confidential Clerk, Eliot’s earlier verse drama. That resolve achieved, Lord Claverton excuses himself, taking his leave of the two lovers. “It’s as if he had passed through some door unseen by us,” Charles says once he has gone. Monica is even more puzzled by his leaving, but Charles finally assures her that it was so they could be alone together. They once more revel in the love that they had just confessed to each other when the play began. Now they realize that they have become “a new person / Who is you and me together,” as Monica puts it. Understanding her love for Charles enables her to understand the true nature of love itself and, perhaps, the sentiments her father has just expressed before taking his ominous leave of them. “Oh Father, Father!” she exclaims, thrilled with her newfound understanding. “I could speak to you now.” Charles offers to go fetch Lord Claverton for her, but she now knows that he has passed away. “He is close at hand, / Though he has gone too far to return to us,” she says. Becoming no one, “he has become himself.” Charles sees a blessing in Lord Claverton’s parting convictions. Monica does, too. “Fixed in the certainty of love unchanging,” which is what her father’s deathbed conversion has convinced her of, Monica can say to Charles that “I feel utterly secure / In you.” Her resolve prepares her to go to her father, who waits under the beech tree under which he had been standing before his entrance earlier in act 3. “I feel drawn to that spot,” he had then answered Monica’s

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query about his fascination with the tree. Now and henceforth she will feel be drawn to it, too.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The Elder Statesman deals with many of the themes that had preoccupied Eliot virtually from the start of his literary career. In Lord Claverton’s final determination to tear off the mask and stand before his beloved daughter as the “broken-down actor” that he has come to see himself as is reminiscent of J. Alfred Prufrock and Edward Chamberlayne of The Cocktail Party. Both of them, too, have to varying degrees become so caught up in the mask that they have virtually ceased to exist except as social constructs. By the same token, and in virtually the same context, there is echoed in Gomez’s confiding to Claverton that a failure is “the man who in the morning / Has to make up his face before he looks in the mirror”—the turn of phrase, also from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” about the pressing social need of having to keep up pretenses by “prepar[ing] a face to meet the faces that you meet.” In the idea of a great man coming to terms toward the end of his life with earlier vanities and youthful lapses in judgment, meanwhile, is Becket of Murder in the Cathedral. Lord Harry Monchesney of The Family Reunion is there as well, however, inasmuch as he, like Lord Claverton, despite their difference in age and experience, are both men haunted by a past that is nowhere near as terrible or horrible as conscience would make it out to be. The theme, too, of reconciliation, both with oneself and between parent and child and husband and wife, is brought to bear in the pages of The Elder Statesman as much as it had been previously in all Eliot’s plays, commencing with The Family Reunion. There is also self-discovery, another key theme of Eliot’s in The Elder Statesman. If, as is hinted at about midway through the play, Claverton has spent much of his adult life as a “hollow man,” lost in a house of admiring mirrors of self-deception, in the last act he climbs the winding stairs of his own “Ash-Wednesday,” as he comes to see through his public confession the valley of dried bones that he has, in his life as a public man, left behind him as

his legacy. So, then, in the man who becomes, as Claverton does by play’s end, free by virtue of his having at last found the courage to become nothing and a nobody, can be seen Colby Simpkins from The Confidential Clerk. That young man is content when his own paternity drama ends in his discovering that he is nothing other than what he has always imagined himself to be. These questions of public identity versus selfidentity are further combined throughout Eliot’s work with the notion that it is only through selfabnegation, surrender, and extinction of individual will, as in the case of the speaker of The Waste Land, say, or of Celia Copplestone, another character from The Cocktail Party, that a person can find a peace “costing nothing less than everything,” as Eliot puts it in “Little Gidding.” Lord Claverton is forced by the resurfacing of some of the unsavory circumstances whereby he had achieved his public notoriety to give up the very public personality that he had himself forced the great world to make up for him. Ironically, that surrendering of a false self allows him to see how much that “personage” is indeed nothing more or less than that—a made-up thing, and far less real than the modest creature that he, as a human being, is and can finally accept himself as being. There are minor themes of Eliot’s found in this aspect of The Elder Statesman as well. His putting down the crassness of material gain and success for its sake alone—the “profit and loss” method toward measuring the worth of a motive or achievement— is Eliot’s way of clarifying what ultimately distinguishes Claverton from his tormentors. Unlike his final vision of life’s purpose, which is that it must find its focus in love, Gomez and Mrs. Carghill share a vision that cannot exceed a worldly view of things. That Culverwell/Gomez and Mrs. Carghill, self-evidently negative characters, revel in a world of power and wealth and manipulation of others, tells the audience that Eliot wishes to condemn such a shallow approach toward life and toward assessing the value of each person that one encounters along life’s way. That shallow view of the world and of life is the same one that Lord Claverton had served all his life, too, and it is one that attracts

Elder Statesman, The Michael as well. Lord Claverton, however, during his final days, comes to see for the sham that they are the worldly successes and honors for which he had sacrificed his peace, his personal honor, and, ultimately, his life, and it is through that insight that Eliot depicts dramatically his protagonist’s final spiritual redemption. Charles Hemington, an attorney who has the same political aspirations that had seduced the young Dick Ferry, may be headed toward the same road to spiritual ruin, yet Eliot presents him sympathetically, if not heroically, as he comes to Claverton’s defense in the final actions of the play. Eliot may be suggesting, however, through the love story of Charles and Monica, that this young man will not turn out the way that the young Ferry and Culverwell did for the very reason that Charles has been blessed to know, through the benefit of Monica’s love for him and his for her, what neither of the other two did until, as in Claverton’s case, it was nearly too late, and that is true love. Ultimately, the theme of The Elder Statesman is indeed love, and the play is Eliot’s most complete commentary on that greatest of all literary and religious themes. This theme, meanwhile, is played out in relatively unsentimental terms in the play, although The Elder Statesman in many ways partakes of the oldest stage tradition in English literature, the morality play. These medieval English morality plays, as the name of the genre suggests, offered clear-cut dilemmas in which goodness and decency triumphed and evil behavior was duly chastised and punished. Lord Claverton, a man whom the world has honored, facing death must confront all of his mistakes and sins of his past. These include the normal quota of failed relationships and the bruised egos of vindictive victims, but these shortcomings hardly rank with the great sins of an older tragic literature, such as Oedipus the King and, in more modern times, Hamlet. And that is Eliot’s point—Lord Claverton’s sins are no different from most people’s. In the final analysis, who does not fail to fulfill the expectations that others have of him? Indeed, who does not fail—period? By making Lord Claverton’s last days something less

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than momentous and nowhere near sentimentally tragic, Eliot comments in this, his final creative accomplishment, on the constant interplay of futility and hopefulness that never cease to characterize the frustrations that permeate ordinary life, no matter how much the world measures success. Claverton, like Scrooge, the ne’er-do-well protagonist of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, another recent version of the morality play, must face being visited by ghosts of his past. In Claverton’s case, however, they appear just when he has been led to imagine that he has succeeded in life and thus might be able at last to put his precious public life behind him and relax and enjoy some rest. Further complicating the matter is that, in his torments, he is not presented as, nor does he appear to be, the sort of man who has any particular interest in making amends of any kind. The world, by honoring him, has made him smug and self-satisfied, a smugness and self-satisfaction that he can ill afford. At first, that is to say, he does not seem to suffer any serious anguish in the face of Culverwell/Gomez’s accusation, only befuddlement that his old pal Fred should have harbored and nurtured a grudge for so long. The same can be said for Claverton’s initial reaction to Mrs. Carghill’s bearing, albeit with some subdued malice by now, an unextinguished flame for him from their long-ago fling. It is only after Claverton’s son, Michael, begins to get his own messy affairs caught up in the mix of events, which are unfolding with an inevitability beyond Claverton’s control, that he begins to see the desperation in his situation, and in seeing that sees much more—that with or without malice, he made mistakes, and they have seriously hurt and continue to hurt other people. The real turning point for Claverton may not have come in the play until he overheard Monica, his beloved and faithful daughter, expressing her concern for him to Charles, but Claverton has by then been made ready to make amends. That does not mean, however, yielding to his accusers. Rather it means acceding to the demands of love. Lord Claverton comes to see that it is better, for everyone’s sake, to bear the consequences of thoughtless or careless actions than to try to evade

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or escape those consequences. And he sees this because he sees that Monica, more than a loyal daughter, loves him—not as her father, and not as Lord Claverton, hardly, but as a fellow and troubled creature who needs her care and attention. She gives to him an unconditional love, and that is something that he, for all his public service, has failed ever to give anyone. There is, however, still time for Claverton to reverse the course that his life has taken, and it is that notion that enables Eliot to bring his ultimate theme to bear. This theme makes The Elder Statesman a tale of original sin and the power of and capacity for redemption. When Lord Claverton, having overheard Charles and Monica’s concerns for him, gets his opportunity to reveal to them those “guilty secrets” that Monica cannot imagine her father has, he is able to clarify how broad a range of moral and ethical failures can be covered under this heading.“There are many things not crimes,” Claverton remarks, listing a litany of the sort of offenses that may not even be thought of as sins—failures, aberrations, surrenders, impulses— “[m]oments we regret in the very next moment.” “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” the poet of The Waste Land had described the phenomenon as being more than 35 years earlier, any unforgivable act that “an age of prudence can never retract.” And as Lord Claverton goes on to explain to Charles, what human being does not know such a moment, sooner or later. That emphasis is being made more for the audience’s sake by the playwright, of course, than for Charles’s sake by Lord Claverton. There is a problem, nevertheless: Who decides what is unforgivable? In a summarization made in 1933 during his Charles Eliot Norton lectureship at Harvard and subsequently published in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot, commenting on an earlier attempt of his at verse a drama that could only be “Sweeney Agonistes,” noted how drama works best when one of the characters on the stage and certain individuals among the audience can both perceive and appreciate the most profound implications of the dramatic action. In this manner, Eliot makes his “morality play” modern by leaving it up to each

of us to decide whether or not Lord Claverton was really “guilty,” and if he was, then what exactly he was guilty of doing. The reader or audience member who approaches the potential “meaning” or “theme” of The Elder Statesman with that caveat in mind will, no doubt, profit from the drama a great deal more (as would anyone who approaches any text with that sort of broad-minded imaginativeness). That is to say, at one end of the spectrum of likely interpretations of the meaning of The Elder Statesman is the enlightening tale of a man whom the world, or at least his sizable corner of it, has honored and who behaves as if he deserves the honors that have been accorded him. When, however, the house of cards of this public personality begins to collapse, as all such fabrications eventually must, the man who is revealed, though he is not necessarily ennobled by the exposure, is at least liberated enough from the burden of his own shortcomings, which are only human, to die a more peaceful death, which is only human, too. Dick Ferry has been released from the prison of being Lord Claverton, a prison that is no less one for having been of his own making. At the opposite extreme of the same spectrum, though hardly opposed to it, is a worldly and vain man who has to one degree or another abused and exploited others but is given the opportunity to atone before he dies. Thus, he is allowed to revisit his past and review his ill-gotten emotional gains so that he might make some sort of moral restitution on this side of the grave to those whom he had injured, the more the fault that he had not intended them any serious harm. In either case, and any in between, Eliot clearly refuses to oversentimentalize or overdramatize the situation that he presents on stage and hardly ever does he cast it in purely spiritual terms. This feat, which he had not always accomplished in earlier dramatic efforts, enables each member of the audience to find his or her own acceptable level of meaning and purpose. It is as if Eliot has found, in Claverton’s story, an objective correlative for the theme that it is never too late or impossible to awaken to moral responsibility to oneself and others. It is an objective correlative because Eliot

Essays on Elizabethan Drama develops that theme fully and expansively without preaching to his audience. The point is that all interpretations of and responses to how that thematic objective correlative plays itself out on the stage and in the mind of the audience or reader will come out on the same moral side. The play recognizes that error is a human trait, but so is the capacity for forgiveness and understanding, not just when it is directed toward the actions of others but, as vital, when such forgiveness and understanding are directed at one’s own actions. In the final analysis, The Elder Statesman makes those two terms, forgiveness and understanding, virtually synonymous. It certainly makes them complementary.

Essays on Elizabethan Drama (1956) Beginning in 1918 with the publication of an essay on Christopher Marlowe and continuing until 1934, when he published an essay on John Marston, Eliot was frequently busy with critical analyses of Elizabethan drama and dramatists. In addition to the two just named, these included, in chronological order, essays on Ben Jonson (1919), Philip Massinger (1920), Thomas Middleton (1927), Cyril Tourneur (1930), Thomas Heywood (1931), and John Ford (1932). In addition there were two essays on WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, including, from 1919, “Hamlet and His Problems,” which introduced the idea of the objective correlative, and “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927). Rounding out the list were “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” also from 1927, and “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” (from 1924 and incorrectly identified in the table of contents for Selected Essays as “The Elizabethan Dramatists”). The last named was intriguingly subtitled “Preface to an Unwritten Book.” All these essays, which had been published in a variety of sources, including the Egoist and The Times Literary Supplement, were collected in Selected Essays, 1917–1932, although three—“Hamlet and

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His Problems,” “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” and “Four Elizabethan Dramatists”—had been published earlier in a small volume titled Elizabethan Essays. The essays dealing with the generally more obscure dramatists—that is, all of them with the exception of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson—are, because of those essays’ extensive attention to details of character, plot, and verse, of far more interest to the specialist than to the general reader.

SYNOPSIS In 1956, toward the end of a literary career that had spanned nearly a half-century, Eliot issued in a new edition a compilation of these original essays on Elizabethan drama and dramatists. Titled simply Essays on Elizabethan Drama, this new collection omitted several of those pieces listed earlier. As he explained in his preface, the celebrated essay on Hamlet’s “problems” as well as the longer essay on Shakespeare and the essay titled “Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” whose subtitle he now labeled “somewhat pretentious,” struck him, upon reconsideration, as embarrassingly callow and impudent. Eliot is well within his rights as the author to dismiss out of hand one of the most influential critical documents of the 20th century, meaning his essay on Hamlet. By this time, he had achieved all the respect that a man of letters might ever hope to, and modesty is never unbecoming. In any event, the net result was that, in this new collection, he limited the selection by leading off, as a sort of introduction, with the extended essay on the mid-16th-century English translations of Seneca, “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation.” That choice makes perfect sense because it is universally agreed that these 10 translations, printed for the most part between 1559 and 1567, gave impetus to the subsequent flowering, in the 1580s and 1590s, of those original dramas in English that are now synonymous with the Elizabethan period. The rest of the volume, meanwhile, would collect the essays on all the other dramatists exclusive of Shakespeare. Those, he explained, again on a modest note, are worth the rereading, if for no other

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reason than that they contain many good quotations—by which Eliot meant from the playwrights, not himself. Not to take issue with him, the fact nevertheless remains that from this vantage point, his observations on these various dramatists are of more value and interest when his aim is directed toward ascertaining how and where each particular dramatist succeeded, or failed to succeed, in marking out his own theatrical territory. It is insights such as those that permit the reader to see an embryonic theory of drama, or at least of dramatic writing, developing, one that Eliot might perfect in future years in practice. Since the essay on the Senecan translations and the essay on Marlowe are dealt with at length elsewhere in this volume, they are not addressed here. Furthermore, in keeping with the spirit of a likemindedness that made Eliot regather them here to the exclusion of other, better-known pieces, these remaining essays will be treated as a coherent unit touching on a handful of core critical issues, rather than as the apparently disparate pieces they were otherwise intended to be. Here we may be permitted to take our cue from Eliot himself. For all that he claims now to feel that his original subtitle to “Four Elizabethan Dramatists”—“Preface to an Unwritten Book”—was pretentious, this 1956 volume, Essays on Elizabethan Drama, can comfortably be regarded as that “unwritten book.” That said, it would do well to begin this present examination with that essay, which, although Eliot omitted it from this later collection as well, still provides some clues to his larger intentions. What seems to have so attracted Eliot to the Elizabethan stage in the first place, and certainly what he found once he had situated his interests there, was a national theater in the earliest stages of its own development, yet one that produced nonetheless in very short order—less than three decades—a body of work and a corps of literary figures that have come to a place of unquestioned prominence on the world stage. What worked for the Elizabethans and what can still be seen to work, as well as what failed then or no longer pleases now, all provide vividly accessible lessons in stagecraft and dramatic verse not easily come by otherwise.

“Four Elizabethan Dramatists” (1924) The “four Elizabethan dramatists” whom Eliot had in mind were John Webster (1580–1625), the author of The Duchess of Malfi; George Chapman (1559–1634), renowned for his translation of Homer; Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), who penned Women Beware Women; and Cyril Tourneur (1575–1626), who wrote The Atheist’s Tragedy. Believing that “the theatre [in England] has reached a point at which a revolution in principles should take place,” Eliot intended his nevercompleted study, to which his essay was to be a preface, to scrutinize these four dramatists as if Elizabethan drama had been precisely what it was not—“a drama formed within a conventional scheme.” Eliot takes this tack because Elizabethan drama’s “weakness . . . is not its defects of realism, but its attempt at realism; not its conventions, but its lack of conventions.” Or, as he asserts a little later: “What is fundamentally objectionable is that in Elizabethan drama there has been no firm principle of what is to be postulated as a convention and what is not.” Although Eliot never got past proposing such an approach in “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” (and ended up never writing at length on Webster or Chapman either), it is with that exact approach in mind now, one that seeks to discern conventions as if there were any, that the following consideration of each of the essays on the various dramatists that Eliot did, in the end, deal with—that is to say, Jonson, Heywood, Tourneur, Middleton, Massinger, and Ford—will take place. Indeed, by beginning with Eliot’s essay on Jonson, the earliest of the lot aside from his essay on Marlowe, the reader will be well on the way toward understanding the substance of Eliot’s stance toward Elizabethan drama as a playwriting workshop in progress. “Ben Jonson” (1919) Of all the various dramatists that the epoch produced, three stand out in literary history as being worthy of exceptional merit and attention, and they are Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson (1574– 1637). Of the three, Jonson presents the most problems as a genuinely great dramatist for the simple reason that he produced no outstandingly great

Essays on Elizabethan Drama tragedy. Indeed, while his Volpone and The Alchemist are easily among the most perfect comedies ever penned in any language, anyone aside from adept scholars of the period would be hard-pressed to name a single one of his tragedies. Eliot’s point is well taken. If the translations of Seneca into English gave Elizabethan drama its two most salient fearures—the so-called blood tragedies, or revenge tragedies, and a delight in high language, or bombast—then it would seem that the very spirit and challenge of this first age of English drama would be tragedy. Yet one of the English language’s finest dramatic poets, Jonson, failed at that challenge. It is that literary paradox—Jonson’s failure as a tragic poet—that Eliot proposes to essay, and his take on how that occurred is especially telling. Eliot does not hesitate to observe the critical commonplace that “the weight of [Jonson’s] pedantic learning . . . burdened his two tragic failures,” but he feels there was something more at stake. Jonson’s Catiline fails, Eliot argues, “not because it is too laboured and conscious, but because it is not conscious enough.” As he explains, Jonson’s failure comes about because he was “not alert to his own idiom” but rather attempts to conform his idiom “not to the conventions of antiquity, which he had exquisitely under control, but to the conventions of tragico-historical drama of his time.” In summary, it is not Jonson’s erudition that sinks his Catiline, in Eliot’s view, but Jonson’s failure to form that erudition to his own needs. Eliot writes of Jonson’s shortcoming in this regard: “The creation of a work of art, . . . of a character in a drama, consists in the transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense, the life of the author into the character.” That is not only a mouthful, but in this essay, which succeeds Eliot’s earlier and more notable essay from 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” with its famous formulation of the impersonal theory of poetry, Eliot may seem to be going against the grain of that latter essay’s plea for a “separation between the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Another way of reading Eliot’s reservations here, however, is to realize that he is speaking

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about a different kind of poetry, dramatic poetry, where the poet must take on many parts to be successful. In another, much later essay, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” Eliot will identify dramatic poetry as the third voice. But in order to modulate that third voice successfully, Eliot makes clear, one must have a distinct command of the first, or lyric, voice. Were Eliot making this same distinction in this essay on Jonson, then Eliot would be saying that Jonson, eschewing his own lyric voice, tries in his tragedies to sound like the other tragic poets of his time and so ends up not sounding like anything other than stale conventions. With satire, however, perhaps because he felt more comfortable with his own voice in that medium, Jonson is able to project not learning and high art but genuine characters. In Eliot’s view, that is what carries the day for any dramatic composition. The idea is for the dramatist to be present as a personality in tone and in style, but not in person or in opinion; otherwise the drama fails. “Thomas Middleton” (1927) At the opposite extreme from Jonson, whose peculiar learning stands out so prominently in his work as to mar it with the error of his personality, is Thomas Middleton. “Of all the Elizabethan dramatists,” Eliot notes, “Middleton seems the most impersonal,” and yet Eliot makes this impersonality of Middleton’s not so much a flaw as a distraction. “His greatness is not that of a peculiar personality, but of a great artist or artisan,” yet one who was “merely a name, a voice, . . . [with] no point of view, . . . neither sentimental nor cynical.” Though his is the “name which associates six or seven great plays,” it is as if, for Eliot, Middleton fails nevertheless because that soul of the shaping artist, the creative genius, is not reflected anywhere in his plays. “He has no message,” Eliot says of him finally, “he is merely a great recorder” of other men’s thoughts and feelings. “Thomas Heywood” (1931) In Eliot’s hands, Heywood (1575–1641), author of A Woman Killed with Kindness, is visited with a similar fate. Heywood’s drama manifests a “sensibility [which] is merely that of ordinary people in

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ordinary life,” thereby reflecting an equally pedestrian intellect. “Behind the motions of [Heywood’s] personages, the shadows of the human world, there is no moral synthesis,” Eliot complains, “no vision, none of the artist’s power to give undefinable unity.” These are shortcomings found in the drama, true, but again Eliot seems to imply that that is because of a defect in the personality of the artist, which the dramatic artist can only make manifest in his art. “Philip Massinger” (1920) The same defect of being a less than original thinker or personality behind the drama detracts as well from Massinger (1583–1640), whose characters manifest “inherit[ed] . . . traditions of conduct,” without Massinger’s “either criticizing or informing them from his own experience.” As a result, Massinger, whose most noteworthy work is The Roman Actor, rendered the conventions of Elizabethan morality “ridiculous” because, as a man of great literary talent but “a paltry imagination,” he could not fit into those conventions the actions and beliefs of “passionate, complete human characters.” “Cyril Tourneur” (1930) In this process of assessing the characterizations and, so, the whole worth of dramatic poets based on what depth of character the poet himself seems to have possessed, inasmuch as that can be discerned in his plots and themes, it is Cyril Tourneur who, paradoxically, fares best. It is paradoxical because he is best known now for the depravities depicted in his masterpiece, The Revenger’s Tragedy. That play, says Eliot, expresses “an intense and unique and horrible vision of life,” one in which “characters [are] practising the grossest vices.” For all that horror, however, the work is a credit to the playwright who, like “a highly sensitive adolescent with a gift for words,” charges the play with a personality that forms the center of this vision of life. In that manner, the characters “seem merely to be spectres projected from the poet’s inner world of nightmare, some horror beyond words.” This very “loathing and horror of life itself” is a triumph, Eliot declares, for the very reason that it is a part of life and, far more important, because it is so perfectly realized.

“John Ford” (1932) The various essays being as widely spaced as they are, having been published over the span of a decade and more, it is interesting to see Eliot’s final two essays in the collection, commentaries on Ford and John Marston, follow the same pattern that has been developing thus far. Among the citations of lengthy passages and details of plot and character, there are the same telling generalizations regarding the relationship between the character of the drama and the character of the author. About John Ford, best known as the author of the Maid’s Tragedy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and The Changeling, Eliot once again is heard complaining that Ford’s verse lacks any genuine substance and is, instead, “the result of the stock expressions of feeling accumulated by the greater men.” The ultimate effect is that such drama lacks purpose as well, making it “tend towards mere sensationalism.” Echoing in this 1932 essay the comment on the personality of the verse dramatist that he had made in his 1919 essay on Jonson, Eliot comes ever more emphatically to the point: “[A] dramatic poet cannot create characters of the greatest intensity of life unless his personages, in their reciprocal actions and behaviour in their story, are somehow dramatizing, in no obvious form, an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet.” And then Eliot goes one step further, proposing that, in Shakespeare, the dramatic poet is perfectly realized for the very reason, once more, that his poetry is “to be united by one significant, consistent, and developing personality.” “John Marston” (1934) In this, the last of the lot, a 1934 essay on Marston (1576–1634), who is renowned for his The Malcontent, the thread of this motif regarding personality and drama is picked up again and repeated. From Marston’s verse, Eliot observes, readers “get the impression of having to do with a personality which is at least unusual and difficult to catalogue.” With Marston’s work, Eliot notes, “[w]e are aware . . . that we have to do with a positive, powerful, and unique personality.” Ultimately, however, whether it be Marston or any other playwright, the creator’s mark is on his creation.

Essays on Elizabethan Drama In the earlier essay on Jonson, Eliot had noted that the “small worlds” that artists create differ from our real world not only in magnitude; “they differ in kind also.” For Eliot, it is the personality of the dramatic poet that determines the quality of that kind of difference. The distinction between what is occurring on the stage and what is being worked out in the soul of the poet creates not just a small world of its own kind but, Eliot adds in this essay on Marston, “a kind of doubleness” as well, rather as if the play presents symbols of a dream or a nightmare that have their own reality and meaning but that depend for their dramatic independence and impact nevertheless on the authenticity of the poet’s engagement with his own angels and demons. Eliot concludes that what he discovers in Marston is representative of a “deep discontent and rebelliousness so frequent among the Elizabethan dramatists.” Eliot adds, “[Marston] is, like some of the greatest of them, occupied in saying something else than appears in the literal actions and characters whom he manipulates.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY By the time Eliot was composing the majority of the essays, between 1924 and 1931, he had had a change of heart. His earlier criticism had been written in the spirit of a practicing poet exploring his art through the practice of others. Following the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, however, Eliot had begun to doubt his ability to continue writing significant poetry, and, in the meantime, his editorship of his own international review, the Criterion, and his work as poetry editor with Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber), were giving him more and more opportunity for his literary observations to make a mark as a literary scholarship and criticism in their own right. There is reason to imagine, although Eliot was continuing to publish significant poetry, including “The Hollow Men” in 1925 and “Ash-Wednesday” in 1930, that he was now perceiving himself as that generalist called “a man of letters,” one whose renown as a significant literary voice and whose recognized critical acumen, erudition, and authority, not to mention connections, would permit him to carve out a new career as a high-ranking literary journalist.

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If so, the territory that he was clearly staking out for himself to begin with was the Elizabethan period, along with the 17th century, where he was also “publishing,” as the saying goes. There he already had produced notable work on such poets and essayists as JOHN DONNE, Lancelot Andrewes, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden, including the 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” in which he had introduced the notion of the dissociation of sensibility. All that said, and while recognizing the positive and productive direction that his career as a poet and verse dramatist continued to take in spite of his own misgivings, there is still much of value for the general reader to find in the body of work that Eliot produced on the Elizabethan dramatists. For if there is, in hindsight, any particular program behind his interest in Elizabethan drama, it seems to have been an evolving one, particularly as he became more and more engaged with writing verse for the stage, first with the abortive “Sweeney Agonistes,” begun in 1923, and ultimately with the success of Murder in the Cathedral in 1935. Embedded among his specific commentaries on these Elizabethan dramatists and their work, commentaries that would otherwise be of specific interest only to the specialist and student, are the gems of critical insights into the creative process. Eliot’s working out of the principles that make for a coherent literary craftsmanship constitute the heart of the criticism for which Eliot remains rightly renowned to this day. Further embedded within those insights is an abstract of Eliot’s view of the relation among personality, poetry, and moral order that makes for effective stage drama, a field of endeavor in which Eliot would himself become more and more engaged as the years passed. Indeed, time after time, in this workshop of Elizabethan drama, one finds Eliot either calling for a more discernible presence of the personality of the author in his work or faulting the work when that presence is felt, and yet the personality proves to be inadequate to the requirements of great drama. Those requirements seem to be, furthermore, that the action that is being worked out on the stage must be significantly worthwhile to deserve the audience’s attention and yet must also be the equivalent of a struggle, an agon, of some

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sort within the poet that is itself genuine and not merely made up for the sake of producing a drama. As in the case of Marston, there must be in the drama “the sense of something behind, more real than any of his personages and their action.” In other words, without that sense that there is something at stake for the poet in his drama, the sense that there is something at stake on the stage will not manifest itself. Nor can the poet falsify his own personal engagement with the stuff of the drama, not if it must find its source in his very soul. One must be prepared, nevertheless, to take everything that Eliot says here in the sizable collection of his earlier work on the Elizabethans with several grains of salt. For one thing, his assessments of the relative merits of this assortment of playwrights who are, with the exception of Marlowe and Jonson, comparatively minor are extremely subjective, and so is his individual assessment of the depths of each’s poet’s soul as a personality. Then again, he is not speaking about the “real” Marston or the “real” Ford or Tourneur or even Shakespeare so much as of the impression of a ruling personality that the words and actions of any one particular drama creates. His argument, then, that a vapid presentation must find its source in a superficial personality, while chicken and egg in its mixing of causalities is more descriptive than prescriptive even if Eliot makes it sound more like the latter than the former. Surely, if one text does not engage attention and interest as powerfully as another, the cause must lie somewhere, and a failure of personality on the part of the poet is as likely a place as any to find it. There are problems with Eliot’s assessment, too, that the Elizabethans offer a fruitful venue for study. As he sees it, their entire dramatic movement was wrongheaded to begin with, based as it was on attempts to mimic the extravagances of ancient Roman tragedy, which were themselves extravagant attempts to mimic the tragedies of the classical Greek stage. For one thing, this explanation does not make any attempt to account for the set of cultural, literary, and liguistic circumstances, not to mention history, that accounts for a group of individuals’ undertaking a project to translate 10 of Seneca’s tragedies into English. At the very least,

tastes were already tending toward Seneca’s bombast and blood, as the work of these native-tongue playwrights reflects. In the final analysis, of course, it does not matter whether Eliot’s assessments and other arguments were right or wrong or even, for that matter, original. Their importance now is to be found in what they can tell us of Eliot’s way of thinking with regard to both producing and interpreting drama and dramatic verse at about the same time that he was beginning to embark more and more frequently on that course of action. Eliot summarized what lessons he learned in 1953 in his essay “The Three Voices of Poetry.” There, as an example of great poetry that is not good dramatic verse, Eliot speaks of “the minor Elizabethan dramatists” (although the example he winds up having in mind is none other than Christopher Marlowe and his Tamburlaine). In their plays, Eliot says, these “passages of great poetry . . . are in both respects out of place,” for they are “fine enough to preserve the play for ever as literature,” yet they are so inappropriate otherwise “as to prevent the play from being a dramatic masterpiece.” Eliot’s concern is how a dramatist may write a poetry that is not merely poetry but is live language “in which characters may be said to live,” even though the audience knows that it is all made up. To illustrate his meaning, Eliot recalls composing the choral sections of his first theatrical success, Murder in the Cathedral. The chorus is composed of the women of Canterbury, and as Eliot explains the task of applying, in this instance, what he calls the third voice, which is the poet speaking as characters to other characters, he notes how he “had to make some effort to identify myself with these women, instead of merely identifying them with myself.” For it to be great dramatic poetry, the women of Canterbury, to explain Eliot’s example, must not sound like poets but like women of Canterbury. And yet—and here is where the poet’s personality, though nullified, sustains both the drama and the verse—this dialogue, so clearly not the poet’s, must nonetheless be seen and heard “somehow [to be] dramatizing, in no obvious form, an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet,” to

“Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” quote again the key portion of that passage from “John Ford.” Essays on Elizabethan Drama is a unique collection among Eliot’s prose. It entails an almost purely literary venture on style and technique and the principles of composition and creative impulses that give poetic vision dramatic form. Nowhere in it is there polemic on the current state of contemporary culture and the deplorable shambles that the sociopolitical scene has become. When read and reviewed in conjunction with “The Three Voices of Poetry,” which it, as a collected volume, succeeded by some three years, Essays on Elizabethan Drama allows readers to hear the closing remarks that Eliot makes in “Three Voices” with some genuine insight into their full import. There Eliot reports, remembering perhaps his similar comments in “Ben Jonson,” how much “the work of a great dramatists . . . constitutes a world.” He is referring specifically to Shakespeare in this case, but he elaborates: “Each character speaks for himself, but no other poet could have found those words for him to speak.” Therefore, if readers look for Shakespeare, they “will find him only in the characters that he created.” This is, as Eliot has pointed out in innumerable instances previously, a reciprocal event, inasmuch as those are the characters that no one but Shakespeare could have created in the first place. In that way, the quality and depth of any dramatic composition is a reflection, a projection, of the quality and depth of the personality of the dramatist who engendered it.

“Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” (1917) Eliot included two critical pieces from very early in his career as a poet and critic in his final collection of prose criticism, To Criticize the Critic—“Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” and “Reflections on Vers Libre.” Both of them were published in 1917. The essay on VERS LIBRE, or free verse, came out in the New Statesman on March 3, while the apprecia-

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tion of Pound, published anonymously, was issued as a book-length pamphlet by Alfred A. Knopf in New York on November 12.

SYNOPSIS The title of the piece now under consideraton, “Ezra Pound: His Metric and His Poetry,” was suggested by Pound himself, and the short book was issued in conjunction with Knopf’s publication of Lustra, a volume of Pound’s poetry. It was Pound’s idea, too, that the critical appreciation be published anonymously so that it would not appear that Pound and Eliot were little more than a mutual admiration society advancing the cause of each other’s poetry for self-aggrandizing motives. It was Pound, after all, who had gotten Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine in 1915, who had secured him an influential position as assistant editor of the Egoist, and who had been instrumental as well in the Egoist Press’s issuing Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. While no one would ever seriously doubt that Pound was engaged in these activities on Eliot’s behalf for any reason other than what he expressed in his famous statement to Monroe that Eliot “had made himself modern all on his own,” it is not difficult to understand Pound’s reluctance to have it appear that the two poets were “scratching each other’s back,” as the saying goes. And that would have been how it would have appeared—like a payoff—had Knopf’s critical estimation of Pound’s work been published the same year under Eliot’s name. Such matters of critical integrity aside, from this vantage point it is invaluable to have available to us Eliot’s evaluation of Pound’s importance as a poet from a time when they were both just coming into their own on the global literary scene. Such a living record could not possibly have been re-created after the fact, no matter how thoroughgoing one may ever attempt to make such “reminiscences” out to be. The Eliot study, as one might suspect, is by and large an overview of Pound’s career as a poet to date. A generous helping of selected, illustrative passages from among Pound’s poetry is mixed with selected comments, both negative and positive,

170 “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” that the poetry has inspired in various newspaper and other kinds of reviews, all held together by a chronological running commentary containing Eliot’s own thoughts on Pound’s contribution’s worth and significance. Pound was always one to thrive on, indeed, relish, literary controversy, so Eliot must style much of his commentary in a contentiously defensive vein, whereby he is as much introducing Pound to a larger reading public as making his notoriety as a somewhat iconoclastic “modernist” known, if not a cause for quiet celebration. No doubt Pound deserved the mantle of champion of the new and liberating that Eliot bestowed upon him. After the briefest survey of Pound’s poetic career to date, Eliot gets into the first source of major controversy: Pound’s identification in the mind of the reading public as the instigator of vers libre or free verse. Not so much in Pound’s defense—that would imply that the charges had substance—as in an effort to clarify the term, Eliot astutely observes that “any verse is called ‘free’ by people whose ears are not accustomed to it.” That said, Eliot emphasizes as well that one can experiment only when one has become, like Pound, “a poet who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and different systems of metrics.” More than any of those arguments, however, Eliot points to what the free verse movement has achieved for contemporary verse in general. The new poetics that Pound has championed, Eliot argues, has liberated the verse line from preconceived constraints, so that it has become “impossible to write like Shelley, leaving blanks for the adjectives, or like Swinburne, whose adjectives are practically blanks.” In these remarks is found that lifelong emphasis of Eliot’s on a verse that reflects natural speech rhythms and what Eliot calls a common language. Similarly, his work in free verse has also enabled Pound to find a new music in the poetic line, a musicality that does not, however, leave the poetry “destitute of meaning.” Instead, Pound’s verse has “always a definite emotion behind it,” expressing both “a visual beauty and beauty of sound,” to the end that “[t]he freedom of Pound’s verse is rather a state of tension between free and strict.”

It is this totality of the poetic experience that Pound’s new poetics is achieving, and to that list of accomplishments can be added the image. “Radiant nodes,” Pound himself would call images, by which he meant highly concentrated visual, aural, and conceptual experiences, emphasizing again the spirit of a nothing-wasted economy to the verse line, so that what is spare is not by any means also bare, but rather lean and tough and to the point. Poets may have always spoken in terms of the image, but while they certainly would have always created and used them, it is Pound who made the poet’s primary craft the crafting of images, giving rise, indeed, to the imagist movement in poetry. At a certain point it started to become overdone—the American poet Amy Lowell would begin composing entire poems composed of little more than one stunning visual image after another, until the whole effect of an intensified economy was lost. At the time that Eliot was writing, however, the movement still had a great deal of creative vigor attached to it. Eliot does not want Pound to appear to be nothing more than a technical innovator, however, who is constantly moving on into new territories simply by virtue of their being new, so he defends Pound against the charge that he introduced into the contemporary British literary scene futurism, a movement that amounted to little more than the celebration of the new for the sake of its newness. Rather, Eliot portrays Pound as a poet who is constantly maturing, echoing in that defense the language and ideas that he, Eliot, would have been using at roughly the same time in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In that essay, Eliot argues that no one can be a poet past his 25th year without having developed what he calls “the historical sense.” In this present essay on Pound, the young Eliot (he would have been entering his 30th year in 1917) seems to write a virtual gloss on the precept of the historical scene when he says of Pound, in explaining the constant transformations in his interest and verse style, that “[a]ny poet, if he is to survive as a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.” Eliot closes his appreciation of Pound’s achievements to date by

Family Reunion, The observing that “Mr. Pound has moved again,” this time into the first versions of the poems that would become the Cantos, Pound’s epic of history that, from 1920 onward, occupied virtually all of his creative attention. “If the reader fails to like them,” Eliot comments in his closing remark, “he has probably omitted some step in his progress.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY During the last year of his life, Eliot had been busily preparing what would be a final compilation of his work, and that compilation, To Criticize the Critic, was published posthumously in 1965, the year of his death. (He passed away during the first week in January.) While any such compilation always has something in the nature of a retrospective about it, it is intriguing nevertheless that Eliot would reach as far back as to 1917 and the very beginnings of his career as a literary critic by including the introduction to Pound’s poetry and the essay on vers libre in the mix. Eliot’s widow, Valerie, in a short note introducing the final collection, commented that he had included the two items from 1917 “in response to many requests,” but their inclusion also seems to be a further indication that he was more and more engaging himself in projects partly for their retrospective value but partly with an eye, too, toward directing the exact nature and content of the literary legacy that he would leave behind. “To Criticize the Critic,” for example, the volume’s title essay, despite its pretenses to being an overview of the kinds and nature of literary criticism, is nothing more or less than Eliot’s own lengthy summation of his considerable contribution to the history of 20th-century literary criticism in English. Nor is that the only example. By the late 1950s, Eliot had been in chronic ill health for quite some time. While it would not be fair to say that he was anticipating his passing, it would be foolish not to think that frequent bouts of ill health were making him more and more continually mindful of his mortality. By the time that he was preparing what would be the last collection of his prose, he had been looking back and taking stock for the past half-decade and more, in keeping with a person advancing into his 70s. The year 1959 had seen his latest verse drama, The Elder

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Statesman, go into production on the London stage. As its title suggests (an earlier choice of title, The Rest Cure, had been as apt), the story focuses on a man preparing to exit the scene after many decades as a celebrated public servant. One should not look for too many other resemblances between Eliot and Lord Claverton, that play’s dying protagonist, but it is hard not to suspect that there may indeed be others lying just beneath the surface details. Then, in 1964, Eliot prepared his 1915 Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” for publication by Faber & Faber under the title Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. The two 1917 essays seem to fall into the same category of endeavor, as he revisits, whether in response to “many requests” or not, his own distant and youthful past with an eye not toward revising its accomplishments but rather toward savoring the rich headiness of its achievements. Those were the days, not just for both Eliot and his friend, mentor, and free verse compatriot, Ezra Pound, but for the modernist era itself. Any reader wanting a good introduction to the early Pound or even just to this exciting phase of English-language literary history, in which Pound figured so prominently that for many it is synonymous with his name, would be well served studying this essay of Eliot’s.

“Eyes That Last I Saw in Dreams” (1924) See MINOR POEMS.

Family Reunion, The (1939) Eliot began work on The Family Reunion in early 1936, shortly after completing “Burnt Norton,” the poem that would eventually become the first of the Four Quartets. He is reported to have regarded The Family Reunion as a melancholy play and a more pessimistic work than any other that he had

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written to date. Most readers would agree with this assessment. At the very least, the writing was slow and painstaking, a first draft not being completed until possibly as late as November 1937. At the suggestion of the stage director E. MARTIN BROWNE, to whom Eliot then read the play, it went through several more drafts and the usual revisions in rehearsal before opening at London’s Westminster Theatre on March 21, 1939, to a disappointing five-week run.

THE CLASSICAL BACKGROUND Eliot’s concept for The Family Reunion is not entirely original, since the play, in keeping with Eliot’s practice of making use of past literary and mythical sources that had long been a hallmark of his poetic style and technique, harks back to a classical tragedy, the fourth-century B.C. Greek playwright Aeschylus’s great trilogy, the Oresteia, on whose third and concluding drama, The Eumenides, the Eliot play is loosely based. More to the point and far more intriguing, the Aeschylus trilogy provides to one degree or another the backdrop for two other significant works of Eliot’s, of which one is the abandoned earlier attempt at an original verse drama, “Sweeney Agonistes.” The other is “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” one of the quatrain poems from 1917–18, during that period of somewhat daring experimentation on Eliot’s part that had followed the early successes of the poetry that would eventually make up his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). When any poet, let alone one with such a celebrated predilection for intertextual layerings as Eliot, consistently alludes to a particular work in a relatively coherent thematic manner, the attentive reader is obliged to take notice. Such is the case with regard to Eliot’s persistent turning to Aeschylus’s retelling of the story surrounding the hero Orestes, from whose name the title of the trilogy is taken. Clearly, Eliot sees some key significances in the tragic tale of the House of Atreus, of which Orestes was, at least in literary terms, the last of the line. Nor is it an exercise in Eliot’s own equally celebrated obscurity and often opaque wit when Eliot calls to his reader’s mind Aeschylus’s treat-

ment of the tragedy of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War, who was slain upon his victorious return from the war at his doorstep by his unfaithful wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, and of the subsequent actions of the dead king’s son, Orestes, takes to avenge his father’s murder. Any reasonably well-educated member of Eliot’s or subsequent college-educated generations would have been exposed to Aeschylus in the sophomore year of his or her undergraduate career, if not in high school. Eliot would most certainly have known this. The question rather is what Eliot would have expected his readers to make of the allusions to Aeschylus, for they are what one must focus on, after all is said and done. The allusions to Aeschylus must lend themselves somewhat to a deeper appreciation of what Eliot is himself imagining that he is about as he composes the various works, each successively building on the other, in which those allusions occur. In the case of “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” the epigraph, quoted in the original Greek, reads in translation, “I am struck with a fatal blow within.” These are the words spoken by Agamemnon as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus together strike the fatal blow after having lured Agamemnon into his palace. This is the key dramatic action of the first play in the Aeschylan cycle, the Agamemnon. Without going too deeply into all the other intricacies of Eliot’s very complicated poem, the reader familiar with the motives for the two lovers’ slaying Agamemnon at the moment of his triumph is reminded of the vagaries both of human nature and of fortune or fate. Agamemnon had 10 years earlier sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia in order for the Greek fleet to set sail from the port at Aulis to accomplish the victory that he was now hoping to celebrate. The only problem was that he had never told Clytemnestra of his plans to kill their daughter in order to placate the goddess Artemis. For his own part, meanwhile, Aegisthus is taking vengeance on Agamemnon not for anything that Agamemnon had done to him, but for the actions of Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, who had murdered Aegisthus’s two brothers in order to get even

Family Reunion, The with their father, Thyestes, Atreus’s brother, who had committed adultery with Atreus’s wife. Most readers familiar with this bloody history of murder, slaughter, and betrayal would glean from Eliot’s allusion to it in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” the notion that, whether it be history, myth, or the tawdry pages of a contemporary scandal sheet in which such tales are encountered, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” (That is how Eliot will phrase the dilemma in a much later poem, “Burnt Norton.”) And human beings cannot bear it because, perhaps, reality itself is not very kind, nor is humanity. Be that as it may, the same reader will later encounter Eliot utilizing Aeschylus again when Eliot cites in his epigraph to “Sweeney Agonistes” words spoken by Orestes in the second play in the Aeschylan cycle, the Choephoroi or Libation Bearers. By the time of the action of this sequel to the Agamemnon, 10 years have passed since Agamemnon’s murder, and his son, Orestes, who was absent from home at the time of his father’s fatal homecoming, returns under an assumed name to his father’s palace in Argos, where Clytemnestra and Aegisthus continue to rule. By a ruse, Orestes gains access to the royal couple, whereupon he reveals his true identity and slays them both, thereby taking vengeance for his father’s murder at their hands. Although Orestes had acted as much under the orders of the god Apollo as through any initiative of his own, there is, however, a fly in the ointment of justice’s now having been achieved. For in the process of killing his father’s killers, as a good son must, he had also killed his own mother, Clytemnestra, as a good son must not. This brings the reader to the moment that Eliot selects for the epigraph from the Choephori that provides one of the two epigraphs to “Sweeney Agonistes”: “You don’t see them, you don’t—but I see them: they are hunting me down, I must move on.” The “they” who are now pursuing Orestes are the Furies or Harpies, horrible beasts that are half woman, half vulture, whose task it is from time immemorial to harry the parricide or parentkiller, which is what Orestes, for all that he has obeyed the command of the gods and the requirements of human culture in taking vengeance on

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his father’s killer, has now become, having killed his own mother. On that note Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers ends, and if Eliot’s uses such a bleak and awful note to any purpose by having it introduce “Sweeney Agonistes,” it is because that unfinished verse drama of his own has within it many powerful hints, shared by the lugubriously lewd Sweeney in a cryptically morbid language, of unspeakable crimes and unspoken guilt. By the time that Eliot composed The Family Reunion, then, it seems that he was ready to let out all the stops with regard to this interest in the Aeschylan Oresteia cycle. The poetry of The Family Reunion, a stage play, is meant primarily to be performed, so unlike in the printed text of “Sweeney among the Nightingales” or the text of “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot does not provide an epigraph to the text. Any reader familiar with Aeschylus, however, will not miss the point that this is another work alluding to the great Greek dramatist’s masterpiece when he or she spies, at the bottom, the list of persons in the drama, The Eumenides. The reader who, once more, is familiar with Aeschylus’s Oresteian trilogy would instantly recognize these characters, whose name in Greek literally means the “good spirits.” Not only are they the benevolent creatures into whom the terrifying Furies are eventually transformed, but The Eumenides is the title of the third and last play in the Aeschylan cycle. That reader will also suddenly become aware that, whether or not Eliot was intending this effect from his first use of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon way back in 1917, by 1936 and the beginning of his work on The Family Reunion, an orderly pattern has emerged in his use of the Greek tragedians recasting of the mythic tale of the fall of the House of Atreus, of which Orestes was the last living male heir. Furthermore, and more important, that pattern tells the interested reader much about Eliot’s thematic intentions for his own loose adaptation of the myth in The Family Reunion. There is a progress to the sequence of Eliot’s allusions to the Aeschylus trilogy that coincides with Aeschylus’s own development of the story of Agamemnon’s murder, the equally deadly consequences for his killers, and, finally, the expiation of the guilt for those killings. To wit, in the same order as these

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three key actions unfold in Aeschylus, the epigraph to “Sweeney among the Nightingales” alludes to the moment that Agamemnon is struck down, the one to “Sweeney Agonistes” to the moment that Orestes becomes aware of the Furies that will now hound him for the blood guilt of having slain a parent, and the appearance of the Eumenides in The Family Reunion that apparently will conclude the mythic cycle of guilt with an act of expiation and atonement, symbolized in the third part of the Aeschylus trilogy, The Eumenides. For it is in that final chapter of the saga that Orestes, pursued by the Furies, ventures to Delphi, the site of the oracle sacred to Apollo, in the hopes that Apollo, the god who had ordered him to avenge Agamemnon’s death, will champion his, Orestes’, cause and send the harrying Furies away. It does not turn out to be all that easy or simple, however. The Furies turn out to be as adamant about their rights and privileges as Apollo is about his own. Ultimately, however, through the intervention of the goddess Athena, a trial is held in Athens, and Orestes is acquitted by a jury not of the gods but of his peers, 10 fellow mortals (although Athena must break a tie vote). In recompense for their centuries of service to a more primitive humanity and their devotion to the idea of an eye-for-an-eye justice, the Furies, meanwhile, are invited to become the Eumenides, honorary citizens of Athens whose task it will be to serve the cause of human justice by virtue of their intuitive knowledge and appreciation of the darker side of human nature. It is made clear in the first scene that Eliot intends his own play, The Family Reunion, to be his way of resolving the conflicts for both the individual and the community that result when motive and action are so tightly interwoven that their separate springs may be easily confused one for the other. Lord Harry Monchensey, the protagonist and Orestes’ stand-in, has barely made his entrance when he intones virtually verbatim the words that Aeschylus’s Orestes speaks at the end of the Choephoroi (as Eliot had cited them in his epigraph to “Sweeney Agonistes”): “Can’t you see them? You don’t see them, but I see them, / And they see me.” With this line, and by casting characters called The Eumenides into the drama as it unfolds, Eliot

is signaling to the astute members of the audience that an allusion to Aeschylus underlies the play and that the agon or struggle is entering its final phase as the play begins. So, then, the resolution of the consequent moral conflict modeled in Aeschylus is coming one’s way, although, as in The Waste Land, one must first traverse the desert of doubt and despair that the play will now portray.

SYNOPSIS The Persons of the Drama The Monchenseys, a family of landed British aristocrats, are headed by Amy, the widowed Lady Monchensey and Harry’s mother. Her three younger sisters—Ivy, Violet, and Agatha—and two of her deceased husband’s brothers—Gerald and Charles Piper—are on hand as well. Even when they speak as individuals, these latter five peripheral personalities serve mainly in the role of the chorus common to ancient Greek theater whereby background information and, more important, a running though not necessarily reliable commentary on what the audience is meant to make of the action can easily be introduced into the proceedings. In addition, Agatha, as the unnamed leader of the chorus, plays a somewhat vedic or priestly role. Her short, occasional comments throughout the play, made almost as asides, provide a cryptic parallel to the vacuity of the chorus’s generally wrongheaded conclusions. Through her, Eliot is able to suggest for the audience’s benefit that there is more going on than meets either the eye or the ear, although her brief bursts of wisdom do not seem to register at all with the other characters, who all too often seem to be on hand primarily to provide comic relief through their lack of perception or sympathy. Mary, the daughter of a deceased cousin of Amy’s, is another character who is equally problematic. At first she seems to be uncomfortable to be there in the household at all, and in her distant relationship to the other, older characters, she may be intended to provide an emotional focus for the audience’s own bewilderment as it is thrust wholesale into the midst of goings on about which, in good theatrical fashion, it knows absolutely noth-

Family Reunion, The ing. Later in the play, however, in her role as Harry’s childhood friend, it becomes clear that she is there to function as the audience’s friend as well. Her easy intimacy with the protagonist will enable her to draw out information about his mental condition, even if his “explanations” ultimately leave her as bewildered as Sweeney’s do Doris in “Sweeney Agonistes.” Along with the already mentioned and everimportant Eumenides, whose role in the play will be to facilitate the completion of the dramatic action, two family retainers round out the characters. They are Denman, a parlor maid, and Downing, Harry’s man Friday. There are also the family physician, Dr. Warburton, and a policeman, Sergeant Winchell. Finally, there is the protagonist and focus of all the action, Amy’s adult son Harry, Lord Monchensey. Part I The first act or part of the play is divided into three scenes. As the action begins, Amy is in the drawing room of her country home somewhere in the north of England, accompanied by her sisters and brothers-in-law and by Mary. Tea has just ended this afternoon in late March, and as might be expected, as the curtain rises on scene 1, the topic has turned to how dreadful the weather is, it seeming more like winter than early spring. Such banter sets the tone for the rest of the drama. These are wealthy people, well-established in their lives and lifestyles, and they are also thoroughly familiar, at ease, and comfortable with each other. Mary is addressed only to give a rather curt response, and she makes her exit. Apparently, it troubles her that she is approaching 30 and is not yet married. This information suggests that Harry, too, is still quite young. In the chat that follows Mary’s departure from the scene, it is established that this day is Amy’s birthday, and to celebrate the occasion, everyone will gather at Wishwood, her country estate. Yet to arrive on the scene are Amy’s three sons—Arthur, John, and Harry. It is the first time in eight years that they have all been together. When Agatha observes that it will be “rather painful” for Harry to come back to Wishwood after having been gone for eight years, it becomes clear that Harry’s absence has kept the

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family circle from being complete during all that time. Agatha is asked to explain herself, and she does so by imagining that, although Harry left as a boy, it is as a man that he will be returning. Harry, Agatha elaborates, “will have to face him,” the boy that he had been, and she fears that “it will not be a very jolly corner” when “[t]he hidden is revealed, and the spectres show themselves.” To appreciate Agatha’s point, the audience need not recognize Eliot’s none-too-hidden allusion to the Henry James’s ghost tale of the same name, “The Jolly Corner,” in which a man, returning to his old family home after many years abroad, confronts the ghost of the man that he would have been had he never left. Harry is coming back, a different person, to a home that Amy has purposely “kept as it was when he left.” Whatever her motives may have been for doing as much, an added emotional burden that Harry will very likely bear is that only the year before—no one is quite sure of the exact timing—Harry lost his wife when she apparently fell overboard from an ocean liner at sea. No one admits to having had any real acquaintance with this absent, nameless wife. In fact, Amy insists that Harry’s wife, by her own design, would “never . . . have been one of the family” in any case, and Amy then insists that no one bring up the topic further. Rather, everyone is under orders to behave precisely “[a]s if nothing had happened in the last eight years.” The others are sharing their various misgivings about and support for just such a plan of action when Harry, to everyone’s surprise, makes his entrance. While his assembled family express their appropriate joy at his arrival, however, Harry is behaving rather strangely and furtively, as if he has something to hide and as if, too, they should share his anxiety about being spied on. He challenges them with his own incredulity. “Can’t you see them?” he asks, echoing Aeschylus’s Orestes when he first sees the Furies. “You don’t see them,” he goes on, in response to their understandable puzzlement, “but I see them, / And they see me.” Amy forces the conversation back to more conventional topics, although Harry continues to be distracted, if not distraught. Why, he wants to know, has nothing changed at Wishwood, when

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everything obviously has changed for him. And then he dismisses them all somewhat cruelly for being incapable of understanding him, even should he try to explain. They, he insists, would want to know about events, not what has actually transpired, saying cryptically but pointedly: “. . . [P]eople to whom nothing has ever happened / Cannot understand the unimportance of events.” While they try to decipher that first emotional blast, Harry strikes them with another, telling them that they are living their lives asleep and so have no way of knowing what it might be like to awaken to a nightmare, as he apparently has. When Agatha then presses him for details, even should those details exhaust their capacity to understand his dilemma, Harry’s horrible truth—or at least the demon of despair that he feels is pursuing him—emerges: He confesses to having pushed his wife overboard. Contrary to the reports that they have heard, her death was not the result of an accident at sea. Rather, and far more horribly, she was the victim of murder, a murder that Harry committed. As might be expected, Harry’s mother and uncles and aunts all take this startling revelation with varying degrees of confusion and denial. They would rather think that he is mad or overly tired from his journey than that he is a killer. Only Agatha seems to be able to accept his confession as genuine, although she confesses that what Harry has told them holds only “a fragment of the explanation.” Her sympathy comforts him enough that he takes his mother’s advice, which is that he most needs a hot bath. Once he has exited the scene, however, the others start to speculate as to whether or not Harry did in fact kill his wife—if so, what his motives might have been, and if not, why he might be imagining that he did. Following Violet’s suggestion that Harry must see a doctor, Gerald proposes inviting the family physician, Dr. Warburton, over so that he might examine Harry. Amy takes it on herself to go off to call the doctor and make all the necessary arrangements. Amy now gone from the scene, Charles, meanwhile, proposes that they interview Downing, Harry’s servant, who has been with him for 10 years.

Agatha feels as uncomfortable with that plan of action as with calling in Dr. Warburton, but rather than objecting, she leaves the others to their business. Downing is summoned and provides information about Harry’s wife on the ill-fated voyage. He informs them that she was drinking a great deal and not quite able to handle it. Downing also reports that Harry was depressed on the voyage, but that it was “[v]ery uncommon that I saw him in high spirits.” He reports as well that Harry seemed anxious about his wife’s welfare, particularly if she ever came too near the railings, and that they were always together on the voyage. Having seen Harry looking quietly over the railings for nearly a half hour the night that she was lost, Downing is convinced that nothing could have been amiss at least at that point in the evening. Despite these reassurances, the servant’s testimony leaves the others no more certain of what the truth might be than they had been before they questioned him, and the first scene closes with the group musing in choral fashion on the conflicting desire to know the full story and yet avoid the scandal in which that knowledge might result. Ultimately, they fall into relying on each other and the comfortable reality that they have known all their lives. “We must insist that the world is what we have always taken it to be,” they conclude, and the scene ends with Amy reappearing to suggest that they all go and get dressed for dinner. “I hope Harry will feel better,” she says, “[a]fter his rest upstairs.” Agatha, who had returned to the drawing room with Amy at the close of the first scene, remains on stage as that scene closes. When the curtain rises on Scene 2, Agatha is alone in the drawing room as Mary enters. There follows a conversation between the two of them that reveals much about Amy’s role as an overly protective if not domineering mother. “What Cousin Amy wants, she usually gets,” Mary observes, and as she sees it, what Amy had wanted was for Mary to have married Harry. Harry must have been similarly aware that his mother would have disapproved of his marrying otherwise, for it turns out that he had invited only Agatha to his wedding. So, then, Agatha is the only member of the family who ever met Harry’s illfated bride. Agatha takes the opportunity to cau-

Family Reunion, The tion Mary that, whatever else she does, she must not act too hastily or rashly now. She offers Mary her help but without specifics, and after further admonishing the younger woman that the two of them are “only watchers and waiters . . . [which is] not the easiest role,” Agatha departs to change for dinner. Mary is left musing out loud about the burden of waiting when Harry enters the room. They reminisce about their childhood at Wishwood, and Harry wonders if Mary had ever been happy as a child, unlike himself, who fears that there may be for him, in this return to roots from which he had hoped to escape, the sad truth that his will be “all one life, with no escape.” He talks of having tried to recapture that time when he might have fancied himself, even as a child, the master of his own destiny. All manner of escape has proved fruitless for him, however, and he tells Mary that “[y]ou do not know what hope is, until you have lost it”—as he apparently has. “You attach yourself to loathing, / As others do to loving,” she scolds him; and he continues to speak like a haunted, driven man, finding himself always at that point and in that place from which he keeps striving to ecape. Over time, this nameless, formless malcontent has become embodied for him in the Furies, “the sleepless hunters / That will not let me sleep,” and he no sooner names them than they suddenly appear, as the Eumenides, in the window opening, much like the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the bedroom scene with Gertrude or, closer to home, like the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in another of Henry James’s psychological ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw. Harry faces them boldly and bravely enough, but it is up to Mary to remain coolheaded and insist that there is no one there, and she tells him to close the drapes. Harry would like to enlist Mary’s aid but realizes that she, like all the rest, is incapable of seeing the specters and, so, “of no use to me.” When Harry rushes forward to open the drapes again, however, the window embrasure is now empty. Understandably bothered and bewildered by his behavior, Mary can do little more than cry out his name as the second scene comes to an abrupt end.

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Scene 3 opens with Harry and Mary still on stage in the drawing room, accompanied now by his aunts Ivy and Violet and by both his uncles. The typical small talk ensues, and Mary uses it as a cover to excuse herself so that she might dress for dinner. Amy enters accompanied by Dr. Warburton, who had been sent for out of a concern for Harry’s mental well-being. She is perturbed that her other two sons, John and Arthur, have not yet arrived. In the meantime, the doctor engages Harry in conversation. Warburton tries to keep the chatter light, but Harry interjects with his typical note of pessimistic gloom that life holds little hope or pleasure for the child that he was who has now matured into a guilt-ridden adult. Warburton shares with Harry his sense of disappointment in what life has to offer but insists that we must take what nature and time deals us. “We’re all of us ill in one way or another,” he remarks consolingly, using the example of a patient of his, a murderer, who was never more anxious to live despite his having an incurable cancer. Harry cuts that consolation short as well, nevertheless, saying: “. . . [C]ancer, now, / That is something real.” Dr. Warburton, whether he is intentionally trying to draw Harry out or not, happily leaves such a discouraging topic, and he, Amy, and Harry go in to dinner. The others remain behind momentarily to give voice to their own fears that something nameless and terrible has happened or is about to happen or be revealed. Each wishes for a more familiar crisis, a less formless terror. As they go into dinner, Mary passes through on her way to dinner. Finally, Agatha arrives on the scene to speak what sounds like half a prayer and half a curse that the knot may be unknotted, the crossed uncrossed, the crooked made straight. The suggestion is that her cryptic utterances conceal some real information that she has at her disposal, and part I ends as Agatha becomes the last to depart so that she may prepare herself to share in the reunion dinner and Amy’s birthday party. Part II Scene 1 opens with Harry and Dr. Warburton in conversation. Harry is being both evasive and defensive, as if he suspects that the doctor is on hand

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because of the others’ concern for his own precarious state of mind. Harry presses for information about his missing father, but when Dr. Warburton finally has an opportunity to speak for himself, it is to warn Harry that Amy’s heart is liable to give out at the slightest shock to her system. Such awful news about his mother’s health seems to have little effect on Harry, however. He continues to press for information about his father, Amy’s deceased husband, and the only thing that finally succeeds in distracting him from that single-minded endeavor is Denman’s entering to announce that Sergeant Winchell has arrived and wishes to see Harry on an urgent matter. Harry begins to talk irrationally again, as if he is convinced that Winchell has shown up to arrest him for murdering his wife. “Do you know or don’t you? / I’m not afraid of you,” he taunts the policeman, who pays Harry no mind, however, since Sergeant Winchell is simply there to report that John, one of Amy’s missing sons, has been injured in an automobile accident. His injuries are serious enough to indispose him for the rest of the evening but are otherwise minor. Amy, accompanied by her sisters and brothers-in-law, now arrives on the scene, but when she insists that she must go into town to see how John is, Dr. Warburton forbids it. Warburton and Winchell depart together, and Harry cruelly takes up the idea that John’s concussion cannot result in much more harm than a “brief vacation from the kind of consciousness / That John enjoys.” When his apparent callousness is challenged by his mother and aunts, with the exception of Agatha, Harry happily admits that he may not be putting it well, but that, like John, most people do not “understand what it is to be awake,” reiterating a theme that was introduced early in part I. Harry goes on to define being awake as “living on several planes at once.” Apparently having by now taken Warburton’s caution about his mother’s health to heart, Harry convinces Amy to let him take her to her room to nap. When he returns, Harry continues his assault on what he takes to be the others’ oblivious state of being. “What you call the normal / Is really the unreal and the unimportant,” he insists.

Agatha seems to be ready to stand up for him, although she advises him not to become one of the “impatient spectators of malice or stupidity.” But then, as if endorsing his harshly judgmental attitude, news comes that Arthur, Amy’s other missing son, will not be arriving either. Drunk and speeding, Arthur has smashed his car and, in addition to a sizable fine, has had his license revoked for a year. The first scene ends with the chorus echoing the endless futility the individual feels in the face of life’s catastrophes, be they major or minor, whether in England or in Argos, the site of Aeschylus’s ancient family tragedy. In scene 2, Harry and Agatha share the stage, and she finally has an opportunity to confront directly the cause and the nature of his apparently ceaseless gloom. Agatha, like Harry, has been expressing a continuing obsession regarding the relationship of the past with the future. (Eliot had completed “Burnt Norton,” with its famous, initial consideration regarding time present and time past both being contained in time future, in 1935, the year before he began work on The Family Reunion.) Now she shows Harry a glaring flaw in his obsession with the interaction between the past and the future. “[A] present is [what is] missing” from his calculations, she tells him, yet that is precisely what is “needed to connect them.” Harry confesses that it is because he first has to learn exactly what “they”—the ghostly presences of the Eumenides— mean. He had hoped to learn as much by returning to Wishwood, but their presence even here has frustrated that hope. As much said, he turns to Agatha for information about his father. Clearly Harry is beginning to associate the presence of the Eumenides with his father. Agatha complies but provides the sort of generic description that Harry does not want. Pressed, she finally admits that Amy and his father’s was not a happy marriage—that, in fact, “I found him thinking / How to get rid of your mother.” The reason that Harry suspects himself of having murdered his own wife has suddenly emerged. As Agatha puts it, theirs is “not a story of detection, / Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation.” Then she becomes even more explicit, telling Harry: “It is possible / You are the consciousness of

Family Reunion, The your unhappy family”—thus fulfilling Harry’s Oresteian, and somewhat Christic, role in which the son suffers for the sins of his parents. Whatever its meaning for Harry, this exchange with Agatha turns out to be just what the doctor ordered. Suddenly, Harry “feel[s] happy for a moment, as if I had come home.” Nor has this new feeling of contentment and fulfillment dissipated by the time the scene draws to a close. Harry can understand now that he has “been wounded in a war of phantoms,” and he can bid farewell to “that awful privacy / Of the insane mind.” The obvious suggestion here, although it is never stated any more forcefully in the remainder of the play, is that Harry did not in fact murder his wife but is projecting the tragic failings of his parents’ marriage onto himself through his own wife’s tragic accidental death. The chain of the past and its bewildering chaotic history, which ultimately has everything and nothing to do with him, has been broken, and as the Eumenides appear one last time, their beneficent purpose prevails. Harry welcomes them, knowing now that they are both real and outside of him, meant to lead him beyond the torment of his begetting. As Agatha pronounces this to be the beginnings of his new life, “a long journey,” Harry knows that his true happiness will come not in returning to Wishwood, but in leaving it behind, an action that Agatha is encouraging just as Amy enters the room. Not privy to the expiation that just has transpired in the room, she can only hear Agatha telling Harry to leave. When Harry assures Amy that he will be doing just that, “not to run away, but to pursue,” it confuses and irritates her that much more, and Harry can hardly explain his meaning. Rather, with an ill-concealed zeal and glee, Harry announces that he does not know where he shall go or what he shall do, but that he “has just recovered sanity,” and as the scene ends, he goes off, proclaiming that he “must follow the bright angels,” an apparent reference to the freedom from an inherited guilt that the Eumenides have all along been representing. Scene 3 commences with Amy and Agatha left alone on the stage to confront each other. Amy has an awful truth to reveal, revealing along with it the reason that she was so disturbed to

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hear Agatha encouraging Harry to flee Wishwood. Agatha and Amy’s husband had had an affair; indeed, it is highly likely that that affair was at the root of his desire to “do away with” Amy. Although that particular aspect of the matter is not raised, Amy wastes no time in exposing the bitter irony: “Thirty-five years ago / You took my husband from me. Now you take my son.” Agatha gives kind for kind. Amy, she insists, at least has had the pleasures of family life, whereas Agatha had taught for years at a woman’s college. Mary’s entrance interrupts their battle of recriminations and self-excuses. She is puzzled by Harry’s abrupt decision to leave Wishwood, seeing that he has barely arrived back after a long absence. Having seen his behavior in that earlier scene when the specters appeared, she is also understandably fearful for his general welfare. Agatha assures Mary that it will only be in leaving Wishwood that Harry will escape any danger to his life, that, instead, he will now be out there “in the neutral territory / Between two worlds.” Amy can only continue to rage against her double loss, first of a husband, now of her eldest son. She sees herself abandoned by all of them now, “[a]n old woman alone in a damned house.” Harry reappears, dressed not for the reunion dinner toward which things have been tending all evening but rather for departure. In their typically foggyheaded ways, his elders get his plans all wrong, imagining that Harry is so changed because he is heading off to be a missionary. Harry does his best to set them straight, but again, it is as if they are from two different worlds speaking entirely different languages. The gap is not one of generations, however; in her sagaciousness, Agatha is able to understand him as well as the much younger Mary. As soon as Harry is gone, Amy asks to be taken to another room, where she might lie down. Left to their own devices, the others all find themselves as befuddled and put out by Harry’s behavior as Amy had been, except for Charles. He begins to imagine that he might begin to understand “if one were awake,” a continuing metaphorical reference point in the drama. Suddenly, Downing is back. His Lordship has left behind his cigarette-case. In his no-nonsense way, Downing explains to the others what he

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thinks has really happened to Harry. “[M]ost of us . . . live according to circumstance,” he describes it, but for people like Harry, “there’s something inside them / That accounts for what happens to them.” And then Downing makes a startling revelation. When Agatha awkwardly tries to prepare him for the possibility of the Eumenides’ appearing from time to time, Downing reveals that he has already been seeing them for quite some time. “You soon get used to them,” he says rather blandly. Downing leaves, and with him Harry. Now, in a line that echoes Agamemnon’s death cry from within the palace at Argos as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus strike their fatal blows, Amy cries out to Mary and Agatha from offstage: “The clock has stopped in the dark.” She has died. Although, unlike with Orestes, his mother’s death is not by Harry’s hand, it seems clear that his sudden departure has resulted in the shock to her weak heart against which Dr. Warburton had cautioned Harry. The Chorus of inept elders is left to try to make sense of how so many small things can add up to such a poignantly tragic account and can only conclude, “We have lost our way in the dark.” The others all exit, however, leaving Mary and Agatha on the stage alone as the drama comes to a close. They set a birthday cake, its candles lighted, down on a table in the center of the darkened stage, and they circle the table, blowing out candles as they go, reciting a richer but equally mysterious litany to explain the significance of what has just transpired. As Agatha puts it in her and the play’s final speech, what has just been witnessed is another chapter in the “pilgrimage of expiation,” one that will continue until “the curse be ended.” With that closing, Eliot makes it clear that Harry’s story, like Aeschylus’s Orestes’ story before him, is everyone’s story. But one must be awake enough to know it.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY There is little doubt that, in his first major attempt at a contemporary verse drama, Eliot intentionally let out all the stops in an attempt to create a work both worthy of his reputation and celebrity as an important poetic talent and voice, as well as significant enough to rank high in the annals of dramatic

art. With The Family Reunion, Eliot wrote his first completely original play, one in which he was hoping to express in a verse drama the rhythms of a natural, contemporary speech, not to mention its moral and spiritual nuances. As with most literary ventures in Eliot’s long professional career, however, the assertion that The Family Reunion was his first completely original play requires some slight qualification. For one thing, his 1925 verse drama “Sweeney Agonistes,” to which, it will be seen, The Family Reunion bears some remarkable similarities, remains perhaps one of the most original of Eliot’s dramatic compositions. Despite its being included in the Collected Poems, however, it was a work that Eliot never completed and essentially abandoned. By the same token, the highly successful 1935 stage production, Murder in the Cathedral, although based on a celebrated historical incident, was certainly an original composition on Eliot’s part, but the idea for that drama had been proposed to him by George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, the summer before while Eliot was staying at Bell’s palace. At that time, Eliot was just coming off the success of The Rock, a pageant play that had been performed before 1,500 spectators at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London between May 28 and June 9, 1934. The Rock, meanwhile, had been his first real venture into live theater. Eliot nevertheless had done little more than write the text for it in keeping with Browne’s scenario, itself based on historical episodes suggested by yet another individual, the Reverend R. Webb-Odell, and it was with these considerable constraints in mind that Eliot wrote the choruses and dialogue. Although he would rely on Browne’s expertise with acting, directing, and stagecraft in general for The Family Reunion, just as he had done with Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion enjoys the distinction of being a verse drama whose conception and execution were wholly Eliot’s idea to begin with. By presuming not only to write a highly competent drawing room melodrama, in keeping with the stage traditions of his own time, but to model its core tragedy on the most celebrated classical treatment of one of the greatest of the Greek myths, Aeschylus’s trilogy detailing the final

Family Reunion, The tragedy of the House of Atreus, Eliot was setting himself up with dual challenges of the first order. Though Aeschylus is given his due, the story of The Family Reunion is now all Eliot’s. Indeed, it would be as grossly unfair to Aeschylus as it would be to Eliot to suggest that Eliot is merely creating a modern paraphrase of Aeschylus’s tragic story, since at its heart such a story was no more original with Aeschylus than it was with Eliot. There are indisputably universal elements at work in any plot that pretends to depict the moral and social conflicts, not to mention the violence, brought about by the dissolution of individual and familial trust caused by circumstances that seem to be beyond any one person’s control. Still, as in the case of Aeschylus’s Orestes or Eliot’s Lord Harry Monchensey, the drama that ensues when the isolated individual feels the full weight of catastrophe descending on his head draws everyone’s attention. For whenever any conflict that is universal—and this one certainly is—can be embodied in the agony of a single individual, great literature invaribly emerges. Without at all disregarding Aeschylus’s previous treatment of the theme of guilt and expiation, then, Eliot’s own treatment must itself be regarded in detail and on its own terms and merits if one is to appreciate fully Eliot’s particular application of a theme as profound and far-reaching as the one that Aeschylus first explored and exploited. There is, after all, a major difference to be noted in Eliot’s approach, one powerfully announced in his title’s emphasis not on a tragic breakup but on a reunion. Eliot’s, after all, is a family that somehow is being reunited, whereas Aeschylus’s House of Atreus is depicted as it begins its tailspin into the last throes of complete disintegration. On that score alone, for all that Eliot claimed that he conceived of the play as a melancholy and pessimistic work, he is already well ahead of the game even as his take on Aeschylus’s classic story begins. To the challenge posed by his begging for comparison with Aeschylus’s classic masterpiece, however, Eliot found it necessary to add another challenge by also trying to conceive a successful psychological horror tale, or at least ghost story, much in the manner of the master of the form,

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the novelist Henry James. Even then it appears that Eliot went one better by throwing in a dose of crime drama for good measure. Whether Eliot succeeded on all those counts or on none of them will be left to subsequent ages to decide. No one can deny, however, that The Family Reunion was an ambitious undertaking. Although the initial London production was hardly a success, the work continues to be performed, and commercial success, while hardly a criterion to be lightly dismissed in the realm of the performing arts, does not necessarily ensure immortality in any case. What can safely be said with regard to The Family Reunion is that it enhances and illuminates other themes and issues with poetic composition with which Eliot had been struggling to this time, and therefore it stands as an important milestone in his literary career. That is a claim to fame and significance for the play that, considering the range and impact of Eliot’s career, will stand any work well. Still, it may be difficult to see in the very British, upper-crust lives depicted in The Family Reunion any of the old Eliot, with his focus on the squalid dimensions of human experience in the midst of the individual’s struggle to realize his own higher spiritual and moral gifts. Is there really all that much pathos, after all, in the closing image of the protagonist heading off in his chauffeured car, cigarette case in hand, to meet his moral destiny? While the problem there may be found in Eliot’s trying to stay too close to his original source—Orestes was of royal birth, after all—the question of why Eliot then deviates so freely and widely from Aeschylus otherwise is left hanging. Furthermore, Eliot had never been one to fear risking crossing class barriers. The play between upper- and middle- or even lower-class lives in The Waste Land provides as convenient an example of this as not, the more to give Eliot’s vision of the modern world its universal appeal. It may, of course, be the point that as much as The Family Reunion seems to bait the argument by artificially employing the myth’s basic terms, in fact Eliot’s aim is to befuddle his audience’s judgment by presenting them with what they expect to hear and see—a melodrama with a classical theme reflecting

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the sorts of conflicts generally encountered by the denizens of the leisure classes—while in fact the play reveals moral and spiritual dilemmas for the individual that are universal and all too typical in their applicability. Harry, stripped of his rank and title, wealth and privilege, is otherwise an ordinary and reasonably young person who has no idea of where he is, where he has come from, or where he is going to. If by play’s end he seems to think that he does know those things, even if that knowledgeability is left cryptically vague for both the other characters on the stage and the audience, it is nevertheless a credit to Eliot’s stagecraft that he at least provides that much ostensible resolution to the awful moral and spiritual dilemma with which Harry is first shown struggling, particularly since there is clearly much more going on onstage than Harry’s finding his way. In a famous passage from late in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, which Eliot had developed from a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1932 and 1933, only a few years before he commenced work on The Family Reunion, he commented on his intentions for an earlier verse drama, left uncompleted, that clearly must be “Sweeney Agonistes.” There Eliot proposed that what he had attempted to do was to provide in that play a central character who was in possession of a deeper understanding than his fellow characters. That same deeper understanding would be in possession of some but assuredly not all of the members of the audience as well. In fact, Eliot felt that intentionally maintaining multilevel meanings was both the special appeal and the peculiar challenge of writing for the stage as opposed to a reading public. As he saw it then, the playwright was obliged to represent in the performance the same range of appeal to understanding as one might expect to find in a typical audience, so that none was left out but neither was the theme intentionally diminished or “dumbed down,” as it were. Such an idea is hardly a new one. One of the most persistent arguments for WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s enduring appeal is that he can be profoundly intellectual, even spiritually provocative, while not in the least bit stinting on the melo-

drama provided by blood and guts and action. In The Family Reunion, although Eliot may not bring to bear any of an Aeschylus’s or a Shakespeare’s love for unadulterated theatricality and high drama, he is just as much interested in telling a story that can appeal to a variety of tastes and concerns, all for the sake of box office. It is only when the Eliot play is regarded primarily from the point of view of the most profound possibilities of its thematic pursuits that its true value as a work by Eliot can be most fully appreciated. Without making him a mere mouthpiece, in other words, it is best to see Harry, like Sweeney in “Sweeney Agonistes” or the anonymous but never querulous speaker of The Waste Land, as the individual in the play who speaks for the poet/playwright. When Harry is heard that way, he speaks a compendium of themes and ideas that had been engaging Eliot’s critical and creative intellect virtually from the time of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” although with increasing emphasis and clarity following Eliot’s religious conversion experience in the late 1920s. To sum up these concerns and considerations in a phrase of Eliot’s own making, used in both Murder in the Cathedral and “Burnt Norton,” “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” In Murder in the Cathedral, composed around the same time as The Family Reunion, the same thought is repeated virtually verbatim by Thomas à Becket, that work’s protagonist and, more important, 12th-century saint. On the basis of such a pedigree, it is reasonable to assume that they are not intended by Eliot as idle words or thought. Rather, they seem to express in ominous terms the unavoidable commonplace that most of us go through life half awake if not totally asleep. In The Family Reunion, Harry gives the same idea utterance one more time, although this time it is without the burnishment of a philosophical pseudo-statement: “I tell you,” he tells his assembled relatives barely moments after he makes his first appearance on the stage, “life would be unendurable / If you were wide awake.” Harry can say this because he knows whereof he speaks. He has awakened and cannot endure it. The theme of The Family Reunion, indeed, will be how one can come

Family Reunion, The to be not only wide awake but able to endure that heightened sense of and engagement with the real. Eliot requires those in the audience who hear the clarion of this theme to come first to an understanding of what it might mean to be wide awake. Nor would it be wise to assume that he can define that only negatively, by what it is not, in the constant tendency of Ivy, Violet, Charles, and Gerald, to miss the forest not so much for trees as for the briars and the brambles, caught up as they are in assigning to the sphere of common duties much more importance than those tasks can ever bear. In sketchy but no less accurate terms, the idea is that in a typically advanced, so-called modern urban culture, the vast majority lives their lives on the front page of the newspaper and from popular film to popular film, from one political cliché to another, always imagining that the way they think and the values they cherish are everyone else’s opinions and values. They imagine as much without even knowing that they are only imagining it. In The Waste Land, these were those who composed the crowd of the living dead flowing over London Bridge. They are Eliot’s hollow men as well, whose heads are filled with straw, and his fickle crowd in “Triumphal March” who salute the banners that fly this way and that and make every latest hero the Savior. It is not a pretty picture of humanity, but Eliot is functioning in the role here in any case not of the social reformer but of the artist depicting the world in which he lives and the people who inhabit it as he sees it, much as Aeschylus and myriad other poets and dramatists and storytellers had done before him for their time and in its terms. For his time and in its terms, in The Family Reunion Eliot portrays the crowd who sleep more or less through the likes of Ivy, Violet, Charles, and Gerald—the “most of us” as their type are generally called. But then there are others, like Amy, Agatha, Mary, and even Downing, and perhaps Warburton, who are or have to some degree awakened to the fact that the world, one’s life, and one’s interactions in it are more than the sum of stock quotes and cricket scores, the latest news and the hottest gossip. In summary, there must be instead, Eliot proposes, those who can bear reality even if it

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is merely to admit that there is something more to life than its daily grind. Then there is someone like Harry Monchensey, who is painfully aware of reality’s most profound depths. He is there to discover for the audience how far and for how long the consequences of the most trivial choice can haunt a person with regret. He reveals that there is no language in which to share such perceptions, nor a forum of polite society in which to do it. And yet his heightened moral if not ultimately spiritual awareness accompanies him wherever he may be, whatever he may be doing, until, haunted so by the constant presence of a reality most cannot even bear to think of, he, too, begins to imagine that he must be mad and surely is cursed. Eliot represents the agon of this heightened awareness through the Eumenides because they neatly provide what he called elsewhere, in his 1919 essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” an objective correlative for what must otherwise remain the invisible and nameless. They also make good theater. Indeed, Harry’s reaction to the Eumenides is Eliot’s way of signaling to his audience that the situation is not as dire as Harry makes it out to be. These are the beneficent spirits, and not the awful Furies that harried Orestes until he was allowed to prove that he was, though not innocent, relatively guiltless. Eliot takes a page from Aeschylus but rewrites it by establishing a rich dramatic irony. By virtue of Eliot’s having introduced the presences that haunt Harry as the Eumenides rather than the Furies, the audience knows that the spirits are good even if Harry, in his understandable fear and confusion and guilt, nevertheless treats them as if they are there to torment him like vengeful and spiteful hounds of hell. By Eliot’s play’s end, it is the hero, not the spirits, who have been transformed, as it should be. Eliot’s theme, after all, is that the malevolence that drives most people into acts of selfish desperation is not “out there,” as Aeschylus would have it, but “in here”—within the individual heart. Whether because of an overprotective mother, who may have been protecting what was hers because she had already lost it, or a more delicate moral nature, or unresolved conflicts with his

184 “La Figlia Che Piange” father, Harry is uncomfortable being Harry—with accepting himself for who he is. His life has therefore been one long string of unsuccessful relationships, capped for him in the inexplicable drowning of his “painted shadow” of a wife, for whose loss he blames himself. No wonder he sees the Eumenides as tormenters, as if they or anyone else has any control over how he may feel. When the turnaround comes for Harry, it is not as the result of any startlingly dramatic resolution or revelation, but out of his own conviction that he now “understands” himself and his life. Agatha, whose mysteriousness, too, diminishes the more her motives for it emerge, really offers Harry only the equivalent of gossip of what his father may have been like. The audience later learns that her almost morbid concern for Harry is motivated by the fact that she was his father’s lover, but Harry never learns this. What he learns instead, at the end of his obsessive quest to find out how the past shapes the future, is that there is neither a meaningful past nor a meaningful future without a constant engagement with the present. Suddenly, he is able to let his obsessions go, accept the Eumenides as a part of his mental landscape, and, in a word, live—though that must mean leaving Wishwood and Amy and all the rest of it behind. In “Burnt Norton,” which has many themes, images, and concepts in common with The Family Reunion, Eliot’s speaker puzzles out the tenuous relationship among the past, the present, and the future. In eternity, that speaker muses, all time must be present, but then that would mean that time is unredeemable, occurring endlessly all at once. Those may be speculations worthy of the poet and the metaphysician, but what The Family Reunion demonstrates is that they have no place in the living of day-to-day lives. What counts there and then is acceptance, as Harry learns. He has been running from chimeras. Now he is prepared to pursue them because they, like time, are manifestations of the forces that do not exist, yet can be more powerfully shaping of the individual than those things that do. The Family Reunion ends with the family dissolved. Arthur is in trouble with the law, John is apparently in a temporarily comatose state, Harry

has taken off for parts unknown, his father is long since deceased, and his mother passes away almost at the exact moment that folks should have finally been settling down to celebrate her birthday. None of this may seem positive on the surface, but those who cannot bear very much reality cannot do so because they only ever see the surface. From another point of view, the prodigal has returned, and although the fatted calf may not have been prepared, he who was lost has been found, who was dead has been restored to life. Eliot uses the most powerful spiritual symbol that the human lexicon can provide, that of an awakening, to demonstrate in wholly contemporary terms the operation of mystery in human affairs. Harry, without changing at all, has by play’s end become an entirely new man, content and, for the first time in his life, capable of fully living. Just as not everyone in the play will have witnessed let alone appreciated that transformation on Harry’s part, not everyone in the audience will have either, but none of that makes the transformation any less real—and that is the crux of The Family Reunion’s most provocative keynote.

“La Figlia Che Piange” (1917) One of Eliot’s most graceful lyrics and, arguably, one of his most original poems, “La Figlia Che Piange” (literally, “the daughter who is crying”) was composed in 1911 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after Eliot’s return from a year spent abroad in Paris following his obtaining a master’s degree in English literature from Harvard in June 1910. The poem did not see publication, however, until it was included in Eliot’s first book-length collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917.

SYNOPSIS It may not be fair to say that love poetry by T. S. Eliot is conspicuous in its absence, inasmuch as it is not very likely that anyone struggling to come to grips with the body of Eliot’s work has ever particularly noticed what is absent from it. Still, what love poetry there is of Eliot’s is a poetry that reminds one of love the way a summer storm reminds one of

“La Figlia Che Piange” a spring shower. There may be many connections, but they are not immediately apparent. In fact, aside from some touching but otherwise not memorable lines of verse, rather than a poem, that he wrote to his second wife, Valerie, relatively late in his life, there is no outstandingly obvious love poetry in the entire Eliot canon—with the possible exception of the poem “La Figlia Che Piange.” It is only a possible exception because, in typical Eliot fashion, the story of the genesis of the poem is far more complicated by the twists and turns of irony than it ought to be. While that story does make the complexities of the poetry sort themselves out rather quickly, however, if told first, that same story also automatically prejudices an objective reading of the poem, which is something other than its source material, no matter how revealingly helpful that material may appear to be. It would serve the reader well to approach this poem, as one should any poem, first in terms solely of the information that is right there on the page. On the surface, “La Figlia Che Piange” does seem out of place among Eliot’s poetry, sounding as it does in its opening stanza like traditional love poetry. As it continues, however, it becomes, like so many Eliot poems from this period (the poem was first composed in November 1911), more and more an exercise in modes of expression rather than an exercise in the expression of a particular theme or emotion, in this case, love. That is not very surprising. What may appear to be love poetry, when penned by Eliot, almost invariably does not reflect the usual expressions of sentiment and emotion commonly associated with love in any event, so it is not remarkable that he does not sustain that tone much past the first stanza in “La Figlia.” Rather, the reader must be prepared for being surprised and befuddled about just who the lover is. Particularly in the case of the poems that Eliot wrote during the decade preceding the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, a reader must first understand that Eliot’s “love” poetry cannot in fact be called love poetry inasmuch as the poet may not himself necessarily be the speaker and therefore cannot possibly be the lover. If that sounds like too constrictive a definition of love poetry—that it must be a genuine expression of love on the part of

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the person that is writing it—it is nevertheless one that Eliot hardly if ever adhered to. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” provides an outstanding example of how Eliot can manipulate his readers by manipulating his speaker, much in the same way that a ventriloquist succeeds by making his audience focus their attention on the dummy rather than on the ventriloquist. Even if the reader regards that poem as a frustrated love song in its confused, and confusing, attempt to justify why the women in Prufrock’s world do not pay any attention to him, the poem nevertheless clearly identifies itself as the “love song” of J. Alfred Prufrock, not of the poet T. S. Eliot. It is quite easy, then, even mandatory, not to classify “Prufrock” as love poetry, despite the poem’s title and Prufrock’s obsessive concern with what women think of him. That may not seem to be case with a poem like “Portrait of a Lady,” for another example. In this poem, the first-person speaker is not given a specific identity, and therefore the reader may feel permitted, indeed encouraged, to follow the long-established convention that such a first-person speaker must be the poet. That again is only ostensibly the case, however, for as one reads the poem, it gradually becomes apparent that love is not the feeling that compels either the overly loquacious lady or the grudgingly reticent (to her, that is) speaker. Once the reader witnesses that the test of the poetry is found in the dramatic imbalances between the speaker of “Portrait” and his subject, the lady, whether or not the speaker is the poet or the poetry is love poetry, both become irrelevant considerations. Language is the cue, of course. What “Prufrock” and “Portrait” lack finally is, quite simply, the language of love. With a poem like “La Figlia Che Piange,” however, the matter may be quite different, even if only at first glance. In this poem, a somewhat romantic scene is set immediately, and the speaker appears to be addressing his beloved in a typically adoring fashion befitting a lover: “. . . weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.” This language is redolent of what W. B. YEATS, in a poem composed at nearly the same time, “Adam’s Curse,” would call the “old high way of love.” It is a language that finds ways to cherish the beloved and preserve the emotion.

186 “La Figlia Che Piange” Then, the next stanza of Eliot’s poem begins as if the speaker is not addressing his beloved at all, but rather imagining how “I would have had him leave her.” This “him” could be no one other than the beloved’s real lover, who is apparently not the speaker, although he may have been the projected speaker of the first stanza nevertheless. The idea that the speaker had extended himself emotionally into the attitude of the subject’s lover, usurping that person’s devotional prerogatives, is a bit shocking perhaps but leaves the emotions of the first stanza intact. So far, so good. What began as a poem of love or at least devotion addressed to “the daughter who is crying,” which is how Eliot’s title translates from the Italian, has in short order become a speculative musing on someone else’s relationship with the beloved in question, and that is, in good Eliot fashion, puzzling, to say the least. The reader has to shift gears rapidly from savoring a lover’s passion to confronting a situation in which the speaker is in fact merely describing the beloved as he would imagine a lover would desire her to look. The Epigraph Thus far the unattributed epigraph has purposefully not been admitted into the mix. It would be appropriate to introduce it now. In Latin and from Virgil’s great epic of Roman imperialism, the Aeneid, it reads, “How shall I remember you, maiden?” It sounds like an innocent enough request, unless the reader further recognizes that the words are spoken by Aeneas as he confronts his own mother, Venus, who has appeared to him in the guise of a young woman. There is frothy subtext here, what with a son being duped into coming on to his own mother. Is the reader to think that Aeneas is the thirdperson lover of the weeping maiden, the “him” who had been introduced in stanza two, and why has the reason that she is crying, or Italian, for that matter, not yet been introduced into the text, let alone addressed? The reader desiring to find out these answers would only be further confused by the remainder of stanza two, which has language more connotative of a violent sundering: “. . . the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, / . . . mind . . . the body it has used.” Though these are presented as similes, the idea is that something more than a lover’s

leave-taking accounts for the maiden’s tears. Is it, for example, even a lover who has left, when the translation of the title—“the daughter who is crying”— clearly implies that it must be a parent who has departed? In which case, of course, the speaker would be regarding the daughter’s grief, and the father’s last sight of his daughter before his death (which would also justify the epigraph, since it, too, deals with a parent-child relationship rather than one between two romantic lovers). Identity becomes a very real issue when we consider that Venus is a daughter as well, Jupiter’s, and that she, as a mother, may be crying for the fate that she knows her son Aeneas will eventually face as he embraces his destiny to found the Italian settlement from which Rome will emerge in a far distant future. For he will suffer great personal loss in the process of making a new homeland for his refugee Trojan followers and be forced as well to give up the love of his life, the Carthaginian queen, Dido. Just who, then, is leaving/loving whom and grieving over or lamenting the absent beloved may seem to be a circular exercise in frustration, but it also has the potential of being a positive poetic exercise, at the same time, in the universalization of grief and love. That possibility, once introduced, seems to be borne out in the third and final stanza. It is autumn, and the speaker remarks on how this mystery girl— for mystery she must seem—and his image of her, “[h]er hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers,” obsesses his imagination as he wonders how they—father and daughter, mother and son, lover and beloved—“should have been together!” This wondering obsesses the speaker so much, indeed, that the mystery haunts him night and day.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Surely, there are conclusions that a reader can feel encouraged to draw from “La Figlia Che Piange”: that the poem exposes the thinking of a jealous rival, unable or unwilling to reveal his own affection for the beloved, or that the speaker is looking at an image of two lovers perhaps, or of a woman engrossed in the protocol of grief, and wonders whose loss may have been the wellspring of such painful mourning. Nor are these two possible readings mutually exclusive.

Four Quartets As mentioned earlier, there is a story about the genesis of this poem, and it is one of the few times, perhaps, that a story about an Eliot poem’s origins may shed some useful light on such an intriguingly puzzling text. The story goes that while Eliot had been staying in Paris in 1911, he made a tour of northern Italy and was told by a friend that he simply had to visit a particular museum to view a stele or bas relief there called “La Figlia Che Piange.” Eliot subsequently visited the museum but was never able to locate and, so, view the piece of statuary, apparently a work of funereal art depicting either a literal or figurative mourner with flowers in her arms. From that episode, the unseen carving of a grieving daughter became the stylized scene depicted in the opening stanza of the finished poem, and the epigraph from the Aeneid becomes Eliot’s acknowledgement that though he now will never know this grieving young woman, he wishes that he may have been allowed to remember her. Whether read with this anecdote in mind or read with an eye toward only what the text itself might reveal, “La Figlia Che Piange” is an admittedly touching poem, rare for Eliot. He had learned from JULES LAFORGUE to use sentiment like a verbal stiletto that cuts both ways. This poem instead is almost old-fashioned in the manner in which it measures out the ways in which we move and are moved by each other’s emotions. The poem reminds us that art, like grief, is a testament to love, and it suggests as well how much, even at this very early stage in his literary development, when Eliot seemed to be for the most part far more given over to cleverness, wit, and erudition than to any other kind of poetic expression, he already had a powerful capacity for striking chords of sentiment that were both profound and sublime, although he would not be ready to plumb these depths fully in his poetry for many years yet to come.

Five-Finger Exercises (1933) See MINOR POEMS.

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“Four Elizabethan Dramatists” (1924) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

Four Quartets (1943) At the end of October 1943, in the midst of the terrible violence, destruction, and slaughter of World War II, Faber & Faber, Eliot’s publisher since the mid-1920s, released Four Quartets. A relatively slim volume of poetry, it nevertheless brought together between its covers a single, coherent poetic work that would prove to be the final fruits of a lifetime of creative endeavor on Eliot’s part as a poet. It was a singular publishing event, for the Four Quartets came to be regarded almost from the first as one of the great literary masterpieces of a very rich literary century. By then Eliot’s worldwide reputation as a poet was substantial enough to warrant such critical accolades, of course. Such is the achievement of the poem in question, nonetheless, that the modernist literary canon would have had to have found a place for it even if Eliot had been a relative unknown at the time. A survey of the four individual poems that would eventually compose this mature poetic achievement of Eliot’s, furthermore, also exposes much about the manner in which Eliot conceived of the relationship among poetry writing, the poem, and the personal experiences that provide a framework for the former two.

A GENERAL OVERVIEW The Four Quartets’ individual quartets, in the order of their composition as well as their placement in the sequence, are “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding.” Read as if they were conceived and composed as the consecutive and interactive elements in a preconceived sequence to begin with, they will not disappoint any reader. Little by little, particularly as each quartet is read and reread in combination with the incremental experience in mind as well of having

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read and reread the other three, any careful reader will gradually come to notice features either that all four of the quartets share or that are contrasted significantly with one to another. Each of the four quartets has for its title and as its primary subject matter an actual place that bears some degree of association with the poet. Burnt Norton is an otherwise obscure English country house that burned to the ground in the 17th century. It is located in Gloucestershire, the Eliot family’s ancestral region in western England, but more significantly, it is a locale that he visited with an old love from his youth, Emily Hale, who frequently spent summers with her relatives and Eliot in England during the mid-1930s while Eliot was separated from his first wife, Vivien. Similarly, East Coker is the name of the quaint country village from which Eliot’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay colony in the mid-17th century. The Dry Salvages, meanwhile, are three rocks that provided sailors with a natural nautical marker off the eastern tip of Cape Ann in Massachusetts. There the poet’s family spent their summers in a spacious seaside home in Gloucester, where the young Eliot became an avid and able sailor in the waters off Cape Ann and up the New England coast to Canada. Furthermore, it was in this region of England’s colonies that Eliot’s family originally flourished for several hundred years until his grandfather, WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT, resettled his young family in the 1830s in ST. LOUIS, then at the very edge of the American frontier. The poet’s birthplace in 1888, this Mississippi River city would also, through its associations with that virtually mythic American waterway, figure in “The Dry Salvages.” Little Gidding, finally, is an equally obscure but far more noteworthy place back in England. It has more general but no less intimate connections with the poet’s life. A well-born young Londoner who had been ordained an Anglican deacon, Nicholas Ferrar, founded a religious community there with his family in the early part of the 17th century. It was to this same settlement that King Charles I fled seeking overnight refuge following the repeated defeat of his forces by Parliamentary troops in the religious and political civil war of 1642 to 1649, a

war that ended in Charles’s arrest shortly thereafter and his eventual execution and in, as well, the decade-long dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell under the title Protector of the Nation. Of the original community, only the chapel remains today, and it was to this spot that the poet came in May 1936. In addition to the prevailing ones just noted, there are other similarities and associations embedded in each of four locations. Most of the locales have associations with the 17th century, for example, and thus reflect various aspects of that especially significant moment in English history when many were resettling in the overseas colonies as a result of religious and political turmoil at home. Also, the locales engage the poet’s personal life not in any single way but in a variety of categories: family, nation, friendships, beliefs, and so forth. This overlapping of relationships permeates the four quartets in a variety of other, equally interesting ways. Each quartet is unique to a season, for example. “Burnt Norton,” with its sunlight and rustling leaves and rose gardens, bespeaks the summer. “East Coker,” with its hint of late-night harvest rituals and talk of late November, speaks the fall. The stormy sea that measures time in “The Dry Salvages” recalls New England’s wintry weather. “Little Gidding” talks of “sempiternal spring,” harkening to the weather that signals the movement from winter into spring, and then talks of May, that month that marks the heart of the spring in both England and New England. As another outstanding organizing principle, each of the quartets also contains references and allusions that, without ignoring the other three altogether, typify a particular one of the four elements: air (“Burnt Norton”), earth (“East Coker”), water (“The Dry Salvages”), and fire (“Little Gidding”). Furthermore, that each quartet contains exactly five sections suggests the fifth, integrating element, the so-called quintessence that partakes of and harmoniously combines the individualized characteristics of each of the other four. As with any Eliot poem, the complexities of those biographical, geographic, seasonal, and elemental associations are further intermingled with the kinds of discourse and imagery and thematic issues that each quartet accordingly employs. The tone

Four Quartets of “Burnt Norton” is philosophical, for instance, betokening its associations with air. “East Coker” uses archaisms that hark back to a late Elizabethan English. “The Dry Salvages” mimics the rolling rhythms of the sea, while “Little Gidding,” the most openly religious in theme of the four, in a key passage echoes DANTE ALIGHIERI’s great religious pilgrimage, the Divine Comedy. This notion of combining a wide variety of disparate poetic resources in order to make harmonious the final product reflects what is perhaps the most obvious of Eliot’s organizing principles, and that is the poetry’s self-evident analogy to music. Eliot had early on used references to musical forms in his titles—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Preludes.” There also has always been at least an analogous and often a direct relationship between poetry and music in Western literary culture. Surely, then, by calling these poems quartets, Eliot’s recognition of a return to the practice in his own right should not have been unexpected, even if it was not until the completed sequence was published that the idea that they were quartets at all was made public knowledge. Earlier, however, the association was with specific forms of musical expression—love songs, rhapsodies, preludes—whereas now, with the allusion to a quartet, the association is with a particular form of musical performance. The quartet, that is, describes music composed to be performed by four distinct instruments, rather than a particular musical piece. The hint is that this is a poetry that is performative rather than communicative; it will show the reader through form rather than tell the reader through statement. The reader will find, then, that, in the quartets, Eliot analogizes the musical, in other words, not by implying that the poetry will incorporate a particular musicality of tone and mood, but by suggesting that there will be both subtle and, occasionally, pronounced variations in the quality of the sounds produced and in how they interact. Sounds in poetry, however, are words and phrases and levels of discourse and shifts in diction and literary style, not mere musical notes. The reader ought to be prepared for a compounding of fluctuations and

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modulations in content and in meaning as each of Eliot’s verbal quartets progresses. What has not been touched on thus far anywhere in this introduction is the poetry’s richest feature, and that is its disarmingly simple and straightforward treatment of themes that humans have apparently always regarded as the most profound. They are those so-called great imponderables regarding the nature of time, love, God, and individual life, the last of which also embodies the themes of death and of the nature and notion of eternity as an abode for the spirit.

THE PUBLICATION HISTORY A work as intricately organized both from part to part and within parts as the Four Quartets is would presumably have been equally as meticulously conceptualized to begin with. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Whatever particular experiences had inspired Eliot to revisit in a poem those moments that he had spent at Burnt Norton with Emily Hale in the summer of 1934, the poetry of “Burnt Norton”—in fact, its opening lines—finds its source in lines that had been discarded from Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot was working busily on Murder in the Cathedral in early 1935 in close collaboration with the actor and director E. MARTIN BROWNE, with whom he had developed the poetry for The Rock, Eliot’s first venture into verse drama. As Eliot’s next theatrical venture, the Becket play, was preparing to go into production, it was Browne’s task to bring to bear his knowledge and experience of the stage to prevent Eliot from including dialogue that, while it might have its histrionic elements, did not advance the action on stage, a critical component for holding the audience’s attention during any dramatic performance. Among those passages that Browne convinced Eliot to eliminate was one in act 1, when the First Tempter tries to encourage Becket to avoid renewing his old conflict with the king. Instead this Tempter urges Becket to renew with King Henry the terms of their original friendship when they were both far more interested in youthful carousing than in going head to head over issues of church and state. At that point in the drama, the Second

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Priest intervenes with comments on “[t]ime past and time present / . . . both perhaps [being] present in time future.” While their allusion to Becket and the king’s youthful friendship is germane, these lines were cut nevertheless—only to reappear several years later as the famous opening passage to “Burnt Norton,” which would be published in Collected Poems, 1909–1935. Other lines and echoes from Murder also occur in “Burnt Norton.” When Thomas first appears on stage, for example, he speaks of there being a pattern to action and suffering, “that the wheel may turn and still / Be forever still.” That passage is reminiscent of “the still point of the turning world,” a metaphorical marker that takes on more and more significance as “Burnt Norton” and the rest of Four Quartets continue. The Third Tempter, too, will speak of how “time past is time forgotten,” and, far more noteworthy, Thomas, within moments of his death, will utter the line that later becomes one of the most frequently quoted from Four Quartets, let alone “Burnt Norton” itself, toward the close of the first section: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Still, as literary history would have it, it is directly from that discarded speech of the Second Priest that the poem “Burnt Norton” sprang, and it may have been for no other reason than that Eliot regarded the discarded verse as too valuable a turn of phrase and idea to never see the light of day. (Lengthy parts of the never completed “Sweeney Agonistes,” for example, would eventually find their way into “The Hollow Men.”) Whatever the case may have been, while “Burnt Norton” would not be published until it appeared in Collected Poems in April 1938, it is reasonable to assume that, particularly in view of its inclusion in a collection bringing together Eliot’s poetry up to 1935, the poem was composed and completed in 1935. In any event, that seemed to be an end to it. In August 1937, Eliot visited the Gloucestershire village of East Coker, taking photographs of such sites as St. Michael’s, the village church in this Eliot ancestral home (and in which Eliot’s ashes would eventually be interred in a memorial in a rear corner near the side entrance). By the late fall of 1939, compelled perhaps by the outbreak of

war among France, England, and Germany following the Nazi invasion and subsequent occupation of Poland in September of that year, Eliot began work on “East Coker.” A world and the values and way of life that it represented and that he had spent a creative and critical lifetime arguing to preserve seemed suddenly to be more in jeopardy than it ever had been before. He modeled the new poem on the five-part structure of “Burnt Norton,” its own structure modeled loosely, perhaps, on the five-part structure of The Waste Land. “East Coker” was completed in draft form by February 1940 and first published in the Easter 1940 issue of the New English Weekly, a socially conservative newspaper with which Eliot had begun an active editorial association in 1934, publishing articles and poetry in it for the next decade. When Faber published the poem in pamphlet form in September of the same year, it would sell 12,000 copies, a remarkable commentary on both Eliot’s renown and the poem’s capacity to embrace something that the reading public must have come to regard as quintessentially English. It was while he was composing “East Coker” that the further idea occurred to Eliot that he might compose four quartets, of which “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” would comprise the first two parts, that would be organized around the themes of the four elements and the four seasons. He composed “The Dry Salvages,” originally titled simply “Dry Salvages,” during the rest of 1940, sending off a complete first draft to his friend and confidante John Hayward on New Year’s Day 1941. The finished poem was published in the New English Weekly in February 1941. All that remained now was for Eliot to complete the fourth quartet, which would be placed in Little Gidding, the site of Ferrar’s community to whose remnant chapel Eliot had made a personal pilgrimage in May 1936. Thus far, world events had begun not so much to overwhelm as to preempt the focus of Eliot’s own poetic conceptions, however. He had wound up composing “The Dry Salvages,” which was to deal with the element of water, while England was fighting for its life to keep open the vital sea lanes between the United States and the British Isles, where critical shipping carrying war materiel

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A recent photograph of the East Coker village church that Eliot photographed when he first visited his ancestral village in August 1937. His ashes are now interred there. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

and other strategic supplies was the constant target of deadly attacks by German U-boats, or submarines. Now, as he began, in early 1941, to write the poetry of “Little Gidding,” the quartet whose element would be fire, London and surrounding English cities had been undergoing merciless aerial bombardments virtually on a nightly basis by the German Luftwaffe, or air force, since the previous September. The Nazi air “blitz” or Battle of Britain, as it subsequently became known, involved heavy bombing and extensive destruction throughout the heart of London, frequently igniting turbulent fires that would rage throughout the night. On May 10, 1941, for just one egregious example, 3,000 Londoners died as a result of these Nazi air raids. The destruction and its attendant fear not just for one’s life but for the life of one’s people and nation permeate the lines and imagery of “Little Gidding” and may account as well for the fact that,

although a first draft of the poem was completed in July 1941, Eliot was not satisfied with it. He would not take up the poem again until August 1942, completing a final version on September 19 after it had undergone five drafts. “Little Gidding” was published in the New English Weekly in October 1942, and the now completed sequence, Four Quartets, came out in book form in October of the following year. The war was still raging, and London was still the target of German air attacks.

APPROACHES TO READING THE POETRY In the spirit that forewarned is forearmed, any approach to the Four Quartets should encourage the reader to be prepared for a difficult read, but not an impossible one. Eliot was never a poet of the accessible, but there is reason to believe that one should also hold suspect poetry that is too accessible, certainly at least when it appears that the

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poet intended it to be that way to begin with. A remark like that is hardly intended as an argument for obscurity and obfuscation in poetry. Rather it is a reminder that, by its very nature, poetry confronts human issues and conditions that do not generally lend themselves to easy modes of representation, exposition, or explication. Eliot himself has been known to comment on the troubling increase in the levels of difficulty that confront the casual reader of the best contemporary poetry, and like it or not, that would be the sort of modernist poetry that Eliot himself composed. Nonetheless, he pleads for readers to understand the circumstances of modern life that compel such complexity in the art of poetry, and he goes as far as to contend that readers, when they encounter particularly difficult poetry, should take heart that the poet in question should find it possible to write at all. When all is said and done, Eliot’s observations are a comment on the stressfully chaotic nature of the times, not on the finer points of styling poetry. As regards the poetry of the Four Quartets, for all its apparently intentional obscurities, a style of writing for which Eliot, the poet of such modernist classics as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, had become understandably renowned, the obscurities of the Four Quartets qua poetry (a distinction that Eliot was often wont to make) are as well a comment on the stressfully chaotic nature of the times, during which a common body of cultural reference points was becoming more and more difficult to find even amid a culture as coherent and self-contained as England’s. That particular reality, more than anything else, accounts for the Four Quartet’s particular difficulties, which are not, however, as multifaceted as the difficulties to be found in much if not most of Eliot’s previous poetry. In approaching Eliot’s previous poetry, up to and including a poem as late as “Ash-Wednesday,” which had been published n 1930, a mere five years before Eliot composed “Burnt Norton,” a reader not armed with a cogent survey of the various sources that Eliot had called on for his network of allusions would likely feel unprepared for engaging the poetry. It is not to say that a reader familiarized with each and every allusion in these earlier poems of Eliot’s would in fact

be any better equipped for deciphering the poetry, as it were, than one who had no such familiarity. However, the richness of allusion in Eliot’s sort of poetry fosters the misconception that readers without this knowledge are necessarily excluded. There was a point in Eliot’s poetic career, when he was composing the notoriously obscure quatrain poems of the like of “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” when he may even have gone out of his way to foster such misconceptions. The case is quite the opposite with the poetry of the Four Quartets. It has its fair share of historical, literary, and biographical reference points, to be sure, but the separation between the poetry and the poet’s sources, whenever he brings them to bear, is so narrow that it is doubtful that gaining or missing the allusion will contribute in any serious way to gaining or missing the meaning. For example, Eliot’s use of the words of the 14th-century English mystic Julian of Norwich is a good case in point. These words of hers, most significantly “sin is behovely” and “all will be well,” come into play twice over in the closing sections of “Little Gidding,” and they help Eliot bring the thematic thrust of the entire sequence to a satisfactory resolution. Yet any readers totally ignorant of the literary source and historical context of those verses would not get so much less out of them that the lines would not achieve very much the same effect and thematic ends for the benefit of those otherwise ignorant readers. A similar case is Eliot’s image in “Little Gidding” IV of the “intolerable shirt of flame” that he tells his readers is “devised” by love. Commentators identify it as a classical allusion to an episode in the life of the mythic Greek hero Herakles. For attempting to rape Herakles’ wife, Deianira, the centaur Nessus was slain by Herakles, but not before the dying Nessus convinced Deianira that the blood from his wound, if smeared on a garment, would act as a love potion on whoever wore the garment. Later, when Deianira was afraid that she was losing Herakles to another woman, she followed Nessus’s advice, but he had tricked her, perhaps in order to gain a posthumous revenge on the hero. The blood-stained garment did not act as a love potion when the unwitting Herakles put it on, but instead as a poison that caused Herakles such unbearable

Four Quartets agony that he was able to escape the pain only by lighting his own funeral pyre and then ascending to Olympus in the consuming flames. The reader who accepts this rendering of Eliot’s image may be no nearer an understanding of his exact meaning, however, than the reader who is familiar instead with the story of another fleshburning garment, this one from Euripides’ Medea. In that Greek tragedy, in vengeance for her betrayal by the hero and her husband, Jason, Medea sends a poisoned garment as a wedding gift to Jason’s betrothed, a Corinthian princess. The moment that it touches her skin, it burns her flesh off, and the king, her father, who then rushes to her rescue, suffers a similar fate the moment that he touches her. Readers totally unaware of either possible source would still see meaning in the image if they were at least aware that it appears to allude to a moment from the London blitz. The notion behind the image is that of a Nazi dive-bomber firing its machine guns as it dives. Such a fusillade might very well devise figurative “shirt[s] of flame” for those poor human targets in the London streets below. Further, a reader armed with nothing more than a literary mind might catch in the idea of a “shirt of flame” an apt metaphysical conceit à la those 16th-century English poets such as JOHN DONNE whom Eliot was greatly influenced by in earlier phases of his career. In this last but hardly final case, the human flesh itself, rife as it is with the heat of desire and passion that is manifested in the blood coursing through one’s veins and arteries, is an “intolerable shirt of flame” enough for those who are subjected to the vagaries of human desire to give the passage both an equal richness and credence. The point is that readers do not need a scorecard to keep track of Eliot’s network of allusions in Four Quartets as much as they need to do—or feel they need to do—with, say, The Waste Land, and that is for the simple reason that the Four Quartets does not rely on the intentional development of such a network for the sake of implying meaning to any significant degree. Nevertheless, the Four Quartets is neither easy poetry nor structured so as to make its purpose and meaning obvious at any one point. Nor is the direction that the poetry is taking always completely self-evident in its transi-

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tions from section to section within each of the four poems constituting the complete sequence or, for that matter, from one poem to the next. There are, however, certain cues and motifs that act as markers from one segment of the text to another— the elements, the seasons, the significance of the varying locales—but these are all in the nature of macrostructures, as it were, and not likely to be of much assistance or comfort as one moves from line to line and stanza to stanza. How, then, one should read the poetry of the Four Quartets remains a problem even for the reader who approaches it as a self-contained poem. Indeed, neither will hoping to find a coherency in the poetry’s analogous musical structure, though it may carry the moment from time to time, carry the day. Music can be harmony, but harmony alone does not make for the sort of explicit statement that one has every right to expect of a poem as opposed to a work of pure music. There is, however, a consistent linking device from one line, one section, and one part of the Four Quartets to another, and it is a concentrated and concentrating sensibility. Whether that sensibility is Eliot’s or is a fictive projection (most likely it is some rich mixture of the two, inasmuch as no writer can be wholly himself or someone else), this speaker’s inquisitive and sensitively ruminative nature makes the various parts of the poem, for all that they may seem from time to time to be sharply at odds with themselves, flow one into another. The total effect is not hypnotic. Hardly. But the more one reads and, particularly, rereads the poetry, the voice of the speaker as he struggles toward an understanding of what can rightly be called nothing less than the experience of life itself becomes a reassurance both that this struggle toward understanding is worth the effort and that it can result not so much in victory as in peace. In summary, Four Quartets must be read again and again in order for the poem finally to become an experience of truth and of beauty—old terms, but no less germane even nowadays. Eliot’s is a poetry of our time. It is a rare treat and distinct honor to live so near the origins of a work that will no doubt be read and studied for centuries hereafter. And if Four Quartets is worth the future’s attention, it is certainly well worth ours.

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SYNOPSIS “Burnt Norton” The extremely abstract nature of the poetry that opens “Burnt Norton,” the first in order of composition and placement of Eliot’s Four Quartets, no doubt is as likely to put even the most stalwart readers off as much as the confusions regarding voice and setting put readers off The Waste Land before they have barely gotten started. In the case of The Waste Land, however, even amid doubts as to who is speaking and what is being spoken about and why he or she is speaking about it, there is still the semblance of the concrete realities of the months and the seasons, dried tubers and Hofgartens and sleds, cousins and archdukes, to make a reader imagine that something is occurring somewhere to someone, even if none of it is very clear. Part I By sharp contrast, the opening stanza of “Burnt Norton,” which runs nearly as long as its counterpart in The Waste Land and even bears a resemblance to it in its arrangement on the page, is striking for its dearth of concrete reference points, so that the reader is left to ponder nothing more or less than the import of the words themselves, rather than to which external realities they refer or the particular nature of the speaker that they call to mind. Nor should readers imagine that that is not the very effect that Eliot is hoping to achieve. The poem begins with what by now has become its famous reflection on the relationship among the past, the present, and the future, replete with a “perhaps,” typical of Eliot, that undercuts with a further vagueness the vagueness of these musings. Just then, this relatively metaphysical bit of reflecting on whether the future is a component of the past, the past and present components of the future, is ratcheted up a notch into a realm of thought that seems to be far more spiritual if not theological in nature. Terms redolent of redemption and eternity enter the picture, but if it is hard to resist the possibility that these matters may be far more critical than the tone of mere musings has initially implied, then the tone then drifts back the other way. Philosophically vague words such as abstraction and speculation now weave a spell of

merely idle reflection again, until, it seems, at least some conclusion is reached. This is that “[w]hat might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present,” bringing the entire exercise back full circle to “time present,” where it had, a mere 10 lines earlier, begun. A merry chase it has been, nevertheless, but even that resolution, such as it is, is only momentary. In a poetry that has thus far been nothing but abstractions, the sudden introduction of concrete details, even if they seem to have only a figurative reality, enter the reader’s consciousness with the very sort of thud that “footfalls echo[ing]” down a passage not taken toward a door “never opened / Into the rose-garden” call up with this sudden intrusion into the verse of the distractive and actual. The reader’s senses, however, are being flooded not with sensations but with their memory, and then the reader is rudely reminded that even these are just words, in any case, echoing in the mind, suggesting that these sensory realities are, in the final analysis, no more real or substantial than the earlier abstract musings about the nature of time. Why disturb the dust one finds “on a bowl of rose-leaves,” the speaker then asks, suggesting in good Eliot fashion again, that he does not know the answer. Yet why, too, gather rose leaves up in a bowl except to preserve them as souvenirs of an event associated with them, an event that one not only does not want to forget but also wishes to commemorate as well? This querulous examination of the interface among time and the passage of time and memory is followed now by an equally puzzling mix of the likely with the unlikely, the possible with the impossible, the ponderable with the imponderable. The reader is invited to follow “other echoes” into the very rose garden that had just been introduced as one that has never been entered, although it may be, on reflection, that it has never before been entered by that particular door at the end of that particular passage. This strange push-and-pull of the poetry thus far, which asserts a reality only to undermine its validity, calls to mind Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland. With its vibrating between the literal and the figurative, the abstract and the concrete, such a poetic technique has been Eliot’s way

Four Quartets of representing the kind of reality between dream and waking that he has explored so frequently in earlier poetry that it has virtually become a hallmark of his unique style of versifying. From the human voices that wake Prufrock only to drown him in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to the shadow that falls between the motive and the action in “The Hollow Men,” Eliot’s has always been the poetry of altered states of consciousness that have been altered not by external agents but by internal turmoil and confusions. That is, in fact, the most peculiarly modernist feature of his verse, its focus on disruptions to interior states of being, and these disjunctions are no less prominent in “Burnt Norton.” Here Eliot, instead of presenting them at their extremes of difference, presents them at those junctures where the distinction between the one and the other—the past and the present, for example, or the present and the future, memory and experience—are so near to

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each other as to be barely perceptible. Rather than lamenting the disjunctions, it is as if he is celebrating their essential associations in the hope that they all must point in a single direction nevertheless. Therefore, for all practical purposes, all distinctions become imperceptible, until, in this rose garden that may or may not be real, there is music in the rustling shrubbery and sunlight may appear to be water in a pool that a passing cloud can then suddenly “empty.” The bird that calls, the hidden children who laugh, are both there and not there as well, echoing the past as memory and the present as a remembrance of itself in its passing. All that one is left knowing, and certainly all that the speaker knows, is that one was there, and then one was not there. He calls it “our first world,” a state of being or mind or spirit (or all three) that may be childhood or innocence or the Garden of Eden (or all three) that point to something, collectively, that all of us have forgotten yet can suddenly remember.

A shaded lane at Burnt Norton. Eliot and Emily Hale may have made their way along this path in the summer of 1934 when they visited the manor grounds. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

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In the same way, the children could be symbolic of a blissfully ignorant innocence. They could be, like any children, the speaker’s recollection of those first human associations that everyone has before processes of maturation occur. They could be specimens from the childhood of a human race now grown jaded with an excess of history and progress. Or they could be Adam and Eve, for that matter. For the reader somewhat familiar with particular details from Eliot’s biography, the children could even be more youthful manifestations of Eliot and Emily Hale. She was an early love with whom he took up again in the 1930s after his marriage to his first wife, Vivien, had dissolved, first emotionally and then socially, in the earlier part of that decade. Shortly before the poem’s composition, Eliot, it is known, had visited the ruined English country home that is the site of the poem, in company with Hale, while she was vacationing in England, apparently to be with him. Clearly, any one of these explanations, and many another, is as likely to be the answer that might resolve all these various possibilities, and these resolutions are as varied as the questions that readers might provide. The real point is that the poem, like all good poems, and the poet, like all good poets, may raise but never answers these sorts of questions regarding source and meaning, since they raise a myriad of questions of their own within the text. These questions may be categorized under the general topic heading, “What Is Reality?,” and they seem constantly to point the reader in the general direction of coming to recognize that reality is of no fixed shape or meaning—at least not for very long. “What might have been, and what has been,” are all too often not very distinguishable from each other in the blur of memory in which, from the point of view of the present, the past is always contemplated. Seen another way, the present is a forever haunted by a never-ceasing past. The poem’s locale, Burnt Norton, supports this somewhat spectral reading of Eliot’s intentionally enigmatic opening. The speaker is puzzled by the presence of the past in a present that is perpetually merging flawlessly with the future partly, at least, because he is himself standing in the unkempt ruins of the formal gardens of an English country manor

that was completely destroyed by fire centuries earlier. Invariably, he has been made mindful of a structure, a great house as they say, that is no longer there, of pools in which water no longer lies, of sounds among the hedges and shrubs that resemble what they cannot be. It is the ponderous weight of all this present reality—of how more has passed than there ever, at any one moment, can be—that brings these doleful musings, half philosophical, half spiritual, toward a purpose that even the speaker cannot discern but that the presence of a bird, in its own perpetual comings and goings, can nevertheless articulate: “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Nothing conclusive comes out of all this; nothing should. It is, after all, only the beginning of a poem sequence that will not only involve the next half-decade and more of Eliot’s creative life, but that will, as the Four Quartets, become his greatest masterpiece. Beginnings are, of course, important, although often their significance cannot be known until, ironically, they are recognized in terms of whatever they began comes itself into being. In the case of “Burnt Norton,” this beginning sets a tone and demarcates the ensuing poem’s thematic boundaries. With regard to tone, the poet who made his early reputation by displaying a rich talent for liberally mixing levels and kinds of discourse makes it clear that he has not changed his legendary approach one iota in this later poetry, although he has toned down his earlier flamboyance and audaciousness considerably. There is as a result a rich variety of poetic voices and concerns expressed in this opening section, although the range of difference and contrasts among them might not have been executed so much in an effort to affront and confuse his reader, as Eliot had seemed to be wont to do earlier, as in an effort to represent honestly the confusion that experience, “reality,” is. Indeed, despite his constantly appearing to be frustrating each new line of reasoning or exposition as it occurs, in “Burnt Norton” Eliot seems to be far more interested in and intent on getting his point across, although the wary reader should always be on guard whenever Eliot’s intentions appear to be so transparent as to be self-evident.

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This empty pool, referred to in “Burnt Norton” I, is on the lower of two terraces at Burnt Norton, the English country manor that provided the inspiration for the quartet of that name. Eliot visited the grounds on a walking tour of the area with Emily Hale in 1934; the house itself was destroyed by fire in the mid-18th century. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

There can be no denying that this opening passage, then, appears to enunciate a number of themes straightforwardly if not emphatically. The passage of time and its effects assuredly is one of Eliot’s themes. Place and its associations with individual identity and growth surely comprise another. The ramifications of thinking too closely on the event, as WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s Hamlet so nicely puts it, whereby the overintellectualization and analysis of experience become emotionally and morally paralyzing, may very well be a third major theme for the ensuing poem, especially if this first section is regarded as an indicator. It can be said, too, that as one continues to read through “Burnt Norton” and then on through the remaining three poems of Four Quartets, these thematic expectations will not go unrewarded or unfulfilled. By the same token, however, this is poetry, not expository or persuasive prose, and expecting

these or any other thematic considerations to be the be-all and end-all of either the poet’s aim for the poetic text or the reader’s reward for having read it will severely diminish the experience of the Four Quartets as poetry. It is particularly important, then, for the reader to remember that Eliot is not only a poet first and foremost but a poet who, in virtually all of his critical writings, stresses poetry as its own species of human communication, one whose primary consideration is hardly ever a purely thematic one. In the 1942 essay, “The Music of Poetry,” which came relatively late in the period involving his composition of the Four Quartets, he seems to express what he had in mind when he struck, as he had often done in the past, a musical analogy to identify the quality and nature of the poetry that he was then writing. In that essay, though he confesses to having little technical musical expertise,

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he recommends that poets should think of those properties that poetry and music have in common, and he identifies them as “the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure.” Lest associations be made from the musical to the dramatic stage, an area to which he was devoting more and more of his own creative energies and attention, Eliot further recommends that poets begin to think more in terms of the concert hall than the opera stage for their musical models, a likely allusion to his intentions for the Quartets, which were then in the final stages of completion. Indeed, he concludes, “There are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet.” What these later remarks on the music of poetry ought powerfully to encourage the reader both to imagine and to keep in mind is that, beyond and perhaps more significant than the substance of statement in “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets, is its musical quality. That would be meant in those very broad categories of structure and of rhythms, exactly as Eliot has just described, nor are they difficult to discern. Granted, those to-and-fro rhythms of the philosophical and spiritual and personal musings with which “Burnt Norton” begins are significant. They are significant, surely, for the interactions of the somewhat conflicting ideas that the poetry is expressing, but that should not be regarded as what Eliot might have meant by the musical substance of either the poetry or the poetic effect of those same verses. Rather, and especially if Eliot is taken at his word, their substance is found in the way in which the vagaries of those reflections conduct the reader’s responsiveness this way and that, mimicking the so-called wind of thought—those verses’ musical quality, in other words, as Eliot would later define it. This notion of thought as a wind is another one of those double-edged metaphorical swords that appealed to Eliot’s modernist love of irony and paradox. Thought is a wind in the way that it can inspire and reinvigorate; thought is a wind in the way that, for all its apparent substance and force, it is still finally just so much empty air. To the litany of themes already set forth, then, yet another might be added: the manner

in which patterns of thought and feeling and language themselves create meaning. These poems, beginning with “Burnt Norton,” are indeed, after all, four quartets. It may not always be easy to remember this metaphorically structural reference point that Eliot provides as one becomes caught up instead in the web of reference and insinuation that the poetry as statement alone inspires. Nonetheless, it would be a serious disservice both to the poetry and to the reading experience to forget the musical analogy altogether. Not that Eliot allows the musicality both of the poetry and of patterns of human experience that emerge from the poetry to be too easily forgotten. If music, like poetry, is patterns of structure and rhythm, so are the activities of nature and of humans. These are often called mythic patterns because, in their cyclical repetitions and renewals, they become the larger and larger patterns by which the human imagination both organizes life itself and renders it meaningful. If the first section of “Burnt Norton” has established these basic themes and structural principles as being those by which Eliot likely composed the poetry, then it is by those same themes and structural principles that the poetry can, as it now continues, most profitably be regarded. Part II Accepting the poetry foremost as musical in both form and movement, there should be less of a shock to the reader’s expectations for a reasonable transition when the second section of the poem commences with a highly lyrical turn announced by the startling image of “[g]arlic and sapphires in the mud.” It is extremely doubtful that any reader’s knowing that this is a direct allusion, albeit translated, from a poem by the 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé would assist that reader in knowing any better what the image, for all its richness, might mean. Nor would it be of much further help to know that Mallarmé was one of the French SYMBOLIST poets who had such a considerable influence on Eliot when he was first starting out as a poet during his Harvard student days. Rather, as might be suspected, the image is best considered in terms of itself and of the apparent

Four Quartets import of the lyrical passage that it now introduces. Once more the reader ought to discover that it is not sources and meanings but patterns—those musiclike formulations of structure and rhythms— and their interweaving that are at issue. In isolation from any possible associations with outside sources, this opening image seems foremost to recommend a contrast between that which is vital and organic and nourishing, namely, garlic, and that which is wholly inanimate and mineral and of little practical use, sapphires. Those first recognitions of contrasts, whatever they may be for each particular reader, can call up only further ones, of course, all of them developing from the traditional associations that garlic and sapphire may call up: things of intrinsic value versus those of extrinsic value, things that are subject to decay and corruption versus those that do not alter except over vast spaces of time, things that are cheap because they are numerous versus those that are valued because they are rare, things that are commonplace and ordinary versus those that are precious because they are spectacularly extraordinary, things that are underrated and undervalued versus those that are overrated and overvalued. The list could go on, as each new series of associative contrasts calls up another. There are similarities, too, of course, the most startling perhaps that, lodged in a medium as thick and obscuring as mud, one could easily be mistaken for the other. The hard sheen of a peeled clove of garlic, after all, could easily match in both size and visual texture the cold sparkle of a sapphire when the eye catches sight of either and both are mixed in a substance as thick as mud. Indeed, the entire imagistic assemblage, in this light, provides an apt metaphor for the confusions of sense and outward things that sensory experience all too frequently is liable to be for the individual. What, then, does the image tell the reader, if it is not what the first section of “Burnt Norton” has already taken pains to demonstrate in its confusions among past, present, and future, experiences and the memory of them, and that is that it is all too easy to confuse a thing not just for its opposite, but for something that is in sharp contrast if not even strong conflict with it. Pattern itself implies

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disruption, indeed, requires it in order for the pattern to emerge, whereas what the soul or the mind most desires is that there be some constant within the eternal present toward which all time and all possibilities point. Shortly Eliot will give that constant both a name and a habitation; he will call it “the still point of the turning world.” But first there are other reminders of ceaselessly forming and reforming patterns and patterning that both measure out and disrupt the singular reality that makes up experience. As this lyric passage that opens the second section of the poem continues, the reader is told that the blood flows beneath “inveterate scars,” meaning ageless scars, just as flesh has been ceaselessly torn and healed and torn again. There are other patterns “figured in the drift of stars” and in “the figured leaf.” Yet another ceaseless pattern, the pattern of pursuit—“the boarhound and the boar,” the hunter and the hunted—follows. These patterns may be “reconciled among the stars,” but the stars are cast into ceaselessly unfolding patterns of their own. Reality seems to be nothing more, as a consequence, than patterns within patterns within patterns. Change one’s point of view and the pattern changes accordingly, but the pattern of those patterns is itself unaltered. In such a view of things, there cannot be anything that is constant and yet still changing, a Great Pattern, as it were, complete and yet fluid, in flux. This one thing Eliot makes the desideratum, the grail that the speaker seeks, and, as already observed, he calls it the still point. There, he tells the reader now, “the dance is,” for it is that point where all patterns converge and merge. This dance is “neither arrest nor movement,” nor is it fair to “call it fixity.” It is not a movement up or down, from or toward, and while it is a place one can be, it is not located in time or in space. The more he speaks of this “place,” the more it emerges as a state not of mind but of being. Its source can be traced in Eliot’s thought to his early studies of the British idealist philosopher F. H. BRADLEY and his concept of immediate experience, which Eliot discussed at some length in his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.”

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The poetry supports this assumption by introducing a term, Erhebung, that is drawn directly from the early 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas influenced Bradley. Erhebung and immediate experience, with their insinuations of an elevation and authenticating of the ordinary, would both contain within themselves the ideas that Eliot is seeking to concretize in his still point, which is both within and outside ordinary experience. The fact remains, however, that this is poetry, not philosophy or any other kind of expository presentation. So, then, this “completion of . . . partial ecstasy” and “resolution of . . . partial horror” cannot ever be adequately expressed except through an accumulation of detail that is as lyrical as spiritual, as philosophical as literary, and as sensible as paradoxical, since all are patterns that poetry alone can reconcile into a semblance, itself “still and still moving,” of what the still point is. Ultimately the idea is expressed in the religious terminology of heaven and damnation, but whichever way the poetry and, with it, the poet’s attention turns, the words can never quite do anything more than point to it in the perpetual image of the rose garden. “To be conscious is not to be in time,” demarcates one edge of the dilemma, yet “[o]nly through time is time conquered,” and that idea demarcates the other. Stretched across these extremes, human experience becomes something that “flesh cannot endure” except as it translates the purity of wholeness into those ceaselessly interweaving and interwoven patterns and pretends, as it must, to see all meaning and movement begin and end there. For all their problematic qualities, and they are considerable, the first two sections of “Burnt Norton” provide the reader with the bright possibility of a common center to experience whereby all experience is rendered inherently meaningful. But that is in the rose garden. Part III The third part of this first quartet is in a different venue and a different key. The “place of disaffection” is the very icon of the vacuity and despair associated with modern urban life: It is the sub-

way, in this case the famous London tube. Eliot was not the first poet to use the subway as a type for the vacuity if not hellish inevitabilities of modern urban life. The contemporary American poet Hart Crane, in his attempt at a modernist epic, The Bridge, depicts in one of the last sections of that work, “The Tunnel,” the dark side of city life through a descent into the sordid and filthy world deep underground in the dark reaches of the New York subway system. Indeed, as the editor of the Criterion, Eliot would publish Crane’s “The Tunnel” in that literary journal in the late 1920s. Not to say that, in terms of offering a hellish vision of contemporary life in a major Western metropolis, Eliot himself had not led the way, at least for English-language readers, with his image of the walking dead traversing London Bridge in “Burial of the Dead,” the opening section of The Waste Land. Images such as these from the early Eliot inspired the response from Crane that eventually became, in The Bridge, his positive vision of the modern city. In “Burnt Norton,” Eliot takes his reader into a crowded subway car carrying its weary urban dwellers leading lives in which they are “[d]istracted from distraction by distraction.” Like the “hollow men” of Eliot’s 1925 poem of the same name, these crowds of humanity with their “time-ridden faces” find themselves in an infernal twilight zone, neither here nor there, caught in a “[t]ime before and a time after” (“suspended between memory and desire” is how Eliot had expressed the same idea in opening lines of The Waste Land). What these modern urban travelers are missing is any engaging present or engagement with it. That is why they seem dead, and their environ seems like hell—because for all intents and purposes they are dead to and within the living moment of immediate experience, “the still point” of part two of “Burnt Norton.” Here, too, Eliot suggests, come false resolutions to life’s dilemma. The movement is movement for only the most trivial and transient of purposes, just as there are others who move not at all but to as little purpose. Meanwhile, “the world moves / . . . on its metalled ways” rapidly toward nowhere, and certainly not toward the rose garden, but carrying the vast quantity of modern urban humanity along

Four Quartets nevertheless, mindless passengers staring vacantly ahead on their way toward nowhere. (An exposure to Eliot may very likely have inspired the Beatles 1960s anthem, “Nowhere Man.”) Part IV As the poem continues, Eliot continues to follow somewhat the five-part structural model of The Waste Land, whose part IV, “Death by Water,” is the shortest of that poem’s five sections and seems on the surface to be an opaque lyrical interlude but proves to be instead a passage that summarizes all that has come before it. Similarly, the fourth section of “Burnt Norton” is equally short and, on the surface, puzzlingly opaque; yet it, too, makes a summary point that accounts for all the musings that have come before it in the present text. The day is buried; a black cloud conceals the sun. The speaker ponders whether it is then that the sunflower will “turn to us.” In the absence of any other light, the poet seems to be asking, “Are we light enough for this dark world?” The reader quickly gathers that it is death—the thought of death and of its reality—that is catching up with speaker: Will the “[c]hill / Fingers of the yew be curled / Down on us?” The yew tree grows by tradition in English country churchyards, its tendrils fed by the corpses of the faithful buried there, lost now permanently to time before and after and present, at least on this plane of existence. It is, indeed, a chilling thought. And yet, even in our absence or freedom from time, there still must be “the light . . . / At the still point of the turning world,” or the hope for it. With the individual’s engaging consciousness, or without it, the music goes on, and Eliot uses the kingfisher, a traditional image for the Christ, to stress that, while that may not be the way of the world, which tracks its own fixed—“metalled”—ways, it is the way of the eternity that contains all things and out of which the rose garden, like the lotos and the rose, the sunflower and the yew tree, blooms. Part V The fourth part having clarified what is at stake in no uncertain terms, the fifth part is able to reassert with an earned confidence the tenuous and querulous sentiments regarding time and eternity that

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parts I and II had barely been able to entertain, let alone sustain. The problem with all of Eliot’s poetry is that processes of clarification can often lead to oversimplification, if not in practice, then at least in appearance. This problem is peculiarly exacerbated in the Four Quartets for the very reason that Eliot is trying to write a less complex and convoluted poetry than had come to be expected of him; at the same time, he is dealing with such extremely knotty problems regarding time and life and death that generally must always resolve themselves, if at all, only in the hair-splitting ambiguities of paradox and double-think. Another way of putting it is that the kind of poetry that he is attempting to produce in “Burnt Norton” is not entertaining poetry, but it is worthwhile poetry. That, however, is the very point why and where the musical analogy proves to be so valuable to his purposes. In addition to its analogous uses, after all, it should be clear by now how Eliot is using this musical analogy as a structural model as well. Specifically, music, like thought, advances largely through the principle of point and counterpoint. In other words, its harmonies, too, are based on the resolution of opposites or of terms in conflict, exactly as the paradoxical in thought processes operates. If nowhere else in the sequence that is the Four Quartets, the fifth and final section of “Burnt Norton” operates on this very principle of musical analogy and on the structural similarities among music, thought, and language or poetry by addressing their perplexities directly and openly. “Words move, music moves,” the speaker, who had just identified the dangers of mistaking movement for meaningful action, tells his reader. But movement, though it may be a characteristic of life in the dynamic of its processes, is not a feature of the perfection that the speaker seems to be seeking, for “that which is living / Can only die.” Life is the burden, but it may not be the way. The problem is a serious one. If there is perfection, it must be an accessible reality, but anything accessed within the confines of lived experience, even something as abstract as music, can and must be constantly transmuted merely in order to exist and, so, is itself subject to decay and its own demise or at least termination, and neither

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of those ends can be regarded as having achieved the goal of perfection or of the still point. That, surely, is why Eliot suddenly introduces the image of the Chinese jar. It is both still and, in its three-dimensional beauties and luster, still moving; yet, being a reasonably constant thing, it is not subject like words or like music to change and pass away before it has barely been contemplated. For any reader familiar with John Keats’s celebrated ode, his Grecian urn should be seen to be reappearing in Eliot’s jar, inasmuch as both poets seek to find a moving experience in a fixed object. In neither case is the poet’s supposition true, of course, inasmuch as both objects, as objects, are as equally liable to ruin and decay as any other. But since such an otherwise solid object changes a great deal less rapidly relative to words or music (in Keats’s case, it was the song of a nightingale that “fled,” whereas the urn, though it is silent, does speak), the urn/jar’s capacity to sustain the illusion of changelessness is certainly a satisfactory resolution for the speaker since that is all that he is really after—a way of bodying forth something as insubstantial as the truth. Surely, if nothing else, the Chinese jar, as object, is far more substantial than words that “strain, / Crack and sometimes break,” and “slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision.” Worse, they “[w]ill not stay still,” whereas, like it or not, the Chinese jar will, so it suits the speaker’s purpose. What ultimately suits the speaker’s purpose, however, is the theme of love. It will become more and more, as the poetry proceeds, the theme of the Four Quartets, superseding and eventually subsuming the great philosophical and theological themes of time and eternity with which the Four Quartets, by virtue of “Burnt Norton,” opens. Being brought to bear at the very close of “Burnt Norton,” this great theme gets from the speaker what may appear to be only a passing, perhaps even merely a begrudging or perfunctory nod: “Love is itself unmoving,” he says, and the reader should recall how important stillness is for this speaker, caught up like all the rest of humanity in the frenetic pace and distracting demands of life itself, let alone those demands as they are compounded by the social and cultural pressures of so-called civilization. Furthermore,

love is “[t]imeless and undesiring,” and the reader should recall as well how crucial those traits are too to the speaker’s ideal experience, seeing that he has been obsessed by time’s passage and worldly distractions. Love, indeed, seems to be a far more apt trope for what the speaker is truly seeking than any Chinese jar may ever be. In mind of love, he hears once more the laughter of the children in the foliage, a laughter that is lost in the rose garden but is, like Wordsworth’s blessed shore in his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” never more than the next split second in perception away. Concluding “Burnt Norton,” one might almost go as far as to say that love is precisely what the speaker of “Burnt Norton” has been, or should have been, seeking all along. He still has a long way to go, however—virtually to the end of the Four Quartets, in the closing passages of “Little Gidding”—before he shall discover that for himself. For now, he can only lament “the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.” Time past and time future both end in the present, be it what it may, and as “Burnt Norton” closes, the speaker has come no more than full circle, or so it appears. And yet, full circle may itself be progress, as the poet of “Ash-Wednesday” knows. In that signal work of his, published in 1930, Eliot’s speaker ascends a spiral staircase, so that although he comes upon a window opening on a vista that he has already seen, it is nevertheless being viewed from the vantage point of a higher plane. In the same way, “Burnt Norton” may appear to be doing, and to have accomplished, nothing more than to be circling the same imponderables of time and space and one’s relationship to those intractable coordinates, but that is only if we judge the poetic presentation by the standards of proposition and conclusion. That is to say, if the poetry of “Burnt Norton” is viewed as a prose argument, which it resembles, by the poem’s closing Eliot does not seem to have extended the terms of the thematic engagement, only reiterated it—and that several times over. If the poetic statement of “Burnt Norton” is judged by a musical paradigm, on the other hand, one in which a motif is not merely advanced but

Four Quartets enlarged upon by repeated variations on it, then “Burnt Norton” is far more than repeated stabs in the dark at those ultimate mysteries connoted by time and eternity. It is rather a progressive enlargement of the imaginative means by which those mysteries can be expressed and visualized from the point of view of the experiences of a single individual, in this case, the poem’s speaker. In that way, too, “Burnt Norton” weds music, poetry, and, in the truest sense of the word’s meaning, philosophy, thereby setting a tone for the remainder of the Four Quartets to follow. For philosophy is the love of wisdom, and it is wisdom that the speaker of “Burnt Norton” is seeking.

“East Coker” As has already been established, Eliot uses several other overarching organizational principles in the Four Quartets, in addition to the primary ones of the poetry’s musical parallels. The most prominent among these other principles guiding the poetry’s composition, structure, and themes is a distinguishing emphasis on each of the four elements—air, earth, water, and fire—accomplished by identifying each of the four poems with one of the four. Also, each of the quartets is set in, if not ruled by, a particular, actual locale that has some associations for the poet, either of a biographical nature or of an intimate personal nature. For example, as much as “Burnt Norton” may seem to reflect the element of earth, what with how much the poetry emphasizes those moments the speaker longs to spend free from longing in the rose garden, it is a critical commonplace that the poetry of “Burnt Norton,” with its obsessive interest in philosophical abstractions and metaphysical speculations regarding time and experience, in fact focuses on the element of air in the sense that that is what such deep and often fruitless or pointless thought is composed of—airy nothings. As a locale, meanwhile, aside from what is known of Eliot’s visit there with Emily Hale very near the time that he composed the poetry of “Burnt Norton,” Burnt Norton is not specifically noteworthy otherwise. Indeed, its sole claim to any enduring fame is the fact that it figures notably in one of Eliot’s major works.

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The locale for the next poem in the sequence that together make up the Four Quartets, “East Coker,” shares some of the same characteristics with Burnt Norton. A small village in Gloucestershire in the southwest of England, East Coker is a pleasant enough place that would otherwise be no more noteworthy than dozens of similarly pleasant and picturesque venues throughout the English countryside had it not, too, achieved great literary fame as the focus of the second of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Unlike Burnt Norton, however, a locale that has specific but still only casual associations with the poet’s life, East Coker, by sharp contrast, has general but nevertheless indelible connections with Eliot personally. It was from this village that Andrew Eliot, the founder of the American branch of the poet’s family, left for one of England’s New World colonies, specifically Massachusetts, in the mid-16th century. East Coker, in other words, is the Eliots’ ancestral home. Part I “In my beginning is my end,” the speaker intones as “East Coker” opens, words that take on a fuller meaning in the light of the village’s particular significance for the poet. These words, reversed, are the motto of Mary Stuart. As Mary, Queen of Scots was one of the many villains/victims in the religious

A country lane just outside the village of East Coker, the Eliots’ ancestral home and the locale for the quartet of the same name (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

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turmoil that tore the English people apart after Henry VIII severed all ties with the authority of the Roman Catholic papacy in 1533. A Catholic rival to Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, Mary devised the motto during her imprisonment in 1568. She was executed for treason in 1587. Beyond this connection to late 16th- and 17thcentury English religious, social, and political history, the words of the motto have several significances of their own for Eliot’s immediate purposes. For one thing, once it has been introduced into the poetry, the idea continues to serve as a frequent philosophical refrain throughout the remainder of the sequence. If nothing else, it provides a handy means of picturesquely summing up of all those philosophical musings regarding time, memory, and mortality that permeated the verse of “Burnt Norton.” Regarded strictly in terms of itself, the motto provides its own anchor for verse that all too often seems to be on the verge of slipping away into the vagueness of reflection. The idea that one’s death is contained in one’s birth, one’s goals in one’s aspirations, is not a uniquely new one, of course. Similar ideas are embraced in the image of eternity as a circle or ring, or as a snake devouring itself. The idea partakes of paradox as well, in keeping with a conceptual strategy already introduced in “Burnt Norton,” whereby every thought and feeling brought to bear seems to be accompanied by its own necessary and contradictory opposite. Certainly there is the same effect in the thought that one’s end can be found in one’s beginning. For “end” has an easily discernible double meaning. It can be one’s end in the sense of a termination point, but it can also suggest one’s aim or goal. As the poet had already warned his readers at the conclusion of “Burnt Norton,” words decay with imprecision. It should be no wonder that “East Coker,” by opening with a brain-teasing paradox, begins with a vivid reminder of just how true that can be. Words provoke meaning more often than they provide it, it seems. Finally, there is irony if not bitter paradox, too, in the fact that the religious strife associated with Mary, from whose “tattered arras” the motto is taken, was just another, earlier chapter in the religious contention and persecution that contin-

ued to plague England well into the 17th century. Andrew Eliot would have been of a different religious party from the Roman Catholicism that had been practiced by Mary, numbering himself by his time no doubt among the dissenters from the socalled established church headed by the king. It is generally assumed, nevertheless, that it was for religious reasons that Andrew Eliot left East Coker, permitting his distant heir, the poet T. S. Eliot, to be born in St. Louis, Missouri. “In my beginning is my end,” indeed. From here the poet started, in a manner of speaking. To here the poet returns, also in a manner of speaking. Every beginning is an end, as he will soon note, every end a beginning. This opening section of “East Coker” also clearly represents the element of earth, the “significant soil,” as the poet calls it, out of which all living things spring and to which they return. If “Burnt Norton,” then, had concerned itself with conceptual time, time as a philosophical construct of mind, “East Coker” concerns itself with generational time. Time here is the means of measuring and calculating the production of the harvest and the births, marriages, and deaths of those who plant and reap the harvest, and who are eventually planted in countless country churchyards, recalling the far reach of the chill fingers of the yew tree of the fourth section of “Burnt Norton.” This is the human universe of birth, copulation, and death, the be-all and end-all of Sweeney in “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot’s aborted verse drama. There Eliot makes those processes seem tedious, but it is from their cyclic rituals of renewal that the poet/ speaker’s own flesh, like all flesh, springs. The new emerges from out of the detritus of the past and then returns to it. As the speaker strolls a lane in this country village where he is himself rooted and his roots are planted in the surrounding earth, itself compounded of all that and all those who came before him, he imagines a summer midnight in an open field, pipes and a drum and a bonfire, and his ancestors dancing. The archaic-sounding English into which the passage suddenly breaks is more than Eliot’s way of marking the moment as one belonging to that time when Andrew Eliot or his forbears would have been there. The words come from a 16th-century

Four Quartets work by another Eliot ancestor, Sir Thomas Elyot’s Book of the Governour, and in the passage that Eliot has selected, Elyot compares the dance to matrimony, matrimony to a dance, in which man and woman are joined for the propagation of further life. Reading this passage, the reader may be made mindful of the still point from “Burnt Norton,” the point where the dance is. This present dance, however, keeps time with the passing seasons and their requirements, the “time of milking and of harvest / The time of the coupling of man and woman / And that of beasts.” Such a vision is both provocative and compelling, echoing as it does both the power of desire and the requirements of a biological necessity that drives all nature. It is interesting that the speaker only observes this scene and comments on it and that he seems to have little desire to join it or find his own place in it. And yet he neither can nor will deny that it is from out of that dance that his own flesh emerges, from which further emerges the questioning and isolated consciousness that dominates “Burnt Norton.” Then the dawn comes, with the “heat and silence” of a new day. If that portends a movement back toward those places and moments of disaffection, where one is distracted from distraction by distraction, still, there is new knowledge in the clear implication that the lives of the speaker’s ancestors were ultimately no different. After such midnight revelries, there must always come the glaringly dull business of the workaday world, whose own demands, like nature’s, are unrelenting. The point is that now the speaker knows that that dance of nature and its forces, though shrouded and exercised in the darkness of its own ongoing mysteries, underlies the urban landscape’s zero day, for “I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.” Part II An evolving structural method for the sequence is also hinted at in the motto. This becomes readily apparent as the second section of “East Coker” opens with a lyrical passage, in keeping with the way in which the second section of “Burnt Norton” had opened. Just as each of the four poems that compose the Four Quartets as a sequence play variations on each particular theme that will then be given a different twist in the succeeding poems, so will the

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manner in which each section of each poem is laid out and constructed follow a common pattern, but in a way that is, of course, unique to each poem. This Chinese-box approach is, in essence, cubed so that the musical connotations of such a structuring principle take on a virtually prismatic effect, elements from one poem not merely resembling but reflecting and refracting coordinate sections from the other three. The result is that, although poetry, like music, is a linear art, the Quartets act on each other as if they were a simultaneous whole. “In my beginning is my end.” The lyric passage of section two of “East Coker” introduces, as its earlier counterpart in “Burnt Norton” had, the theme from the point of view of its most poetic coordinates, assuming that poetic here means, in the popular sense, less keyed in to reality. In that sense of the term, the next 17 lines beginning with the words, “What is the late November doing,” are nonetheless hardly watered down in their substance or beauty, so that a reader fresh out of the more prosaic passages of the first section of “East Coker” would hardly imagine that these 17 lines, as beautiful as they are, are merely a setup on the poet’s part. But a setup they nevertheless indeed are, though to what purpose, or end, the reader is left to ponder. So, then, in those first 17 lines of the second section of “East Coker” the poet/speaker muses in rather expansively poetical terms on how all things move toward “that destructive fire / Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.” The poetic passage is appropriate, too, coming hard on the heels of the first sections long meditation on all those preceding generations that have gone under earth’s lid, as the old saw goes. No sooner is the passage ended, however, than the poet, inasmuch as he may be regarded as the speaker, steps out of character to comment, negatively, on the poetic passage that has just transpired. “That was a way of putting it,” he tells his reader, and then he criticizes its “worn-out poetical fashion” in no uncertain terms, calling it “periphrastic,” that is to say, wordy and circumlocutory. Such is the poetic style, in fact, that had been all the rage and was on its way out when the early 19th-century English poet William Wordsworth had criticized it nearly a century and a half earlier. Wordsworth,

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however, had criticized it in a prose preface to his collection Lyrical Ballads, not in a poem and certainly not immediately after tricking his reader into accepting it as his own idea of poetry and then turning on it and betraying the reader’s trust by dismissing it all as just so much been-there donethat rubbish. Setup it is, then, but why step out of the performance by revealing it as a performance? If all things change, if they come only to go, and if it is ordained that there is nothing that is made that will last forever, it is a part of the poet’s performance and of his trust with his readers to remind them, even if that reminder appears to be offered rudely, that among the items on that finite but nevertheless lengthy list of things that do not last is poetry, including most assuredly all its passing styles, including the poet’s own. The poet who had told his readers in the closing fifth section from “Burnt Norton” that words decay with imprecision now has told them that poetic fashions not only change but also become outmoded. Eliot is not saying anything new here either by telling his readers that even the highest form of all human verbal communication, poetry, can become outworn, nor must the reader imagine that Eliot is trying to startle. Nevertheless, while Eliot may not be the first poet to have opined regarding the limitations of word and the fading stylishness of any poem, seldom has a poet said this about words and about a poem that he is himself writing, in that very poem that he is writing. By thus compounding this otherwise commonplace point, Eliot makes his point: that there is no getting away from the decay of all human endeavor, even in the fabled realms of enduring artistry. Yet that is not itself the point, of course. “The poetry,” the reader nearly just as soon learns, “does not matter.” Nor should it. Rather it is that “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” that matters, engaging not only the poet but every other thinking, feeling human being as well—the effort to understand, to come to an understanding, to make sense. No wonder, then, that the speaker does not want to “hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather their folly,” because after all has been said and done, “[w]e are only undeceived / Of that

which, deceiving, could no longer harm.” The idea is, to be sure, an apt one, although it may give the lie to the very premise that it is trying to establish: that there is no utterance, no “wisdom,” that is human that is not, in time, dismissed as folly by those who succeed the utterer. All things pass, but none as fast as human wisdom, unless it be life’s joys. “The houses are all gone under the sea. // The dancers are all gone under the hill.” Part III The parallels between the structure of “East Coker” and that of the preceding quartet, “Burnt Norton,” continue in the third section of “East Coker.” In “Burnt Norton,” the speaker had turned from a contemplation of the individual’s aspirations for the ideal represented for him in the rose garden and in the stillness of a Chinese jar to a consideration of the frenetic and distracting pace of life for modern city dwellers caught in those collectively empty and meaningless moments as they rush to and fro on a subway. In “East Coker,” similarly, the speaker turns from his contemplation of the ravages of time on individuals and on their joys and griefs alike to a consideration of how those same natural forces ravage as well all the trappings of earthly power and glory, defeating the goals of the mighty and powerful and self-important just as surely as those of the meek and the humble. There, in the same dark vacancy, are to be found “captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,” and even the generous and the distinguished among them “all go into the dark.” Though the imagery is Dantesque, these worldly individuals are not portrayed as bad people in and of themselves, any more than the highly successful and worldly Lord Claverton in Eliot’s last important work, the verse drama The Elder Statesman, will be portrayed as a bad man, only an oblivious one. These are, however, individuals whom the world honors and admires, setting them aside, as if in some vague hope that not everyone and everything succumbs to the all-consuming nothingness that is time past. The speaker’s point is that in the hustle and bustle of the moment, when what is important to us comes near to seeming to have the same importance to the vast and impersonal universe, it

Four Quartets is easy to be distracted and to forget the awful and persistent truth that no one and nothing survives very long. The image introduced now is not one of passengers on a subway but of an audience in a darkened theatre: “I said to my soul, be still, and let the darkness come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God.” As ominous a view of life as such a plea implies, it is hardly unrealistic, for the stage set, all indeed is being “rolled away.” And then, suddenly, the image is one of being again on “an underground train, in the tube,” a stop between stations, and behind every face there is a “mental emptiness” that leaves “only the growing terror of nothing to think about.” The metaphors are sure and accurate, illustrating the emptiness that intrudes when life’s planned distractions—the next scene in the play, the next stop on the way—suddenly does not come about exactly as expected and, freed momentarily from distraction, one is left alone in an ultimate darkness without any inner support or resources to call on. There one can only wait, without the three cardinal virtues of faith, hope, and charity, since they, too, are all contained in the waiting. This is what the philosopher might call the existential void when there is nothing left to prop up the unattended self. But rather than wallowing in such despair, Eliot’s speaker instead accepts the void by embracing its very essence as being itself a spiritual state—by embracing, that is, the very nothingness that one fears. In mystical practice this process is called the via negativa, or negative way. Eliot borrows the idea wholesale from St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish Catholic mystic from whose works on spiritual discipline Eliot had already taken half of the epigraph that introduces “Sweeney Agonistes.” It is another work that darkly explores the edges of the hardly bearable. Now, however, in “East Coker,” recognizing the paradox that, for us poor benighted humans, enlightenment comes from embracing the darkness that swallows us all in any case, the speaker discovers freedom in surrender, and fulfillment in denial. Thus, “the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.” At this juncture the poetry weds the paradoxical center of “Burnt Norton”—the stillness that is

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movement—with the paradoxical center of “East Coker”—the darkness that, for the soul, is light. If it is in paradox, not agedness, that wisdom comes, the speaker now repeats a litany of paradoxical moral and spiritual postures taken almost verbatim from St. John of the Cross’s The Ascent of Mt. Carmel. The negative way that he espouses there has much of practical wisdom about it, once the advice is read in the spirit of ironic truths. If one wants to have everything, desire nothing. If one wishes to achieve everything, achieve nothing. Once the idea is grasped, it is difficult to fail to get the point—and equally as difficult, however, to put it into practice: The less one wants, the more one gets. In the hands of Eliot’s speaker, meanwhile, this same kind of advice may overwhelm the reader already somewhat overwhelmed by the onslaught of paradox and contradictory juxtapositions and apparent non sequiturs that frequently characterize his poetry, certainly the poetry of Four Quartets, and without a doubt this particular passage. But the speaker softens the psychic blow somewhat by dragging the reader into the text and making him a knowledgeable accomplice in the quest for resolution, even if that resolution is rendered as puzzles. Addressing the reader directly, the speaker suddenly says: “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. . . . / Shall I say it again?” The reader is, of course, saying absolutely nothing but is brought nonetheless into the text and onto the page by such boldness of direct address. The “you” who then is schooled in the ways of dispossession is made that much more intimately connected to the reader through the speaker’s free use of such an informal mode of address in the midst of an otherwise intensely formal and dislocating presentation. Part IV The direct exposure to the paradoxical way of thinking that the via negativa requires makes the deflections that come in the fourth section sound particularly reasonable. The “wounded surgeon” is an apt oxymoron, in the physician-heal-thyself school of moral insight. Everything, of course, contains its opposite and, so, calls it up. “Compassion” is “sharp,” “health” is “disease.” “To be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” All these things that

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sound impossible from the physical point of view of a strictly material universe are, of course, profoundly true from a spiritual point of view focused on eternity. From that angle, the death of the body is indeed the birth of the soul, and darkness here is light there, whereas light here is a source of darkness there, and so forth. As in “Burnt Norton” and in the original model, The Waste Land, the fourth section is the shortest, in gathering and summarizing in stark metaphorical terms all that has come before it thus far and thereby preparing the reader for the poem’s resolution. If also in “Burnt Norton,” however, the fourth section appears to invoke God the Father in the still point of the turning world, the fourth part of “East Coker” clearly invokes God the Son in the image of the “bloody flesh” that is “our only food,” and it concludes by recalling the Eucharistic feast: “. . . [I]n spite of that, we call this Friday good.” The notion that the day that the Christ was crucified is called Good Friday because of the benefit that Christians believe Christ’s sacrifice brought to all humanity caps the entire movement toward the paradoxical with Christianity’s ultimate paradoxical resolution—aside, perhaps, from the felix culpa of Adam’s sin that precipitated humanity’s fallen state to begin with. In keeping with the idea that all things not merely contain but are their own opposite, Adam is portrayed as “the ruined millionaire” whose error of eating the forbidden fruit that then led to his expulsion from the Garden of Eden ended up with his ironically and paradoxically “endow[ing]” this hospital/hospice called Earth, where all are born only to die. Part V If St. John of the Cross provides much of the text for the third section of “East Coker,” then there are the ghosts of such English metaphysical poets as John Donne and Andrew Marvell haunting the fourth section, with its extravagant conceits, or metaphorical comparisons. In the fifth and final section of “East Coker,” Eliot acknowledges these debts by having his speaker muse on the difficulties of achieving effective creation. It cannot be overemphasized that the poet’s stepping not so much out of character as out of role by commenting on the poetic process, as he

will do periodically throughout the Quartets, is not a distractive or coy device but an integral thematic and structural component of the total work and its effect. If a single note is being struck throughout, after all, it is that from virtually any vantage point, there is an immense measure of futility in all human action. While the reader may hope through hints only half-given thus far that that futility will eventually resolve itself into a more expansively hopeful vision of a life spent on Earth, it makes perfect sense nonetheless that the poet will not exempt his own particular kind of activity, the composition of poetry, from that pervasive sense of the futility of action. The poet himself, then, more than any speaker or even poet/speaker, seems to be addressing his readers directly again as the fifth section of “East Coker” commences, and he addresses them not as readers but as if they are old friends with whom he has shared many moments in the past. Since the poet in question just happens to be T. S. Eliot, certainly one of the most celebrated English-language poets of his generation, he and his readers would indeed have, as it were, developed a special relationship with each other over the quarter century and more that he has been publishing. They have shared with him, too, the “[t]wenty years largely wasted” between the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, and the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland. He had already, at the end of “Burnt Norton,” lamented the sad wasted years stretching before and after. Now, as he comes to the conclusion of “East Coker,” he can perhaps better explain why someone who imagines that all human action is futile should lament the waste of time. Paradoxically, it may be because he had not thought that he was wasting it—might have thought, instead, that he was achieving things, just like those captains of industry, whereas in fact he was only “marking time.” For time spent in idle pursuits is the ultimate wasteland, the poet of The Waste Land has convincingly just now told his readers in “East Coker.” “[A]ll go into the dark,” he had intoned at the opening of the third section, and he would not say as much if he did not mean it.

Four Quartets Words, too, go into the dark, one generation’s way of putting it becomes the next’s outmoded fashion, and what holds true for a generation holds true for individuals as well. So, then, it is neither unfair nor inaccurate to say that each poem is a “raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating,” and one learns “only to get the better of words / For the thing . . . / One is no longer disposed to say.” The man, too, who had paid homage to his biological ancestry in “East Coker” only to admit that they are all buried now pays equal homage to some of his literary ancestors as well—St. John of the Cross, Marvell, Donne—only to admit that he cannot “hope / To emulate” them, for there is nothing more for each next generation of writers than “the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again.” Otherwise, “[t]he rest is not our business.” Perhaps because its focus has been on things past, “East Coker” has not been a very pleasant experience. Its poetry seems to be largely the poetry of lamentation, complaint, and regret, all of those emotions that reflecting upon the past can inspire. “East Coker” draws to a close on a somewhat hopeful note, however. The poet who had dismissed the wisdom of old men as folly (he would himself be entering only his early 50s as he was writing “East Coker”) imagines a different fate for himself and his generation by borrowing a page from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s great poem “Ulysses.” The Tennyson poem presents the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, who has been back home on his native island of Ithaka for a long enough time that his spirit has become restless to return to the open sea with its promise of high adventure and knowledge of new lands and peoples. Tennyson may himself have borrowed a page from DANTE’s characterization of Ulysses, in the Inferno, as a leader whose passion for knowledge brought catastrophe on himself and his fellow mariners, a passage that Eliot himself alluded to in the earliest versions of The Waste Land. As problematically negative as that possible allusion to Dante may make his characterization, Tennyson’s Ulysses is cited most often as an example of that never-say-die mentality that was thought to typify the sensibilities of Victorian England, particularly as he exhorts his fellow mariners that it is “not too

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late to seek a newer world,” that they should not “rust unburnished,” and that they should “strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.” After the morose mood of much of the rest of “East Coker,” Eliot appears to echo these sentiments in the quartet’s close as he speaks of spending “a lifetime burning in every moment,” of the kind “when here and now cease to matter,” for “[o]ld men,” he concludes, “ought to be explorers” who must be “still and still moving.” Instead of his fellow mariners, as in the case of Tennyson’s Ulysses, Eliot’s speaker/poet has all those “undisciplined squads of emotions” to deal with. But dealt with they must be, particularly since one has no other choice, unless it is to vegetate in the dead world of a lifetime of meaningless repetition as is embodied in and by the subway travelers. To be still and still moving, for all its apparent paradox, is not so difficult a task to accomplish, however, although it may require more than a typical measure of self-discipline. As a practical sentiment, it is perhaps best expressed in a Latin tag that Eliot’s friend from his youth, the American poet EZRA POUND, adopted as his personal motto in his own advanced years: Tace et face. Loosely translated, it exhorts one to shut up and get to work.

“The Dry Salvages” The significance of the name “The Dry Salvages” is conveniently glossed by Eliot with an introductory parenthetical immediately following the title of the third of his Four Quartets. Therein he tells the curious reader that the poem’s namesake, the Dry Salvages, is a “small group of rocks,” three in fact, off the northeastern coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. The name is presumably a corruption of the French les trois sauvages, or “three savages,” and, as he goes on to explain, “salvages” should be pronounced so as to rhyme with “assuages.” As an added piece of information, Eliot concludes by noting that a groaner is a whistling buoy. One of the least forthcoming of poets of the 20th century, Eliot seems to be going out of his way here to frustrate the ambitions and steal the thunder of any scholars or instructors who may be bent on revealing these relatively obscure bits of information themselves to the interested reader or

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student of the poem for the sake of showing off a mastery of geographical trivia. Trivia it may be, but for Eliot, the Dry Salvages would resound with as much personal significance as those equally obscure place names, Burnt Norton and East Coker, had. It would be unfair, then, to think that Eliot is intentionally trying to obfuscate or mislead by identifying the Dry Salvages so carefully, especially when he had not gone to anywhere near the trouble of identifying the no less obscure Burnt Norton or East Coker. It is as if he wants to be certain that there will be no mistaking the particular Dry Salvages that he has in mind. Part I All the more reason, then, that, as the poetic text begins, Eliot may catch the reader by surprise nevertheless by going on about a river after having just alluded in painstaking detail in his headnote to a maritime location. For it does seem as if one has missed a beat when Eliot, having taken such care with the headnote, then seems to preempt himself by beginning the poem that follows with the thought that, although he does “not know much about gods,” the speaker is inclined to “think that river / Is a strong brown god.” What is the wind up to, one might well ask, echoing the high-strung and befuddled lady of “A Game of Chess,” the second part of Eliot’s The Waste Land. And in that poem’s almost equally Alice in Wonderland terms, one might very well answer, in good Eliot fashion, everything and nothing. There are, after all, obvious associations between a river and the sea, and that is that they both have to do with water and with the cycles of nature. Whereby the sea is constantly replenished by rivers flowing down into it, those same rivers are fed by inland rainfalls, which are themselves seawater evaporated by the sun and then condensed back into rain in the upper atmosphere. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl learns of this cycle in general science back somewhere in grammar school, as Eliot himself would have in his own boyhood. So, then, it is just as curious and, finally, enlightening that the river that Eliot speaks of is spoken of in terms of the “nursery bedroom” and in the Whitmanesque details such as “dooryard,” “grapes on the autumn table,” and the circle of light cast “in

the winter gaslight,” as if Eliot is recalling his own boyhood spent in the 1890s in his birthplace, one of America’s most celebrated river cities, St. Louis, Missouri, situated on the banks of America’s most celebrated river, the Mississippi. To know further, then, that the Dry Salvages also have a powerful association with the poet’s childhood, opens a door on the poet/speaker’s past, exactly as the first two parts of the Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker,” also did, each in its own way. The Dry Salvages are somewhat off the farthest tip of Cape Ann, at Rockport, itself within easy sailing or driving distance of Gloucester’s Eastern Point, where the Eliots, after vacationing in rented accommodations for many seasons, built themselves a lavish summer home in 1896, when the poet was only seven going on eight. As a boy, then, spending summers sailing off New England’s Atlantic shore, Eliot would come to know the rhythms of the sea by sailing from Cape Ann, coming to know in the process the Dry Salvages and other landmarks and sea signs, the buoys and beacons put out to guide the mariner, exactly as he would have come to know the river traffic that formed a daily backdrop to the life of the city in which he was raised. “The river is within us, the sea is all about us,” he can honestly observe, keeping all those many metaphorical reference points, in which the river is time, the sea eternity, intact while not in any way diminishing the import that the statement has for his own personal history. As a boy he became intimately acquainted with both the river and the sea—how they can serve us and even appear to be tamed, and then in an instant turn our human universe over on its head. In the river and the sea—but particularly the sea—Eliot finds the perfect representation of what he had struggled so hard to find in the first two quartets: a reality that is not our reality but that is no less real. In that way, the poet can keep it in metaphorical perspective yet not pretend to know it in any actual way, thus making the sea in “The Dry Salvages,” whose element, after all, is water, the perfect emblem of that elusive eternity where time past, time present, and time future meet, mingle, and become indistinguishable. The sea keeps its own time, and while the individual can know its surface of currents and hazards,

Four Quartets no one can ever know its depths or be completely comfortable on or near or with it. From out of its depth it “tosses up our losses.” The “torn seine, / The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar” each tells a story, but it is only the fragment left of a whole that can never be known. The sea has its “many voices,” none of which are human voices, though there may be attempts to humanize them in their “howl” and “yelp” and “whine,” or in the groaners and ringing bell buoys warning the mariner. As its massive swells lift and ring those bells, here is indeed, too, a “time not our time,” a time “[o]lder than the time of chronometers, older / Than time counted by anxious worried women.” This that Eliot describes is the sea as sea people know her, a reality that both dwarfs and, by its persistent presence, validates our own, nearer than the dark interstellar spaces of “East Coker” but no less simultaneously both alien and familiar. It is time “[b]etween midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception.” It is time “that is and was from the beginning,” preserved in its own liquid constant, forever closed to human understanding, but present with us, “[c]lang[ing] / The bell.” Part II As the second part of “The Dry Salvages” opens, the reader has been put by the first part of the poem into an entirely different frame of reference from the one that city dwellers know on a daily basis. Based, too, on the patterns that have been emerging in the overall poem in “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker,” the reader has become used to expecting the second section to be a lyrical turn, one that seems to distill the quality of meaning of the first but that then may be followed itself by an almost prosaic commentary that undercuts both the lyrical passage and its insights and that laments the limits of poetry, indeed, of speech itself. One should have noticed by now as well, however, that what is actually being challenged in such commentaries is the value that experience has for an ego-constructed self. Put simply, experience from a limited point of view, which is what the experience of any one human being is, is of very limited value. Because it is so inherently unknowable, however, the sea ironically enough offers the poet, and the reader, the opportunity of far less limited focus

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on experience, even if it is still somewhat constrained by what an individual can know. So as Eliot launches into the lyric passage that forms the second part of “The Dry Salvages,” it is more of an extended dirge, a melancholy sea shanty, and the commentary that just as invariably follows in this instance is less a criticism and far more of an endorsement of the insights that the poetry has gained. This may come as a welcome change from the degrading view of the poetic impulse that the speaker of “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” may have indulged in almost a bit too liberally, as if even the poet doubted the efficacy of poetry, but the antidote presented here in “The Dry Salvages” exacts its own price from the reader by painting what is, on balance, no more rosy a picture of aggregate human experience. The speaker’s “Where is there an end to it,” with its echoes of Elijah’s “How long, O Lord, how long,” begins the second section with some of the most witheringly bleak poetry that Eliot, who can seem to be intimately acquainted with the dark side of human experience, ever penned. That there is here no old-style punning—as if, for example, he is really just being cute, as he might have been back in his youth, by really only asking where something as vast as the sea might end—is made quite clear instantly. Images of “soundless wailing,” “silent withering,” “drifting wreckage,” follow in quick succession, ending on the note of a “calamitous annunciation,” which itself puts the reader in mind simultaneously of the life and passion of the Christ; the suffering of his mother Mary, whose heart would be pierced by grief like a sword; and the last word that is spoken of all mere mortals—that he or she has died. In answer to his own question, the speaker observes that “[t]here is no end, but addition,” until one is ready for what is, in the end, the only choice: “renunciation.” Shortly, in the third part, the speaker will be speaking of the Hindu warrior hero Arjuna and the advice that Krishna gives him as he prepares for battle. In the passage, Eliot may better clarify what precisely he means by so unabashedly bold a directive. For now, however, the poetry continues with a resigned but not bitter litany of acceptance expressed in what is essentially a modified sestina,

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wherein six six-line stanzas rhyme not on six end words that are randomly mixed, the standard pattern for a sestina, but on a fixed pattern of six closing rhymes: -ailing, -owers, -tionless, -age, -able, and -nation. Again, the reader should not be cloyed. Eliot introduces this complex rhyme scheme not to show off his skills as a poet, but to reaffirm the musical idea, expressed throughout the Four Quartets, that it is only through measured pattern that worthwhile meaning comes. From the beginning, in Burnt Norton, the poet has spoken of patterns. Now he begins to create them himself out of the formless chaos of the sea’s mindless movement and ceaseless moment. The “drifting boat with a slow leakage,” “fisherman sailing / . . . where the fog cowers,” “forever bailing,” and “the withering of withered flowers” are all literal tokens of a universe of decay and defeat, as well as figurative emblems of life’s vicissitudes, its ups and its downs, swells and dips, all toward a single end. From one point of view it is death, the God to whom our bones pray, for they are only mortal, condemned to the fate of the material universe. From another point of view, however, at that extreme, there is “[o]nly the hardly, barely prayable / Prayer of the one Annunciation.” The initial capital letter tells the reader that by now, the end of the sestina, the possibilities of what that calamitous annunciation upon which the movement opened may turn one way, and one way only: Toward the Annunciation that is the Incarnation. The sestina ended, its pattern concluded, the speaker’s commentary on the poetry commences. Having just completed a pattern in a sequence, he muses that, “as one becomes older” (as he just has) “the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence”—that is, a progress from beginning to end. For when and if it is looked at that way, as if life were a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, it becomes “a means of disowning the past,” as if to be only in a perpetual present is one’s persistent goal. Clearly, the poet, in musing about time, now has come to realize that such a linear view of time leaves life devoid of any acquired meaning. Rather, passing along life’s way without developing any regard for discerning its meaning as

it passes ends with one’s missing the meaning altogether, while “approach to the meaning restores the experience,” but “beyond any meaning / We can assign to happiness.” The idea is less complicated than it might appear at first glance: Experience remembered is colored by one’s idea of what a particular experience ought to be, and so never can be, in the recollecting of what it actually, singularly was. “For our own past,” as the speaker explains it, “is covered by the currents of action,” and these are, as it were, fictions that are made up by each individual out of a pastiche of the experiences of others—“but the agony abides.” The speaker concludes the second part of “The Dry Salvages,” then, with a rehearsal of the opening stanza and its reflections on the great inland river and on the sea off Cape Ann that the speaker/ poet had known as a boy. Here is “the ragged rock in the restless water,” the Dry Salvages. “Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it,” but like Shelley’s stars when the daytime sky is blue, the rocks are still there, “always a seamark / To lay a course by.” In other words, one must have more than memories colored by what one has overheard and read and otherwise acquired, the memories of others; one must have something permanent and fixed that is one’s own, both to lay one’s course by and to measure one’s progress. In one of his sonnets, Shakespeare calls love an “ever fixéd mark.” The speaker of the Four Quartets, who had earlier observed, at the closing of “Burnt Norton,” that “[l]ove is itself unmoving,” may well be headed toward the same conclusion, but he has not arrived there yet. Part III If life is only a passage on not only uncharted but unmarked seas, then it is going nowhere, and no one has ever been anywhere but lost on the same featureless surface of unconsidered experience. “I sometimes wonder if that is not what Krishna meant,” the speaker observes, picking up the thread of the second section as the third section of “The Dry Salvages” begins. The speaker sounds as if he has been caught in the act of observing out loud. Wonders, that is, if all ways lead the same way, the way up the way down, forward back, echoing one of

Four Quartets the Herakleitean fragments that provide the Four Quartets with its epigraphs. Is it all the same thing at the same time, he ponders, so that one’s sense of before and after, success and failure, progress and decline, are all illusions determined by nothing more real than merely one’s point of view? And if so, what is the point of view that will save one from being pinned and wriggling forever on the wheel? What, or where, is that still point of the turning world? For if the speaker knows anything, he knows that “time is no healer; the patient is no longer here.” Or, as he put it only moments before in the poem, approach to the meaning will not restore it in any way that can be “assign[ed] to happiness.” For that, one must have the meaning to begin with, or at least have it, like those sea rocks, in sight. In each of the two preceding quartets, the third part has eventually taken the reader down into the subway, emblem of a modern urban emptiness and sameness as the fixed world of human business moves on its self-defined and -limited “metalled way.” Now the subway train, which may be any train, becomes instead a type of one’s passage through time and space, the inevitable continuum that contains us all, or at least seems to. As the train moves, the passengers change, minutely in truth, but literally nevertheless, so that: “You are not the same people who left that station / Or who will arrive at any terminus.” That, again, is not a mystical insight but a literal truth, yet, shifting the mode of transportation to a sea vessel now, the speaker knows that each passenger thinks that he will arrive when he gets there, whereas the speaker knows that every instant is an arrival, a new beginning and a new end. Thus, he can assert with considerable confidence that none of the passengers would think of how “ ‘the past is finished’ / Or ‘the future is before us.’ ” Yet that is equally as true even as each of us travels, ostensibly standing still, on nothing more or less than the Earth. Therefore, he can urge all to think, “ ‘Fare forward . . . ,’ ” since that is the direction all of us take, into the future, whether one goes there or not, knows it or not. Thus comes, as advice to all of us, the words spoken to Arjuna by Lord Krishna, when Arjuna,

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on the field of battle, asked on what he should think so that he might triumph. “Think on me,” Krishna had admonished him, for the teaching is that one becomes one with “whatever sphere of being / The mind of a man may be intent [on] / At the time death.’ ” Should Arjuna think on Krishna as he fares forward, then he need not worry how he fare, or whether, in battle, he shall fare well or fare ill, because in life or in death he will be one with Krishna, who is with the One. So, then, the speaker who, at the end of the second part of “The Dry Salvages,” had admonished that each of us must have “a seamark / To lay a course by” now is able to extend the metaphor for the benefit of all “voyagers” through eternity: “Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers,” for that is the direction in which time carries us whether we will or no. Part IV Any readers of the Four Quartets, even ones generally familiar with the intentional vagaries of literary modernism and somewhat comfortable with the forward thematic movement of the Four Quartets thus far, may nevertheless have their heads spinning by the time they begin the fourth section of “The Dry Salvages,” which opens with what can be nothing other than the speaker addressing Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. From one point of view, this should come as no surprise at all. Not only had there just earlier been a direct reference to the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel informed Mary that Jesus had been miraculously formed in her womb, but the poetry had already previously alluded to him and to the father. Eliot would have had good reason to think that his readers would be aware of the veiled allusion to the first person of the Christian trinity, God the Father, in the fourth part of “Burnt Norton.” Then there was the far less veiled allusion to Christ, the second person of the Trinity, in the reference to Good Friday in part four of “East Coker.” Logic would suggest that the Holy Spirit, the Third Person, would appear here in “The Dry Salvages,” the third quartet. However, the Holy Spirit will in fact be invoked in the dove of “Little Gidding,” the fourth quartet, whose sign and element, fire, is more in keeping with the idea of

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the Holy Spirit, often typified as well as a flaming tongue. The Virgin Mary, meanwhile, among whose other denominations in Christian liturgical rites and prayers is the Blessed Mother and the Mother of God, is appropriate to “The Dry Salvages,” whose sign and element is water. Water more than any other of the four elements betokens the feminine and the maternal, particularly inasmuch as its fluid state suggests the amniotic sac, filled with water, in which the human fetus develops in the womb. Even more so, a woman’s menstrual cycles coordinate with the cycles of the moon, exactly as do the ocean tides. That Eliot wants readers to think of Mary specifically in keeping with the tradition of her maternal role is further underscored in his referring to her, shortly, as “Figlia del tuo figlio,” which translates, from the Italian, as “daughter of your son.” The apparent paradox accounts for Mary’s human nature while honoring her, again, as the Mother of God. Granted, then, all signs point toward Mary’s putatively none-too-sudden appearance here in the fourth part of “The Dry Salvages.” Yet this appearance may and perhaps should come as a surprise if not shock in the immediate context of the poetry, coming as it does hard on the heels of the preceding references not to Christian but to Hindu beliefs through Krishna and Arjuna. Should there be such a disconnect for the reader, however, it can be rectified in several ways, all of which will further illuminate the poet’s apparent intentions not only for the passage in question but for the entire Four Quartets. While it may not be readily apparent, the Four Quartets have been continually tending toward a Judeo-Christian resolution in keeping with the foundational religious values and the traditional belief system not just of the poet but, more important, of the culture that formed him. This is not the place to enter into a lengthy discussion of works of Eliot’s as early as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and as late as Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), to name but two, in order to emphasize the importance and the nuances that Eliot places on the relationship between the individual and his or her unique culture, nor is his position on these matters a radically

divergent one from what most would hold with regard to the importance of nature and nurture in shaping an individual’s values. Suffice it to say that, for Eliot at least, those values and beliefs, when they inform any work of literature, do so not in order to indoctrinate or proselytize the prospective reader but because they form a part of the author’s actual life experience. So when the Four Quartets are described as “Christian,” that should be regarded not as a doctrinal or sectarian denominator so much as as a cultural marker, exactly as one might describe the work of another as Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist. By the same token, however, since religions and values entail systems of beliefs, those beliefs will emerge as well not in their capacity to attempt to sway others to embrace them but in the manner in which they provide a foundation on which the poetry, as poetry, finds its own coordinates for valid expression. When, for example, “The Dry Salvages,” as a poem, speaks at the end of the second section of “[t]he bitter apple and the bite in the apple,” since the locale is clearly once more the river with which “The Dry Salvages” opened, a reader who is something of a literalist might think of the actual debris floating on the water. Another reader, however, might think of Huck Finn and Jim from Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn, which is also set on the Mississippi and which, at one point, has Huck and Jim vowing never again to steal and eat bitter persimmons (“the bitter apple”) and stick instead only to stealing and eating watermelons. The reader versed in the Judeo-Christian culture out of which the poetry emerges, meanwhile, cannot fail to think of the apple that Eve fed to Adam and that led to humankind’s expulsion from the Garden, our lost paradise that the rose garden of “Burnt Norton” seems to urge upon the reader’s consciousness. Even if the Lady who is Mary has, then, for all the reasons already noted, a rightful place in these proceedings as “The Dry Salvages” continues, her sudden appearance nevertheless right after the reader has been served a heap of Eastern thinking cannot but seem out of place or, worse, contrived, except for one critical detail regarding Eliot’s lady: The manifestation of the Lady that he has in mind

Four Quartets is unique to this maritime region and its legendary associations with the sea, but even more particularly to the town of Gloucester, where the Eliots made their summer home. Anyone who has ever read Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 novel Captains Courageous about the Portuguese-American fishermen who fish the stormy waters of the North Atlantic Outer Bank, or seen the 1937 classic Hollywood film version of same or the 2000 film The Perfect Storm with George Clooney, knows the treacherous relationship that the sea shares with the fisherman of Gloucester, for whom it is both preserver, providing them with a livelihood, and destroyer, taking their lives from them. (It has been reported that as many as 10,000 Gloucestermen have perished at sea since the time that the first Europeans settled there in the 17th century.) As a boy, Eliot would no doubt have heard tales of storms at sea and of lost fishing vessels and drowned men, for many of whom the Dry Salvages would have been their last sight of the seamarks off the Cape Ann headlands as they fared forward into the Outer Banks fishing grounds for what would turn out to be their last voyage. Many of these fishermen, particularly from among those same Portuguese immigrants who later settled there among the original English settlers, may have been parishioners of a Roman Catholic church that stands to this day on a hill in the town of Gloucester overlooking the inner harbor, its tall façade looming over the harbor waters below and the many fishing boats moored there. For someone viewing the town from across that same harbor, the church structure is on a prominent enough promontory to rival the tall clock tower of the town hall, the only other outstanding landmark. This church, Our Lady of Good Voyage, to whom it is dedicated, is not only Gloucester’s fisherman’s parish but the church to which Eliot would have accompanied his Catholic nurse, a young Irish woman named Annie Dunne, for Sunday Mass during the family’s summer sojourns there. It is not known that the poet had this church in mind when he has the speaker address the Lady whose “shrine is on the promontory,” asking her to her to “[p]ray for all those who are in ships,” but neither would it be unreasonable to assume that Eliot was thinking of this church

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Our Lady of Good Voyages Roman Catholic Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Some scholars regard the church as likely candidate for the “Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory” of “The Dry Salvages” IV. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

or, if not, some other very much like it, a shrine dedicated to those whose lives are on the sea, and so whose deaths may be there, too. It was the poet/speaker’s recollection of the literal Dry Salvages as a sea mark at the end of the second section that led him to muse, at the opening of the third, on what Krishna’s words to Arjuna may have meant. The possibility that this lady of the fourth section, whose shrine is on a promontory, has very real associations with the Dry Salvages and the surrounding waters considerably shortens the poetic distance among the three: Krishna, the Lady, and the Dry Salvages.

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Recalling that in each quartet the fourth section is the shortest and that this section is no exception, the reader finds quickly that the section consists of the speaker’s own prayer, directed to Mary, for those on ships, for their wives and their children, and for all those who have already perished and thus can no longer hear “the sound of the sea bell’s / Perpetual angelus.” The reader may now note, too, that the poetry has come full circle from the opening of the second section of “The Dry Salvages” to this closing of the fourth section. Just as the manmade sounds of the sea and their companions, the sea yelp and the sea wail, inspired the poetry of the second section, its auditory imagery had flowed out of the first and then into the musings of the third, concluding with the seamark by which one might set one’s figurative course for one’s literal life. And it was from that metaphorical reference point that the further musings on Krishna and Arjuna had emerged, with their injunction to fix one’s sight on, or course by, the mind and spirit’s most permanent features, rather than the transitory matters of time and tide, which are themselves as much subject to change as we are. So, then, as one is further urged to consider that one is faring not well (or ill) but forward, it should follow that the appeal to the Blessed Mother of Christian belief fulfills and completes the circle of meaningful action organized around the still point that, simultaneously, the Dry Salvages, the bell buoy, Krishna, and the divinity of Christ all, to obviously varying degrees, represent. The significant difference, from the point of view of the speaker, is whether the individual comes upon this revelation in life, as the speaker and Arjuna each in his own way is doing, or in death, as happens to the drowned men, who cannot hear the sea bell’s angelus tolling the passage of time, which, with an irony all its own, passes in any case. Part V The focus from the beginning of the Four Quartets, with its opening meditation on time past, time present, and time future in “Burnt Norton,” has been the individual’s intellectual and spiritual quest for what does not pass, characterized repeatedly in the poem as the still point. As “The Dry Salvages”

moves into its fifth and final section, the reader may by now have noticed that yet another pattern has emerged to give the sequence its developing form and character. For just as the speaker has commented periodically on the topic throughout the quartets, pattern itself must always be present but is not always apparent. The fifth section opens, then, with a cataloguing of all the various ways in which humans try to finesse the future by fathoming its shape, “all these . . . usual / Pastimes and drugs.” It should rapidly become apparent that, just as “Burnt Norton,” with its emphasis on perceiving the here and now, deals with time that is the poet/speaker’s present and “East Coker” with its harking back to the Eliot family’s English roots had dealt with time that was the poet/speaker’s past, “The Dry Salvages” with its emphasis on uncertainty deals with time that is the future, represented in all the various imagery drawn from the vast expanses of the unknown and unplumbed sea that is itself a type both of time and of eternity, that is, of the timeless. There are more local reasons why the future should be so much on the speaker’s mind. Inasmuch as the topic is the uncertain prospect of faring forward into uncharted seas, there is indeed the sort of uncertainty and “distress of nations and perplexity” by which “[m]en’s curiosity searches past and future” in the warfare that was at that very moment being waged in Europe and in Asia as Eliot wrote his poetry. “The Dry Salvages” was composed during 1940 and completed in early 1941, while the Battle of the North Atlantic was being waged. This naval effort to keep the vital supply lines open between North America and Britain would continue throughout the nearly six years, from September 1, 1939, to May 1945, that hostilities between Germany and England persisted, but it was particularly virulent at the time that Eliot was composing this quartet, whose motif is the sea. At the height of the sea conflict, in May 1941, German submarines were sinking 300,000 tons of allied shipping, or in the vicinity of 10 or more seagoing supply vessels, weekly. In plain terms, death and destruction at sea were likely more numerous at the time of Eliot’s writing than at any other time in human history,

Four Quartets and as Eliot had raised in the fourth section of “The Dry Salvages” his prayer to Mary for those in peril on the sea, the immediacy of these concerns, and a general uncertainty about the future, could not have been far from his mind at any time. The point is, one would have to imagine that the same state of mind on the poet’s part would hold true as well for his composition of the fifth and final section of the poem, the ultimate irony being, of course, that these same concerns for those in peril on the sea would be there to obsess the speaker, or anyone else, for that matter, even if there were no war then being waged at sea—would be there if there were no sea except for the sea of time. The future is forever an uncertainty, after all, except for those who “apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time,” but that, the reader is told, is “an occupation for that saint.” Whatever that all may mean, the reader will have to wait for Little Gidding, whose theme is eternity, or the eternal, to find out. For now, and “[f]or most of us,” there is only the sidelong glimpse of such moments, a “hint half guessed, . . . gift half understood” caught in “only the unattended / Moment, the moment [both] in and out of time.” The speaker calls that very magic moment, in which an “impossible union / Of spheres of existence” is actualized and “the past and the future / Are conquered, and reconciled,” Incarnation. That that concept resonates with the central mystery of Christianity is something that the reader has already been prepared for by the poet’s earlier introduction into “The Dry Salvages” of Mary and the associated miracle of the Annunciation, but as profound as those mysteries are in and for Christian beliefs, Eliot is not suggesting that this hint, this gift, is wholly sectarian in nature, a matter of doctrinal assertion rather than experience. Otherwise his poetry at this point, toward which he has been laboring throughout the composition of the sequence of the poetry that will eventually become the Four Quartets, will ring hollow for anyone who is not a Christian or, equally a challenge, unacquainted with Christian beliefs. No doubt, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is precisely what the speaker has in mind when he calls Incarnation the hint and gift that “prayer, observance, discipline,

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thought and action” can make the individual conscious of as “[t]he only hope, or else despair,” that last phrase borrowed from “Little Gidding.” The idea does not exclude those who are not of the Christian faith, however, since the speaker has defined Incarnation not in any theological sense but as the intersection of the timeless with time. In that context, Incarnation becomes the human condition, just as Christ is the ultimate human, the spirit made flesh, the flesh made spirit, “the impossible union,” again, “[o]f spheres of existence.” It is the Christian ideal, surely, but if the Christian tenet is true, it is that condition into which all humans, as spiritual beings existing in eternity, or the timeless, are admitted at the moment of conception, or the intersection with time. That Eliot wishes to universalize in a temporal and secular sense such a complexly profound spiritual mystery is further manifested in his using not any Christian saint but the great hero of the Hindu faith, Arjuna, and the primary avatar of Brahma, Lord Krishna, as the exemplar in the presentation that concluded with the speaker’s introducing the notion of Incarnation as the key to salvation from time. For Krishna himself, as well as his injunction to Arjuna to think always on him, that is, on the eternal, confirms in no less spiritually adept terms the primacy of Incarnation as an article of Hindu belief. “For most of us,” then, “this is the aim,” not to achieve Incarnation, for that is the given, the gift, but to apprehend it as the ultimate truth of the human condition. However, as “The Dry Salvages” concludes, the speaker has made it clear that to achieve such an apprehension here in this world is “an occupation for the saint,” not for the “most of us.” If to apprehend such a truth here must be our aim, it is nonetheless an aim “[n]ever here to be realised” by most, who otherwise remain “only undefeated / Because we have gone on trying.” The speaker, who has been wise enough to cast his own putative fate with the “most of us” rather than with the saints, lest he alienate his reader, ends by expressing the hope that he may at least be himself buried “[n]ot too far from the yew-tree,” that is, in hallowed ground but an otherwise common grave, where he too may nourish, like his East Coker ancestors and all else

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who have come before him—Arjuna among them, no doubt—the “life of significant soil.”

“Little Gidding” Though Four Quartets appears to be driving toward expressing or defining a state of contentment, it seems to have a hard time getting there, as, perhaps, it ought to. The poetry has made it clear that, ultimately, contentment can come only through belief, which is itself not always forthcoming or when it is easily obtainable. If nothing else, then, the poetry can be admired, even if grudgingly, for what appears to be an unstinting honesty and integrity of purpose. One might well ask, nevertheless, echoing the speaker of another ostensibly bleak Eliot poem, when, if not whether, the dead tree of such an all-encompassing existential despair will give shelter, even if that be only from itself. Indeed, if readers of the Four Quartets wish to possess that biblical pearl of great value that costs nothing less than everything, perhaps it is Eliot’s intention to put his readers through the wringer before they find it. Nothing worthwhile comes easily, after all, especially wisdom. These readers have just heard the closing words of “The Dry Salvages,” which tell them that the best they will have for all their trying is the knowledge that they tried, and if they are really fortunate, they will thus be able, like the poet, at least to lie at last in a marked grave on dry land, unlike all those others for whom a watery grave was the final resting place. It would make perfect sense, then, that the reader, like the speaker, would be ready to take refuge in an isolated and ancient chapel in the English countryside. The chapel at Little Gidding is the sole remaining structure once used by a religious community which Nicholas Ferrar founded there in 1626. Gidding is one of the oldest place names in Huntingdonshire, where the settlement is located, and is derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root as giddy, which means to be carried away by music or dance or to be possessed by God. It might seem that the poet chose this chapel for those associations alone, so much do they relate to overall themes in the Four Quartets, with its emphasis on music and dance and patterns and structures, as well as on theological and spiritual considerations.

Those associations are merely fortuitous, however, for Little Gidding, like Burnt Norton, East Coker, and the Dry Salvages, is another locale chosen because of its personal associations for the poet. While it may never be known exactly why he visited that particular historical site, because no one, not even he, could then have known that the last of his four quartets would eventually emerge from the experience, Eliot came to this spot in May 1936. Five years later and in an entirely different world, Eliot was busily at work on “Little Gidding,” the poem. The German air war against England was then at what would subsequently be regarded as its peak, although no one could have known that at the time, either. Indeed, England at that time, May 1941, was not doing well in the conflict. Her French

The chapel at Little Gidding. Eliot would visit the site in May 1936 and commemorate its significance to both his personal history and English history in “Little Gidding” I, the poem that closes the Four Quartets. (Courtesy of Russel Murphy)

Four Quartets ally had fallen in June 1940, and Hitler would not take the pressure off the English by recklessly opening a second front with his invasion of Russia until June 1941. The United States did not enter the war until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following December. The spring of 1941 must then have seemed like England’s darkest hour to many, Eliot among them. In any case, as he began work on the last part of the Four Quartets, he turned, for some reason, to the experience of that personal pilgrimage that he had made five years earlier to Little Gidding, whose historical associations are with another dark hour in English history—the 17thcentury civil war that had culminated, in January 1649, with the execution of King Charles I. During the long, complicated, and chaotic course of that distant war, which began in September 1642, Charles at one point had taken refuge at Little Gidding. He had already had personal contact twice before with the religious farm community there that Ferrar, son of a wealthy and influential London merchant, had established as a household of prayer with his extended family. The first time, in the early 1630s, involved Charles’s interest in a gospel concordance in Ferrar’s possession. The second time, Charles actually visited the community. This was in March 1642, within months of the outbreak of civil war. By that time, Ferrar had already been dead some four years or more, a victim of malaria. It is Charles’s second visit, when he arrived alone the night of May 2, 1646, that is particularly significant. At any rate, it is the visit to which Eliot directly alludes in the first section of “Little Gidding.” After continuous military setbacks, Charles’s cause had been all but defeated by the Parliamentary forces, and he was in the process of eluding capture when he arrived that May evening at Little Gidding. Indeed, John Ferrar, Nicholas’s elder brother and his hand-picked successor as leader of the community, was so anxious that pursuing troops would search the community compound that he removed the desperate king to a private home in the nearby village of Coppingford. Such measures were all to no avail, however. The king, who left the following morning, was captured several days later, on May 5, and as a result of their suspected

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assistance to him and allegiance to his cause, the Ferrar community was disbanded by force. Part I “The Dry Salvages” closes with a reminder of the current “distress of nations and perplexity,” so it is appropriate that “Little Gidding” opens with some serious stress on the persistence of calamity in human affairs. (The “calamitous annunciation” could be only the daily news.) Eliot’s line, “If you came at night like a broken king,” from the first part of “Little Gidding” is a direct allusion to King Charles’s arrival at Little Gidding in the dead of night during his flight in an attempt to elude capture by Parliamentary troops. But seeking refuge from despair at the foot of the cross, as it were, is not a measure that Eliot would limit only to fleeing kings, except as each person is the desperate master of his soul and king of his own meager kingdom of self. And that is why our speaker has come there now. So much, after all, has been the constant theme of the Quartets. Where, indeed, is there an end to it, is the question that any reader must ask. And that is why the speaker now, as “Little Gidding” opens, the turbulent seas of “The Dry Salvages” behind him, takes such pains to emphasize, recollecting the springlike day in midwinter that he himself had visited this quietly historic and powerfully spiritual site, that “[t]here are other places,” no doubt, equally well associated with distress and perplexity, confusion and frustration and exasperation. This one at Little Gidding, however, is for the speaker the most convenient and meaningful, because it is “the nearest, in place and time, / Now and in England.” It is here, too, that the same speaker who had just concluded “The Dry Salvages” by imagining that, for the “most of us,” there is only the thought that we tried, now seems to be convinced that “apprehend[ing] / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time” may not be possible only for saints. The complete renunciation need not be synonymous with utter resignation. Just as “the time of death is every moment,” the principle on which Krishna’s admonition to Arjuna had been based, so is the moment of the one Annunciation

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and complete renunciation every and any moment as well, and a matter not of chance but of choice. Thus, one is not here, in this case at Little Gidding, to “[i]nstruct . . . , or inform curiosity / Or carry report,” but rather “to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.” Now that the speaker has recognized what constitutes faith, he is ready to act on it. For the very reason that “what the dead had no speech for, when living,” they can, by their example, now communicate through the beliefs that their lives modeled, beliefs “tongued with fire beyond the language of the living,” the speaker is ready himself, at last, to be still and still moving, ready to listen. What he “hears,” for the language of the dead is the model set by their behavior, is that prayer is action, too, particularly when all else has failed either to please or to fulfill. Rather than waiting for the unattended moment, which may never come or, coming, may be missed, the speaker opens himself up at Little Gidding, a space where “prayer has been valid,” to this “intersection of the timeless moment” that is “England and nowhere. Never and always.” Part II The transition from the first section of “Little Gidding” to the next will seem abrupt only for the reader who has not yet grasped the core thematic idea of the Four Quartets, which is being brought to fulfillment in this closing quartet. That idea is to find the complete conjunction of the personal, the historical, and the particular with the timeless and eternal. Remember, too, that, although as many as five years separate the composition of “Burnt Norton,” begun sometime in the late summer of 1934, and “East Coker,” not begun until the fall of 1939, Eliot’s composition of “The Dry Salvages” began almost immediately on the completion of “East Coker,” and that same pace of creative energy carried over into the poet’s work on “Little Gidding.” The writing of “Little Gidding” did not go easily by any means. Indeed, although Eliot began to work on “Little Gidding” in early 1941, he would revise it extensively and not complete a final version until September 1942 some 20 months later. Still, the relative haste of composition of successive portions of the emerging Four Quartets meant that

the poetic vision expressed in “The Dry Salvages” appears to carry over directly into “Little Gidding.” Furthermore, this same immediacy and consecutiveness resonates among the poetry in each succeeding section of “Little Gidding” as well, so that the relationship among its five parts is somewhat easier to discern than with, say, “Burnt Norton,” where the relationship between each of its five parts and the next is not always apparent. As this second section opens, then, the reader, like the speaker, must continue to follow the path that Charles had taken those centuries before. For him, Little Gidding was not the end of the road; before him lay the humiliation of arrest and execution—complete defeat. Like him, then, the speaker and reader are, in the second section of “Little Gidding,” cast out of the peacefulness of the chapel at midnight, without the benefit of any warning, into that world of destruction and death that armed conflict betokens, a world that is never far from hand even when there is apparent peace. As the poet has been stressing thus far throughout the successive poems of the Quartets, nature is never hospitable, nor is life ever not a struggle. When there is great public calamity, it may make such moments seem especially catastrophic, but the human catastrophe is never either greater or lesser in the aggregate, only easier at times to ignore. Still, “[i]t would always be the same,” for it always only ever is just that—the same. Now, however, is not a time for either the poet or his speaker to ignore the persistence of that truth. The ash that falls “on an old man’s sleeve” as the second section begins is clearly the soot and dust in the air from London’s nightly fires in the present moment as the city endures the constant German air attacks. Where there was a house and the lives lived in it, there now is nothing. “This,” the speaker tells us, like a bell tolling the final hour, “is the death of air.” The litany of doom and terror continues as in each succeeding stanza the speaker makes the reader painfully mindful of the tragedies unfolding all around him. Existence collapses into its absence, which is death. There are the dead at sea washed up on sandy shores and the dead in the mud of the water-filled craters the bombs have left in their wake. “This is the death of earth.” There

Four Quartets are the bombed-out churches, their ruins still smoldering, the foundation drenched and flooded with water, gone both “sanctuary and choir. / This is the death of water and fire.” The world and all its glory having been thus reduced to its elemental baseness, which is dead, inert matter, the speaker suddenly finds himself on a foot patrol searching for smoldering fires through the ruined and deserted city streets after the bombing has ended but still during “the uncertain hours before the morning.” The succeeding 71 lines of poetry, from line 78 to line 149, both in the threeline stanza pattern and in the general tone of dark despair, are demonstrably in the style of one of the great pilgrims of eternity, the early Renaissance Florentine poet DANTE ALIGHIERI. On the basis of his rightfully celebrated masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, Dante holds an unassailable place as one of the premier poets of world literature on the topic of the relationship between the individual and eternity. Far more to the point, however, Eliot had alluded tellingly and generously to Dante in major poems of his own from virtually the beginning of his poetry writing. It would not be fair to say that Dante has been conspicuously absent thus far from the verse of the Four Quartets since its poetry is not as copiously allusive as Eliot’s poetry was apt to be well into the middle of his career, in a poem such as “Ash-Wednesday,” published in 1930, for example. By the same token, Dante’s sudden appearance in the pages of a poetry even as idiosyncratic as the poetry of the Four Quartets comes as no surprise. In fact, there is a certain inevitability that Dante’s ideas, technique, or style, if not all three, would be reflected at some point in this poem by as assiduous a student of Dante’s as Eliot has been throughout. A reader does not have to be aware of the Dantean influence on the “Little Gidding” passage in question in order to appreciate it, however. On its own, it is perhaps the most sustained and compelling poetic passage that Eliot ever composed, moving forward at a breathtaking pace and with a narrative coherence that satisfies the reader’s every expectation, and then some. The reader mindful of the passage’s fully intentional debt to Dante, however, cannot help but gain that much more insight and enjoyment from the experience of reading it.

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In a 1950 essay, “What Dante Means to Me,” which was first delivered as an address to the Italian Institute in London on July 4 of that year, Eliot commented on his intentions for the passage and its place of honor in “Little Gidding,” calling it “the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or the Purgatorio [the first and second parts of the threepart Comedy], in style as well as content, that I could achieve.” By doing so, Eliot went on to say, he hoped “to present to the mind of the reader a parallel between the Inferno and the Purgatorio, which Dante visited, and a hallucinated scene after an air-raid.” To give this working tribute to Dante even more verisimilitude, Eliot found a way to approximate Dante’s terza rima (tri-rhymed) rhyme scheme by alternating multisyllabic and monosyllabic endings without the benefit of rhymes. According to Eliot, the key concept is that the scene that now transpires is hallucinatory, and it is taking place on “a dead patrol” following an air raid in those darkest hours just before the dawn. In that hellish setting after the enemy warplanes, their mission completed, “[h]ad passed below the horizon of [their] homing,” the speaker encounters a stranger and sees “in the brown baked features . . . a familiar compound ghost.” Since the speaker had first “caught the look of some dead master” in the specter’s features, the reader is allowed to imagine a number of likely candidates for the honor of being this “dead master.” There is first and foremost, of course, Dante himself. Not only is the entire passage indebted to him both stylistically and conceptually after all, but readers of the Inferno might see in certain details of the stranger echoes of Brunetto Latini, Dante’s own former teacher, whom the poet encounters in the third round of the seventh circle of hell where Latini’s features have been baked by the fiery rain falling on burning plain where the sodomists are punished. A complete reading of the passage, however, brings several other candidates to mind. Any reference to Dante, for example, cannot help but call up the Roman poet Virgil, to whom Dante himself claimed a great debt and who had initially appeared to Dante, in the Inferno, as a “shade” or ghost before then guiding Dante through hell and

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purgatory. The tone of the passage, meanwhile, is also reminiscent of the scene in act 1 of Hamlet in which Hamlet, alone, encounters his father’s ghost, which then speaks to him, so another viable candidate for the dead master is WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Toward the end of Eliot’s passage, for yet another example, there is a reference to “that refining fire,” which could call to mind the scene toward the end of the Purgatorio in which Dante encounters Arnaut Daniel, the Provençal poet to whom Eliot, in his dedication to The Waste Land, had earlier favorably compared his own poetic mentor and close friend, the American poet EZRA POUND, another candidate. That reference, however, is quickly followed by the idea that, in that refining fire, one “must move in measure, like a dancer.” While such an image is not unique to the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. YEATS, a friend and near contemporary of Eliot’s and Pound’s, Yeats ends one of his major poems, “Among School Children,” which itself uses as its central metaphor the notion of masters and students, with a celebrated image of a dancer: “O body swayed to music, o brightening glance, / How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” So Yeats is a likely candidate as well, particularly in view of the fact that he had passed away fairly recently, in January 1939. JAMES JOYCE, the Irish modern novelist whose last masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, Eliot had published in his capacity as an editor for Faber & Faber, is another possible candidate, inasmuch as he, too, had recently passed away, in 1941. Here, however, the connection would not be a purely literary one so much as an iconic moment for Eliot. Eliot was just approaching his mid-50s while composing “Little Gidding,” and Joyce was only in his early 60s at the time of his death. Surely, with the war on the one hand and the calendar on the other, Eliot must have been becoming more and more conscious that both his generation and his epoch were passing. Others, meanwhile, have nominated the 17thcentury English poet John Milton for the role. Whoever this dead master might be, and keeping in mind as well that he is a “compound ghost,” the ultimate point is that he is clearly a kindred spirit, one who, like Eliot, had spent his life as a poet engaged in the same effort to “purify the dialect of

the tribe.” In that capacity, Eliot’s introduction of this figure into the poetry allows him again to muse on the limits of language in general and of poetry and art in particular, as Eliot’s speaker has done several times before in the course of the Quartets. Once more, through this device, the reader is asked to consider how, like all things, even the words of the poet are dated material, “[f]or last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice.” All things pass, the poetry has frequently iterated, including poetry, and that paradox—that the means by which humanity muses on and communicates its feelings regarding life’s imperfections is itself imperfect—haunts the pages of human history as much as it does the pages of the Four Quartets. This entire passage, finally, is more than just a commentary on the temporal quality of poetry and the language of poetry, however. Earlier, in “East Coker,” Eliot’s speaker had disparaged the idea that there is any wisdom that comes from age. Indeed, the futility of all human wisdom has become an underlying theme of the poetry, as the speaker seeks to come to grips with the distinction between what can be known and what should be known. Is it any wonder, then, that the most critical information that this familiar ghost has to impart to the speaker should regard “the gifts that are reserved for age / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort”? Nor should readers miss the ironic tone here, lest they suspect that the entire tenor of the poetry thus far, with its persistently expressed lack of faith in human endeavor, is about to be turned on its head. For the point, at least on the part of this ghost, is that there are no gifts reserved for age. Instead, the spectral figure speaks of a deadening of the senses, the “conscious impotence of rage at human folly,” shame and embarrassment over one’s errors, and the slow realization that praise was flattery and worldly honors ignominy. It is a veritable litany of self-revelation and exposure that, as a theme, Eliot would essay far more fulsomely in 1959 in the character of Lord Claverton, the protagonist of Eliot’s last verse drama and major work, The Elder Statesman. For now, however, the ghost’s awful revelation succeeds in

Four Quartets bringing the speaker back from the brink of a personal despair. Unfortunately, it succeeds in doing as much only by universalizing that despair. By this point in the last of the quartets, it appears that the poet is saying that all humanity and human enterprise is doomed to futility and vanity. As gloomy as that assessment may seem, it is only the same as the assessment of every other great religious, philosophical, and spiritual system in human history. Poets do not rightly achieve their renown for saying anything new, however, or for saying anything that any reasonably thoughtful, feeling person should not already know by the time that he or she has reached some measure of advanced adulthood. Rather, we expect poets to share the common experience in uncommon ways, so that simple truths emerge renewed and refreshed, or else to share uncommon experiences in common ways, so that the rare experience of a singular individual becomes accessible to all. Surely, Eliot has been doing just that throughout the Quartets, so that a man visiting an English country home or riding the subway or watching for fires after an air raid or kneeling in an ancient chapel or pondering the flotsam on a river is not only the same man but the same as every other person if he or she, too, were followed through the rich varieties of experience that the typical individual may undergo in a lifetime. Part III The dark night of the soul of the second section ended, Eliot’s speaker takes deserved time out in the third section, as he moves again into a reflective mode to ponder the distinction among attachment, detachment, and the dangerous middle—indifference, which is dangerous because it can be mistaken for the ideal, which is detachment. If nothing else, the speaker has been learning—learning that while there may be patterns, they are endlessly repeating, even in the individual’s life, let alone the life of the nation, or people, or species. Even in the midst of war and the distress of nations, one must be still and still moving, committed but not attached to the nation and its fate, and certainly not indifferent, imagining that not to care for temporal affairs is the way of the saint. Rather, it is a narrow, straitened path that one must tread. To see that the ways and the things of this world

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are important, too, is to recognize that they are “[o]f little importance / Though never indifferent,” as the speaker observes. What history is and is not can never be deciphered, but its passage is undeniably self-evident, and within its confines, we come and we go. “See, now they vanish, / The faces and places,” but only to “become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.” The poetry now borrows from Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English mystic. Dame Julian received her inner locutions or “shewings,” as they were called, in 1373, though she did not compose them into a book until 15 years later. Her Thirteenth Revelation came in response to her puzzlement regarding the purpose of evil in a world created by divine goodness. She is told, “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It is from this revelation that Eliot quotes quite liberally both here and at the end of “Little Gidding.” Despite her 14th-century origins, Julian is yet another figure in the poem from the century and a half between Henry’s break with Rome and Charles’s hanging. During that time, a whole people, the English, the poet’s people, became embroiled in and disintegrated into the very sort of religious and political infighting and suppression that very likely resulted in Eliot’s own ancestor’s leaving her shores. Most assuredly, those conflicts resulted in the death of Charles, so it may not be at all coincidental that medieval English mystics, of whom Julian remains an outstanding example, were very much in vogue during the 17th century, perhaps because of their connectedness to an England where faith was a communal constant rather than a source of divisiveness. Even so, Julian serves Eliot’s larger purpose, emphasizing that every age is an age of conflict for the simple reason that life is conflict. Julian, then, was a countrywoman whose life it was to remain cloistered in but not of the world (she did not take religious orders, for example). She was, as a result, free, much like Eliot’s speaker from time to time is, to meditate on first and last things—on humanity and eternity and God. On the basis of such a contemplative life, she had been led to conclude that “[s]in is behovely,” that is, that it is morally necessary. For reasons that we

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mere mortals will never understand, surely not in this life, sin is said to serve a purpose, yet, nevertheless, “[a]ll shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well.” It is what Eliot’s speaker makes of this in his own circumstances that should most matter to readers of the Four Quartets, of course, particularly now that it is nearing its conclusion. And what he makes of it is that, indeed, all “are touched by a common genius,” and all in the end suffer the same fate. Just as the “familiar compound ghost” had reminded the speaker that last year’s speech is for last year’s deeds, so are last year’s factions for the beating of last year’s drum. Now, instead: These men, and those who opposed them And those whom they opposed Accept the constitution of silence And are folded in a single party.

The poet/speaker, who at the conclusion of “The Dry Salvages” suggests that the best that most of us can hope for is to have tried, can now, as the third section of “Little Gidding” comes to an end, raise that apparent cop-out to the level of the only heroic action that is available—to carry one’s cause to the grave, like that broken king, Charles I, not because the cause was right and true (no wholly human cause ever can be) but because it is a motive for action, and action is better than inaction, just as detachment is better than indifference. A commitment to action, even though that action may be futile and vain, is better than no commitment at all, and, furthermore, it forever remains as “[w]hat they had to leave us—a symbol.” It is, in fact, all, in the end, they had to leave us. Part IV With the same beauty and power as the poetry of the Dantean scene from the second part of “Little Gidding,” the poem’s fourth part, which in each of the preceding quartets has been the shortest section, providing a lyrical interlude that both summarizes the poem to that point and gives entry into the concluding fifth section, brings us to the pivotal moment of terror and glory, fear and freedom, whose conflicting tensions have guided the entire sequence to this point.

The dove that is descending is a Stukker dive bomber, one of Germany’s most feared war machines, whose screaming descent put fear into the hearts of even the most battle-hardened troops, let alone civilian populations, and yet that dove is as well, in keeping with the mystery of divine will revealed to Julian, the Holy Spirit. If the disparity seems outrageously derisive, even blasphemous, comparing the third person of the Christian Trinity to a warplane, then the reader has forgotten the import of Julian of Norwich’s inner locution that “[s]in is behovely,” echoing the timeless religious conviction that even evil must serve God’s purpose, albeit in ways that we poor human creatures, limited by time, intellect, and the distractions of circumstance, can never hope to understand. Perhaps Eliot’s rendering of the same idea is that something as awful as a Nazi fighter bomber strafing a London street before releasing its so-called payload can drive people to God by convincing them, through the furious suffering forced by its “flame of incandescent fire,” that if there can be such evil and violence, then there must be a God. Or perhaps it is the notion that such destruction, though wrought by humankind and, so, seemingly unnecessary because it is willful, is really no different from all the other species of violence and destruction that nature herself can work. The indisputable fact, nevertheless, is that such violence, whether it be natural or manmade, reminds the individual in vivid and dramatic ways that there is only “one discharge from sin and error,” and it is death. Otherwise, in recognition of free will, the speaker, as any of us do, reserves for himself the right to pick his poison, as it were, although the one means the life of the spirit, the other its death. He calls it “the choice of pyre or pyre— / To be redeemed from fire by fire.” While all this may sound theologically complex, it really is not, building as it does instead on other religious paradoxes. One can burn with desire or burn in the fires of hell, or one can burn in the cleansing purgatorial fires, and that can be done here, in this life, as much as there, in that other, eternal life. The difference is that here we have the will to make the choice, whereas there the choice has been made for us. So, then, the “dove descend-

Four Quartets ing breaks the air,” even if it is a dive bomber coming down on us, guns blazing, dropping its bomb with pinpoint precision, by forcing the choice upon the individual, enabling him or her indeed to make the choice to be “redeemed from fire by fire.” If the premise that has just now been promulgated in the first stanza of the fourth part of “Little Gidding” is valid, it leads invariably to the query, “Who then devised the torment?” And it is followed by the equally incredible answer: “Love.” As much is incredible, again, only if it is taken in its immediate and temporal context, however. Julian, for example, was finally freed to compose her revelations when, pondering why she had been made privy to her revelations, she was told that if she would “learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing,” then she should know that “Love was the Meaning.” So, too, if Eliot’s poem’s unspoken assumption is true and there is a God, then all things are devised by love, for some purpose or meaning that we cannot ever fully understand or comprehend. Sin is behovely for the same reason, and thus it is indeed the occupation of the saint to contemplate the eternally present intersection of the timeless with time. Even in the midst of such utter destructiveness, after all, nothing has truly changed except in the human universe of vainglorious illusions. From the point of view of eternity, that is to say, the physical realm has simply rearranged its molecules a bit, as it is perpetually doing with or without the assistance of human agency. But from the point of view of the individual human spirit, it is quite another matter. From that point of view, everything has changed for good or for ill forever as the result of the collusion of one’s own will with the moral equation that those molecules spell out for each sentient mortal being. “Love,” although few may be prepared to embrace such knowledge, most surely “is the unfamiliar name,” and surely is, as Shakespeare says, the ever fixéd mark that the poet/speaker has all along been seeking. Part V In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel of the 1920s, The Great Gatsby, which shares a great deal with The Waste Land as a criticism of contemporary life, there is a scene in which Fitzgerald’s narrator,

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Nick Carraway, suggests to the novel’s title character, the romantic tough guy, Jay Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” Gatsby retorts, and he goes on with a typical American incredulity in the face of “can’t” by insisting, “Why, of course you can!” The burden of the past, and even questions of what that burden may be in terms of the present, haunts the Four Quartets as well. Throughout the Four Quartets, the speaker has been undergoing a learning experience, teaching his soul to be still in a physical universe that is unceasingly moving, ceaselessly changing, yet persistently fixed as present in memory. In the earliest parts of the extended sequence, the speaker seems to think that the past can be recovered or at least restored to meaning. That moment in the rose garden, for example, becomes a lost moment that the speaker hopes to discover again by turning the right corner or opening the right door. However, as the Four Quartets continues, the speaker seems to become more and more conscious that, although time present and time past may be present in time future, as “Burnt Norton” famously opens, time past is otherwise lost. This changing idea regarding the recoverability of the past reaches its final reversal in the idea, expressed in “The Dry Salvages,” that we must fare forward, for at every moment, even when we are ostensibly standing still, faring forward is what we are doing in any case. In that insight, nevertheless, the speaker does not find consolation; rather, he finds the vague hope that since only the saint can grasp the mystery at the heart of the moment of Incarnation in which the timeless intersects with time, he, the speaker, is left, like the rest of us, to at least live out his appointed time in trying. In his trying to do just that, however, what is never clarified is how one should conduct a life of “just trying.” Only in “Little Gidding” does that clarity comes. The speaker recognizes in a figure like the doomed King Charles a symbol of how we all are doomed but must yet act on our convictions to the last bitter moment, satisfied not that we have tried but that we have succeeded by trying. For no life is a success, despite what the eulogists and journalists say, since all lives end in death. Yet it is love itself that brings us to this realization and recognition,

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not to humiliate us or frustrate our efforts, but to free us from their perturbation. Experience, when rightly viewed, leads us to freedom from its importance, but commits us to the importance of seeking an active correctness in all we do. Such a clarity achieved, at last the poet is ready to conclude his poem, and the speaker his pondering. Schooled in all manner of thought and feeling, the speaker is prepared now to relinquish it in exchange for acceptance. If the speaker has grown in anything throughout the course of the quartets, it has been in awareness. He has changed from someone who had to ponder the relationship among time, the passage of time, and memory to someone who can appreciate living in an eternal present—the only kind of time anyone has—with a constant awareness of the past and its continuing presentness. More, he has become aware that tragedy and failure have a place in life and serve a purpose. He has grown, in other words, in understanding by coming to understand that it is itself limited but that the individual can extend those limits virtually infinitely. The danger of a doctrinal faith, particularly from the point of view of the outsider, is that it encourages the assumption that once one has acquired the doctrine, one has acquired understanding as well, whereas in fact nothing can be further from the truth. The doctrine is there as discipline and prayer and observance, but understanding can come only through the experience of the dove descending, in whatever form the dove may take, since all forms are, like all patterns, the same form. So, then, as the fifth and final part of “Little Gidding,” also the final section of the Four Quartets, opens, the reader is reminded of ends and of beginnings. The speaker is ready now to accept what may seem to be a commonplace bit of practical wisdom, but one that he has come to on his own through the continuing effort at prayer, observance, and discipline that the poetry of the Four Quartets has thus far represented. He has come to understand the circular nature of experience, its way of repeating itself in patterns, the patterns themselves permitting the repetitiveness of experience to emerge into consciousness, so that words such as ends and beginnings become meaningless, although

there is still a need to recognize sequences, as one thing follows another. Language, then, the means by which poetry is recorded in memory, relies on sequencing, without which there is no pattern or progress: “every phrase / And sentence that is right (where every word is at home / . . . dancing together) / . . . is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph.” As with language, so with action. All action leads the same way and follows the same pattern, recapitulating itself generation after generation just as the poetry recapitulates its own past moments: “to the block [Charles in “Little Gidding” III], to the fire [“Little Gidding” IV], down the sea’s throat [“The Dry Salvages” IV].” Each generation ends, thinking its actions cataclysmic and decisive. Yet from those endings, the next generation picks up its own beginning, which was the same as for the generations that have preceded it. Then that new generation reaches what it imagines to be its own cataclysmic ending, which was their ancestors’, too, so that we do, indeed, “die with the dying” and “are born with the dead.” All moments, then, are from the point of view of eternity, the same moment, even if each individual, from his or her own point of view, lives a moment that appears to be unique and particular. That is, again, the configuration that the timeless shares with time. From one end of the telescope, the “moment of the rose . . . and of the yew-tree / Are of equal duration,” whereas from the point of view of natural processes, they are nothing of the sort. From the other end of the telescope, in the meantime, is the individual’s end: “[o]n a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel / History is now and England.” There is no essential difference, ultimately, but for the individual, it is all the difference in the world. As the fifth part of “Little Gidding” draws to a close, it need only reiterate what the poetry has been persistent about. Though there may be no gifts reserved for age, the speaker asserts his will, as he does in the closing of “East Coker,” by proclaiming that old men ought to be explorers, faring forward as we all must, whether we will or not. “We shall not cease from exploration,” the speaker now vows with more certainty and purpose than he had

Four Quartets when these spiritual and temporal explorations of his began. By doing so, by insisting on continuing to grow in awareness and in understanding all the days of our lives, we will able to “arrive from where we started / And know the place for the first time.” The past, that is to say, cannot be re-created, but it can be made peace with and organized into significant patterns, both for a people and for individuals, and out of those renewing patterns a viable relationship with the present in its own continuous passage into the past can emerge. For the past is all still there, the poetry asserts as well, returning to its own past now back in the early pages of “Burnt Norton,” where the Four Quartets began. Looking back now, the reader can discern that the end was concealed in those opening ruminations on time in its flight, to be revealed now in “Little Gidding”’s ending, where is heard again the children’s laughter in the apple tree. Back in “Burnt Norton” I, that laughter was “[n]ot known, because not looked for.” But once sought, once looked for, as it has been through all the intervening pages of poetry, that childhood laughter is seen to be “[q]uick now, here, now, always.” For if there is an eternity, then nothing is ever lost. To achieve such insight is indeed to achieve a “condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything),” exactly what one would pay for a pearl of wisdom of such great value. In the closing lines of “Little Gidding,” the place of such an honor is reserved for Julian, as the poetry not only echoes her visions once more in the confident promise that “all shall be well” but echoes itself, too. Having entered the realm of human experience by virtue of its having been written, the poetry of the Four Quartets, too, becomes a part of what we know, whether we know it or not. Earlier, “East Coker” IV contrasted the images “the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars” with “frigid purgatorial fires,” and “The Dry Salvages” I offered a pair of similar images as it told readers that the “salt is on the briar rose, / The fog is in the fir trees.” Smoke and briar and fog, fire and roses, connote the ambiguous aspects of reality, wherein what seems solid can be a vaporous web, and what seems beautiful can be ensconced in thorn and pain. From the proper distance and the right per-

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spective, what is only a chimera and what is the fragile petal can be virtually indistinguishable, just as, in some manner of truth and meaning that is far more than merely metaphorical or figurative, time and the timeless must, from the proper perspective, be virtually indistinguishable one from the other as well. For the poet of the Four Quartets, that point is real, and there, as the poetry ends, those previous images are recollected into one extended image, where “tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.” That fire is wartime London burning; that fire is the sunlight catching the petals of a rose just so in the rose garden; that fire is the point where terror and beauty meet in the risen and crowned Christ in glory; that fire is Dante’s multifoliate rose, the image that he makes of the souls of the blesséd gathered about the throne of God, as they appear to Dante from the great distance from which he is permitted to witness the phenomenon and with which he ends his Divine Comedy. Finally, along with all its other potentials for meaning, that is the still point, and as Four Quartet ends, the poet permits himself to assert that the still point is more than merely a metaphysical concept. It is, rather, a real state of being. It is, at least, a basis for vision enough for the 20th century.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Any general summary of the significance of the Four Quartets as a poetic statement ought to begin by taking a page from the poet of the Four Quartets: In its end is its beginning, and the reader returning there to the poem’s beginning will know it again for the first time. Put no less straightforwardly but less colorfully, the complexities and befuddling puzzlements with which the poem opens are, on any subsequent reading, far less onerous, even if not necessarily a great deal clearer. That should ultimately come as no surprise, however. A poem that aims to tackle life’s greatest mystery, the place of the divine in human affairs, is not likely ever to read like a narrative romp. Yet the poem’s own mysteries, like life’s, are often matters of perception rather than fact and, once uncovered, prove to be no mysteries at all.

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The two epigraphs that Eliot provided for the Four Quartets are a case in point. They are both taken from Heracleitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whose thought has come down to us only in fragments. The two fragments that Eliot cites, when translated from the Greek, read as follows: “The word is common to everyone, but each man thinks that the word is his own” and “The way up is the way down.” For all their seeming ambiguity, those two epigraphs, taken together and appreciated for their insight, explain just about everything that anyone needs to know in order to grasp the central message of the Four Quartets. Once one has reached the end of the Four Quartets, one can return to those epigraphs and, as it were, know them for the first time as just that: explanations in a nutshell of what all of the poetry of the Four Quartets is getting at. In terms of the first epigraph, it is hard to deny that human experience, for all its apparently endless variety, is a relatively common experience for everyone. Everyone imagines that his or her point of view, nevertheless, is not only a unique one but is generally the only valid one, particularly when it comes into conflict with someone else’s. In terms of the second, no matter from what point various courses of inquiry begin, assuming that they all arrive at the only satisfactory conclusion, it will be pretty much the same conclusion. The thrill, as always, is in the chase, not the capture. And is there any prey more elusive than the meaning, the purpose, of life itself? Heracleitus’s are practical insights once their essential wisdom is grasped, and they are the same insights at which the speaker of the Four Quartets finally arrives. However, Eliot’s speaker had to earn his way to those conclusions, not simply accept them on the basis of the word of another. To imagine that Heracleitus is correct without testing his premises in experience would be to miss his whole point, which is that experience—not logic or doctrine or even belief, especially when that belief is based only on someone else’s testimony—alone matters. And that is why any reader must first experience a poem as rich as the Four Quartets before feeling secure enough to begin to try not so much to understand as to grasp, like Heracleitus’s,

its insights, which are, in the final analysis and coming full circle, the same insights. A danger is that approaching Eliot’s work this way may make it appear to be very clever, but little more. As with any element in an Eliot poem, however, the reader must be ready at all times to separate the appearance of such mere cleverness from a more meaningful possibility—that the poem has a far deeper richness, one of intent and of purpose. Cleverness, on the one hand, is James Joyce’s multilingual pun in calling his final novel Finnegans Wake, and it has deservedly been well recorded in critical circles, whereby Finnegan is a play on both an Irish surname and the words fine—“the end” in Latin—and again. Combined in that way, the play on words is connotative of beginnings and endings, too, particularly in the context of a wake with all its connotative ambiguities. A richness of meaning, on the other hand, is Eliot’s making even his epigraphs serve the purpose of mind-opening exercises in the extension of language into thought and of thought into paradox. Structure can be a means of extending meaning as well. The intricate interweaving of levels of discourse and modes of thought with depths of feeling and both personal and public history can often, like the musical structures the poetry is meant to mimic, overlap in the Four Quartets in ways whereby the beginning of one motif or train of thought is lost momentarily or is completely blurred by another just ending, giving the endless impression that the poetry is nothing but a series of false starts followed by dead ends. In fact, however, it is these persistent over- and undertones of rhythms of thought and feeling that, on subsequent rereadings, give the poetry an overarching coherence. Modulated like pitches between major and minor keys, the poetry’s playing back and forth between reflections on time, history, and eternity, all against a backdrop of symbols drawn from a basic and unadorned natural landscape, gradually take on an internal harmony, particularly when they are presented within the narrative framework of the poet’s own cataloguing of significant places. As its pace slackens and quickens, with a purposiveness that continuously grows in confidence as the poem progresses through each of the succeeding quartets, those feelings and thoughts that

Four Quartets were first expressed with a hesitant philosophical certainty begin to take on themselves the semblance not of abstract speculations but of practical conclusions drawn from a relatively long life’s reflections on real experience. The resulting assurance with which the great imponderables are not so much resolved as they are successfully categorized becomes infectious, and the reader should complete the poem not convinced but confirmed, for by virtue of all these varied techniques, the poetry has managed the unmanageable but always imaginable possibilities that the very idea of eternity holds out to us poor creatures of time. As a result, Four Quartets itself succeeds in making coherent the normally incoherent and giving powerfully memorable shape to the vague but necessary dream that there is, in the words of W. B. Yeats, a purpose set before the mind, the profane perfection of mankind. What is holiness, the poem asks again and again in a wide variety of ways, if it is only for the holy? Eliot’s speaker works this inquiry out, for the most part, against the backdrop of a Christian belief system, inasmuch as the inquiry is conducted in religious terms. Religion may seem to dominate the poetry from time to time, but as much could be said of a number of other human preoccupations—the getting and spending of wealth, the exercise of power, the passage of time, the longing for peace and contentment, the fear of death, and the knowledge of its inevitability. All these various strands or motifs or themes or topics, depending on whether the poetry is characterized with a weaving, a musical, a poetic, or a prose metaphor, accumulate as the poetry is developed, so that to isolate only one strand or motif or theme or topic is not to diminish the experience of the poetry of the Four Quartets so much as to demolish it. What is holiness, if it is only for the holy? The answer that the poetry offers is that if there is holiness, it cannot be confined to a particular experience or moment or way of life or culture or belief system. It must be, too, a state of being that is recognizable and achievable, in which one can function in perfectly ordinary ways among perfectly ordinary people and things, as well as extraordinary ones. What passes for religion in Eliot, in other words, is often its own species, like Heracleitus’s,

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of good practical wisdom based on commonplace observations. The problem, as Eliot himself was aware at least since the 1920s and his essays on Shakespeare and Dante, is that poetry is neither philosophy nor belief, although it may seem to emerge from both in no certain way and to no certain purpose. The result, especially in Eliot’s later poetry, beginning with “Ash-Wednesday,” is often a critical confusion whereby, depending on the individual commentator’s biases, Eliot is either praised or blamed, and his poetry is either commended or excoriated, according to the degree to which it appears to be advancing some species of religious faith. The British essayist and novelist George Orwell, whose classic political satire Animal Farm would later be published by Faber & Faber on the basis of Eliot’s editorial recommendation, provides a case in point when he reviewed “The Dry Salvages” for Poetry in its October–November issue for 1942. Orwell makes it clear from the start that his monumental dissatisfaction with all three of the quartets that had appeared thus far was the “result of something lacking in myself.” Still, he concludes that Eliot’s poetic powers have diminished in proportion to how much the poetry reveals Eliot’s own Anglo-Catholic faith, which is one for which Orwell clearly has little respect. According to Orwell, Eliot’s “later poems express a melancholy faith and the earlier ones a glowing despair,” and Orwell, though he may or may not endorse the despair, dislikes the faith so much so that, for him, the poems themselves fail. Accordingly, taking his cue from Eliot’s speaker’s comment on “the intolerable wrestle / With words and meaning,” Orwell concludes, “I should imagine that the struggle with meanings would have loomed smaller, and the poetry would have seemed to matter more, if [Eliot] could have found his way to some creed which did not start off by forcing one to believe the incredible.” Without taking issue with Orwell’s patronizing dismissal of the typically unprovable dynamics at the core of any belief system, the reader should note that Orwell is judging the poetry on the basis of what he knows of the poet’s personal faith, rather than on the basis of the poetry itself. That is

230 “Francis Herbert Bradley” a critical distinction, and one that cannot be easily overlooked or forgiven for the simple reason that it is distortions such as these, not the poetry, that make of poetry bad philosophy and even poorer religion. The Four Quartets is neither, and that is why it is great poetry.

FURTHER READING Alldritt, Keith. Eliot’s Four Quartets: Poetry as Chamber Music. Totowa, N.J.: Woburn Press, 1978. Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: A Casebook. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Bergsten, Staffan. Time and Eternity. A Study in the Structure and Symbolism of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Stockholm, Sweden: Uppsala, 1960. Blissett, William. “The Argument of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” University of Toronto Quarterly 15 (January 1946): 115–26. Clubb, Merrel D., Jr. “The Heraclitean Element in Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Philological Quarterly 40 (January 1961): 19–33. Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Scribner’s, 1949. Ellis, Steve. The English Eliot: Design, Language, and Landscape in Four Quartets. London: Routledge, 1991. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. New York: Dutton, 1950. ———. The Composition of Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1978. Hargrove, Nancy. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978. Hay, Eloise Knapp. T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Ho, Cynthia Olson. “Savage Gods and Salvaged Time: Eliot’s Dry Salvages.” Yeats Eliot Review 12, no. 1 (Summer 1993): 16–23. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Lobb, Edward, ed. Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante. London: Macmillan, 1989. Matthiessen, F. O., and C. L. Barber. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.

Smith, Grover, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

“Francis Herbert Bradley” (1926) What the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE was to the young T. S. Eliot as a poet, the English idealist philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) was to the development of Eliot’s critical intellect, and perhaps of his poetry writing as well. Eliot came to Laforgue earlier, in 1908, while still a Harvard undergraduate and did not become a serious student of Bradley’s thought until after he had begun his graduate studies toward the doctorate at that same institution in 1911. Even then, he would not purchase his personal copy of Bradley’s major work, Appearance and Reality, until June 1913, although it is likely that he had first gained his acquaintance with Bradleyan idealism while attending the lectures of the French idealist philosopher Henri Bergson in Paris in 1910. Whatever the case may be, Eliot ended up making Bradley the focus of his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” which he completed in the spring of 1915. This essay of Eliot’s is an introduction that he prepared for the republication, in 1926, of Bradley’s Ethical Studies, which had originally been published in 1876 and which Bradley himself had refused to reprint throughout the remainder of his life. Although Eliot’s dissertation on Bradley was not issued in book form until 1964, under the title Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, Eliot would later collect this introductory essay to Bradley’s Ethical Studies in his Selected Essays, 1917–1932.

SYNOPSIS Eliot begins the essay by questioning the sincerity of Bradley’s fabled diffidence of tone in his prose, a modesty that many took to be an unscrupulous

“Francis Herbert Bradley” pose to gain an intellectual advantage over his opponents as well as his readers. Since the same sort of ironic-seeming self-deprecation is a notable aspect of Eliot’s own prose style, Eliot’s conclusion that Bradley’s was not a pose is worthy of attention: “[I]f this had been a pose it would never have worn so well as it has.” Those same terms could be applied to Eliot; any attitude that is long sustained seems to be a genuine one. As Eliot continues, it becomes of further interest that, although it is reasonable to assume that it must have been the content of Bradley’s thought that had attracted Eliot to him in the first place, it is Bradley’s style that becomes the primary focus of Eliot’s attention. It is, indeed, Bradley’s “great gift of style,” Eliot claims, that allows Bradley to continue to exert an influence on contemporary thought. This style reflects a “purity and concentration of feeling,” one that “wholly and directly” reveals Bradley’s “intense addiction to an intellectual passion.” The direction in which Eliot is leading his argument with this high praise then becomes clear: “The nearest resemblance in style [to Bradley] . . . is Matthew Arnold.” This mention of Arnold, one of England’s leading cultural critics during the latter half of the 19th century, calls to mind Eliot’s distaste for Arnold’s ideas. It would be another four years until the publication, in 1930, of Eliot’s essay “Arnold and Pater,” but in it he pointedly blames Arnold for laying the foundation for the virulently antireligious stance of 20th-century humanism by virtue of his confused thinking with regard to linking the cross-purposes of art and of religion. This secular humanism itself, in the meantime, will come in for a direct assault from Eliot in his 1927 essay “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt.” There he severely criticizes his former Harvard mentor’s attempt to offer humanism as a substitute for religion for 20th-century intellectuals. Therefore, while Arnold is introduced innocently enough into Eliot’s discussion of Bradley’s style, the reader who is wary of where Arnold’s presence in the text may be leading it will not be surprised when the essay turns out to be another foray against the self-centered assurances of the humanist position. Admittedly, it may seem at first

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that Eliot is aiming merely to compare Arnold’s style—and style of thinking—with Bradley’s. For the next few pages, a variety of representative passages from each is offered for the reader’s discernment. But then Eliot observes that there is a substantial difference between the two, that Bradley’s prose arsenal in the intellectual battles that he waged had behind it “a heavier force and a greater precision” than Arnold’s. Eliot continues, somewhat ominously: “Exactly what Bradley fought for and exactly what he fought against have not been quite understood.” Eliot gives the impression that what Bradley had fought against, successfully, was 19th-century utilitarianism, the prepragmatic philosophy that proposed a mechanistic basis for organizing all human institutions and giving them purpose. Arnold had attacked this unimaginative view of human industry as well in his own major work, Culture and Anarchy, but as Eliot sees it, it was Bradley’s thinking, not Arnold’s prose, that “replaced a philosophy [utilitarianism] which was crude and raw and provincial by one which was, in comparison, catholic, civilized, and universal.” This may seem to be putting Arnold and Bradley in the same camp, but then comes the coup de grâce. Although Arnold and Bradley may have shared a distaste for utilitarianism, Bradley “wished only to determine how much of morality could be founded securely without entering into the religious questions at all”—the point being that Arnold did enter into religious questions and did so happily and readily. In Culture and Anarchy, for example, Arnold had equated “the will of God” with “our best self.” From Eliot’s point of view, this best self of Arnold’s “looks very much like Matthew Arnold slightly disguised.” For Eliot, ever fearful of the prerogatives that the modern world permits of individuality and personality, that is an excessive danger—allowing opinion to pass for thought.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot raises in his essay on Bradley what has been for him a crucial issue in his own critical writing from as early as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919 and certainly from the time of “The Function of Criticism” in 1923. In the latter essay,

232 “From Poe to Valéry” its title echoing Arnold’s own “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Eliot had ridiculed the humanist ideal that the individual can conduct his or her behavior properly and to the benefit of others with nothing more than a self-guided, self-generated morality. In that instance, Eliot had held up for ridicule the contemporary English social critic J. MIDDLETON MURRY’s ideas, putting them under the heading of the “Inner Voice.” In their place, Eliot proposed instead a social order, and personal conduct, founded on longstanding cultural traditions. In “Francis Herbert Bradley,” it is Arnold’s notion of conducting oneself according to the personal moral dictates of the “best self” that comes under attack. Even then, it is not mainly in terms of itself that Eliot takes that notion to task, but as it has subsequently evolved, in Eliot’s view, and is now being manifested in Babbitt’s concept of the “inner check” (shades there of Murry’s inner voice). Eliot stands instead by Bradley’s side as a thinker whose own system of ethics sought not to supplant the religious impulse or the necessity of religion. For “to attempt to erect a complete theory of ethics without a religion is none the less to adopt some particular attitude towards religion.” Bradley keeps the two events separate. Speaking in tones that imply that he is speaking wholly for himself, not Bradley, Eliot makes it clear that he regards the religious impulse, or the necessity for it, as something other than a more elaborate species of ethics or morality. He writes, “The distinction is not between a ‘private self’ and a ‘public self’ or a ‘higher self,’ it is between the individual as himself and no more, a mere numbered atom, and the individual in communion with God.” Eliot is asserting that a thinker such as Bradley scrupulously avoids encroaching at all on the prerogatives of the possibilities imposed by the spiritual circumstances of our being, but yet he can deal with the social realities with a respect for those constraints in mind. Bradley does not, in other words, usurp an authority that a proper regard for the limits of philosophy cannot possibly permit. “Morality and religion are not the same thing, but they cannot beyond a certain point be treated separately” Eliot writes. Equally true for Eliot is that

they cannot and should not be confused with each other. Eliot wishes to make that one thing clear: that Bradley, perfect philosopher that he was, did not transgress the intellectual barrier where the one can easily be confused for the other and where both—morality and religion—are equally diminished in the conflicting intellectual and spiritual turmoil that can thus result.

“From Poe to Valéry” (1961) “From Poe to Valéry” is from among the essays gathered in Eliot’s last collection of prose, To Criticize the Critic, which was published posthumously by Faber & Faber in 1965. The essay was originally presented as a lecture at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on November 19, 1948, and that choice of venue may have had more influence on the content of the presentation than not. Poe is an American poet, after all. Although Eliot had published, anonymously, a pamphlet on another American poet, EZRA POUND, as early as 1917, he was not generally wont to spend much critical ink on American poets or literature. So, then, an essay apparently devoted to the 19th-century poet, short-story writer, and erstwhile critic Edgar Allan Poe must seem on the surface to be a singular honor for Poe. Nothing could be further from the truth, however.

SYNOPSIS Eliot makes it clear to begin with that he is not “attempt[ing] a judicial estimate” of Poe, whose work, he says, appears to be “slipshod,” “puerile,” and “haphazard,” although it also evinces a “unique shape and impressive size.” What Eliot finds puzzling about Poe is not his unique importance as a literary figure but the incredible influence that his work has exerted in comparison with its quality. However, it is not American poetry that concerns Eliot or that has benefited, but French poetry—and that is what is most puzzling. Indeed, if anyone in particular had reaped the benefits that the influence of Edgar Allan Poe had on the development of French poetry in the latter half of the

“From Poe to Valéry” 19th century, it would be none other than the Harvard undergraduate student and future poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, who discovered the French symbolists, among them JULES LAFORGUE and Stéphane Mallarmé, in ARTHUR SYMONS’s landmark critical study, The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, during the fall semester of his third year at Harvard in 1908. It is not because of Poe’s intrinsic value or significance as a literary figure or even as an American that he has come to occupy Eliot’s attention at all now so much as because Poe is the one who started it all—Eliot’s own career as a poet included, one might hazard to say—entirely in spite of himself. In fact, Eliot’s real interest, as the title of this essay suggests, is not in Poe but in the French symbolists who were inspired by him. Mallarmé and CHARLES BAUDELAIRE are chief among them, but there is also a French poet who is not a symbolist at all but a modernist contemporary of Eliot’s, Paul Valéry. “These three French poets,” Eliot tells his readers, “represent the beginning, the middle and the end of a particular tradition in poetry,” and he sees it as an ironic travesty of the whole idea of literary influences that that tradition, for them, finds its root in an American who was as competent and no doubt as notorious but otherwise as dangerously lackluster as Poe. It may be best to pick up at the end of the road that the French took “from Poe to Valéry,” as it were, in order to realize how Eliot has come to see the circuitous route that Poe’s influence took through French poetry ending, in the modernist epoch, in Valéry’s pernicious brand of what Eliot calls la poésie pure, or pure poetry. In the parlance of 19th-century English literary history, pure poetry generally comes down to readers as a poetry written in the so-called Parnassan or “art for art’s sake” school of poetry. Poets the likes of Algernon Swinburne and the young W. B. YEATS would be examples of these in the English tradition. Such poetry aims toward achieving a beauty of expression above all else, often at the expense of sense or practical considerations, and always at the expense of the sorts of worldly concerns that trouble all the rest of humanity on a day-to-day basis. Pure poetry makes, in a manner of speaking, a religion of art, and, as a literary movement, its

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danger lies in its capacity to divorce aesthetic pursuits from the world of action and typical moral responsibilities. It is from that movement’s earliest manifestations as English romanticism that Poe derived his models and influences. The entire tradition, as Eliot would characterize it, moves away from an older poetic impulse, in which “the attention of the listener is directed upon the subject matter,” to one wherein the subject, “instead of being the purpose of the poem,” becomes instead nothing more than “a necessary means for the realization of the poem.” That is to say, the “how” of poetry writing, its attention to style, becomes more important than the “what,” its subject. However, what Eliot fears is that, while too intense an attention to subject does not in and of itself make for poetry, a “complete unconsciousness of anything but style would mean that poetry had vanished.” That is where Eliot finds Poe’s influence on French poetry troublesome. Such a pure poetry would become nothing more than sounds pleasingly arranged. There is another point of view that would argue instead that la poésie pure would in fact produce a more beneficial result, a pure poetry divorced from anything but the self-conscious attention to craft. Here, in Eliot’s view, contemporary poetry readers would find Valéry’s agenda. How Valéry fits into the picture, however, requires a recognition of how Poe’s theories of poetry writing became, among the French, its practice instead. In the process, Eliot reveals more about the future of poetry than he does about its past. For a glimpse into that future, the interested reader must return to Eliot’s examination of how Poe seemed to propose a poetry that was produced rather in the same way that one produces a precise effect rather than a particular statement. Poe, Eliot admits, had, “to an exceptional degree,” an ear for poetry as an incantatory art—that is, one devoted purely to the sound of words. “But, in his choice of the word that has the right sound, Poe is by no means careful that it should also have the right sense.” It is here that the French, encountering him as an undisciplined genius of vision, but unable to see his faults as a poet as readily as someone familiar with the resources of English might have,

234 “From Poe to Valéry” went off on a track from which poetry might never recover. These same French poets have subsequently exerted an even greater influence on world poetry than Poe, in English, ever could have, as Eliot must be extremely well aware, being himself a product of that powerful French influence on his generation of English-language poets. Poe, Eliot imagines, had a powerful intellect, but it never obtained its maturity. Absent from it is that “which gives dignity to the mature man: a consistent view of life.” The combination of the two in Poe’s poetry—word choice determined more by sound than by sense, and an apparently demented vision that is really more the result of adolescent excesses than of a carefully managed philosophy of life—proved fatally fruitful in translation, at least for the French. With so many young French poets, beginning with Mallarmé, fascinated by Poe’s vision but, because of a language barrier, unschooled in its essential incoherence, what emerged in France in the later half of the 19th century was symbolism, an entirely new kind of poetry enabling a way of conceptualizing an idiosyncratic engagement of language and sensibility with the brutal realities and sterile conformities of the tediously dull urban world that was also beginning to take shape in Europe at the time. Instead of a poetry of engagement, however, the result has been a poetic force that has self-consciously divorced itself from the culture and society that are producing it and that have need of its ameliorative effects. Eliot cites Baudelaire on Poe: In keeping with the lessons to be learned from Poe, Baudelaire writes, poetry “should have nothing in view but itself. A poem does not say something, it is something.” Eliot’s thesis is that such an attitude, in its coldest form, has come to roost in contemporary French poetry in Valéry. For Eliot insists that from Valéry, a poet infected by the theory that has emerged from Poe’s influence but not affected at all by the influence itself, has come a poetry in which the subject matter of a poem is not less important (that would still admit it a place); rather, subject matter has “a different kind of importance: it is important as means: the end is the poem.”

Add to that, as Eliot does, Valéry’s “extreme skepticism,” and the net result is a poetry that does not even exist as an art for art’s sake experience, since Eliot regards Valéry as “much too skeptical to believe even in art.” In summary, Valéry writes poems to write poems, and that is, in Eliot’s view, an extremely isolated and self-centered experience. This kind of intense self-consciousness on the part of the poet, whereby the poem is its writing, not its effect, let alone anything even approaching a purpose, forces the art to turn inward on itself, mimicking to an alarming degree the cold and calculating way that Poe himself claims to have written “The Raven” in his famous essay “The Philosophy of Composition.” In Valéry, the “penetration of the poetic by the introspective critical activity is carried to the limit . . . at which the latter begins to destroy the former,” and Eliot sees that entire process as having found its seeds in the French take on Poe.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY As is often the case whenever outsiders, even if they are otherwise devoted readers of poetry, encounter a literary argument or disagreement, the issues raised in this essay may seem to be just so much quibbling over whether “themes” and “meanings” or stylistic virtuosities should win the day. Eliot has more in mind than that, however. While Eliot would never lay claim to knowing what poetry’s purpose is for a culture, he would never be one to deny that it must serve one. In countless critical pieces he had argued consistently for making clear distinctions between poetry and belief and between poetry and philosophy, so much so, indeed, that it is one of the enduring hallmarks of his critical canon. But to divorce poetry from poetry—for Eliot, that would be going a step too far. As he says, and it bears repeating, such a movement away from sense and into pure sound has, in Valéry, “gone as far as it can go.” Eliot ends his essay expressing an opinion that seems to harbor a hope. “[T]his advance of self-consciousness, the extreme awareness of and concern for language which we find in Valéry, is something which must ultimately break down, owing to an increasing strain against which the human mind and nerves will rebel.”

“Frontiers of Criticism, The”

“Frontiers of Criticism, The” (1956) First presented as the Gideon Seymour Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1956 and subsequently collected in On Poetry and Poets, this essay takes up where “The Function of Criticism” had left off some 33 years earlier. While it is not to say that Eliot had not produced much interesting and influential commentary on literature during the intervening years, most notably The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism in 1934, the fact remains that those other works of his dealt mainly with individual authors or the social and moral ramifications of certain trends in literature.

SYNOPSIS A pointed analysis on the state and purpose of literary criticism at the present time as a field of endeavor in and of itself was long overdue from one of the founding voices of 20th-century literary thought. Eliot calls attention to this situation himself by commencing his address by somewhat selfdeprecatingly harking back to his 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism.” He happily admits that by now he can no longer remember what all the fuss was about in his attack on J. MIDDLETON MURRY and other critics of that ilk, whom he had characterized as devotees of what he called “the Inner Voice.” He saw them as individuals whose unwillingness to accept external standards of literary taste and propriety could only corrupt contemporary critical intelligence, which, in Eliot’s view, required objectified measures of quality, not an enthusiastic responsiveness to what the critic found pleasing on personal grounds and for no other reason. From the vantage point of a public address being made more than three decades later, Eliot could say that he may have been engaged then in no more than the old debate regarding authority versus individual judgment. He freely admits, too, that much has changed in the field since 1923, not the least event among them I. A. RICHARDS’s publication in 1925 of The Principles of Literary Criticism. In that landmark work, Richards had attempted to systematize criti-

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cal processes largely on the basis of proposing a psychology of reader response. Another major change to which Eliot calls attention is that there are increasing numbers of professional literary critics, the result of universities embracing their expertise as an integral part of the teaching and study of literature. A further result, as Eliot sees it, is that “serious criticism now is being written for a different, a more limited though not necessarily a smaller public than was that of the 19th century.” It is that observation that enables Eliot to open his essay to a consideration of his main topic, which, as the title announces it, is the “frontiers of criticism,” or, rather, its proper limits. In 1923, Eliot had observed that, unlike creative endeavors, criticism is not autotelic; that is, it is not self-justified or self-fulfilling. Quite the contrary, it could be asserted as an axiomatic truth that literary criticism exists only because literature exists. The danger these 33 years later, as Eliot sees it, is that literature itself may be in danger of becoming a secondary pursuit to the much larger interests represented by and invested in the academic industry now created by the criticism of literature, to the end that the messenger becomes more important than the message, and the message than the event to which it relates. Nor is Eliot out simply to protect his own primary turf as a poet and a playwright. As he had already argued in 1942 in “The Social Function of Poetry,” a culture that loses the habit of poetic discourse as an end in itself loses its attachment to emotion and feeling. This increasing emphasis on the processes of criticism poses a threat to creative processes unless they, the critical processes, be kept in constant check. So, then, Eliot is able to pose the dilemma as a question: “When is criticism not literary criticism but something else?” As he sees it, the danger comes down to altering reader expectations of what a work of literature can accomplish and of what engaging it can achieve for the reader. Placed alongside what he calls the “workshop criticism” of the practicing poet, such as himself, who in his earlier critical efforts commented mainly on what he had learned from and appreciated in the work of other poets and dramatists, the criticism that merges with or emerges from the sort of scholarship that the universities

236 “Frontiers of Criticism, The” encourage is by far the more influential. The trouble is that, as influential as it has become, it encourages what he says “may be characterized as the criticism of explanation by origins.” As examples of this notion that a text is explained once its origins have been exposed by the scholar critic, he cites two outstanding examples. In the first case, it is John Livington Lowes’s now legendary source study, The Road to Xanadu, which makes a convincing case that images and phrases from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reading found their way into his poems “Kubla Khan” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. While commending Lowes’s impeccable and impressive scholarship, Eliot implicitly questions, nevertheless, both its value and its validity as literary criticism by pointing out that despite Lowes’s extensive investigation into the literary sources for Coleridge’s imagery, how that material became great poetry “remains as much of a mystery as ever.” The other work that Eliot cites as an example of the criticism of explanation by source is a work of the imagination rather than of criticism, JAMES JOYCE’s virtually unreadable last novel, Finnegans Wake. That a reading experience as densely cryptic and obscure as Joyce’s “novel” becomes the sort of literary achievement that other scholar critics, emulating Lowes, then go on to crave and encourage, suggests that the tail is beginning to wag the dog. The creative artist begins to provide the sorts of texts that are approved by the prevailing critical method, in this case, one that seeks to identify obscure or cleverly concealed sources rather than to engage the text head on for its purely literary value and qualities. As might be suspected, Eliot does not deny that the notes that he provided for The Waste Land (notes that he claims were the result of decisions regarding the printing of the poem in book form) have gone a long way toward making source studies suffice as literary criticism. The result is that such criticism leads to the error among readers “of mistaking explanation for understanding,” so that, in his estimation, ultimately “a good many readers” nowadays desire that “poetry should be explained in terms of something else.” In contrast, Eliot holds, as he virtually always has, that “When the poem has been made,

something new has happened, something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before.” Indeed, Eliot goes as far as to plead that that “is what we mean by ‘creation.’” For all his particular biases and preferences, Eliot remains a pragmatist at heart. Early in the essay, for example, he had credited Coleridge with making an irrevocable alteration in the direction of English literary criticism by bringing philosophy and psychology to bear on aesthetics. “Were he alive now,” Eliot observes, Coleridge might instead “take the same interest in the social sciences and in the study of language and semantics.” A point so well made ought to be well taken as well. Circumstances and human knowledge, its extent and its interests, alter, and as it does, so do all the fields of human endeavor. While he will not, then, give these new critical methodologies, with their fascination with sources, their own due, he insists that “to understand a poem . . . we should endeavour to grasp what the poetry is aiming to be”—that is, the critical focus should be on not what the poetry was made out of but what it has been made into. When he argues, then, using lines from Shakespeare and from Shelley for his examples, that he can understand some poetry without the benefit of explanation, he is not being coy but emphasizing, as he has done many previous times in his critical career, that nothing else can suffice for an actual experience of the poetry itself, as poetry. “I see nothing to be explained,” he points out with regard to the lines in question, “nothing, that is, that would help me to understand it better and therefore enjoy it more.” Criticism, he concludes, when it is truly literary criticism, is an explanation that leads to the sort of understanding that enhances one’s enjoyment of the poem. Any criticism presented as literary criticism that does not enlarge one’s understanding for the sake of enjoyment may still be legitimate, Eliot is willing to concede, but it is not literary criticism. Rather, it is “a contribution to psychology, or sociology, or logic, or pedagogy, or some other pursuit . . . to be judged by specialists, not by men of letters.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot delivered these remarks in the heart of the enemy camp, inasmuch as that metaphor is appro-

“Function of Criticism, The” priate here. He is on a major American university campus, after all. Many in the audience would have been drawn there by Eliot’s well-deserved celebrity alone, but doubtless the most attentive among his audience are literature professors and graduate students convinced that source studies and deep readings are not only a present prerogative but the wave of the future for literary studies and, by extension, literary criticism. Still, Eliot asserts, when he draws his remarks to a close, that “to understand a poem” is the same as “to enjoy it for the right reasons.” He adds that “to enjoy a poem under a misunderstanding as to what it is, is to enjoy what is merely a projection of our own mind.” For Eliot, that is the worst thing that one can do. He is calling for a firsthand engagement not with the poet’s life or beliefs or his or her sources, nor with the reader’s life or beliefs, but with the poem itself. There must be, finally, a balance between considerations of understanding and enjoyment in the best literary criticism. Emphasize issues of understanding at the expense of enjoyment, and the result can be mere explanation to no other purpose. Overemphasize enjoyment, however, and there is a danger that the criticism can become too subjective and impressionistic. What matters is that Eliot has delivered on the promise of his title, delineating what he takes to be the frontiers, the proper limits, of literary criticism. In doing so, he also reasserts his lifelong insistence on regarding the poem as poetry, not in terms of something else, such as philosophy or religion or biography.

“Function of Criticism, The” (1923) Originally published in Eliot’s own literary review, the Criterion, and later collected in Selected Essays in 1932, “The Function of Criticism,” along with “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956) and “To Criticize the Critic” (1961), provides a cogent commentary on what Eliot sees to be the purpose of literary criticism, as opposed to its application to

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individual texts and authors or as a platform for mounting assaults on contemporary social and cultural issues. As such, the three essays, taken separately or regarded as a whole, map the development of Eliot’s ideas regarding the benefit of criticism to literary production and, more important, to reader receptivity to literary values. In the process, of course, Eliot also defines what he takes to be a correct critical method. Eliot, however, was never wont to compartmentalize the purely literary from other social and even political concerns, so the unwary reader of “The Function of Criticism” may quickly wonder what is going on.

SYNOPSIS After a measured and carefully considered opening, in which Eliot takes pains to define the critical process as it is distinguished from the creative, he suddenly launches into several pages of splenetic raillery against the critic J. MIDDLETON MURRY, whom he presents as the exemplar of the enemy camp. If it were a battle in the present culture wars, Murry and his ilk would be stylized as liberals; Eliot, in keeping with the epithets of his time, calls them Whigs. These critics adhere to the free-wheeling principles of the spirit of romanticism, with its anything-goes mentality, and are therefore opposed to its perceived nemesis, classicism, and that movement’s religious manifestation, Catholicism, with their interest in preserving the status quo for the sake of protecting traditional values and models of behavior and social propriety. In 1923, when the essay was written, it was still some five to 10 years before Eliot’s famous declaration that he was a Catholic, a classicist, and a royalist in faith, taste, and politics. At virtually any time in modern history, those are all conservative postures to assume. Yet already here is Eliot, in the shadow of his radical modernist iconoclasm that had just the year before produced The Waste Land, attacking those who listen to the “Inner Voice” of romanticism and moral disorder, whom he caricatures as marching under the intellectual banner of “Muddle Through,” and he is doing so with the same restrained passion that he will bring to bear some 10 years and life-altering religious experiences later in After Strange Gods (1934). That later

238 “Function of Criticism, The” work would embarrass even Eliot for being perhaps too partisan in finding fault with those who did not agree with his own aesthetic and moral positions, which he himself perceived as traditionalist and conservative. Fortunately, in this earlier essay, Eliot makes it clear in logical rather than merely rhetorical terms why he believes that the sloppiness of thought and feeling associated with romanticism—that love affair with the Inner Voice—does not lend itself to criticism, and such clarity of intent continues to form a great part of the essay’s value as a critical document. “Those who obey the inner voice.” Eliot contends, returning to his original topic, the function of criticism, “will not be interested in the attempt to find any common principles for the pursuit of criticism. Why have principles,” he asks, only partially tongue in cheek, “when one has the inner voice?” Earlier in the essay, to establish the basic principle that criticism, in a literary context, entails “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of tastes,” Eliot had referred to the 19th-century English poet and critic MATTHEW ARNOLD. In 1851, in the landmark essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” a title Eliot’s title no doubt intentionally echoes, Arnold had hoped to give English literary criticism a more authentic intellectual pedigree, and he argued for basing criticism on principles drawn from observing an alternating cultural dynamic that required periods of objective critical analysis as much as periods of unbridled creative effort. Now Eliot dares to modify Arnold’s original position in order to establish why he feels that those who rely on the inner voice of intuitive reactions to both the creative impulse and the critical response cannot possibly produce either an adequate critical literature or critical method. Arnold, Eliot claims, missed the point by separating the creative and the critical into two complementary but nevertheless different faculties. The creative writer, in Eliot’s view, is equally as engaged in a critical as a creative process as he or she composes, particularly if the writer is one who, like the classicists Eliot defends, does not rely on the “Inner Voice” but on the guidance of long-standing traditions and

carefully considered poetic and aesthetic standards of both a technical and a thematic nature in the act of selecting and discarding the materials that eventually constitute the poem. Conversely, Eliot proposes, the opposite must be true as well. “If so large a part of creation is really criticism,” it follows that “a large part of what is called ‘critical writing’ [is] really creative.” Its creativity, however, is necessarily derived from an intense interaction with the creative work with which it is engaged, and that enagement cannot take place unless a critic has a “very highly developed sense of fact.” This respect for the externals of the creative process, as it were, cannot possibly accompany an attitude toward creative endeavors that makes of them inviolable utterances inspired not by tradition or technical virtuosities but by attending on the amorphous guidance provided by an inner voice and a muddle-through approach. Comparison and analysis rather than responding with how one feels are the critic’s “chief tools,” Eliot says, but one then has to know what to compare and what to analyze. There processes of interpretation come into play, but they must be guided facts, as he calls them, that are then put into the reader’s possession. The result may seem “arid, technical, and limited,” Eliot readily admits, but it is, in his view, the only kind of criticism that can lay true claim to being such—in his definition, the elucidation of texts and the correction of tastes. Such a criticism, he admits, may make readers more interested in reading critical texts rather than the primary sources, the poems and novels and plays. Still, Eliot asserts that facts cannot corrupt taste, although opinion can.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Overall, and from the vantage point of nearly a century of further refinements in critical theory later, Eliot may seem to be doing little more than arguing in favor of carefully balanced, informed readings of a text, even when such a reading may seem to be cold and detached. His definition of criticism contrasted the impassioned gushings of a literary impressionism that had dominated what passed for literary criticism for much of the 19th century, against which Arnold had proposed his

“Gerontion” own analyses of the cultural dynamics represented by the creative and critical impulses. To read Eliot’s position in that way, however, misses the pointed attack on some contemporary critical strategies that he had felt free enough to disparage with an intellectual vigor in the earlier pages of his essay. Eliot had begun with a favorable allusion to his earlier, celebrated essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” implying that the present essay would elaborate on principles first enunciated there. In “The Function of Criticism,” too, after everything is said and done, Eliot is ultimately asserting the primacy of tradition over individual tastes and practices, of objective judgment over subjective responses, and of the whole over the part. This abhorrence of his for the notion that the self is the final arbiter of all values and valid judgments eventually led him to embrace ultimate tradition in the Catholic Christian foundation of the Anglo-American culture that bred him. Ironically enough, this same foundation, with its emphasis on the sacrosanct relationship between each soul and its creator, had also bred the profound respect for the individual as the court of last resort in matters of aesthetic, moral, ethical, and spritual judgments of which Eliot himself seemed to be more and more mistrustful the more his own creative and critical instincts and talents matured. In essence, Eliot casts his vote in favor of a critical methodology that relies on judging a work’s relative merits in terms of generally accepted standards of taste and technical virtuosity rather than on the basis of one’s individual taste and opinions. Never an intellectual purist, Eliot realizes that that may often mean finding great merit in a work that flies in the face of current practices, and minimal merit in one that does little more than repeat past performances. But that is not what is at issue here. Rather it is that both works have been judged in relatively objectified terms, not according to the vagaries of the critic’s personal fancies, however “tasteful” they may appear to be. In the same way, Eliot will gradually ally himself with belief systems and political ideologies that mitigate personal preferences for the sake of enduring foundational values. It is this seamless nature of Eliot’s intellectual approach to contemporary concerns that makes

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him such an interesting thinker. Whether one agrees with his positions or not, he enlarges on them, refining and extending them into all corners of his individual interests, the spiritual and moral as well as aesthetic and critical, without ever altering his essential belief in conforming oneself to the overriding and underlying social and cultural structures and strictures out of which human values emerge. As the decades continued, ideas on the value of order and tradition only vaguely expressed in an essay such as “The Function of Criticism” became more and more integral elements in his poetry and criticism and eventually plays.

“Gerontion” (1920) Composed in May and June 1919 while Eliot was coming out of his quatrain phase and Europe had just emerged from World War I, “Gerontion” signals a new direction in Eliot’s poetry, and yet, as is often the case, the poetry partakes of much of the style and tone of earlier Eliot efforts as well. It makes perfect sense. A missile’s trajectory is not perfectly known until it hits target, and the trajectory of “Gerontion” would not become clear until Eliot produced The Waste Land some three years later. The more sober and serious view of reality that that poem addresses, for all its superficial absurdities, marks a genuine turning point for Eliot from the mocking seriousness of such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales” toward the ultimate somberness of Four Quartets, his final achievement as a poet. As is the case with any Eliot poem from any point in his long career, however, the best approach to “Gerontion” is to clear up its general complexities rather than try to make each line and image and allusion align with one another in an otherwise absolutely coherent manner. Generally, a tactic like the latter only leads to further confusion or rampant myopia.

SYNOPSIS Somewhat like an ancient Greek or Roman comedy or tragedy in which the characters, for all

240 “Gerontion” their naturalistic and individualized detail, were intended to be taken as stereotypes, little more than dressed-up caricatures of human traits and foibles, Eliot’s speaker in this poem is both himself and the embodiment of his type—an old man and the old man, worn out and alternately comic and tragic in his pathetic bewilderment now that time and custom have passed him by. Gerontion, after all, means “little old man” in Greek. Ultimately, however, in the richness of the details that then assault the reader’s sensibilities, the poem seems to be encouraging the reader to imagine that there is in the complicated tale that Gerontion tells an extended metaphor emerging through its words and images. The speaker can be located in space, for example; he seems to be a resident of a northwestern European city, somewhere in Belgium or England. Yet there are country images as well, and he cannot be easily located in time. The speaker refers to having fought at the “hot gates,” which suggests Thermopylae, which means “hot gates” in Greek. At that site the vastly outnumbered Spartans heroically lost a battle to the Persians in 480 B.C., long before there even was a London or an Antwerp or a Brussels. Rather than the life of any flesh-and-blood speaker whom the language reveals, then, the reader may be led to suspect, quite rightly, perhaps, that the speaker only appears to be a person, the action only appears to be realistic in its detail, and there may in fact be a symbolic drama shaping itself in which, instead of a characterization, it is ideas or ideals that are being portrayed as if they were themselves characters in a dramatic monologue, in this case Gerontion’s, as he tells the tale of a tired old man that is really the story of a worn-out culture. The option of that kind of a reading becomes even more alluring a signpost to follow when it is discovered that Eliot was composing the poem just before he began to conceive of The Waste Land and had even at one point conceived of “Gerontion” as a sort of prelude to that longer, equally dark work. All those hints that these unfolding actions, like the speaker, may be symbolic rather than specific, fall away to reveal a way of dramatization, it is possible, of a Europe that has fallen into a cultural decline and a moral morass.

A reading such as this diminishes the power of the poetry, perhaps, transforming it from a soulsearching specimen of contemplative verse into a mere morality play, a dramatized lecture if not a quasi-political and social cartoon, but that nevertheless is the direction in which Eliot’s poetry and his social criticism were tending as the 1920s, a postwar decade, were just beginning. Before the decade was out, Eliot had converted to the Anglican Church, had become a British subject, and, after allegedly expressing the disillusionment of a generation in The Waste Land, had turned, according to his own testimony, Catholic, classicist, and royalist in his spiritual, literary, and sociopolitical leanings. What is being suggested thus far is that “Gerontion,” although composed in 1919 and first published in 1920, can now be viewed with the benefit of hindsight as marking the end of one period in Eliot’s poetry and the beginning of another. The complex ambivalence of the poem’s intentions for theme and purpose, for example, underscore an increasing ambivalence of purpose and aim in Eliot’s poetry writing in general to this point. Shortly he would write, in The Waste Land, a poetry that provides the reader with no apparently sustained structural, verbal, or dramatic clues or other markers to suggest an overriding purpose. With “Gerontion,” the abandonment of standard generic and tonal clues that had only been hinted at and toyed with in Eliot’s earlier poetic efforts was already beginning to take its toll on the reader’s comfort and perhaps even patience. The poetry that Eliot had been writing to this point had at least allowed the reader to choose his or her own point of reference. The relationship between the evening sky and the patient etherized upon a table or between the yellow fog and a cat in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example, while not immediately transparent, is nevertheless suggestively appropriate. That is to say, the reader may not land on the exact meaning that the poet intended by such tropes, if there were any, but the reader is nevertheless encouraged to imagine that there is a meaning being intended. In “Gerontion,” by sharp contrast, Eliot is beginning to write a poetry where elements sharing even

“Gerontion” the same verse line, let alone the same stanza, seem to have an arbitrary if not capricious association at best, and that one known only to the poet. Like The Waste Land, “Gerontion” remains stubbornly itself as a poem, a closeted, secretive text that the reader must enter on its terms, nor are those terms in any way spelled out except as there seems to be something serious at stake, as much for the reader as for Gerontion. Too, in “Gerontion” the metaphorical distance between objects of thought and the thoughts themselves is too wide a gap to be easily plumbed. The rapid transitions assault the reader: for example, from the epigraph, unattributed as usual, but which comes from Shakespeare, to images suggestive of pirates or buccaneers fighting with cutlasses in a swamp, to references to such relatively modern commercial cities as Antwerp, Brussels, and London, to, as the first stanza closes, images that are connotative of subsistence living in an agrarian culture. It is virtually impossible for a reader to gain any clear understanding of where or who or what is being portrayed or presented. The epigraph is from Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays that delve into the enigma of human nature as it confronts matters of fairness and justice. The verses that Eliot chooses to cite primarily emphasize that neither/ nor, either/or sweep of possibilities that Gerontion’s words, more rhetorical than informative in nature, portend as well. Indeed, Prufrock’s ominous “Here is no great matter” comes frequently to mind as Gerontion’s words begin their murmuring like the wind in empty spaces. The opening stanza, nevertheless, so vigorously establishes an atmosphere filled with regret and resignation that this mood and tone dominate the remainder of the poem. It is this consistency of mood and tone that Eliot seems to be relying on as Gerontion continues his mottled and muddled tale, or is it a confession? To decide that, the reader would do well to approach Gerontion, the characterization not the poem, as if he were indeed a living, breathing person who happens to have a name that embodies his present nature—“an old man in a dry month.” What has brought him to this state consequently becomes the basis for all that he goes on to tell the reader/listener.

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Gerontion’s state is literally a state of mind, the mind of Europe, as Eliot would call it, but also the minds of the myriad individuals making up the modern world. His tiredness and despair mirror a culture that had reached a dead end and had become both morally and literally bankrupt as a result of World War I, a conflict that would have only lately ended (the armistice effectively closing hostilities had been signed on November 11, 1918). So, then, Gerontion may only “stiffen in a rented house” of its “jew . . . owner,” a combination that, in addition to its blatant anti-Semitism, reflects the notion that Gerontion has mortgaged his inheritance. The same concept—that Europe had in effect whored itself—will later be reflected in the image of someone named Hakagawa, another “nonEuropean” person of apparently Japanese heritage, bowing among the Titians. The implication is that Europe is no longer a vibrant culture; it is a vacated house that has become a tourist attraction. Not much earlier, Eliot’s quatrain poem “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” had already echoed the same theme, an odd one to be promoted by a man who was himself not a European but the heir of twice transplanted New England Yankees. His commenting on the state of contemporary Europe is a presumptuousness on Eliot’s part, however, only if it is thought of as the theme of a native culture being exploited by others. The point is, rather, that Europe has exploited and has squandered its ancient inheritance all on its own. In the same manner, the Christian tradition that had been virtually synonymous with European tradition since the decline of the Roman Empire some 1,500 and more years earlier had devolved only into something to be “eaten . . . divided . . . drunk / Among whispers.” The living Christ, meanwhile, who was originally an innocent baby, now lurks at the edges of consciousness, a tiger liable to take his divine vengeance for the transgressions and lukewarm faith of his putatively faithful adherents. The godhead who, on the cross, had pleaded with his father to forgive his persecutors because of their ignorance cannot as easily forgive them now, some 2,000 years later, for “[a]fter such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Only ignorance is forgivable; Europe

242 “Gerontion” and Europeans ought to have known better, or, at least, had been, during the better part of the late 18th and 19th centuries, pressuring others around the globe with their economic, military, and cultural swaggering as if they did. Despairing of even the hope of salvation, Gerontion’s is indeed “a dull head among windy spaces,” his thoughts the “thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.” Past and present coexist in memory, but without order or purpose or direction, they collide meaninglessly with each other, bits and pieces, names both vague and familiar, foreign and common. There are lines that echo the rhetorical style of the 17th-century poets and dramatists whom Eliot would praise in essays such as “The Metaphysical Poets,” hints of better days, fears of worse illnesses. Wherever the poetry goes, it takes the reader nowhere because Gerontion has reached the end of the line, his line, his rope. He has run out of things to do or to say or to think. He hangs suspended from nothing over the void of his own making. All he can say with certainty is that he has trapped himself, spun his own web of self-deceit and selfbetrayal around him. He knows that “History has many cunning passages” and can be a labyrinth in which even its designer may become lost, bewildered, and ultimately defeated. So, although he lives, he is as if dead, a motif that Eliot would soon develop to an even greater effectiveness in “The Hollow Men.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The most outstanding feature of “Gerontion” is that there is absolutely nothing positive about it. Not even its Christic elements offer the possibility of redemption, of a second chance. The reader is situated as if at the center of a void where fragments of meaning, sucked dry of substance, drift by on a sterile wind. Nature’s inexorable processes continue; the spider and the weevil and the gull proceed with it. The stars continue their motion. But for Gerontion, time, history, life, and hope all stand still and, so, fall into decay. In this, he is not alone. His house—whether that be his mind or his lineage or his present rented address—and all its tenants are the lost, the self-damned.

But there is another feature clouding the speaker’s own features, as it were. Gerontion, as the speaker tells the reader in the very first line, is a little old man, which is what the word means in Greek. So, then, a common misunderstanding that may occur among readers is that, rather than being descriptive, the title is the speaker’s name. Such an error is forgivable inasmuch as a reader without Greek simply could not be expected to know any better. The question whether or not the poet, T. S. Eliot, is relying on his readers’ possible confusion in this regard, however, must nevertheless be addressed. Understood for what it means, in Greek, the thrust of the title seems to be encouraging the reader to imagine that he or she will be encountering a type, not a person, a substantial distinction. The poem itself, however, very likely because it makes use of a first-person and, so, apparently dramatized presentation, spins the semblance of a characterization rather than an allegorical depiction out of the ensuing monologue. Between the one and the other is, it must be reiterated, all the difference in the world. If, on the one hand, the poem depicts, then the poet is telling the reader something and has made the reader’s judgments for him or her. If, on the other hand, the poem is a dramatic monologue, then the poet is presenting someone by creating a personality, as it were, for readers to judge all on their own, according to their own standards and values. It would be correct to suspect that, with “Gerontion,” Eliot may be providing his readers with yet another encounter with Eliot the trickster poet— “Old Possum,” as his friend EZRA POUND had dubbed him—whom they would have already come to know quite well in such earlier, equally puzzling works as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hippopotamus,” “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” and “Whispers of Immortality,” poems that could as likely be taken as frivolously and cleverly silly as ominously and overbearingly serious. So there may very well be some measure of intentionality on Eliot’s part in the way in which the title of “Gerontion” has the capacity to mislead readers into mistaking a generic description for a specific speaker, or vice versa. But what end those intentions serve, this poet will never reveal.

“Gerontion” Even more troublesome is the fact that whereas with those earlier poems the mixed signals had allowed Eliot to play with both his reader and his material, the tone and subject matter of “Gerontion” instead betray a seriousness of intention that does not abate in the least as the poem continues. If there are serious considerations in Gerontion, with its consistently somber tone and overt references to Christ and matters of sin and salvation, then the reader must also ponder why Eliot would undercut them by resorting to his patented trickster’s wit and an erudite cleverness, as he had been wont to do in so many earlier poems. Resolving the question of whether “Gerontion” is a character study or an extended metaphor for the characteristics of agedness is, then, a critical matter. No Eliot poem, when a potential ambiguity rears its head, should be treated as if the ambiguity is unintentional. There is also, however, the further problem, just noted, that the ambiguity that the reader instantly encounters in “Gerontion” as to whether the poem is an allegory on aging or the dramatization of a particular person’s expressed values is not an ambiguity that extends to intention. There again it seems to be clear that Eliot, or, at least, the speaker of “Gerontion,” has something very important to impart. That importance is nevertheless jeopardized somewhat by the reader’s inability to sort out easily the speaker’s dual nature, whereby he is presented, apparently, as both his type and himself. If the former is the case, then our speaker is not a person at all, after all, but a personage, a spokesman for a certain attitude and quality of being, in this case, an old man’s. Left vague and surely unanswered in this scenario is how the reader should judge the speaker’s opinions and conclusions. If, however, the reader, out of a measure of ignorance, adopts the convention of making Gerontion the speaker’s personal name rather than a categorical identity, then, while the speaker is no less an old man “in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain,” he is as well relating the details of a personal biography in the observations that follow rather than, for example, metaphors or symbolic actions. In that case, readers are permitted, indeed invited, to judge Gerontion as they

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would judge any other person for the values that he is expressing, since those values are based on personal choices, and to judge him as well for the moral posture that they seem to have compelled him to assume. This entire dilemma is, of course, one that cannot and probably should not be resolved. In typical Eliot fashion, the either/or of the speaker’s true nature and, so, of his and the poem’s purpose has to be simultaneously maintained, satisfying the temptation to hear in Gerontion’s revelations both the particular and the general, the literal and the figurative, the personal and the polemical, the individual and the historical. It has been suggested that the “wilderness of mirrors,” for example, is meant as an allusion to the palace of Versailles where, in the Hall of Mirrors, the victorious allies, primarily France, England, and the United States, imposed an impossible peace on the vanquished Germans as they, the allies, dictated the terms of 1919’s Treaty of Versailles, officially ending World War I. Too, treaties have cunning passages—that is why hammering them out requires such great diplomatic skill. If all of the foregoing is even remotely the case, however, it still would not make even the Treaty of Versailles and its being negotiated in an ornate hall adorned with mirrors anything less than another metaphorical action for Eliot, who crafts in “Gerontion” the virtually impossible—a poem whose poetry mirrors the very state of mind, spirit, being, and culture that the poet is attempting to expose. Where Eliot succeeds is that he does not tell his view of things but rather demonstrates it through his speaker, making them seem to be one and the same. His close friend and fellow poet EZRA POUND would call postwar Europe “an old bitch gone in the teeth” in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a poem composed at virtually the same time that Eliot was composing “Gerontion.” Eliot makes Europe an old man in a dry month who has reached the end of the road and found it to be smack dab in the center, not of chaos (there there would at least be drama, action, catastrophe, and tragedy), but of entropy and ennui—in a word, boredom. The next stop for this poet would be and could be nothing other than The Waste Land.

244 “Goethe as the Sage”

FURTHER READING Brooker, Jewel Spears. “The Structure of Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’: An Analysis Based on Bradley’s Doctrine of the Systematic Nature of Truth.” ELH 46, no. 2 (1979): 314–340. Donoghue, Dennis. “On ‘Gerontion.’ ” The Southern Review 21 (1985): 934–946. Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Scribner’s, 1949. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Mankowitz, Wolf. “Notes on ‘Gerontion.’ ” In T. S. Eliot: A Study of His Writings by Several Hands, edited by B. Rajan, 129–138. New York: Haskell House, 1964. Matthiessen, F. O., and C. L. Barber. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

“Goethe as the Sage” (1955) There are few artists in any medium who are known and instantly recognized in the world of literature by a single name, and Goethe, though perhaps not quite as well known to English-speaking readers as he ought to be, is undoubtedly one of them. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is as renowned as the youthful author of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a work that so electrified his generation that young men were committing suicide in emulation of its romantic hero, as he is for authoring his mature masterpiece, the epical poetic drama Faust (1808; 1832), completed the year of his death. Such a towering literary figure had somehow escaped the full critical attention of the eclectic tastes of Eliot until this rather late essay, written on the occasion of his accepting the Hanseatic Goethe Prize for 1954, which was awarded to him at Hamburg University in May 1955. In fact, there had been a time when Eliot had been bold enough to declare that DANTE ALIGHIERI and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE divided the world of poetry

between them and that there could be no third. By this point in his own illustrious career as a man of letters of international renown, Eliot was now prepared to changed his mind on that count. He promises in his opening remarks to take two separate tacks in his address, significantly subtitled “A Discourse in Praise of Wisdom.” One is to account for the characteristics that “Great Europeans,” of whom Goethe is one, have in common. The other is to account as well for the process whereby one becomes reconciled to great authors to whom he may originally not have been sympathetic and may perhaps even have been antipathetic. The implication here is that Goethe is one of them, which is not to say that Eliot denies ever having a certain affinity for the great German poet, novelist, dramatist, naturalist, and thinker, as the essay will amply prove.

SYNOPSIS Eliot begins his essay by remarking that he has had the facsimile of a drawing of Goethe in old age displayed on the mantelpiece in his London office for some 15 years. This is Eliot’s none too oblique way not only of confessing to a long-standing, albeit late-to-develop admiration for the elder poet, but also of alluding to the wartime bombing of London, then barely little more than a decade past, a destructive reign of terror that had been carried out by Germany, the same nation that was now awarding Eliot this literary prize and whose cultural inheritance Goethe otherwise so proudly represents. Eliot comments on how his cherished picture of Goethe was once “violently dislodged” from its otherwise serene perch, the result of one of the “incidents of that disturbed time.” Though he does not himself say precisely how that dislodgement occurred, Eliot’s office and a small apartment that he used in Faber & Faber’s offices on Russell Square were struck by a German buzz bomb in 1944, inflicting enough damage that the accommodations were rendered useless for a time. It is not remarkable that, in an essay whose professed theme will be to identify the nature of the greatness of European culture, Eliot has pointedly begun on a note that calls up that same culture’s great and enduring capacity for tragically destruc-

“Goethe as the Sage” tive failures as well. Once he gets down, then, to the business of publicly reevaluating the development of his attitude toward Goethe, Eliot has already made it clear that he is speaking as a European to fellow Europeans, not as a transplanted Anglo-American addressing a postwar German audience. He wants it to be known that he has personally shared the consequences of Europe’s recent past, as much as he wishes to celebrate the glories of its cultural history. When he gets down to cases, it is to explain how he had earlier lumped Goethe together with the other poets of his time, primarily those of the late 18th and early 19th century and mainly the English romantics, who he imagines would have been “greater poets if they held a different view of life.” Goethe, he now can see, was not of their camp at all, however. Rather than having set his face against whatever the prevailing views may have been, which is what the English romantics were guilty of doing, in Eliot’s estimation, Goethe’s recalcitrant view of life was the unavoidable result of the temper of the times that had nurtured him. There is a yet more pressing reason for Eliot’s eventual reconciliation with Goethe, and that is Eliot’s fear that, in ignoring some particular figure, he may “otherwise have neglected some opportunity of self-development.” Throughout the rest of the essay, nevertheless, Eliot does not speak of any benefits that he derived for himself as a poet from his revaluation of Goethe. Of course, it is perfectly possible that his coming to terms with his earlier antipathy to Goethe did contribute to Eliot’s self-development precisely because it has enabled him to undertake the present task of defining the characteristics that constitute a great European. To accomplish this, he combines his consideration of Goethe with that of two other European authors, neither of whom should come as a surprise: Dante and Shakespeare. First, however, Eliot explains why he must exclude from any sort of similar consideration the great writers of Europe’s classical past, the Greek poet Homer and Roman poet Virgil each being the most likely candidates from among them. The European experience, Eliot explains, is an amalgam, not the product of any single ancient cultural heri-

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tage. Europe is Greek and Roman and Jewish, Eliot explains, identifying, of course, the Christian foundation that has undergirded European civilization since at least the fourth century A.D. Only poets steeped in that amalgamated culture can truly lay claim to being representative of a civilization that is authentically European, and neither Homer nor Virgil nor any other classical poet can realize that critical requirement. Eliot explains how the poet must furthermore be of Europe. The 19th-century American poet Edgar Allan Poe, for example, had a great influence on contemporary French poetry, but that does not necessarily make his poetry itself European. Similarly, the English romantic poet George Gordon Lord Byron may very well have been the poet of his age, no small claim to fame, and is certainly a European, yet neither can he be counted among the great Europeans because, like Poe, the verdict is still out on his qualities as a poet. Eliot wants poets whose “qualifications are undisputed.” Once more, then, he settles on Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Each of them, not in any singularly outstanding work, as in the case of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, for example, but throughout a lifetime of literary achievement, have, for one thing, helped “to explain European man to himself.” There must be more than that, however, for it can be argued that others have done that equally well, Cervantes again coming to mind. What Eliot finds to be unique characteristics shared by Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe is that their effort was so singularly sustained and coherent throughout as to constitute a cultural whole in and of itself as a body of work. Abundance, amplitude, and unity are the terms that Eliot now goes on to apply to distinguish the unique achievement of each of these three. He summarizes them when he says, “[W]hat each of them gives us is Life itself, the World seen from the particular point of view of a particular European age and a particular man in that age.” All three authors both define and are defined by their age. As Eliot puts it, “[W]e take these men as representative, only to find them unrepresentative.” What he is saying is that we now know their time by their work, even if their time knew itself in other terms.

246 “Hamlet and His Problems”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot sees Goethe as being of his age as much as Dante and Shakespeare were of theirs. And so they are of their time and place and language as well. But now Eliot comes upon what he regards as a more critical—perhaps the most critical—question, and that is whether there is in their work another kind of quality, one that “transcends place and time, and is capable of arousing a direct response as of man to man, in readers of any place and any time.” It does not take much reflection to see how important that consideration is, even if such a consideration baits the entire matter of what then makes these particular authors great Europeans. Eliot calls that transcendent quality wisdom, for the very reason that he does not want it to be confused with philosophy or belief. Readers familiar with Eliot’s critical writings would know that in the late 1920s, in essays such as “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927) and “Dante” (1929), and continuing on into a work such as After Strange Gods, published in 1934, Eliot had tussled with the knotty problem of poetry and belief, arguing consistently that they were totally disparate although not mutually exclusive realms of human knowing. Here, in the closing pages of “Goethe as the Sage: A Discourse in Praise of Wisdom,” he comes as close as he ever will to resolving the disparity. The kind of wisdom of which he is now speaking, Eliot says, is “an essential element in making the poetry, and it is necessary to apprehend it as poetry in order to profit by it as wisdom.” That is a critical distinction; it makes it clear that Eliot does not think of poetry as being what is popularly called “wisdom literature,” that is, a somewhat prettified or more palatable species of philosophy and belief. Rather, the poetry is informed by and is thus a product, and not merely the expression, of the wisdom that gives the poet the inspiration that itself inspirits the poetry. Still, it is in the poetry that the poet’s wisdom and the reader’s experience of it meet, not in any external system of thought or belief. The reader, as it were, puts himself or herself “in the position of a believer” in values that are not expressed in the poetry as belief but are rather felt, or intuited, as wisdom. Similarly, the poetry is the wisdom while the poetry lasts; after that, it

becomes grist for the mills of thought and systems of thought. This is not to say that there may not be actual expressions of what passes for belief or a philosophical posture in poetry. Beliefs certainly are openly stated in Dante and quite often in Shakespeare and to a large degree in Goethe. Those expressions of belief, however, are not themselves the source of the wisdom that the great poet conveys. Rather, the wisdom of poetry is embedded in and cannot easily be separated from what the poet may in fact believe, or may believe he believes. Whether Eliot is correct or not, his is a way of describing how a reader can be moved and shaped by ideas expressed on the basis of a belief system that no longer exists or that has long since been historically discredited, such as Virgil’s, for example, or that, if still active, springs from the value systems of otherwise alien cultures. In summary, wisdom, rather than transcending personal belief, is an entirely different category of insight into and evaluation of human behavior and experience. So, then, Eliot can happily conclude, as much for himself as for his listeners, that “[w]hether the ‘philosophy’ or the religious faith of Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe is acceptable to us or not . . , there is the wisdom that we can all accept.”

“Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) Eliot first published the essay “Hamlet and His Problems” in Athenaeum on September 26, 1919, and subsequently the piece was collected in The Sacred Wood in 1920.

SYNOPSIS In the essay, Eliot was ostensibly reviewing two recent books on WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s play, one by an American scholar, Elmer Edgar Stoll, the other by an English scholar, J. M. Robertson. He singled both of them out for praise because, in their treatment of Hamlet, he felt that they had shifted their critical attention away from the more typical focus on Hamlet’s character and instead toward

“Hamlet and His Problems” the play itself. Maintaining that same shift in focus in his own commentary, Eliot, in the course of his review, deliberates on what he sees to be Hamlet’s failure as drama, and in the course of that part of his discussion he coins the term objective correlative, one of the two critical phrases for which he became perhaps as much renowned as he did for his poetry (the other would be dissociation of sensibility). The coinage came about as Eliot was attempting to define the precise nature of what is lacking from Hamlet that makes it, in his view, less successful as poetic drama than it could have been. Essentially, the play, Eliot suggests, is filled with “stuff” that Shakespeare as both playwright and poet was unable to “drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” This, according to Eliot, is a failing not necessarily in the material itself but in Shakespeare’s handling of it. Readers of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), for example, a piece virtually contemporaneous with his essay on Hamlet, will already know how important for Eliot were matters of craft and technique, those dispassionate structures and linguistic strategies whereby the poet transforms experience, be it real or invented and imaginary, into the work of art. As Eliot would have it, this transformative process overrides any other considerations. Indeed, for him, craft and technique should be the foremost constituents of the poetic process if poetry is ultimately to be accepted as an impersonal act of communicating the complexities of reality. Having defined Hamlet’s “problems” as a failure on Shakespeare’s part to manage his poetic material as effectively as he could have, Eliot then offers what, in his view, ought to have been the solution to these problems, had Shakespeare only employed it. It is in that context that Eliot introduces the phrase “objective correlative” into his argument. For an emotion to be “immediately evoked” in a work of literature, Eliot contends, there must be “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that constitute “that particular emotion,” such that when that formulation is presented, it will result for the reader or viewer in a sensory experience evoking the desired emotion. “The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to

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the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The core idea that Eliot is expressing in “Hamlet and His Problems” seems indisputable once grasped. Essentially, all that he is saying is that a work of art affects the perceiver in many ways and on many levels—emotionally, sensuously, morally, ethically, socially, aesthetically, viscerally. The list goes on. The point is that the work of art succeeds best that combines the right elements into an “objective correlative” to elicit the broadest range of responses that the artist is aiming to provoke in the perceiver. According to the implications of Eliot’s theory, it can be argued that Shakespeare could have gotten more clarity out of the various components of a drama that has always impressed even its most ardent admirers with its murkiness had he, Shakespeare, succeeded in finding and then casting just the right objective correlative to exemplify the emotional and moral complexities of Hamlet’s dilemma. For example, Hamlet’s preexisting hatred of Claudius is justified by the Ghost’s revelation that Claudius is a murderer and putative adulterer, but so does the fact that Hamlet despises Claudius to begin with cloud the single-minded motivation required of Hamlet to seek the vengeance to which the Ghost exhorts him. There is much that is subjective in Eliot’s evaluation, of course, and Eliot himself wisely avoids suggesting any concrete ways in which Shakespeare might have improved the play. The point is that Eliot takes the opportunity to pontificate on finding a serious flaw in one of the world’s greatest tragic plays, and he not only gets away with it but enhances his own reputation and credentials as a critical intellect in the process. The real issue is not whether Eliot is correct in his assessment of Hamlet or whether the objective correlative, albeit an original coinage, is a wholly original formulation on Eliot’s part. Rather, the focus should be on how influential the term has become as a critical commonplace, bespeaking the authority that Eliot acquired early on in his career as a critic. There appear, as with virtually all Eliot’s ideas, to be subtleties that are either not sufficiently

248 “Hippopotamus, The” explicated or too facilely glossed over in his explanation of the aesthetic phenomenon that Eliot speaks of when he defines the objective correlative; but it is easy to get the general idea, since ultimately the point is well taken if regarded solely as a creative rule of thumb. In terms of the poetic arts, Eliot is arguing that an emotion cannot merely be named but must be demonstrated, represented, evoked, by something that is itself not the emotion but that in the proper context and at the right moment will nevertheless bring to mind in the reader the specific emotion that the poet desires to elicit. To achieve this, of course, the poet must be quite conscious of the effect or effects that he or she is hoping to achieve, so, in essays such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot will argue for the impersonality both of artistic process and of the artist, by which he would mean that poetry is not self-expression but the precise expression of emotions unique to the work itself. The yellow fog in Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” may provide as good an example as any of the objective correlative in operation as an impersonal process of the creative mind aiming to achieve not self-expression but a specific effect. The mental image of such a fog undoubtedly colors the reader’s response not only to the scene that the poem is setting but to the tone and mood that it thus evokes, creating an atmosphere of the lurid and the sickly that both works against and complements the characterization both of Prufrock and of his life and social milieu that is emerging through the poetry. Furthermore, the yellow fog is rendered finally in the aspect of a feral animal, reminding the reader, perhaps, of details from the opening stanza, where the evening sky is personified in a surprising and disturbing way as an etherized patient and where the tawdry and lurid are suggested by references to sleazy hotels and lowclass dining establishments. This accumulation of details that are unsettling in their potential for revealing a seamy sordidness just underlying and certainly thereby enveloping Prufrock’s otherwise stately but stale world, both in its physical realities and in its psychological impact on him, is embodied in the yellow fog, which strikes just the right note to summarize the emotions that

the poetry appears to be attempting to provoke in the reader—disgust, curiosity, sympathy, caution. That yellow fog, then, in keeping with Eliot’s own definition, can be said to function as an objective correlative, triggering the sought-for emotional response in the reader by presenting rather than stating all of these tonal colorations. The fog is, as Eliot would say, an external detail adequate to the emotions, inevitably leading to them; in other words, it is an objective correlative for those emotions.

“Hippopotamus, The” (1919) Composed in 1917 during a period of reasonable creativity following the publication of Eliot’s first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, that same year, “The Hippopotamus” can easily be regarded as light verse after a single reading.

SYNOPSIS Despite its reputation as light verse—in the sense of the witty and satirical—the obvious religious references and overtones of the poetry of “The Hippopotamus,” for just one example, ought to put the reader instantly on guard. At this time Eliot was still producing a poetry that was liable to mix the ridiculous with the sublime in doses and at a pace sufficient to deflect his reader’s attention from one to the other in so swiftly and bewilderingly detached a manner that it becomes well nigh impossible for even the most attentive reader to separate mockery from cleverness and playfulness from a somewhat slanted but nevertheless genuine sincerity of thematic intention. To call the poetry of “The Hippopotamus” satirical would stretch the definition as much as to call it contemplative. It is, rather, provocative, and it provokes the reader into thought and into feeling in good French symbolist fashion. The question must be, nevertheless, whether the payoff is worth the effort that the reader must expend to achieve it. So, then, “The Hippopotamus” moves from its legitimately ponderous title to an epigraph citing an equally ponderous passage from a letter of St.

“Hippopotamus, The” Ignatius warning against those whose faith in the authority of the church, like the Laodiceans, is lukewarm and lackadaisical (an epigraph otherwise unidentified, in typical Eliot fashion). It nevertheless can only be said tongue in cheek, of course, that the poem’s title is as ponderous as Ignatius’s weighty words, since the former names a large, heavy animal. But is it only tongue in cheek in fact? Indeed, it would be remiss on the reader’s part not to ask what a hippopotamus could have to do with Ignatius’s admonition, which is itself quite ponderous but in an entirely different context and sense, being ponderous in content but not bulk. In summary, Eliot plays with possibilities as to exactly what his poem’s ponderous subject may be. In its literal but somewhat whimsical sense, by virtue of a contrast with the comical nature of the bulk of the hippo, the poem’s subject is weighty, but then, in the poem’s epigraph, he relates that concept to a topic, religion, that is ponderous in another literal sense of the word—intellectually heavy and dull. (Weighty matters never bring joy, whereas weighty objects may.) Before even attempting to deal with that point of contrast and potential confusion, however, it would be helpful, perhaps, to ponder the inevitable implication of the lightness of the verse—the typical hippopotamus is a heavy object, after all. If the reader wonders whether Eliot would be capable of devising such an elaborately delightful verbal as well as conceptual pun—light verse about a heavy thing—that same reader would need only consider as well that it is light verse about a weighty topic, religion, as well. Perhaps, then, it is the reader whose suppositions are being made light of. Some suggestion that this is indeed Eliot’s very intention is found in the fact that the hippopotamus means “river horse” in Greek. The name came about because the ponderous and awkward bulk of the hippo, a terrestrial or earthbound beast, is so buoyed by the river water that it often finds itself far more at home in it than on land. Likewise, its mass, in this light verse treatment of Eliot’s, is quite literally highlighted because it is naturally lightened by the hippo’s natural inclination to find a local buoyancy, whereas the “True

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Church,” which, as the saying goes, is in the world but not of it, is what in fact is weighted down, and weighed down, by the ponderousness of its dogma and doctrine and admonitions on same. The result, as Eliot plays the figurative off against the literal, is that religion, which should lighten the freight of humans’ mortal condition, is instead made burdensome and has become mired in a miasmal mist, in other words, swamp water, another sharp contrast to the buoyant river wherein the hippo abides. Meanwhile, the hippo, having by poem’s end won heaven by virtue of staying true to his kind and to his nature, enjoys a blissful release from the burden of his earthly bulk/baggage, one which the true church, fixated on and fixed here below, will never realize. The contrasts multiply. The hippo has accepted its limits; it will never taste the mango. And the hippo, even if its love song is not lovely, loves. As comic an image as Eliot may call to mind in something as awkward and as bulky as a hippopotamus being raised into heaven on gossamer clouds, the fact remains that, in its natural goodness, the hippo is not lost in the miasmal mists of a smug self-righteousness and, so, may indeed know heaven sooner.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot himself thought of “The Hippopotamus” as a less than serious poem, although he included it in a volume published by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Poems, in 1919 and again in the 1920 collections Ara Vos Prec and Poems, published in England and the United States, respectively. At this same point in his development, Eliot was still primarily in his so-called Laforguean phase, in which, as might be found in the poetry of the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE, an apparently casual and lighthearted if not silly tone and style are often used to mask a far more serious if not insidious intent (keeping in mind that insidious implies trickery). Eliot’s adroit mixture of elements such as the strictly formal rhyme scheme and stanzaic pattern of the quatrain typical of more traditional poetry along with his employment of the dispassionate qualities that an artificially elevated vocabulary can create to enhance the coldness of the ironic tone, a trick learned from the symbolists, further distances

250 “Hippopotamus, The” the poetic statement from the poet. This distancing was a key aspect of the poetic theory that Eliot would announce in such essays as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” at virtually the same time that the quatrains were being conceived. It is no wonder, then, that the poems from this period and in this style, but especially those known collectively as the quatrains, while unique achievements, are not easily categorized. It is worth reiterating that foremost among these quatrains as a poem that belies its apparent intent is “The Hippopotamus.” Although there may quite frequently be an ironic edge bordering on the comic in many an Eliot poem from this time period, on the surface “The Hippopotamus” reads like an exercise in a whimsy offering hints of the sort of rhythmically nonsensical poetry yet to come from Eliot’s pen years later in, say, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Because, however, “The Hippopotamus” is also one of the quatrain poems composed over a span of several years in loose conjunction with a number of other similarly structured poems, including “Whispers of Immortality,” “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” it has a far more honored place in the Eliot canon than it otherwise might as a stand-alone item. Nevertheless, Eliot was apparently so casually involved with his work with the quatrains, a form that he and his close friend, the American poet EZRA POUND, borrowed from the mid-19th century French poet Théophile Gautier, that the precise dating of some of the related pieces is impossible to determine. “The Hippopotamus,” meanwhile, also is noteworthy inasmuch as it shares a title and central metaphor with Gautier’s own “L’Hippopotame,” although the resemblances otherwise end there. With their four-beat lines and four-line stanzas rhyming on the second and fourth lines, the socalled quatrains lent themselves to the very sort of verbal musicality and clever wordplay that might make even the most serious material sound lighthearted or frivolous. (“The Hippopotamus” is an exception, rhyming on the first and third as well as the second and fourth lines.) All that said, a reader must have a mind and a wit as nimble and ready as Eliot’s own to appreci-

ate that there is much method to the madness that “The Hippopotamus” purveys and even more of truth, of a sort, to the poem’s whimsy. After all, thematically Eliot is doing no more (albeit doing it so very elaborately) than contrasting that smug self-righteousness of those who think that salvation is found in the rote observance of ritual and rule, with the natural goodness of the hippo, who, innocent of any motive other than its animal survival, knows how to keep a buoyant spirit in balance despite its cumbersome bulk and, as a result, can maintain itself in a vital and harmonious relationship with all the rest of creation. That is not very much, but still more than enough, to ask of any creature. It is the very absurdity of the comparison—a hippopotamus with the true church—that makes these genuine contrasts valid observations as well and, thus, worthy of the reader’s consideration, but without the added pressure of being preached to or lectured at. These same contrasts, as they play off each other, become less and less casual seeming. Indeed, the more the reader realizes that while Eliot’s hippo may have a bit of the burlesque about it, rather like one of the ballet-performing hippos in Disney’s Fantasia, his critique of the so-called true church, although it may not be universally applicable to all believers and all religions, is not far off target in exposing the sorts of hypocrisy and moral blind spots that too rigorous a devotion to the word of the law at the expense of the spirit of the law can often lead to and result in. There may even be something of the UNITARIANISM of Eliot’s ancestors and his own boyhood in the theology developed in “The Hippopotamus,” inasmuch as the poem privileges the natural and evenhanded goodness of the godhead and of creation at the expense of a rigorously exclusive system of faith, whereby adherents are saved and all others and all else lost. In conclusion, “The Hippopotamus” may not have been, in Eliot’s view, a serious poem, but it tackles a serious theme and gives it both the scope and the treatment that it deserves. “Judge not lest ye be judged,” the Gospels intone. “The Hippopotamus” precludes judgment by castigating its selfcentered terms.

“Hollow Men, The”

“Hollow Men, The” (1925) Containing perhaps one of Eliot’s most often quoted lines, “The Hollow Men” nevertheless has a varied enough publication history to suggest that Eliot virtually stumbled on this celebrated achievement of his. The third part of “The Hollow Men,” for example, was originally published in a sequence collectively called “Doris’s Dream Songs” in the Chapbook in the autumn of 1924. Then entitled “This Is the Dead Land,” it was included with two other poems, “Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears” and “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock,” which were themselves later reprinted as minor poems in the same volume, Collected Poems, 1909–1935, as “Sweeney Agonistes.” Eliot’s lifelong habit of recycling images and lines and, in some cases, whole sections of poetry can be a source of continuing temptation and confusion. “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock,” for example, itself incorporates parts of “Song for Opherian,” first published in 1921 and never subsequently collected by Eliot. There is also the curious fact that part IV of The Waste Land is lifted virtually verbatim from “Dans le restaurant,” a poem published in 1918. (It is only virtually verbatim because the 1918 version is in French.) The danger would be in assigning too much significance to Eliot’s intentions in cannibalizing earlier poems for the sake of later ones. Surely the parts must fit, but there must also be in his motivation the artist’s powerful inclination not to let a good line fade into obscurity for lack of a permanent abode in his or her canon. Too, Eliot had a developing but nevertheless consistently coherent vision throughout his poetic career that lines from one piece might serve quite suitably in another really is no surprise at all. Whether these three poems were “dream songs” to Doris or about Doris, who had played a minor role in “Sweeney Erect” and was Sweeney’s love interest, loosely defined, in “Sweeney Agonistes,” is impossible to determine. Nonetheless, that connection between the poetry of “The Hollow Men” and of “Sweeney Agonistes” may provide insights into the former work’s theme. It appears that Eliot regarded the abortive verse play “Sweeney Agonistes,” which he had begun in

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the autumn of 1923, as the major work that would provide a suitable successor to The Waste Land. Eliot abandoned the verse play entirely in 1925, although excerpts were published in the Criterion in October 1926 and again in January 1927, and he would include it among his unfinished poems in Collected Poems, 1909–1935. More to the current point, he reportedly viewed the poem sequence that would eventually emerge as “The Hollow Men” as poems related in their own originality of tone and theme to “Sweeney Agonistes.” Indeed, it is far more likely that much of “The Hollow Men” is composed of tangential material that Eliot had been working up for inclusion in the verse play and that he did not wish to discard wholesale once he had put the larger project aside. For now, then, it would be profitable to explore the patchwork publication history of the various individual poems that would eventually emerge as “The Hollow Men,” for that history strongly suggests just how tentative were Eliot’s overall intentions for a work that has by now come to be regarded as a major statement in his canon. That it may have been far more a pastiche than a coherently executed piece would not diminish the impact of the poetry’s final arrangement into a completed piece. It would, however, enable a more accurate assessment of the true critical worth and purpose of the verbal assemblage with which readers have ultimately to deal by allowing them to appreciate how much “meaning” is a thing that emerges from creative processes rather than something that that the creative intellect imposes on those processes to begin with. In summary, it is rather as if Eliot composed the poetry to discover its meaning instead of pursuing the opposite tack. If, then, part III of “The Hollow Men” is a poem apparently discarded from an earlier work that was itself left unfinished, the other parts also had earlier independent incarnations before they found a final home in Eliot’s corpus as sections of “The Hollow Men.” Parts II and IV were subsequently published in the Criterion in January 1925, and then the first three parts were published independently in the Dial in March, although part I had already appeared separately. Part V, however, was

252 “Hollow Men, The” not published until the poem came out in Poems, 1909–1925, once more indicating that Eliot was tinkering with the sequence up to the last minute.

SYNOPSIS A General Overview When the poem is regarded as a single, coherent piece, which is what the sequence has rightly come to be regarded as by now, whatever paths its composition may have taken, the title seems to say it all: “The Hollow Men.” Certainly the first five parts are linked, inextricably it must seem, by the recurring motif of “death’s other Kingdom,” variously called “death’s dream kingdom” and “death’s twilight kingdom.” That this domain is a state of mind is a conclusion encouraged if not confirmed by the other linking element, incorporated into the title, that is the singular voice compounded of the collective “we” who are “the hollow men / . . . the stuffed men.” Except in part II, where an “I” speaks instead, these pathetic souls bare the shame of their empty, meaningless lives, only to disappear entirely, after the nursery rhyme opening, into the third-person litany that forms part V, which itself peters out like an old record disk winding to a stop on the final word, whimper. It is not a happy scene, but perhaps that is what makes it one of the few of Eliot’s poems needing little in the way of a broad rendering of its meaning, so abruptly obvious is that general tone and meaning. It is as if all of a sudden all wit and irony had ceased to exist in creation—and this in a poem coming from Eliot, who had written the book on wit and irony in modernist literature. Can life really be all that bad, one is tempted to ask, but it is not about life itself that the poetry is speaking but about the lives that creatures like the hollow men lead—the kind of lives they lead both because they are hollow men and that make them hollow men. This particular poem of Eliot’s will pay the reader off smartly and will open doors of opportunity for discovery into much of Eliot’s later poetry, if the reader keeps that one premise in mind: that the poem is not a commentary on life, but a commentary, presented in their own words and voices, as it were, on hollow men—that is to say, on the choices and values that make individuals become

that way. So, then, as good a place as any to begin a consideration of the poem itself is with the title and its possible sources and meanings, as limited as the latter may seem. The Title Eliot later claimed, in a January 1935 letter, that the title for the poem came about by combining the title of a romance by William Morris, The Hollow Land, with the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The Broken Men,” but Eliot was also notorious for intentionally tossing red herrings into the path of source-hunting literary scholars. There is in the epigraph to “The Hollow Men,” nevertheless, an overt allusion to JOSEPH CONRAD’s celebrated 1899 novella, HEART OF DARKNESS. There is also a covert but nonetheless equally obvious allusion to the same Conrad tale in the poem’s title. When in the text of the poem the speakers repeatedly talk of themselves as the hollow men, the stuffed men, their heads filled with straw, among the various images—or, in Eliot’s phrase, objective correlatives—that such a conceptual description may bring to mind for the reader are, no doubt, the corporate nonentities who are often portrayed as inhabiting the modern world’s bureaucracies, from boardroom and committee room to classroom and church. Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, was among the first European authors to identify that new breed of humanity, the so-called Organization Man, who came into his own in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and who is thought of as all surface with nothing of any substance or fiber beneath or within—the hollow man. In any event, this type is described in exactly that manner by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. When Marlow, the story’s protagonist, recounts his journey up the Congo into “the heart of darkness,” he tells of encountering the manager of the Central Station of a colonial trading company. This manager is portrayed as a company man whose only managerial skill seems to be that “he inspired uneasiness,” in Marlow’s words, making him conclude that “[p]erhaps there was nothing within him.” Shortly thereafter, among the various lackeys vying for position and advantage, Marlow meets a company agent “with a forked little beard and a

“Hollow Men, The” hooked nose,” a man who is so transparently oily that Marlow, no slouch when it comes to taking the true measure of a man, sees through him instantly. Marlow then describes this unctuous agent as a “papier-mâché Mephistopheles,” in other words, as a devil that is all surface without any substance or depth, a man whose values and character run no deeper than the slick façade that one encounters to begin with—like the manager, this agent represents another empty, hollow man. This similarity does not necessarily mean that the Eliot poem and the Conrad story share the same theme or point of view with regard to it, although, like Eliot, Conrad, too, wrote fictions that were multilayered in their potentials for meanings, which were as capable of contradicting as enhancing each other. Suffice it to say that neither Conrad nor Eliot is out in either work simply to present a superficial putdown of Organization Men. Nevertheless, there is a definite commonality in the mutual mistrust for individuals who are hollow at the core, that is, committed to nothing but their own self-interest. The reader must keep in mind as well that the possibility that Eliot’s title is an allusion to the Conrad work is further and dramatically underscored by the fact that the first of Eliot’s two unattributed allusions in his epigraph comes from the Conrad tale as well. The Epigraphs Eliot cleverly splices together two entirely separate allusions to make the epigraph to “The Hollow Man” seem to be two consecutive sentences. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead. / A penny for the Old Guy.” The curtness of the English sounds to be pidgin or at least not standard, as if the same hurried speaker utters the entire two sentences. For another thing, since it is not an uncommon practice to talk of putting coins on the eyes of the dead or a coin in the dead man’s pocket for the sake of the ferryman who will be taking him over the mythical river into the land of the dead, it sounds reasonable that these words might come out of a context in which someone, after abruptly announcing that a man named Kurtz has just passed away, could then go on to ask for a coin for one of those ritual purposes.

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Nothing can be further from the truth. The two sentences come from two entirely different sources that are separated by several centuries and a wealth of background detail. The source for the first part of the epigraph is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. To be sure, the words, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” come in Conrad’s text within less than a page of the passage from Conrad that EZRA POUND had convinced Eliot to discard as his original epigraph to The Waste Land. It almost seems as if Eliot refused to let go of his desire to allude to that passage from the Conrad novella in which the dying Kurtz, the mysterious idealistic trader turned moral monster whom Marlow is hired to rescue, is heard to utter the words, “The horror, the horror!” Whatever the case, Eliot found a place for a near allusion to it here in the epigraph to his poem published some three years later. In fact, the words from the epigraph to “The Hollow Men” are spoken to Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, within moments of the time that Kurtz had had his final say about the horror, and they are spoken by a native retainer bringing Marlow the news that Kurtz, the legendary social reformer and light of Western civilization, has at last succumbed to the jungle fever that had, along with his moral blindness, driven him mad. The second part of Eliot’s epigraph, meanwhile, although it comes from an entirely different context, this one historical rather than literary, perhaps also points to an individual whose misguided idealism proved to be his undoing. “A penny for the Old Guy” finds it origins in a centuries-old English celebration, variously called Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night, and, in New England until the late 18th century, Pope Day. The festivities, such as they are, find their origin in the discovery and suppression, on November 5, 1605, of the infamous Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy among a band of English Roman Catholics to blow up Parliament and, with it, King James I in order to foment an uprising of Catholics, who were then suffering under increasingly severe and restrictive laws at the hands of a Protestant establishment. The conspiracy was discovered and foiled with the arrest of one Guy Fawkes virtually in the act of lighting the fuse that would then have ignited 36 barrels of gunpowder that had been secreted in a

254 “Hollow Men, The” cellar under the House of Lords. Fawkes and all the other conspirators were appropriately punished for their treasonous act, in most cases by imprisonment or execution. The story goes that when word spread through London that a plot to assassinate the king had been foiled, the relieved citizenry lit bonfires in thanksgiving, and the event has been repeated on the anniversary date ever since, with bonfires and firework displays throughout England. Effigies of Fawkes and frequently the pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, are burnt on these bonfires. It is another common practice for children to prepare a dummy of Fawkes, which they call “the Guy” and which they then carry through the streets, begging passersby for “a penny for the Guy.” What they do with the coins they collect is their business, but the dummy is eventually thrown onto one of the bonfires. Eliot’s calling Guy Fawkes to mind just after calling Conrad’s Kurtz to mind points the reader in a single-minded direction, it must be admitted, giving a certain sociopolitical cast to the poem to come, one that the poetry itself may not necessarily support. Fawkes, both in life and most definitely in death as a papier-mâché effigy, is another candidate for being, like Kurtz, a “hollow man”—someone whose core humanity was a superficial sham and who was directed just as powerfully by the abstract coldness of a cause, misguided or not, rather than by a primal sympathy for the simple welfare of other mortal creatures like himself. Surely, it is in that profound regard that Eliot’s choice of epigraphical material seems to serve the far more spiritual tone and attitude of the poetry that follows. The Text The poetry of “The Hollow Men” is a challenge to many readers inasmuch as little is concrete in the way of an apparent setting or context onto which to latch. Even the speaker of “Gerontion” in his mewling musings sets a vivid scene by mentioning the condition of his house, the weather outside, and how he is being “read to by a boy.” The hollow men of this poem are, in keeping perhaps with the thinness of their existence, little more than a tone, and a monotonous one at that, as well as an atttitude that is itself barely more

than a vacuous mumble and paper thin. The reader would be wrong not to recognize how those very effects are a good part of the poem that Eliot is aiming to achieve here, as well as of whatever meaning may be assigned to it. These speakers are self-confessedly barely alive, and the narrow band of modulation through which the poetry moves bears out that essential quality much more dramatically than any words ever could. Furthermore, for the first time ever, perhaps, Eliot seems to be going out of his way to eschew the richly allusional qualities of much of his earlier poetry. Although the wide variety of literary and other allusions in an Eliot poem to this time was as often liable to mislead as to enlighten the reader who is desperate for direction, there was nevertheless the illusion that some sort of direction toward meaning was being provided. While “The Hollow Men,” too, has its literary allusions, they are more debatable and far less ostensible. Some would argue that Eliot, who had faced some charges of literary plagiarism over the pastiche of past poets that the final, published version of The Waste Land turned out to be after Pound removed most of Eliot’s original material, was being cautious. However, there is as likely a thematic motivation behind even this relative absence of obvious allusions from an Eliot poem. Hollow men, it would stand to reason, are not the sorts who would have absorbed much of the world around them, particularly its store of cultural values and moral issues that is comprised by literature, religion, and history. Indeed, the poetry of the poem is so much a reflection of the emptiness of the lives of its collective speakers that readers who do not known all of the background information about “The Hollow Men” might, for all the poetry’s apparent complexity, have a great deal less difficulty getting their proper bearings, provided that they trust to the simple rule that what a text says should not be too far afield from what it means (even when the text in question is one composed by T. S. Eliot). Part I For example, a reader without this background, having just encountered the poem’s title, “The Hollow Men,” then would read the epigraph as a

“Hollow Men, The” single, consecutive passage of speech, spoken as if in dialect, relating that someone has died and that the person relaying that tragic news is for some reason asking for a token memorial to “Mistah Kurtz.” The reader, armed only with interpretive skills, would have a great deal less difficulty getting into the poem that follows. Such a reader would very likely imagine, beginning to read the text of the poem “The Hollow Men,” that what is being read is the sort of vacuous, pitifully pitiless, evasive response to the initial plea for sympathy that the epigraph seems to be making if it is construed as a single statement, however pathetic a form that response seems to be taking. Heard in this context, the hollow men’s “dried voices,” their conspiratorial whispers that are “quiet and meaningless,” their “[p]aralysed force, [and] gesture without motion”—all these details connotative of a deadness of feeling, along with the excruciatingly begging and self-deprecating tone in which the words are being spoken, would seem appropriate to souls who could not muster the energy, let alone the humanity, to respond to the epigraph’s apparent plea for some meager measure of grief for a fellow mortal’s tragic fate. Nor would such a reading by such a reader be very far from wrong. For if now, to this rendering of the characteristics that the hollow men exhibit be added all the aforementioned information regarding the poem’s connections with “Sweeney Agonistes,” the title’s allusion to Conrad, and the epigraphs’ additional allusions to the sorry cases of Kurtz and of Guy Fawkes, any reader would see these hollow men for exactly what they are—and that is exactly as they see themselves: as hollow men, individuals without pity or energy or feeling for themselves or for others. The oxymoronic “hollow men / . . . stuffed men” can make sense in no other context but that. Though there is nothing within them of substance, they are crammed to the gills with the detritus of their vain and empty worldliness. Whatever they have pursued, it has been dust blown on the wind to the narrow, tinny sound of “rats’ feet over broken glass.” Eliot doubtless imagines such men to be among the living who form the listless, faceless crowds that one sees daily in any modern urban setting, dispir-

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ited individuals similar to those in the crowd flowing over London Bridge at the end of “The Burial of the Dead,” the first section of The Waste Land. Eliot ends part I of “The Hollow Men,” however, by strongly suggesting that these hollow men, though living, also might as well be wandering through DANTE ALIGHERI’s Inferno. Ultimately, however, it makes little difference whether the reader imagines that the hollow men are literally or figuratively dead, for that is the very point: For them, the difference is a negligible one. The poem does seem to partake of certain themes and interests and images that were occupying Eliot’s attention at the same time that he was composing the poetry of “Sweeney Agonistes.” For example, some of the most strikingly unsettling lines given to Sweeney in that fragmentary play deal with how much existence is itself a living death, as when Sweeney tells Doris, “Death is life and life is death,” and the formulation does not sound at all facile. For Sweeney, it would be better if it were. For the hollow men, on the other hand, it is as if it never were anything but. So, then, if Eliot was striving in this post–Waste Land poetry to contrive a verse that sounded wholly original, the hints of the landscape of Dante’s hell that come to mind in the last stanza of part I of “The Hollow Men” suggest either that he was not striving too hard or that he knew a good echo when he heard it. Whoever those “who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom” may be according to Eliot’s intentions, the image brings to mind Dante entering the portals of hell where he witnesses the first of the sinners undergoing the pains of eternal damnation, the opportunists. They are the individuals who, when in the world, neither denied nor embraced evil any more than good, so that heaven does not want them and hell will not take them. As a result, they are kept outside the boundaries of hell proper and blown both this way and that on a vast and indifferent wind, in keeping with the purposeless processes of a dispassionate and heartless vacillation that was their course of action in life. In essence, they who were not alive in life are not permitted to experience even the fullness of the death of the soul that is the fate of all the other sinners condemned to hell. These are the

256 “Hollow Men, The” hollow men, who have spent their lives in what the poem will later call the “twilight kingdom” of neither/nor and who will not be remembered as “lost / Violent souls,” only as what they in fact are—hollow men, stuffed with only the empty whims of the passing moment. Part II The second part of the poem opens with the compelling idea that such a person will not meet another’s eyes even in his dreams, so much is he caught up in gathering the nothingness of his own isolated being. At best, like the fictional Kurtz and the historical Fawkes, the hollow men live and die lives committed to the vague abstractions of social and political causes rather than to the flesh-and-blood realities that call individuals to a passionate engagement with the world and their fellow humans. So, then, in this “death’s dream kingdom,” it is perhaps beneficent that these eyes do not appear to trouble the hollow men’s selfish dreams, and, in keeping with the experience of living that they kept at arm’s length, everything about them is composed of broken objects or distant sounds, carried off on a ceaseless wind echoing the emptiness of abstract thought. Having kept both life and the living at a distance, the better to keep from feeling, perhaps, one would of necessity ask not to be any nearer to life and the living in death, and instead would hope to go about in whatever guise will continue to keep others at bay—a rat, a crow, a scarecrow, “[b]ehaving as the wind behaves.” The way the wind behaves is never to be still, so as always to avoid “that final meeting”—which is, for a hollow man, any meeting with another or with otherness—since that would involve the untidiness of interpersonal entanglements. Part III Out of their bitter selfishness is bred the arid desert of personality without context, life to no purpose, so part III depicts the desert of emotional sterility that such an existence becomes, their lives spent nurturing nothing, fructifying nothing, producing nothing. Theirs is “the dead land . . . [the] cactus land,” a place of “stone images,” where rituals are performed by “a dead man’s hand.” Eliot had, of course, already used this stone-and-desert imagery

to great advantage in The Waste Land, but it serves him no less well here. Still other lines in part III, meanwhile, may remind the reader of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” or “The Preludes”: “Waking alone / At the hour when we are / Trembling with tenderness.” And then the old stiletto twist of the bitter irony that this tenderness comes too late, for there is nothing and no one there to kiss, only broken stone to which to pray. That dreamy, twilight kingdom of death that the speakers’ intellect haunts but fears may be a real locale or only a semblance of horrors that run too deep and dark for words, let alone images, to portray. In a word, the hollow men are those who have led wasted, empty lives by squandering their love and attachment on transitory things, wherever they may be found and whatever they may be, and who have, additionally, come to realize as much but to no avail. Their fate is recognition without reform, reckoning without recompense. They are, in a word, lost, and in part IV that recognition is realized as the vista of ceaseless hopelessness that it necessarily entails. Part IV The poetry now picks up the imagery from parts I, II, and III in a sweeping crescendo of dashed opportunities. The eyes one earlier dared not meet become “eyes [that] are not here” at all; the stars are “dying stars”; the landscape is a “hollow valley”; death’s varying kingdoms have become “our lost kingdoms.” Speechless, the hollow men “grope together” as if they are blind, avoiding any contact even among one another. Here, “on this beach of the tumid river” (an image that calls up once more Dante’s opportunists, who only ever get as far as the hither side of the Acheron, being denied access into hell proper as they are), though sightless, they seem at least able to imagine Dante’s multifoliate rose. It is his emblem and image of the blessed in paradise who, rather than gathered in the faceless, speechless crowd of hollow men, are gathered at the far end of eternity around the throne of God. As part IV ends, it seems that the “hope only / Of [these] empty men” is that somewhere there is the peace and contentment of salvation, but it is not there for them. Instead, in keeping with their char-

“Hollow Men, The” acter, it remains for them a distant and impossible prospect that teases them into self-pity but not, apparently, the capacity for shame. Part V “The Hollow Men” ends on what is perhaps the most quoted line in 20th-century English-language verse. The entire section is a dirgelike rendering of the hollow men’s inability to change. They are caught on the wheel of their own making, ceaselessly circling their own moral and spiritual ineptitude as, in a parody of a children’s nursery rhyme, they go round and round the “prickly pear,” heading nowhere. Half-formed lines from the Lord’s Prayer punctuate the page. Like an old phonograph record whose needle is stuck, or like the monotonously circling game, their praying, like their faith, progresses nowhere. The explanation for their state of near-suspended animation—“[p]aralysed force” is how it was described earlier—is embodied in the Shadow that falls between the hollow men’s every impulse and its execution: the idea and the reality, the motion and act, conception and creation, and so forth. The reader is compelled to regard that Shadow as whatever may turn a person from completion, from fulfillment, from contentment, but it must be a darkness that is self-generated as well, the shapings of an inner failing rather than anything external and uncontrollable. That Shadow is also reminiscent of the Conrad novella from which the concept of the hollow men seems to have been partly spawned. Marlow, as noted, is Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness, but Conrad’s framed narrative technique is more complicated and ambiguous than that. Readers first meet an anonymous narrator who sets the scene. He and a group of friends, among them Marlow, are on a cruising yawl at dusk in the lower reaches of the Thames, waiting for the tide to go out. This anonymous narrator then tells how, in the twilight stillness, Marlow tells the story of his harrowing journey up the primordial river to “rescue” Kurtz. Marlow begins his story of Kurtz by imagining what the mouth of the Thames must have seemed like to the ancient Romans who first encountered it some 2,000 years earlier when Britain was inhab-

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ited solely by Celts who would have seemed, to the invading Romans, to be barbarians at best, savages at worst. “And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth,” Marlow observes, breaking the anonymous narrator’s private reverie, which had been focused on the light of civilization that had over the centuries flowed down the Thames out into a benighted world. Marlow may begin by invoking the experiences of the ancient Romans in Britain, but it becomes clear that he is speaking about all humanity when he hastens to add, playing on those metaphors of light and of darkness, that “we live in the flicker.” The Conrad tale makes the same point that the reader hears in the closing litany of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” when, amidst echoes of the Lord’s Prayer, the hollow men—or is it the poet himself now?—remind the reader/listener that between all human impulses and their fulfillment, all human aspirations and their achievements, “falls the Shadow.” Conrad’s profound critique of the limits of human endeavor are there in Eliot’s vision of misguided desire and ambition, limitations in the persistent failure that humans experience by trying to match aspiration to achievement. All experience, in this imperfect universe, can be perceived as a litany of failures. Eliot does Conrad one better, however, by pointing out that the hollow men, having experienced such failures, succumb to them, taking the easy way out of making life choices. In place of the heroic ambiguities of Marlow’s struggle to come to grips with the short flickers of light that we do catch here, Eliot’s hollow men do not have the courage or the passion even to curse the darkness. Rather, they accept their self-willed fate, their pitiful tale ending, like the poem, “[n]ot with a bang but a whimper.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Following the publication of The Waste Land in late 1922, Eliot engaged in a period of experimentation that was as much a groping for new ways of expressing his insistent vision of a contemporary human scene in crisis if not chaos. The products of this effort were largely either stillborn (the unfinished “Sweeney Agonistes” providing the most outstanding example) or otherwise piecemeal, lacking the

258 “Hollow Men, The” ambitious focus that the critical success and notoriety of The Waste Land seemed to require. This creative dry spell, such as it was, would end with the publication of “The Hollow Men” in 1925. Intriguingly enough, it is a poetry of apathy. Indeed, the hollow men seem to make the case against their pervasive apathy so well that readers may conclude that, short of paraphrase, their poetic vehicle does not require very much in the way of further elucidation. While that would be a fair conclusion, it would not be an adequate or, perhaps, accurate one either. By the same line of reasoning, for example, a reader could conclude that “The Hollow Men” is another of Eliot’s many fine psychological studies masquerading as dramatic monologues and doubling as poems. The poem in that case would be exposing a state of mind more than particularly expatiating on a specific theme woven into its subtle network of allusion, symbolic imagery, and self-revelatory statement. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” comes most immediately to mind as the forebear of Eliot’s poems in this manner, followed by the masterwork “Gerontion,” which may strike the reader as a companion piece to “The Hollow Men.” By this reckoning, just as “Prufrock” examines the inner workings of the mind of a personality painfully incapable of asserting his existence in any social setting, and “Gerontion” gathers into a poem the idle musings of a man lost in his own past—each of them perturbed into “speaking his mind” because he is incapable of taking any more decisive or definitive action—so does “The Hollow Men” present its readers with the verbal equivalent of nonentities who recognize the meaningless choices that they have made but are content to live with them for the lack of any lingering initiative to do otherwise. As reasonable as that may sound, however, it is very likely far from the truth of Eliot’s aim for the poem. Beginning with The Waste Land, with its gropings toward a resolution that had something more enduringly permanent about it than the mere requirements of social realignments, Eliot’s poetry seemed to be taking on a more and more decidedly spiritual if not religious slant. Readers sensitive to that trend may have detected it in his poetry from

as early as the more superficially ludicrous of the quatrains. “The Hippopotamus” and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” come instantly to mind as works that, for all their ostensible irreverence, bite impatiently at the bit of spiritual shallowness. The question is what to replace it with. Surely anyone so bold as to provide an epigraph from Dante for his most accomplished early success as a poet is not concealing the fact that there is a spiritual dimension to his work, although it does seem that in these early efforts, that dimension is openly introduced by and large. Thus, it may be dismissed or otherwise exploited more for effect than for substance. Not so with “The Hollow Men,” and that is so much the case that the presence of the spiritual, if not indeed the religious, in the poem may not impress readers as powerfully as it ought to. The hollow men are presented in such a manner as to elicit not so much sympathy or even impatience from the reader as judgment if not outright condemnation, and it is for their spiritual rather than their social or moral shortcomings that they elicit this response. The evidence suggests that this sort of a response is precisely what Eliot is seeking, and in doing so he has finally begun to free his poetry from the pervasive ambiguity and irony that had dominated it from the beginning. The evidence in question comes from three sources: the epigraphs; “Sweeney Agonistes,” which shared an equal place in Eliot’s interests at the time that he was preparing the sequence that became “The Hollow Men”; and, of course, Dante. Once the poetry of “The Hollow Men” has been adequately considered for the sake of discovering the apparent drift of its thematic implications, the particular appropriateness of Eliot’s choice of epigraphs becomes clear. For Kurtz and Guy Fawkes, in their devotion to a cause at the expense of all else, each represents the type of individual who fulfills the requirements subsequently implied by the hollow men’s half-hearted heartlessness. On the surface, granted, that may hardly seem to be the case. Kurtz and Fawkes, it has just been said, had causes to which they were apparently committed, but the reader should recall that the hollow men are stuffed men. That is to say, having a cause does not automatically ennoble one, especially if the cause in question was an empty one to begin with.

“Hollow Men, The” Kurtz’s objective was to enlighten the native population, whom he took to be tragically benighted. It is that very status of his as a “true believer,” to use a phrase coined by the 20th-century philosopher Eric Hoffer, that makes Kurtz far more reprehensible than his fellow white traders, who, for all their own hypocrisy, do not imagine that they are in Africa for any other purpose than to exploit the land and its people for personal gain. From that angle, Kurtz’s going mad with the power that he gradually assumes among the native people is, rather than a dramatic conclusion, merely a tangential result of his putting more stock in his ideals than in his common humanity. Fawkes comes through as a similarly misguided idealist whose ideals were contradicted by his actions. In the name of his own religious faith, a doctrine founded on the principles of love for and forgiveness of others, especially one’s enemies, he contrived to be the trigger man, as it were, in a plot to kill scores of people in a violent explosion and throw an entire nation and people into chaos just so that his side might prevail. Fortunately, the plot failed under the weight of its own ineptitude, allowing the enemies whom Fawkes had hoped to vanquish once and for all instead to profit from his catastrophe and overwhelm the cause of a Catholic restoration in England for centuries to come, perhaps even permanently. (James II was a Catholic king, but not for very long.) Therefore, Eliot can intone “Mistah Kurtz—he dead. A penny for the Old Guy” in a memorial of pity for these two model hollow men who set the standard of “[p]aralysed force, gesture without motion” that so many others would follow in the 20th century. Such a reading may lead to the erroneous conclusion, however, that the type is limited to the sphere of public personalities engaged in public action, such as Kurtz and Fawkes were. That is where the poem’s known connections to the fragmentary verse drama “Sweeney Agonistes” serve their purpose by extending the range of human experience that is susceptible to a hollowness of spirit. In that play, Eliot made it clear in a 1934 lecture at Harvard University, Sweeney is the spokesman for the point of view that Eliot wished to

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convey to the audience. What Sweeney reveals is that a life lived without reference to otherness—to someone or something other than the self—is worse than hell; it is a death. That death of spirit in the midst, life is, of course, the same inner bleakness that afflicts the hollow men, who, like Sweeney, do not know if they are living or dead since there is so little distinction in their impoverished behavior toward others between the one state of being and the other. Finally, to support the idea that the crisis of the hollow men is a crisis of soul rather than one of mind or attitude, there is Eliot’s cautious blending of Dante’s vision into his own, so that the ideas and the feelings he is trying to convey are what prevail, suggesting their great importance. Till now, Eliot had used the literary allusion almost as an embellishment, so loudly did its presence among his own original lines of verse announce itself, as if he were more interested in presenting the allusion than in combining it into his own essential vision. While his ability to make the allusion an authentic enhancement rather than a pronounced embellishment of his own poetic aims would not be fully realized, perhaps, until the publication of “Ash-Wednesday” in 1930, in the use of Dante in “The Hollow Men,” Eliot is already making something new out of the old, rather than merely laying one atop the other. Someone mindful of Eliot’s relatively obvious allusions to Dante in the last stanza of part I and in the second and third stanzas of part IV would surely appreciate their effectiveness in advancing the cause of Eliot’s own poetic agenda. These allusions provide the inescapable clue that these hollow men are “lost souls” similar in their spiritual failings to Dante’s opportunists. In Eliot’s case, however, such individuals are further removed from even the passions of remorse, a spiritual luxury allowed the damned by Dante. Unlike their semblances in the Inferno, Eliot’s hollow men are able to witness the beatific vision of the blessed in paradise and thereby feel in real terms the vastness of the distance that separates them personally from blessedness. That the capacity for recognizing their immense shortcomings nevertheless has no ameliorative effect on their behavior is Eliot’s way of emphasizing how pathetic their lives are.

260 “Humanism of Irving Babbitt, The” and “Second Thoughts on Humanism” A reader who does not recognize these allusions to Dante, however, and the spiritual shortcomings of the hollow men that are thus mapped out by them should nevertheless get the idea of those images of a listless crowd gathered on the shore of a tumid river and gazing up at a distant star described as a multifoliate rose. Such a reader would be no less likely to imagine that there is an immense distance separating the lives that the hollow men live from the possibilities of redemption and salvation that are arrayed before them. For either reader, Eliot has effectively managed to portray an inner state of being in a manner that does not distort his own apparent intentions, or the reader’s attention, for the sake of displaying his wide-ranging literary erudition. The effective communication of feeling and idea takes precedence, in “The Hollow Men,” over the peculiarities of technique and method. This may very well be a first for Eliot. Eliot finally seems to feel that he has something to say, something to share with his readers. That is not to say that he had not had as much to say before, only that now the importance of its being said seems to supersede the manner in which it gets said. The poet has triumphed over the wit. This final observation, if accepted, ought to permit the reader not to fall prey to the last fatal error in reading great literature—to imagine that, unless the portrait painted is flattering, it is about someone else and not oneself. When Pound composed for his long and continuing work, The Cantos, a section that was intended by him to do for the moral failings of the modern world what Dante’s Inferno had done for similar failings in his own, Eliot is said to have criticized the work that Pound thereby produced, observing that his friend had “created a Hell for other people, not for us and our friends.” It is an astute observation with great general applicability, and certainly with applicability to Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” For it would be wrongheaded to imagine that his hollow men are other people and not “us and our friends.” Perhaps Eliot’s Sweeney is a special case, and perhaps that is why, after the unfinished “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot never essayed that personage again. But the hollow men, like Pru-

frock and like the characters who people The Waste Land and even perhaps the speaker of “Gerontion,” are not special cases at all. Their lives, their world, like so many others’ typically end with a whimper rather than a bang, unless there is something else to a life, and to the world and its purpose or purposes. Discovering that something else, and its possible shape and direction, would become more and more the underlying principle that guided Eliot’s poetry virtually from this point on.

FURTHER READING Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Scribner’s, 1949. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Smith, Grover, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meanings. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Strothmann, Friedrich W., and Lawrence V. Ryan. “Hope for T. S. Eliot’s ‘Empty Men.’ ” PMLA 73 (1958): 426–432.

“Humanism of Irving Babbitt, The” (1928) and “Second Thoughts on Humanism” (1929) The first of these two essays was published in The Forum in July 1928, producing even from among “sympathetic friends,” according to Eliot’s own testimony, a reaction that compelled him to reprint the original essay along with his “second thoughts” the following year. Anyone who knew how Eliot manages an argument, however, would hardly have expected a retraction. By the late 1920s, Eliot was all but a sworn enemy of the secular humanism that had invaded virtually every quarter of intellectual and political life in Europe by the beginning of the 20th century and that was beginning to manifest its primarily materialist, naturalist bias in spiritual realms as the young century progressed.

“Humanism of Irving Babbitt, The” and “Second Thoughts on Humanism”

SYNOPSIS Babbitt and Humanism In “Second Thoughts,” Eliot characterized the conflict as follows: “My previous note has been interpreted . . . as an ‘attack’ on humanism from a narrow sectarian point of view. It was not intended to be an attack.” What Eliot had attempted to do in “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” it appears, was critique Babbitt’s defense of humanism not on religious grounds—that “narrow sectarian point of view”—but on the grounds of Babbitt’s proposing it as a solution to contemporary spiritual ills, a solution that, in Eliot’s view, simply could not deliver the goods. Babbitt, an American social critic and academic, had been something of a mentor to the younger T. S. Eliot during his undergraduate years at Harvard, where Babbitt was on the faculty. Despite these later intellectual disagreements, he and Eliot remained good friends, corresponding with each other throughout the remainder of the “Dear Master”’s life, as Eliot addressed those missives. Eliot continued to have a bone to pick with Babbitt and his fellow American humanists, however. Specifically, early in the first essay, Eliot ably summarizes what he takes to be Babbitt’s characterization of humanism in religious terms: “Mr. Babbitt makes it very clear . . . that he is unable to take the religious view—that is to say that he cannot accept any dogma or revelation; and that humanism is the alternative to religion.” If that characterization is accurate, then Eliot feels justified in questioning whether humanism can therefore be regarded as a substitute for religion as well, and, if it can be, whether it is “durable beyond one or two generations.” While Eliot is not simply baiting the argument, he makes it clear that he regards humanism as an attitude that can flourish only because of a long tradition of religious belief in human cultures. “The religious habits of the race are still very strong, in all places, at all times, and for all people,” whereas there is no universal tradition such as humanism; rather, it is “merely the state of mind of a few persons in a few places at a few times.” If, then, humanism “always flourishes most when religion has been strong,” then a humanism that is antire-

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ligious, inasmuch as it has no use for religion and hopes to provide an alternative to it, “is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it destroyed.” According to Eliot, Babbitt imagines that the outer restraints on individual behavior that religion provides can be supplied instead by the individual’s inner restraints on himself—what Eliot demeaningly calls, in “The Function of Criticism,” an “inner voice.” Eliot claims that Babbitt is willfully distorting the nature of the control that religion imposes on individuals, since “the very idea of the religion is the inner control.” Its controls, he argues, are not like those of political organizations, however, because, with religion, “the appeal [is] not to a man’s behaviour but to his soul.” So, then, Eliot asserts: “If a religion cannot touch a man’s self . . . then it has failed in its professed task.” Eliot concludes “The Humanism of Irving Babbit” as he began it, proposing that his sole aim is to clarify where the tendencies in Babbitt’s argument will lead, and that is invariably to “the conclusion that the humanistic point of view is auxiliary to and dependent on the religious point of view.” Whether Eliot is right or not, that is a long way from regarding humanism as an alternative to religion, if not a substitute for it. According to Eliot, should humanism pursue the agenda that Babbitt proposes for it of eventually supplanting religion, which in the case of England would mean Christianity, then it will have succeeded only in cutting off the tree from the branch that it, humanism, occupies. Humanism and “Heresy” In “Second Thoughts,” Eliot defends himself against the charge—although misunderstanding may be a fairer characterization—that he had attacked humanism on sectarian grounds. He summarizes what he finds legitimate in the protest of his critics as follows: “[I]f I succeed in proving that humanism is insufficient without religion, what is left for those who cannot believe?” Eliot will not deny that that is a just reservation, but he will not retreat from his central position: Humanism, which admits that it was once allied with religion, now believes that it can “afford to ignore positive religion.”

262 “Hysteria” Turning from Babbitt’s formulations of humanism to Norman Foerster’s American Criticism to make his case, Eliot further reduces the humanist position by arguing that its appeal as a surrogate religion not only is limited to intellectuals but also bears, in effect, “the imprint of the academic man of letters.” In other words, American-style humanism is more a literary experience than a religious experience and is therefore further limited in that respect. “The trouble is that, for a modern humanist, literature thus becomes itself merely a means of approach to something else.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Many attribute Eliot’s increasing antipathy to secularism to his conversion, in June 1927, to the relatively orthodox folds of Anglo-Catholicism. However, for all that his earlier poetry seemed to embrace the startlingly new, Eliot had been defending the primacy of tradition in his prose criticism from as early as 1919, with his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and he had lambasted the “muddle through” crowd, as he called them, with their reliance on a subjective “inner voice” in 1923 in “The Function of Criticism.” Not long after composing these two essays in response to Babbitt, Eliot suggested and then insisted that poetry must be treated as something other than second-rate theology and philosophy. Here, early in his own version of the culture wars, Eliot is already identifying secular humanism as the source of the dilemma whereby literature assumes more and more moral authority at the expense of traditional centers of moral judgments and values. Although Eliot had praised Foerster for his brilliance, Eliot finally declares that “Mr. Foerster is what I call a Heretic: that is, a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood.” The dark shadow of Eliot’s most notoriously polemical work, 1934’s After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, is beginning to be cast at this time in Eliot’s career as a critic. In his preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, in 1928, he promises that a future project will be entitled Principles of Modern Heresy, but already in “Second Thoughts on Humanism,” Eliot is tagging

the enemy with what he regards as an appropriate sobriquet. To call humanism heresy is a powerful indictment of one of the most potent intellectual and political forces of his time. Although such an indictment partakes of humanism’s own quasi-religious aura, it is for that very reason an indictment that, Eliot must be aware, is as liable to backfire as not. Still, he presses his point. In the hands of defenders and promulgators like Babbitt and Foerster, “[h]umanism becomes something else, something more dangerous, because much more seductive to the best minds.” That is because, perhaps, unlike another modern intellectual stance materialist in nature, behaviorism, which reduces all human action to predictable conditioned responses, humanism partakes of its foundations in the spiritual in order to undermine those very foundations. It is in an older spirit of humanism, with its original dependence on religious foundationalism in mind, that Eliot frames his most cogent criticism of the secularist posture that humanism is now assuming and that he is roundly condemning: “If you remove from the word ‘human’ all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man, you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal.” Rather than a refutation, these words coming from Eliot’s pen sound much more like a thought worthy of being seriously pondered.

“Hysteria” (1917) Composed in November 1915, this short prose poem would not see print until 1917 when it was collected along with Eliot’s other significant work to date in his first published volume, Prufrock and Other Observations. Written in the manner of JULES LAFORGUE, the French symbolist wit and self-deprecating dandy under whose considerable influence Eliot had been writing poetry from as early as 1909, the poem is an exercise in the outrageous, but its aim can be seen as a noble one if the reader keeps in mind that Eliot’s virtually constant poetic agenda at this time was to extend the range and possibilities

“Hysteria” of poetic discourse by keeping his own readers perpetually off balance. One of the most convenient ways for Eliot to achieve this aim, as he had learned from Laforgue, was to don the mask of the sophisticate who views everything both about himself and about his social milieu just a little askew. For that is the very aim of the Laforguean manner, to defy the reader’s normal expectations of what poetry is and is not required to do, and of the means by which it accomplishes those expectations. It is in the spirit of this defiance that the poet then is able to reassert control over the medium and reeducate the reader as to its capabilities and purposes.

SYNOPSIS “Hysteria” certainly accomplishes those goals. The title suggests that what is about to follow may as likely be a definition-by-representation of hysteria as much a poem treating that human emotional state as its topic and theme. In good Laforguean fashion, the presentation that follows successfully exploits both possibilities by simultaneously commenting on and demonstrating the signs and effects of hysteria. If the reader takes the speaker’s side and accepts unquestioningly that the woman in question has fallen into a fit of ungovernable hysterical laughter, then the poem becomes a way of evoking that laughter. With the speaker, the reader becomes immersed in the experience as the subject gets carried away with laughing. The reader hears the short gasps between each next outburst but otherwise sees into the woman’s throat and down into the musculature of her chest, from which the laughter is emanating. The effects of the laughter are further manifested by the reaction of the elderly waiter, whose solicitations strongly suggest that he is afraid that the boisterousness of her prolonged outburst will disturb the other guests in the dining room. As the details of the woman’s relationship with and to the speaker become more clear, the nearly morbid attention to the physical details of the spectacle that she is apparently making of herself begin to hover near the embarrassingly intimate and familiar, perhaps too close for comfort. The reader is asked suddenly to focus on “the shaking of her breasts,” hardly a physical feature that one should feel at ease with staring at in a public

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setting or even contemplating in private, particularly when the level of discourse of the entire poem further suggests that the ambiance is one of polite company. So, then, with a sudden twist of the knife reminiscent of a dark poem such as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” the speaker catches the reader entirely offguard when he begins to propose that he might save the afternoon if he might only find a way to stop those breasts from shaking, and the poem then concludes with his confessing that he turned his attention to the accomplishment of that very end “with careful subtlety,” whatever that might mean. There are, after all, only so many ways in which to put an effective stop to someone’s hysterical laughter, and none of them is particularly attractive.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The point of the entire poetic exercise in “Hysteria” seems to be that the speaker’s verbal demeanor throughout has implied that the reader knows exactly what the speaker means and exactly how and why it should be so unsettling to find oneself suddenly keeping company with someone who has broken out in uncontrollable laughter. One telling detail, however, the motive for the hysterical laughter, has been entirely omitted from the speaker’s report, leaving it conspicuous in its absence by poem’s end. Was it at something that the speaker said or did, or is the laughter at his expense in some other, more embarrassing way? At the very least, it appears to have been totally unexpected and, most important, not shared, justifying somewhat the speaker’s reversion, as a last resort, to the cryptic and sinister. The reader is left to wonder not only what the speaker went on to do to stop the laughter—images of his strangling her on the spot arise—but also what were the source and nature of the hysteria that the poem’s title identifies. For example, hysteria, which is generally defined as a state of violent mental agitation, had been thought of in all its various forms and manifestations for many centuries as a peculiarly female disorder brought about by uterine disturbances (the word hysteria has its root in the Greek hustera, or womb). Eliot, through his speaker, may be merely playing on those old prejudices and medi-

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cal misconceptions, whereby human females were thought of as flighty and mercurial creatures whose emotional outbursts could be neither trusted nor publicly tolerated. However, he may be exposing male hysteria—in this case, excessive and uncontrollable fears manifested in both the speaker and the waiter—about female behavior. It is impossible to say, and no doubt there are those, too, who would read the poem as a commentary on a real episode that Eliot may have had with his first wife, Vivien, whom he had married but months before the poem’s composition and whose nervous disorders brought about by uterine problems were, it is safe to say, virtually legendary among their circle of friends. This technique of both alienating the reader and making the reader the accomplice to an inside joke is used to great effect in “Mr. Apollinax,” for example, which emerges from essentially the same period and out of the same spirit of reckless abandonment of all formal and thematic constraints. In that poem, the title subject is suspected of being a celebrity whom the poet wishes otherwise to remain anonymous. (Literary commentators have subsequently identified the celebrity as the English analytical philosopher and Cambridge fellow Bertrand Russell, who visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1914 while Eliot was engaged in his graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard.) But who the speaker or his subject actually is is not the point; it is what he makes of himself and of his subject. So, then, this Mr. Apollinax is shown by a sympathetic but otherwise anonymous speaker to be the absolute master of his stuffy social environment. By being too much of a mind and too jovial a manner to be fitted into any easy and convenient categories, Mr. Apollinax has both the first and the last laugh without ever seeking either. The unbridled poetic energy with which Eliot mingles levity and erudition with a ponderous seriousness and droll cynicism owes as much to these earlier, experimental poems, slight as they are, as to such more significant earlier poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Surely Eliot’s uncanny ability to manipulate and modulate tone and voice within a poem, often from one line to the next, was further honed in these lesser workshop poems. The

reader who regards these otherwise minor achievements of Eliot’s as the bedrock on which he was then able to build the fragmented edifice of mixed motives and confused aims that is his early masterpiece, The Waste Land, can forgive Eliot the verbal excesses in which these same Laforguean pieces relish. On the other hand, the less kind or patient reader may find distracting if not insufferable an overriding satirical note that dominates these poems yet never quite clarifies its target or, when and if it does, provides the reader with neither a necessary alternative point of view nor a sufficient reason to care. While a poem as brief as “Hysteria” arguably deserves little more attention than has already been granted it as an exercise on Eliot’s part in the rich ambiguities of both topic and theme that can be teased from the most trivial kind of experience through the careful manipulation of background information, detail, and, above all, voice, “Hysteria” provides interested readers with an invitation into the most secret of places, the artist’s workshop. It is in minor works such as this one, in which nothing of any great significance or importance is at stake, that technical virtuosities are often most exposed and therefore most available for special care and attention.

Idea of a Christian Society, The (1939) In his preface, Eliot succinctly summarizes his aim and his hopes for this work, itself the published result of three lectures that he had delivered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in March 1939 at the invitation of the Boutwood Foundation. As if to deflect the growing public suspicion that Eliot’s religious interests were merely personal concerns if not obsessive, the result of this high priest of modernism’s having “gotten religion” in the mid1920s, in the preface he makes it clear from the outset that his thoughts on the subject of the social consequences of a more and more secularized and relativistic culture “can only be of use if taken as an individual contribution to a discussion which must occupy many minds for a long time to come.”

Idea of a Christian Society, The

SYNOPSIS Chapter One Even at the time of his writing the essay in question, Eliot must have been mindful of the sorts of misunderstandings to which his intentions have subsequently been subjected. In the same spirit of attempting to objectify his position, which can easily be confused for a personal and religious one, Eliot goes out of his way now as well to establish at the outset the overriding cultural importance of clarifying the terms of the debate. His presentation is not intended as a defense of Christianity. Rather it is an argument for undergirding the social structure of the contemporary English nation with a moral and ethical value system that is itself more enduring than the expedient solutions generally offered in the short-term give and take of political discourse because such discourse, in a democracy, is forced to cater to the whims and opinions of the moment and of special interest groups. In his nuanced approach to his announced topic, Eliot proposes for the English a “Christian” society in the same way, for example, in which an Iranian or East Indian or Japanese thinker, on the basis of equally long-standing cultural traditions and historical realities, might propose a Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist model of moral and ethical organization for his or her respective society. Nor are these nuances of Eliot’s all that subtle. After taking such pains to explain these aims in his preface, Eliot begins the first chapter of his essay proper by defining what he means by a Christian society, doing so by establishing what he does not mean. Throughout, it should be kept in mind that the opposite of a Christian society is not a non-Christian society. That latter supposition would make Eliot’s entire treatment of the topic nothing less than a sectarian broadside, promoting a particular religious view at the expense of all and any others. Indeed, rather than promoting Christianity in particular, Eliot is promoting the idea that a society must be promulgated on commonly accepted and practiced religious principles, so he proposes that they be Christian because Christianity has been the basis of belief among the English people for at least 1,300 years. If, for example, the English were

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a traditionally Muslim or Buddhist people, Eliot’s idea of the kind of society to be founded there in England on religious principles would have varied accordingly. This is not a point to belabor, perhaps, but it is one to keep in mind. Nowadays as much as in Eliot’s time, the tendency is to view a proper state or society as one that does not favor a particular religion more than any other. The result too often, however, is to forgo any religious basis to social structure and social interaction whatsoever. Eliot does not fail to comment on how much the current practice of separating matters of state and the church, be it an established church or not, all too often revolve around the question, “What church?” He feels that such questions rather should revolve around the question, “What state?” It is by frequently proposing the problem in those kinds of terms that Eliot keeps his reader mindful that Eliot is interested in the just operation of the social system, not in promoting Christian values in and of themselves for their own sake. Opposed, then, to Eliot’s Christian society is, in his view, England’s present, secularized society, which he calls a neutral society. The danger of a neutral society ought to be self-evident: There is no continuity or consistency to the moral and ethical judgments that it must inevitably make and then foist off on the citizenry. His primary interest, he claims, is to bring about such a change in social attitudes “as could bring about anything worthy to be called a Christian Society,” for he fears that the other option is that the so-called Western democracies, as secularized or religiously neutralized as they have become, may eventually each become, like Germany and Russia, a pagan society, wherein the state has preempted all the moral prerogatives normally left to the church but without even the pretense of any consistent principles for making moral judgments. So, then, Eliot sees England at a moral and ethical crossroad. Without being an alarmist, Eliot paints the current alternatives in dire enough terms. “[T]he choice before us,” he states quite emphatically, “is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one.” Toward the end of his first chapter, he will reiterate the current crisis in the same terms, for

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what is at stake, he believes, is “a way of life for a people.” At present, rather than being a Christian society that defines itself in terms of its own values and tradition, England’s is a society as materialistic as its fascist and communist rivals. However, worse than the others whose value structures are at least self-defining, the English “are in danger of finding ourselves with nothing to stand for except a dislike of everything maintained by Germany and/or Russia.” Such an attitude, with no positive basis of its own, fosters uncritical habits of mind and spirit, in Eliot’s view. “[G]ood prose cannot be written by a people without convictions,” Eliot warns, nor can such a society “thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilization.” The only corrective to these problems, as Eliot sees it, is for England to discover its spiritual roots by becoming a Christian society, yet he is afraid that recent trends instead will make Christians in England’s present society a tolerated minority, in keeping with the modern neutral state’s habit of tolerance in the name of neutrality. But there lies the danger. “[I]n the modern world,” Eliot warns, “it may turn that the most tolerable thing for Christians is to be tolerated.” Still, he insists, a “Christian society only becomes acceptable after you have considered the alternatives.” Chapter Two In his second chapter, having addressed the need for discussing what the nature of contemporary society ought to be, Eliot is free to discuss how a Christian society should be organized and operate. The need for one, in his view, is pressing, for he imagines that, unless the idea of crafting a positive Christian society is embraced, present trends indicate either a sharp decline in English society in general or the emergence of a completely secularized society. That necessary Christian society cannot look to earlier versions as models. Instead, it must have three components, which Eliot identifies as the Christian state, the Christian community, and the community of Christians. He begins by giving a functional description of the Christian state that is limited mainly to the scope and nature of its leadership. Perhaps because he focuses on matters of personnel rather than pol-

icy or practice, however, Eliot manages here, intentionally or not, to give his readers a sharply focused picture of the ways in which he is expecting this Christian state to be Christian. Thus, the leadership of the Christian state need not themselves be chosen on the basis of the depths of their Christianity; instead, their leadership must be “confined,” as he puts it, within a Christian framework so that “they must never attempt to defend their actions on un-Christian principles.” They would receive what he calls “a Christian education,” by which he means one that would have trained them “to be able to think in Christian categories.” While there can be no doubt, then, that Eliot has specific precepts of moral behavior in mind, accomplishing his idea of a Christian society would require a leadership that follows, like the citizenry who will compose the other two elements necessary to maintaining such a society, a “traditional code of behaviour” founded on those Christian principles. These same practices, pursued among the Christian community and the community of Christians, should be so conducted as to make the religious and social life of the nation form “a natural whole” wherein “behaving as Christians should not impose an intolerable strain.” The ultimate problem here, Eliot contends, is that the parish unit, the bedrock on which the community of Christians may flourish, has become stultified in England’s agricultural past. Nowadays, “modern material organization,” by which he would means the machinery of trade and commerce as well as the machinery of the bureaucratic state, “has produced a world for which [those more traditional] Christian social forms are imperfectly adapted.” To resolve this dilemma, Eliot observes, some have proposed a return to the simpler social organizations of agrarian times, while others wish to adapt Christian principles to present conditions. Eliot, however, sees neither solution as adequate or long lasting. Rather, he feels that there must be a complete reorganization of society along Christian lines, to the exclusion of the profit motive as a social ideal and to the exclusion, as well, of the exploitation of human labor for the benefit of the few. This is, of course, a very daring proposal, and with it Eliot brings his reader as close as is pos-

Idea of a Christian Society, The sible to a full appreciation of what Eliot means by Christian in political and economic terms, which is that it should entail the social eradication of economic iniquities and inequality. At present, rather, “a great deal of the machinery of modern life,” Eliot contends, “is merely a sanction for un-Christian aims,” making the maintenance of any Christian society nearly impossible. So, then, it is only by virtue of a genuine “Christian organisation of society,” Eliot believes, that “the natural end of man,” which he identifies as “virtue and well-being in community,” be acknowledged “for all”—not only Christians, but peoples of other beliefs and persuasions in the community, too. Since there is a religious foundation to the new society that Eliot is proposing, such a society also would foster “the supernatural end—beatitude— for those who have the eyes to see it.” In that kind of a Christian community, the community of Christians will be “the consciously and thoughtfully practising Christians, especially those of intellectual and spiritual superiority.” While not limited strictly to the religious, the community of Christians would, by virtue of their conscious commitment to practicing and formulating the faith, be distinct from the Christian community, which is all those members of the general public professing a belief in Christianity’s moral, ethical, and spiritual principles. Eliot takes pains again, however, to make it clear that, although this spiritual and intellectual cadre forming the community of Christians is guided in all its behavior by an adherence to Christian principles, it need not be, particularly in the area of education, composed entirely of Christians so much as of individuals who, without any personal belief in Christian theology, nevertheless can adhere to and inculcate its essential vision of humanity and human behavior. It is when Eliot discusses the place of artists and the arts—of what most would call culture—in such a society that he digresses, admittedly, into a discussion of the isolation of that branch of the intelligentsia from the mainstream of community life. He also comments on the pressure of the profit motive, meanwhile, to cheapen the quality of literary production intended for public consumption, thus separating the arts from their authentic social

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function. Furthermore, a divorce between the interests of religion and of arts and education in general encourages the political leadership to regard ignorance of developments in those fields as a virtue. “Accordingly,” Eliot concludes, “the more serious authors have a limited, and even provincial audience, and the more popular write for an illiterate and uncritical mob.” That he regards such a state of affairs to be the result of the lack of a uniformity of culture is a topic that he had already addressed in the controversial After Strange Gods in 1934. Now, it appears, he is better able, or at least more careful, to clarify what he sees to be the importance of a society’s having a common center, not of belief, but of accepted principles of human behavior and standards of judgment from which the intellectual and aesthetic life of the community may radiate a coherent point of view. For the English, he finds that common center in Christianity because then individuals, while not being obliged to act in concert, can nevertheless appeal to enduring principles in making judgments and decisions that affect the well-being of the entire community. Eliot establishes as well, however, that this community of Christians is not the same as, say, the early 19th-century idea of the clerisy proposed by the English poet and thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge had a fairly well-defined body of thinkers and practitioners in the arts, in religion, and in education in mind, whereas, in keeping with the more amorphous structures of the contemporary world, Eliot makes it clear that, on all fronts, his community of Christians must be, of necessity, “a body of indefinite outline.” His Christian society itself is nevertheless now successfully outlined, and Eliot will conclude his second chapter by observing that a Christian state, as a consequence, need not have an organized church, so long as the state respect Christian principles. That goal will be accomplished, of course, as long as there is also within the Christian society that Eliot has envisioned a Christian community in which those principles are observed in their everyday lives by the common citizens. A community of Christians, meanwhile, is also necessary in order for them to bring to bear their intellectual and spiritual expertise constantly to make the adjustments

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between principles and practice that any dynamic society requires. The community of Christians must achieve this function without either compromising the former or constraining the latter. Chapter Three As he begins his third chapter, Eliot notes that he will except the United States and the Dominions from the discussion to follow, inasmuch as it will concern itself with the fact that his idea of a Christian society, as just developed, “can only be realised when the great majority of the sheep belong to the same fold.” If earlier he implied that components of his community of Christians need not even be Christian so much as they adhere to Christian principles, nonetheless a pluralistic approach to belief among the citizenry would not advance the idea of a Christian society. So, then, the church should have a relationship to those three elements previously outlined: the Christian state, the Christian community, and the community of Christians. For that reason, he admits that the sort of inclusive society that has evolved in the United States might necessitate the maintenance of what he calls a neutral state there, and he wisely limits his discussion of this last aspect of a Christian society—unity of belief—to England, where the Church of England, or Anglican Church, fulfills that requirement. There again Eliot is careful to point out that the issue is not one of a theological purity or even stability. This particular church is tied to the historical processes of the Christianization of England by virtue of the Church’s traditions, organization, and relation to what he calls the religious-social life of the English people. This adherence to a national church, one that is of a particular people and a particular place, requires a balancing act between the temporal and the spiritual, however. For one thing, Christians everywhere, despite sectarian conflicts, regard Christianity as a universal church. What is true in principle, of course, is all too often not the case in practice. Eliot will address the resulting paradox of a universal church that must nevertheless express the social values of a wide variety of particular peoples in a later work, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948).

For now, he admits that too much emphasis on the national character of the church might undermine Christianity’s professedly universal character, but so might any attempt to pretend that there is universality in a system of belief that everywhere reflects the local culture undermine the uniquely English character of the Christianity practiced by the people of England. Such dangers caused by the opposing demands of blood and of creed can, in Eliot’s view, only compound themselves, especially when religious and social cohesion is needed most critically for the life of the nation. A Christianity too identified with a people can become submerged in their prejudices and passions. Conversely, by becoming a “kind of society of Christian societies,” any one people’s—say, the English’s—can dilute the essentially Christian character of the nation’s religious life. The idea of maintaining a national church in the context of a universal church can result in “the idea of a supernatural League of Nations,” Eliot jokes, referring to the then-contemporary equivalent of the present-day United Nations. It proved to represent nothing in its attempt to represent everything. In keeping with the spirit of pragmatic compromise between extremes for which Anglicanism has long been noted, however, Eliot proposes as a solution to these various dilemmas a middle way, whereby, in a “dual allegiance, to the State and to the Church, to one’s countrymen and to one’s fellow-Christians everywhere, . . . the latter would always have primacy.” A check of that order would create tensions, he concedes, but such tensions would be a way to distinguish a Christian from a pagan society, since the former would be obligated to adhere to the conscience of an international community, Christians everywhere. Chapter Four In his fourth and final chapter, Eliot addresses the form of political organization that his Christian state ought to embrace, concluding that to specify a particular one would be a serious error. Forms of government and social organizations are all temporary and subject to frequent change, whereas the Christian principles on which the state is founded find their appeal in their enduring and universal

Idea of a Christian Society, The applicability. To argue, then, that England’s present form of government is ideally suited to a Christian state or that a fascist or communist state never can be a Christian state as well is to confuse purposes and to confuse methods with ends. Eliot emphasizes again that by professing to be a Christian, the individual is not called to piety so much as to respecting a communal sensibility that is Christian in both nature and dogma. The bond would be that the citizens hold the Christian faith, not that they practice or observe it to some particularly prescribed degree or extent. Based on these same principles, Eliot envisions, too, a national life more in conformity with nature. A shift of that order would put the present-day adulation of all that is mechanized, urbanized, and commercialized back into its proper perspective, he imagines, and enable a culture like England’s, as out of touch with its own roots in nature and the natural order as it has become, to see “in some of the societies upon which we look down as primitive or backward, the operation of a social-religious-complex which we should emulate upon a higher plane.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY It is a virtually universal assumption on the part of critics and readers, given Eliot’s profound and publicly professed conversion to a high form of Anglicanism in the late 1920s, that, in the essay, Eliot must be defending or at least proposing a theocracy for the English people based on a devotion to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Forearmed with this prejudice, no reader is capable of appreciating the nuances of Eliot’s actual presentation, whether that reader is out to defend Eliot or to attack him. There would have been little secret that in conceptualizing what he calls a “Christian society,” Eliot would of necessity be addressing as well the spiritually deadening processes of the secularization of public life and private mores that had been taking place among the Western democracies in Europe and North America since the mid-19th century. This issue had involved Eliot’s attention more and more since at least the time of “Gerontion” in 1919. In terms of his prose criticism, his developing thoughts on the cultural crisis ushered in by modernism had culminated in the polemics

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of 1934’s After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. That latter work’s reception as a conservative and reactionary tract in certain quarters, however, had no doubt caused Eliot some private pain, enough at least for him to take the public step of forbidding any future publication of that controversial work. Eliot’s purpose here is to emphasize that, rather than hoping to see one’s own point of view prevail, the far more important matter is the maintenance of a healthy public debate on the issues that he raises, regarding them and their resolution, as he does, as the most critical of concerns for the culture in general. Contemporary history and current affairs have certainly borne Eliot out. Were he alive today, he would see a society in which debates regarding the place of God and of issues of belief in public life and morality, and in fields as ostensibly diverse as medical ethics, public education, and biotechnology, occupy the headlines. Having been himself bloodied for taking a consistently traditionalist stand for a social and spiritual conservatism in matters literary since the time of his 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism,” Eliot proceeds, in this present and extended essay, to make it clear that his interest is not in preserving or defending “spiritual institutions in their separated aspect.” By now he would be fully aware that even the appearance of assuming such an orthodox posture will be perceived only as being narrowly sectarian and, hence, not only divisive but a bar to encouraging that all-important ongoing discussion. Indeed, Eliot’s aim is not, and likely never has been, to proselytize or evangelize; instead, it has always been to analyze and critique what he takes to be a foundational crisis within the spiritual life of the culture and community. It is all that much more imperative, then, that he does not give the impression that he is being sectarian or, worse, a Christian apologist. Thus, Eliot does not wish to address spiritual concerns for their own sake. Rather, and from his point of view more important, his concern will be to offer his readers a “direction of religious thought which must inevitably proceed to a criticism of political and economic systems.” Eliot is emphatic that his real topic is the contemporary political scene, not religion. This crucial

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distinction reflects economic and political developments taking place at the time of his writing. Since the end of World War I, two new economic and political systems had emerged on the European continent, and in terms of both their viability and their aggressive style of self-promotion they were posing serious threats to the continuing economic and political stability of Europe’s so-called Christian democracies, such as England and France. One such development had occurred in Russia. The success, in October 1917, of the Bolshevik revolution there not only brought down the socialist government that had replaced the czarist monarchy in the preceding spring but instituted a communist state that effectively outlawed organized religious institutions and most civil liberties, including the right of private ownership. That development on the left of the political spectrum was matched by equally ominous developments on the right, however, that may have taken longer to crystallize but that were to prove no less indicative of the radical changes taking place in the age-old traditions of Christian Europe. An emphasis in those traditions on individual initiative and worth had come to form the basis of Europe’s Christian democracies. As a result, social, economic, and legislative accommodations between the nobility and commoners had been evolving over the past several centuries. Now all that appeared to be about to change. Surely the leftist, Marxist challenge to traditional models of state and economic structures was to be expected, but a far more serious challenge was emerging as well. The Marxist model had nowhere near the appeal of the alternative to the Christian democratic state that fascism would offer the more prosperous societies of Western Europe. Fascism placed all its faith in the efficiency of a secular state founded on a hierarchy of party affiliation as opposed to religious discipline and devotions. At the top of this hierarchical state, based on a sort of ancestor worship, was a strongman who represented the ancient, pagan traditions of the tribe or nation. In the case of Italy, Benito Mussolini’s appeal to Italians was based on his associating himself with a revival of the power and glory of Imperial Rome. Adolf Hitler eventually proved even more monstrously effective in his efforts to

restore to a Germany defeated in war the blood brotherhood associated with the old Teutonic knights. While neither tampered with the institutions of organized religion, as the Soviets had not hesitated to do, neither hesitated to admit that they were effectively making a religion of the state that would compete with the church for the unquestioning devotion of its citizenry—and compete successfully. By replacing the mystery of faith with the mysteries of race and national identity, and by delivering the goods as well, the fascist ideology was remaking the face of Western Europe as dramatically as communism was remaking Eastern Europe. Without this understanding, a reader cannot possibly appreciate the stand that Eliot is about to take as he postulates the “idea of a Christian society.” Eliot had already addressed some of these geopolitical concerns in “Coriolan” in the early 1930s in a never-completed poem sequence that compared the bread-and-circus demagogueries of ancient Rome with the only somewhat more subtle, similar tactics of the modern bureaucratic state. Now, speaking mere months after English prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement, in September 1938, of Germany’s expansionist aims in Central Europe, and within six months, too, of war breaking out in Europe as a result of Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Eliot had an opportunity to play on his audience’s immediate rather than merely academic concerns. He would have been aware that his British audience was mindful of both the long- and short-term implications of the threat to Western democracies posed by the successful political, economic, and military advances of both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, their competing models for a modern, secular state notwithstanding. It is important for readers to keep all of these considerations and developments in mind as they regard Eliot’s “idea of a Christian society,” for there can be no doubt that Eliot had them in mind himself. It is in considerations of this order, as his essay draws to a close, that Eliot’s aim becomes unmistakably clear. Whatever else he may be calling his fellow English to, he is calling them to a spiritual renewal that ought to recapture the traditional values that had shaped the nation to begin with. That

Idea of a Christian Society, The he defines that renewal in Christian terms reflects a cultural bias far more than it does any religious one. Note, for example, his frequent emphasis not on piety and orthodoxy so much as on a consistent foundation to the nation’s moral and ethical life. In the case of the English, that foundation happens to be Christian, in Eliot’s view. Also note that he sees that foundation threatened on several fronts. At home there are the pressures of the relative prosperity that industrialization has brought about, including an increasing materialism and a removal of the population from England’s rural roots. From abroad, meanwhile, are competing political and economic systems whose appeal to secularization and social collectivity offers attractively modernsounding alternatives to religion as the lifeblood of a people. Finally, there is the overriding threat of another world war, and the First World War from 1914 to 1918 had already found the vitality of Europe’s Christian values wanting. In their renewal, even if only among the English, Eliot hoped to find an ameliorative to the looming crisis. In his closing paragraph, then, Eliot cites the events of September 1938 as an occurrence that had forced one to doubt “the validity of civilisation.” He is referring to the famous Munich accord, whereby the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had appeased Nazi Germany’s expansionist goals by ceding the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, to the Nazis. While having the short-term benefit of preventing an armed conflict, that self-serving action on the part of the British (war with Germany would break out within a year in any case, on September 1, 1939, with Germany’s invasion of Poland) would lead Eliot to ponder whether English civilization had “any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends.” What would become known to history as World War II broke out mere days before Eliot’s essay went to press on September 6, 1939. As if to verify his fears, that awful event signaled not only the failure of civilization, as any war does, but the failure of a Christian civilization to make its principles a viable part of the lives of the nations that ostensibly adhered to its principles.

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Eliot had argued throughout his essay that, without a conscious and public adherence to Christian principles in the life and practices of the state and community in England, the state and the community both are guided by nothing more than the expedient good of the profit motive in all its various guises, so that even peace among nations becomes nothing less than a means to maintaining business as usual, as the Munich Accord attested. While Eliot’s call for instituting a Christian society in England is far more long-range and ambitious in scope than those events might suggest, despite how momentous they themselves were, the conjunction of his appeal with the impending failure of those very ideals that all of Western Europe professed to be following makes his closing remarks particularly propitious and poignant. The failure of the Western, Christian democracies, in particular England and France, to dissipate the international tensions that would eventually result in an armed conflict in any event is, if Eliot is correct, not a failure of Christianity but a failure of their leadership on all fronts—the spiritual, educational, and cultural as well as the economic and political—to behave consistently in a manner in keeping with Christian principles, not because those principles are inherently more correct or better than other religious principles but because they are the religious principles on which European civilization is founded. In that way, too, Eliot can assert convincingly that, inasmuch as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia are guided by their own respective species of post-Christian principles that describe and define their every action and policy as states, their so-called pagan societies must appear to many to represent the way of an inevitably secularized future. At the very least, in their diplomatic and public relations successes, those two modern nation states have become contending models for social, political, and economic systems that have it all over the hollow-at-the-core semblance of a Christian society that England, at the time of Eliot’s writing, had come to be. Not even Eliot could have imagined, however, how catastrophically England would soon be learning that not even a neutral society can remain so for very long. As he would have it, a people without

272 “John Dryden” belief are not spared the necessity of acting any more than any other.

“John Dryden” (1922) In his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot observed, much to his subsequent and enduring reputation as a critic, that after the 17th century, a “dissociation of sensibility” had set in in English poetry, and this dissociation between the expression of thought and of feeling is one “from which we have never recovered.” This notion of Eliot’s lays the dissociation at the doorstep of two vastly different 17th-century poets, John Milton and John Dryden.

SYNOPSIS “Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well,” Eliot wrote of Dryden and Milton in 1921, “that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others.” No wonder, then, that in this essay of Eliot’s on Dryden, published the next year in the Times Literary Supplement and subsequently collected with “Andrew Marvell” and “The Metaphysical Poets” in the 1924 Hogarth Press volume Homage to John Dryden, he should begin by praising Dryden as “the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the 18th century,” a statement qualified somewhat by Eliot’s earlier guarded estimation of Milton and Dryden’s accomplishment in the essay on the metaphysical poets. In this later essay, Eliot takes the opportunity to clarify what it was that Dryden did “so magnificently well.” Though asserting that “Dryden was much more than a satirist,” Eliot fears that Dryden’s overall reputation has been overshadowed by those whom he so brilliantly satirized in poems such as “MacFlecknoe” and “Absalom and Achitophel” that his victims—fellow poets Shadwell and Settle and political manipulators Shaftesbury and Buckingham—are remembered more than he, thanks to his literary efforts at immortalizing them. And that is what distinguishes Dryden’s poetry: “[H]e makes his object great.” Even that works as a drawback for

Dryden, however, as Eliot sees it. Because Dryden is so adept at “the transformation of the ridiculous into poetry,” his poetry is reproached for being too prosaic, not sublime enough. To such a reproach, Eliot counters that it “rests upon a confusion between the emotions considered to be poetic . . . and the result of personal emotion in poetry.” Eliot clarifies the problem a few pages later: “The point is that the depreciation or neglect of Dryden is not due to the fact that his work is not poetry, but to a prejudice that the material, the feelings, out of which he built is not poetic.” This is an interesting critical formulation on Eliot’s part, not quite equal to his formulation of the objective correlative or the dissociation of sensibility, but an intriguing notion nonetheless. Eliot has drawn a distinction between the emotion that readers demand of poetry, called by Eliot the “poetic,” and the emotion that actually is expressed in a poem as a reflection of the thoughts and feelings that the poet brings to bear on the working material of a poem. Such a distinction is not, in Eliot’s view, a quibble but a critical issue of the first order. In the former case, wherein readers dictate what constitutes the “poetic,” the development of poetry runs the constant risk of becoming stultified by public tastes and preconceived standards of what poetry should “sound like.” In the latter case, what constitutes emotion in poetry is permitted to develop in keeping with poets’ needs to express themselves in their own terms, limited only by their material, rather than in keeping with potentially outworn tastes and conventions. As a result, Eliot can argue that “Dryden is distinguished principally by his poetic ability . . . his ability to make the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic, the trivial into the magnificent.” In summary, Eliot writes, “We prize him, as we do Mallarmé, for what he made of his material.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot concludes his essay by faulting Dryden somewhat on the same grounds that he rightly praises him. The 19th-century American novelist Herman Melville was both wise and wry to observe that he was writing his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, about a whale because one cannot write a great novel

“Johnson as Critic and Poet” about a flea. By the same token, although Dryden’s choice of material may not inhibit his poetic ability, Eliot does see it as a check on his capacity to achieve the sort of all-encompassing vision that is expected of a poet who not merely is great but is a poet of vision as well. Eliot will always invariably use that standard as the single standard by which the greatest of poets must be judged—a whole and consistent vision of life. For Eliot, Dryden lacked that. Ultimately, then, Dryden, in Eliot’s book, does not fail, but he does fall short on this crucial score. “Dryden lacked . . . a large and unique view of life; he lacked insight, he lacked profundity,” Eliot writes. Ironically, in Dryden’s case as Eliot has cast it, less is more. That he is, in Eliot’s view, a great poet despite these serious shortcomings proclaims how great a poet Eliot took him to be.

“John Ford” (1932) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

“John Marston” (1934) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

“Johnson as Critic and Poet” (1944) If this rather lengthy appreciation of the 18th-century English critic and poet Samuel Johnson (1709– 84) has a single theme, it is to verify Johnson’s importance in an age that can no longer conceive of his work in terms of its continuing significance. Best known for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1777), Johnson was an astute marketer as well, freeing himself from the need for patronage that had constrained English writers to that time.

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His career, meanwhile, spans a period of atypical aesthetic and ideological stability in culture and thought, an age that had no sooner begun than it not so much ended as disappeared entirely in the emotional turmoil of romanticism and the subsequent intellectual conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Although Eliot does not push the point in his assessment of Johnson’s place in English literary history, an assessment that was initially presented as the Ballard Matthews Lectures at University College, North Wales, in 1944 and then collected by Eliot in On Poetry and Poets in 1956, for Eliot, Johnson and his age represent a norm of civility and good judgment toward which Eliot, in his own social criticism, seems to be trying to direct his contemporaries.

SYNOPSIS Eliot begins his two-part lecture by accounting for the current “indifference” to Johnson’s literary criticism, attributing that indifference to two fundamental causes. The first is that Johnson as poet was not the initiator of any literary movement; therefore, his criticism does not itself provide a window into the thinking behind particular innovations and alterations in poetic production. As much if not more to the point is that many of the poets included in his Lives of the Poets are themselves no longer well known. An interesting notion there: The critic depends for his own survival as an arbiter of tastes on the durability of the works to which he devotes his critical attention. That established, nevertheless, Eliot makes it clear that to approach Johnson, one must approach him in accordance with the critical sensibilities that his own time enabled him to have. As Eliot aptly puts it, “we must not be narrow in accusing him of narrowness or prejudiced in accusing him of prejudice.” What those sensibilities were becomes Eliot’s task to reconstruct throughout the remainder of his presentation. To begin with, Eliot imagines that for an 18thcentury poet and critic like Johnson, “the values of language and literature were more closely allied than they seem to the writers and to the reading public of to-day.” For both the writing and reading public of Johnson’s time, coming as it did on nearly

274 “Johnson as Critic and Poet” two centuries of development beginning with the great epoch of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ushered in by the likes of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, there had been a virtually continuous progress and refinement that resulted in “a confidence in the rightness and permanence of the style which had been achieved,” and yet modern readers regard as a blemish this very confidence that Johnson places in his critical judgments. The problem for a critic of Johnson’s time, nonetheless—if a problem it indeed was—is that an age just having arrived at its own maturity could not possibly have perceived of any need for renewal or conceived of any alternative to its own standards and style. The age, in fact, assumed that enduring standards had long since been established by an arduous process of literary development to that time. As a result, for Johnson the past was already archaic, and the future was fixed in the present. The function of the critic and of criticism becomes, rather than one of assessing relative quality and resources, a modest corrective to tastes that are already in place and unlikely to be challenged or questioned. In summary, Eliot argues, “the notion of the language as perpetually in change is not one which had impressed itself upon the age of Johnson,” so the only lapse for which he can be censured as both poet and critic are lapses from his own standards of taste. While that may have been the impediment that the age imposed upon Johnson, it also conferred on him certain freedoms that are not enjoyed in contemporary times. Since Johnson could proceed at all times with a priori judgments regarding the proper language and topics of verse, he “did not confuse his judgment of what an author was saying, with his judgment about the way in which he said it.” By way of an almost painfully sharp contrast, Eliot paints a portrait of what it is like to be a critic in his own time: The standard of edification has been fractured into a variety of prejudices: with no common opinion as to what poetry ought to teach, the critic is not necessarily liberated from moral judgment, but will frequently declare a poem

good or bad, according to his sympathy with, or antipathy from, the author’s point of view.

For an especially egregious example, in 1942 the English satirist and social critic George Orwell had written an extremely negative response to Eliot’s “Dry Salvages,” the third part of his Four Quartets, arguing that it is bad poetry because it is based on a belief in God, which, in Orwell’s view, is an absurd belief.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Behind Eliot’s effort neither to justify nor to excuse Johnson and his age so much as to appreciate them for what they are, there is a nostalgia on Eliot’s part for the sort of coherent order that he sees his own times sorely lacking. “[T]he conditions under which literature is judged simply and naturally as literature and not another thing” require “a society which believes in itself, a society in which the differences of religious and political views are not extreme,” Eliot writes. Eliot wrote the essay in 1944, and Europe was in the midst of a second major war in a period of three decades. In the late 1930s, Eliot had made a case, in The Idea of a Christian Society, not for a theocracy but for a social order at least organized around a central system of thought, belief, and action. By the late 1940s, he was pleading, in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, for a return to a cultural cohesion on which postwar Europe could reorient itself toward its more enduring and foundational traditions. Little wonder, then, that in the midst of such conflict and doubt, Eliot found in the orderly assurances of Johnson’s time no cause to feel superior but rather cause for a sort of wistful envy. Eliot had begun his essay by imagining that Johnson’s literary influence “merely await[s] a generation which has not yet been born to receive it.” By this point in his life, Eliot may be hoping that his own generation would experience such a good fortune. In keeping with the so-called Age of Reason that Johnson’s era came to entail, the norm that Johnson’s criticism maintains is one by which ideas of standards and traditions and permanence are so much the given that they are not even thought of

“Journey of the Magi” in those terms. In summary, Johnson had the luxury of imagining that he was applying, in his criticism, criteria that would hold for all time. It is that confidence that gives Johnson’s pronouncements the air of a haughty inevitability that makes them seem distasteful to modern ears, which are more used to contention than deliberation in critical discourse. It is this self-assured critical posture of Johnson’s, nevertheless, that enables Eliot to defend Johnson in his criticism from the foremost charge against him in Eliot’s own time, and that is that he lacked an ear for the musicality of poetry, paying attention only to how well it expressed ideas. As Eliot will eventually establish, Johnson lacks not an ear but “an historical sense which was not yet due to appear.” Unable to imagine the sorts of innovations that would shortly be coming into vogue, Johnson, in his confidence, had a sharpened sensibility to “verbal beauty of another kind”—the beauty of established meaning against which productions in verse were to be measured. Eliot aims to show that his own contemporaries have been rendered incapable of appreciating the depths of Johnson’s critical assessments. “[E]asily seduced by the music of the exhilaratingly meaningless,” his contemporaries, Eliot argues, think little of verse that expresses “intelligence and wisdom set forth in pedestrian measures,” yet that is the choice toward which an age like Johnson’s was inclined. “[N]o work comparable to The Lives of the Poets could be written to-day,” Eliot is loath to admit, but that “should not lead us . . . to elevate Johnson to a pinnacle, and lament the decline of civility which makes such criticism impossible.” Fair enough, but Eliot goes on to make the equally, perhaps more valid point: “[N]or should it . . . tempt us to treat these essays merely as a curiosity of no bearing upon our actual problems.” Those “actual problems” are problems, after all, and they include a literary landscape where there are no commonly accepted criteria with which to weed out the worthwhile from the worthless (where, indeed, such terminology is itself anathema) and to ask of literature that it help organize thought and feeling, not that it promote particular kinds of thought and of feeling. By way of a sharp contrast, it is Eliot’s fear that the criticism of his

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time has moved too far into judging a work of literature for the particular kinds of thought and of feeling that it promotes. He was too astute a man and critic, however, not to be aware that much of his own criticism in the 1920s and especially the early 1930s fostered the authenticity of just such a critical temperament, his After Strange Gods: A Primer on Modern Heresy providing a particularly outstanding example.

“Journey of the Magi” (1927) This poem, the first of Eliot’s contributions to the Ariel series, is, along with “A Song for Simeon,” certainly far easier to place within the immediate context of the Christmas season that inspires it than his later contributions might seem to be. Eliot’s title would quickly make anyone with even the most general and secular awareness of the popular associations connected with Christmas mindful of the three wise men, or magi. Celebrated in song and image, they constitute an integral part of the lore of the Christmas story to this day. The three magi, history would have it, were pagan priests from the East, most likely adepts in astrology from the environs of Persia, who, on the basis of their observations of the stars, traveled westward, guided by the so-called Star of Bethlehem, to the “place where Jesus lay.” Tradition would further have it that they had become convinced by the astrological charts that they had cast that a great king was about to be born, one whose birth, life, and death would usher in a new age. In his poem, Eliot focuses on the trials of the magi’s journey to the stable in Bethlehem and on the hope that they placed in the miraculous birth that they had traveled so far to witness, as well as on the effect that witnessing such an event had subsequently had on them. Rather than telling their story, however, Eliot, in keeping with his use of the dramatic mask that goes back as far at least as to characterizations such as J. Alfred Prufrock, imagines himself to be one of the magi many years later, telling his story apparently to a scribe so that there will be preserved a written record of it. It is

276 “Journey of the Magi” a clever literary device, one that such prominent 19th-century poets as Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning had already used to great advantage. By pretending to be great literary or historical figures such as the Greek hero Ulysses or the Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto in dramatic monologues that sought to reveal the psychology of character as much as the ruminations of theme, they were able to explore a wider range of human experience than any lyric poet can typically undergo in a lifetime and yet still use that most powerful rhetorical device, the authority of the first-person singular voice, the “I” of firsthand experience and eyewitness accounts. Utilizing the opportunities for modulating voice and poetic mask through the medium of these dramatic monologues to which those two poets had thereby reintroduced literary audiences, Eliot’s contemporary poet and good friend, the fellow American expatriate EZRA POUND, had earlier done something similar to what Eliot does with the magi with another biblical character in “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere” (1909). In that poem, the imagined speaker, Simon the Zealot, is permitted to “come to life,” as it were, to give a first-person account of Christ’s Crucifixion. In every case, the aim of the poet using this form is to make the tired but true sound refreshingly new by giving it the characteristics of living speech caught as if in the act of being spoken. In Pound’s poem, for example, despite the artificial note struck by the pronounced rhythm and rhyme scheme required of the traditional ballad form, Simon speaks in something of a Cockney accent, making him sound like a contemporary working-class bloke rather than a high-toned Christian preacher. The dramatic monologue was hardly a new device in Eliot’s poetic repertoire, of course. He had already expanded that form’s potential in such works as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men,” to name several outstanding examples, not to mention The Waste Land, in which he set new and perhaps permanent standards for the manipulation of persona and voice as a mode of poetic discourse. But somewhat like Tennyson, whose dramatic monologues can strike readers as elaborate contrivances for all their poetic power, Eliot tended to make

the form more of a poetic than a purely dramatic exercise. Prufrock might sound as if he is speaking his thoughts and feelings, for example, but they are freely combined with purely literary elements, and the entire mix is then mangled into the fragmentary by his emotional ups and downs so that any resemblance to recorded speech is purposefully blurred if not obliterated.

SYNOPSIS In the Ariel poems in general and in “Journey of the Magi” in particular, Eliot exceeds the models of those two other masters of the form and accomplishes a poetry closer in its perfection as a dramatic monologue to the considerable achievements of Robert Browning. He does so in the powerful sense of audience that he creates. The reader is made witness—only an auditory one, it is true, but a real one nevertheless—to one of the magi as he, ruminating here, reflecting there, now regretting, now rejoicing, bears witness to the events of that momentous journey, all for the sake of the invisible and silent scribe. Note, for example, that although no specific passage of time since the journey has taken place is mentioned, it is not difficult to catch in the speaker’s tone the sense that quite some time has passed since that eventful winter’s night when they came upon the scene in Bethlehem. This is not a man still caught up in the excitement, confusions, and exhaustion of the moment, nor is he someone who has just recently returned home from an arduous trip who is sharing both his thoughts on what it was like and his relief that it is now over. Rather there is a weariness concealed in his account, a measure of helpless disappointment akin somewhat, perhaps, to the overall fatigue that invades the musings of the old man/speaker of “Gerontion.” And yet there is a tone of self-importance as well, a sort of “I was there, let me tell you” puffery, as if Eliot wishes to leave the impression, which is always aesthetically more effective than any direct treatment of setting or subject matter, that this is an I-knew-him-when sort of summation that the speaker is making, coming long after the baby he sought on that long ago journey had matured into not the king that they had imagined that they would

“Journey of the Magi” find but the sacrificial victim whose birth, life, and death had nevertheless redeemed and transformed human history in ways that no one, not even these fabled wise men, could ever have anticipated. The dramatic monologue is the perfect instrument for creating ironic tensions between what the fictional speaker thinks he is saying and what the poet wants his own readers to hear. Surely, Eliot’s magus is, these many years later, less impressed with the event and more full of himself than someone who had come that close to miracle has any right to be, and to a great measure, that is the effect that Eliot is aiming to achieve. Even now, child of the old dispensation that he self-confessedly is, Eliot’s speaker can only muse on the event with a vague appreciation for but even vaguer understanding of the changes that that birth have subsequently wrought upon him and his world. The magus begins his recollection by recalling the coldness of the journey, and to give that recollection its antique quality as if it comes not just from an earlier time but from another age, Eliot quotes virtually verbatim (and even uses quotation marks as if to underscore this point) the 300-year-old words of the 17th-century English cleric Sir Lancelot Andrewes, a contemporary and fellow word stylist of the metaphysical poet JOHN DONNE. In the passage from the Andrewes sermon that Eliot employs to set the scene and tone for his own speaker’s account, Andrewes comments on the Nativity and on how awful it was for Joseph and Mary to undertake the journey to Bethlehem. “A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in,” he commences. The only real alteration that Eliot makes in Andrewes’s original prose, indeed, is to change a third-person plural verb, they, to the first person plural, we, in keeping with the fiction that his own poem is a first-person telling of the episode. For those who might recognize Eliot’s original source, it is as if the presence of the holy family has infiltrated the text to begin with, lurking in the corners of the reader’s own experience of the poem as it continues. This is, after all, a poem focusing on the paradoxical contrasts that the birth of Christ and his life’s mission will force on

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the religious imagination that will emerge from Christianity. The light of the world comes at the darkest time of the year. The king of the world is born amid conditions associated with the most abject poverty. The fire of God’s love comes at a time of bitter cold. Eliot allows the speaker’s remembrances to reflect these sharp contrasts, as he thinks of the summery life that he had left behind to make the journey, with its “summer palaces on slopes” and “silken girls bringing sherbet,” whereas all about them now, instead, is a barren winter landscape, inhabited by uncouth ruffians, an inhospitable and alien environment that seems to mock them with the nagging feeling that the perilous journey that they have undertaken is little more than “all folly.” Having painted such a bleak scene of doubt and desperation, the speaker thus manages to surprise the reader all the more with the sudden burst of vitality with which the second stanza opens. As if it is resplendent of the hope for new life that is itself embodied in Christ, the speaker reports that they reached “at dawn . . . a temperate valley, / . . . smelling of vegetation.” This scene provides what Eliot would call an objective correlative for the spark of a rebirth, allowing Eliot to share with his contemporary readers a glimpse of the potential contained in this particular birth that his speaker could not even begin to imagine, the Earth’s resurrection into grace that Christ’s own birth foreshadows for the human spirit. However, as if to emphasize that the journey from this miraculous moment to the final redemption of humankind is a far longer and more arduous journey than any that the magi may ever have undertaken, as well as one more fraught with the defects of human folly than theirs, the dark of winter encroaches again in a flood of foreshadowing images and blots out that refreshing scene with which the second stanza had opened in its momentary flash of new life and, with it, hope. If the sought-for birth truly were daybreak for a new epoch of humanity, then upon that stillfragile hope, at this moment nothing more than a newborn infant, the darkness of this world drops again, as W. B. YEATS would put it, in the image of “three trees on the low sky.” They cast the long

278 “Journey of the Magi” shadow of Christ’s death on a cross, a thief crucified to each side, backward over the pastoral valley of his birth, thus hardly permitting the speaker, or the reader, so much as a moment’s respite from the fact that heaven has not yet arrived on Earth, only its king. While it is clear that the speaker could not recognize the special significance of this and other details that follow the description of the pleasant valley setting, these images of the coming catastrophe of Christ’s Crucifixion muddy the scene and darken even the relatively ignorant speaker’s mood and tone. Eliot is also still employing the dramatic irony that he had used earlier; the poem is addressed to a contemporary Christian audience, after all, one that would definitely get the message that the first Christmas will end in the Passion of the Christ. In the poem, at least, the darkness does not lift. Employing techniques similar to contemporary films, in which a juxtaposed image comments on a scene but is not otherwise related to it in content, Eliot now allows a horse to careen across the landscape, suggesting a natural universe out of control and hovering on the edge of chaos, and then there is a tavern and men playing dice for silver, bringing to mind the boisterous, drunken Roman soldiers who would later gamble for Christ’s garments at the foot of the cross, and Judas, too, who betrayed him for 30 pieces of silver. The speaker continues his memoir, totally unaware of the tragedy that he is seeing foretold, and concludes, pedantically, that they finally arrived at their destination, “[f]inding the place . . . (you may say) satisfactory.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The understatement at first astounds and then renders itself perfectly understandable. For all of their acquaintance with mystery, its human dimensions, Eliot offers the suggestion that the magi could not possibly have understood the profundities of the unfolding mystery that they were there to witness in its initial manifestation. But then Eliot has his speaker surprise the reader by expressing at least the inkling of some awareness that, even when counted among miraculous things, this was no ordinary birth and that something far more than merely extraordinary had entered the world and,

through it, human history. The speaker seems to know, or at the very least intuit, that his age and his kind, and all the wisdom of his world, is coming to an end and that this birth is the signal of their death. “[W]ere we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” he wonders, entertaining the paradox of the contradictions that such a blessing portends. Such a birth brings with it renewal, but renewal requires the removal of all those things that are now to be replaced. His is “the old dispensation,” a world that for the speaker still exists but that for Eliot and his readers is by now something even less than a relic—all that which was born too soon and died too early. The speaker confesses that his long-ago experience has forever unsettled his life; he is “no longer at ease here” in his familiar surroundings, but to what purpose he neither puzzles out nor supposes. Like Eliot’s hollow men, he appears to have seen the light but is unable either to recognize its source or to follow it, so he shall die in the wilderness that, for Eliot, is a world without a coherent belief in a singular creation that serves a singular purpose. For all his wisdom, the speaker’s tragedy is to have come that close to mystery and majesty without having grasped its significance for him and him alone, a state of affairs whose continuing implications could not have been lost on a contemporary reader, Eliot among them. Christ said to Nicodemus that to be saved he must be reborn, and Eliot closes the poem by seeming to play on this cryptic injunction. “I should be glad of another death,” the speaker says in an ironic twist on the notion of a spiritual rebirth, as if for him sharing the common lot of the grave would have been a better fate than to have been fated to glimpse those many years before in that desert birth the unsettling truth that his age was coming to an end along with all else that he and his hold dear—as if, for him, to gain some inkling that there is something better and greater can be worse than to know nothing at all. Eliot’s speaker seems to share the plea of the speaker in MATTHEW ARNOLD’s “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” (1854), who begs the harbingers of a new age that he, the speaker, knows he will not live to see to “leave our desert to its peace.”

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley The allusion to Othello’s closing speech in Shakespeare’s great tragedy that comes when Eliot’s speaker commands the scribe to “set down / This” has been often noted, but what Eliot has to say of that moment in the play Othello may cast some further light on what the reader ought to make of the speaker of the Eliot poem. When, just before stabbing himself to death, Othello defends himself by recalling the services that he has done Venice and makes a similar command, “Set you down this,” to the Venetians who stand about him, thunderstruck at the terrible deeds of death and violence that they have just witnessed, Eliot, in his essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” which was also published in 1927, writes that Othello “in making this speech is cheering himself up . . . [by] dramatizing himself rather than his environment.” In the same manner, Eliot’s magus sees this unfolding drama, whose initial moment he was privileged to witness, only in terms of its effects on him—the sort of self-centeredness that the Christian ethic encourages humanity to abhor. As Eliot would summarize this defect later in his poem “The Dry Salvages,” one might say of the speaker of “Journey of the Magi” that he “had the experience but missed the meaning.”

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1964) In 1962, encouraged somewhat by an increasing critical interest in the influence on Eliot of Bradleyan thought, with its complementary emphases on the relativity of all human knowing and on experience as an absolute condition, Eliot undertook the preparation of his long-completed Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” for publication. Faber & Faber, the London publishing house with which Eliot had been associated since 1925, published the dissertation in 1964 under the somewhat shortened title Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.

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BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS Eliot had begun his graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard at the beginning of the autumn semester in 1911, following his return from a year spent abroad, largely in Paris, where he had attended lectures given by the French philosopher Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. Bergson’s idea that human experience of reality is, at the conscious level, largely a perceptual event—that is, an appearance rather than any direct and immediate engagement with the unfolding interaction of objects in time and in space—no doubt had a certain appeal to the budding idealist that Eliot was at the time. It was not until June 1913, however, that he would purchase his own copy of a book by the English idealist philosopher F. H. BRADLEY. Titled Appearance and Reality, this compendium of Bradley’s thought on the nature of knowledge and the degrees by which experience might itself be known and defined would not only become, as Bradley’s central work, the center of Eliot’s doctoral dissertation on Bradleyan thought but one of the most influential works on Eliot’s own thought and, very likely, further development as a poet. In any event, if Eliot bought his copy of Bradley in June 1913, by September 1913, Eliot, now a budding Bradleyan idealist, was enrolled at Harvard in a graduate course offered by JOSIAH ROYCE, another one of the leading idealist thinkers of his time. The course was an exploration of the problems posed by processes of description and interpretation. Put simply, the course was intended to demonstrate that, for an individual, experience can never be known firsthand, since it can be consciously engaged only after its having been filtered through sensory and then thought processes. These “problems” with the description and interpretation of objective experience not only are in keeping with the focus of Bradley’s work, as shall be seen shortly, but are as well the same sorts of problems that confront the poet as well as the student of literature. There is no doubt that Eliot would have been well aware of that fact. For the course in question, Eliot wrote a paper on the limits of scientific observation. His conclusion was that since the observer becomes a part of the process of observing, a purely scientific objectivity is unobtainable. Eliot further elected to devote

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his dissertation to the question of the relationship between knowledge and the objects of experience in Bradley’s philosophy. Although Eliot developed his own ideas on the topic under Royce’s mentorship, he would complete the dissertation while on a traveling fellowship from Harvard to study Aristotle under the tutorship of Harold Joachim, a disciple of Bradley’s, at Merton College, Oxford, beginning in the fall of 1914. (Bradley was himself a member of the college at the time, although Eliot never met him.) When Eliot’s year at Oxford ended the following autumn, he had not yet completed the dissertation, but, as he would explain many years later, “I did not . . . abandon immediately the intention of fulfilling the conditions for the doctor’s degree.” Although to support himself he had taken a position as a junior master teaching Latin at Highgate Junior School, he explained: “Harvard had made it possible for me to go to Oxford for a year; and this return at least I owed to Harvard,” by which he meant finishing his doctoral dissertation. Eliot submitted the completed dissertation to Harvard in April 1916. He had made plans to deliver the dissertation personally and then remain in America long enough to take his viva, or oral defense, the final step in a doctoral program. He was somewhat reluctant, however, to give up for very long the literary life that he was quickly establishing in London, largely as a result of his acquaintanceship with BERTRAND RUSSELL and Leonard and VIRGINIA WOOLF, not to mention EZRA POUND. He had married as well. As the case may be, war conditions forced Eliot’s hand. The ship on which he had booked passage for his second trip back home in little more than six months did not sail as scheduled, and Eliot had to dispatch the dissertation to Harvard by post. Although Eliot was duly informed in June that the philosophy department had accepted his dissertation without hesitation, Eliot would never take the viva and so never did complete his Harvard doctorate, although that institution would eventually award one of its most famous living alumni an honorary doctorate in 1947.

SYNOPSIS In his preface to the 1964 Faber edition of his work, Eliot confesses that “[f]orty-six years after my aca-

demic philosophizing came to end, I find myself unable to think in the terminology of this essay. Indeed, I do not pretend to understand it.” Nonetheless, the affinities between Bradleyan thought, or at least Eliot’s take on it, and certain hallmarks of Eliot’s poetry are too remarkable to be casually dismissed. While it is indisputably impossible within the scope and purpose of this present critical overview ever to do justice to the subtle complexities of Eliot’s treatise on a topic as erudite as knowledge and the objects of experience in Bradley’s philosophy, it is nevertheless possible to give readers some glimpse into the matters with which Eliot the doctoral candidate was dealing, as those matters touch on his poetry. A passage that comes readily to hand may serve a further purpose by casting some light on how Bradley’s philosophy, or at least Eliot’s rendering of it, goes hand in hand with Eliot’s theory of poetry as well, at least inasmuch as that theory is realized in his critical and poetic practices. The passage referred to occurs several pages into his first chapter, entitled “On Our Knowledge of Immediate Experience.” In this passage, which runs for several pages, Eliot discourses on feelings as objects of experience, an interesting enough concept, particularly since few individuals are accustomed to thinking of feelings as objects at all. First, however, a primer on Bradley’s concept of immediate experience, which was the most critical component of his idealist philosophy. For example, according to Eliot, Bradley used the terms experience and feeling interchangeably. Most of us are conditioned to think of experience as a multifaceted event, largely physical or sensational in nature, of which feeling—aside from any tactile referent—is only a single and not very coherent component. If, however, feeling is taken to mean the whole construct of an experience in an instant of time that is real but otherwise immeasurable and unknowable, then there is there some sense of what immediate experience might mean. In its actual or ideal state, an experience is so complete and total as to be entirely unknowable to the person—a “finite center” in Bradley’s parlance—who is undergoing the experience, yet, of course, it remains entirely effective on that person

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley as an experience. As Eliot expresses it, “we cannot know experience directly as an object,” but “we can yet arrive at it by inference, and even conclude that it is the starting point of our knowing, since it is only in immediate experience that knowledge and its object are one.” Once, however, one attempts to divorce the knowledge of an experience from the experience in order to know it, that cohesion is lost and the experience, as well as one’s knowing it, is fragmented into what is ordinary experience. There are the three components of Eliot’s approach to Bradley—experience, knowledge, and object. In Bradley, they are indistinguishably combined in that state or zone of existence that he calls immediate experience and manifested, for the person or finite center, as feeling. To paraphrase how Eliot will express it later in his poetry, we can know only that we have been there, but not when or where, and certainly never why. It is intriguing, nevertheless, that, by this definition of experience as unknowable but experienced, poetry, particularly those artfully crafted verbal mélanges of Eliot’s sort, becomes the less that is more. There is in such poetry a verbal approximation of immediate experience, but only for the reader who can see, through the surface confusions of almost any Eliot poem, a genuine attempt on his part to use language, tone, and image to mimic the essentially impermeable quality of experience without sacrificing the bits and pieces of sensations and associations by which it can be consciously known and acknowledged, although never completely understood. It is apparent, then, that there are definite enough affinities between Bradley’s philosophy and Eliot’s poetry to establish a clear relationship or range of influences between the one and the other. How those influences actually worked themselves out, however, must remain, always, in the realm of chicken-and-egg arguments. Eliot may have found expressed in the logical terms of Bradley’s philosophical discourse certain predispositions toward his own unarticulated perceptions of experience that he was already expressing in poetry rather than philosophy. A reader, however, coming upon these essentials of Bradley’s philosophy, once made familiar with Eliot’s early and intense interest in

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Bradley’s thought, might easily imagine that Bradley’s ideas shaped Eliot’s poetry all along. Again, that is impossible to say, for the very reason that, if Bradley’s thoughts are capable of touching even remotely on the real nature of experience, then it is impossible not to conclude from them that feeling cannot be dissociated so neatly from experience, even of an intellectual kind, as to enable one to track the consequences of the one upon the other in any way that can be assigned to happiness, to paraphrase another bit of Eliot poetry. All that said, however, it is equally interesting nevertheless to find in Eliot’s dissertation on Bradley’s thought words and concepts that can be applied to Eliot’s practice of poetry. For Eliot, as for Bradley, feelings are the mediator between immediate experience and one’s ordinary experience of objects in action. “We find our feelings . . . on the one side to be of the same nature as immediate experience, and on the other to present no radical difference from other objects.” Their capacity to be of one and of the other extreme of experience enables Eliot to find in feelings the ideal tool for both expressing and giving significance to experience. “There is no reason, so long as the one feeling lasts and pervades consciousness, why I should cut off part of the total content and call it the object, reserving the rest to myself under the name of feeling.” At the moment of the unattended experience, that is to say, there is no separation between the object and the feeling that it inspires or, vice versa, between the feeling and the objects that it draws to its attention. Much more interesting, however, is what Eliot, by then already the poet of such painful slices of social drama as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” says in the next sentence: “It is only in social behaviour, in the conflict and readjustment of finite centres, that feelings and things are torn apart.” Given a universe, that is to say, in which there were only a single perceiving subject and a single object to be perceived, there would still be a disconnect between the perception and the actual experience of perceiving. But in a social universe of myriad finite subjects and an infinity of objects, including other finite subjects, there can be no way for a single experience to

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be isolated from the rest, let alone for immediate experience to be recognized as anything more than an intellectual construct. And for Eliot, because for Bradley, it is decidedly not that. Rather, it is experience itself. Eliot concludes that there is a “continuous transition by which feeling becomes object and object becomes feeling.” The context of his remarks does not require it, but Eliot could have gone on at this juncture to say that it is that sort of sliding scale, wherein a perception moves off from its immediacy further and further into the category of words by which feelings and objects are made fixed and permanently identified, that makes for both the problems and the strengths of poetic discourse, especially as it is manipulated by him. Put simply, naming a thing diminishes it, and this is as true of feelings as of objects. Poetic discourse, however, by not being as constrained by rules of syntax and associational logic, can enlarge the experience of a feeling or object, thereby allowing words to approximate Bradleyan immediate experience.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY To appreciate the full extent of Bradley’s influence on Eliot, the reader must remember that, by June 1913, many of Eliot’s early masterworks, on which a great deal of his critical reputation would depend until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, had already been written, even if not yet published. These would include “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”—hardly an inconsiderable achievement. It would hardly be accurate, then, to assign to the influence of Bradley qualities that are of the very essence of Eliot’s poetic technique, particularly that uniquely opaque style and vision of his that, for many, would become virtually synonymous with literary modernism. Bradleyan thought, nevertheless, focused on experience as perceivable but otherwise unknowable, because the very effort to describe or to know it is itself a part of the experience that one is attempting to know or describe. It is in the subtle elegance of that view of experience as a describable event that Bradley, even if he did not have an initial influence in shaping Eliot’s mind, found in

the young poet and philosopher’s grasp of reality hospitable ground in which such a skeptical idealism might take virtually instantaneous root and abundantly flourish. In Bradley, as in Eliot’s poetry, the usual distinctions between subject and object, appearance and reality, idea and meaning, are erased, not because they do not exist, but because they are artificial distinctions, categories, that facilitate thinking about the nature of reality but do not actually represent it. The distinction, too, between perception and apprehension is erased, since to perceive is to apprehend. The difficulty comes in trying to make those apprehended perceptions consciously knowable, a feat that generally can be accomplished only by translating them into words, which are cognate to an experience but never the experience itself. It is this effort at using words to make conscious the unconscious that accounts for the common illusion that verbal formulation is in the end what constitutes thought, even constitutes understanding and meaning, rather than the recognition that such formulations can only be the result of the diminishment of actual experience and are never its enlargement. This can be easily demonstrated. Describe anything, even a simple object. It will not take long to realize that no amount of detail can possibly do justice to the thing that one is attempting to describe. Now try applying that same principle to describing an event—falling in love, for example—that is taking place over an extended period of time and involves a wider and wider variety of objects, places, and people. Here can be found a likely source for Eliot’s affinity with Bradleyan thought. Because the suggestive is not as self-limiting as the explicit, the suggestive word is more revealing than the clinically precise word, and yet suggestion requires a new measure and new levels of precision. Here also the modernist idea of the primacy of the image comes to mind. The image is more than a clever combining of words; it is a way of seeing something’s essential quality so exactly that a few choice words may suffice to present—“re-present”—that something. Whether or not the words do equal the object or the experience, however, must be left

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley to sheer hopefulness and conjecture on both the poet’s and the reader’s part. But as much is equally true of any other verbalization of experience. For the Bradleyan, however, that kind of ambiguity is not a cause for frustration, for the excitement of the intellectual chase is to contrive ways by which experience, within these constraints, can nevertheless be further known and further defined. Feeling gains primacy over thought as a result, since feeling is more immediate than thought. Yet thought can serve its purpose as well, shaping feelings into the contours of language where they can be expressed and explored, even if only inadequately. This is, of course, Prufrock’s world, where it is impossible to say just what one means. In Bradleyan thinking, then, just as the usual distinctions between subject and object blur, so do the distinctions between the idea and its meaning. The idea is the meaning, for which its various expressions are always something less than the idea, or its meaning, itself. As much established regarding Eliot’s views of feelings and the objects of feeling as they are intellectually dealt with in his dissertation, the further one explores Eliot’s treatment of Bradley, the more insights it may provide into the relationship among Eliot’s intellectual interests, his critical theory, and his poetry writing. If, on the basis of his exposure to Bradleyan thought, for example, Eliot equates feelings not only with the very nature of experience but with those objects that constitute it, then Eliot’s particular formulation of the “objective correlative,” that famous critical turn of phrase of his first introduced in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” may take on an entirely different cast of thought as well. Generally, an objective correlative can be regarded as the outward manifestation of inward things. The yellow fog of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” broadcasts, for the reader, the murkiness of Prufrock’s social environment and social standing—his feeling that, as an insider, he is an outsider. The madman’s shaking a dead geranium in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” gives the reader another vivid image—and objective correlative—for the seething turmoil of disconnects that afflict the madman’s mind and his sense of proportion, let alone reality. Readers familiar with Eliot’s

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dissertation would also know that he had been schooled to think of feelings with objects, thereby adding a provocative twist to these occasions. Rather than imagining that the objective correlative attaches real events and real objects to things that are otherwise not real except for the perceiver, that is, feelings, Eliot would regard feelings as more real than the objects and events used to broadcast them, particularly inasmuch as, in keeping with his way of thinking through Bradley, they are themselves objects. Any apparent complexities and confusions here can be dispelled by realizing that such terms as real and ideal have different meanings from their ordinary usages for a man like Eliot, who is thinking in terms of the interface of the mind with experience, which is itself being defined in a specialized sense as something on which the mind can reflect but not immediately perceive. Put more simply, a choice of word or tone of voice or attitude of language can be as much an objective correlative from the point of view of such a mind and a poet as an object or event. This would certainly explain how the ostensible opacity of an Eliot poem or even a line of his verse can quickly dissipate once that poem or line is construed as the outer reflection of an inner condition, itself otherwise impossible to represent or see. Objects, for Eliot, need not have mass and bulk; in fact, the more significant they are, the less likely it is that they will. When he seeks in his study of Bradley to distinguish between the words real and ideal, there is much more at stake than philosophic hair-splitting. To put it succinctly, whereas the typical reader would see the poet using “real” or concrete things to represent things that most do not think of existing at all, that is, feelings, because they are not substantial, it is their very lack of substantiality that would make them all the more real for this philosopher/poet. The difficulty, indeed, comes for the poet in trying to express the immediate experience of feeling in the most precise terms possible, while being aware that mere objects or events, as objects and events, are far less substantial things from the point of view of their significance to the perceiving mind. The yellow fog, for example, is capable of giving voice to only a single aspect of Prufrock’s complex

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inner feelings, after all; in a like manner, the dead geranium, ultimately, says very little by saying too much. In his dissertation, then, Eliot can say that “an idea is not a symbol,” although it might serve present purposes better to say that “an idea is not its symbol.” So, then, he continues, “an idea as contrasted with reality, is something which cannot be grasped—for it can only be described in terms of that reality—in which case you have the reality and not the idea.” In Four Quartets, Eliot would speak of having the experience but missing the meaning; here, nearly a quarter century earlier, is a forecast of what this means. Simply, if a thing cannot be described in terms of itself, the same is infinitely more true of what we call an idea. Yet the idea is the very kernel of meaning around which and from which the perceived reality of things emerges. For all its apparently intensified objectivity, poetry, in these terms, becomes the expression of a second-best or lesser reality, since it cannot possibly express the primary reality that the idea itself embodies. Yet, too, of all human discourse, when done well, it is poetic discourse that comes closest to achieving just that end, where reality and the ideas that inform it meet in feelings. To grasp this concept totally, however, a reader would have to be extremely aware that idea and opinion are not interchangeable terms, that, rather, the idea is in fact reality. Whereas in the common parlance an idea is everything contrary to the real or, as it is also characterized, to the concrete, in the parlance of Bradleyan philosophy, an idea is of the very essence of reality (which is why his is called an idealist philosophy). As it were, the idea is the meaning at the core of experience, but one that remains incapable otherwise of expression for the very reason that its meaning is manifested only in terms of itself or, in Bradleyan terms, of immediate experience. Thus, Eliot will ultimately go as far as to take issue with his mentor Bradley on the very matter of the relationship between an idea and its meaning. His taking issue with Bradley is not at all unusual. Eliot’s is a doctoral dissertation, after all; he is trying to demonstrate not simply that he understands Bradley but that he has evaluated the logical validity of Bradley’s position.

It is interesting, therefore, that Eliot finds himself in disagreement with Bradley on this very point— Bradley’s contention that the idea is a symbol. For if the idea is merely a marker for the essential reality, or immediate experience, then it merely represents it, rather than being an actual manifestation of it. This disagreement, once the philosophical niceties are accounted for, can perhaps be laid to rest as a distinction between Eliot the philosophy student and Eliot the practicing poet. “We have found,” Eliot observes in an effort to summarize the premise on which the rest of his dissertation will depend, “that reality is in a sense dependent upon thought, upon a relative point of view, for its existence.” Idea, in other words, is everything, but to the perceiving mind, it emerges from reality, rather than being the source of that reality. Ideas enter the picture, therefore, not as symbols of reality but as its very substance. “For ultimately the world is completely real or completely ideal, and ideality and reality turn out to be the same . . . itself at another stage of development.” Eliot’s insistence on the primacy of the idea, itself contingent on feeling, out of which what we call the real emerges is, in a literal manner of speaking, the very nature of poetry, particularly a poetry of the kind that Eliot composes. In it the images drawn from the so-called reality associated with experience are subjugated to the necessity of the prevailing idea that is seeking expression, often at the expense of what may typically seem to be good sense or at the very least traditional definitions of meaning. It is vital to think of idea in a Bradleyan sense, however, not as a substitute terms for theme or concept. If the Bradleyan idea is meaning, then all else must be made coordinate to it, even the normal rules of syntax and logic. This practice of poetry writing virtually turns the poem inside out so that what the poet is saying at any one time is a verbal sketch of what is meant, rather than its expression. Eliot’s famous opacities, his virtually intentional obscurities, the surprising turns and contradictory tones, the fragmentary verses and barely concealed allusions—all of these devices and techniques of his point in one direction, and that is back into these musings of his mind on the exact constituents not

“Lancelot Andrewes” of reality but of experience itself. For Eliot, poetry is the ultimate expression of the knowledge of experience, which is itself an elusive reality contained in ideas that are the same as feelings. Whether his attraction to and studies in Bradley instigated these notions on the nature of ideas or merely provided Eliot with a vehicle with which to give them a voice of their own is impossible to determine. That his poetry would continue to evince these foundations in Bradleyan idealism is equally impossible to deny, as any review of his published Harvard dissertation will readily attest.

“Lancelot Andrewes” (1926) Although the present essay is not one filled with the sort of “quotable quotes” for which Eliot was still renowned at this point in his literary career, this short piece, “Lancelot Andrewes,” an appreciation of the 17th-century Anglo-Catholic divine, nevertheless occupies a significant place in the poet-critic’s canon because of its subject’s many associations with Eliot’s other intellectual interests at the time. For one thing, Andrewes, in his sermons, was to the development of modern English prose what his fellow divine, the poet JOHN DONNE, was to English poetry. In keeping with the same metaphysical tradition of a strong, natural language and powerfully extravagant metaphors that characterized Donne’s poetry, Andrewes’s sermons wasted little in getting emphatically to the point; as a stylist alone, Andrewes earns the same sort of laurels that Eliot accorded Donne in “The Metaphysical Poets.”

SYNOPSIS Eliot begins the essay at hand by singling Andrewes out as “the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church.” This, of course, is meant in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic Church, to which the English faithful had adhered until the reign of Henry VIII a century or more before Andrewes’s time. If Eliot’s qualification—“English Catholic”— makes his praise of Andrewes’s skills as a preacher seem somewhat guarded, as if Eliot would rather err on the side of historical cautiousness, it also

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delineates an England, and English language, that is starting to mark a unique place as a European culture, freeing itself of the spiritual influences of papist Rome and the linguistic and cultural influences of Norman France. Ultimately, however, it is the times that make the man, and Eliot sees Andrewes as a beneficiary of the intellectually and spiritually powerful ferment of his times. “Intellect and sensibility were in harmony; and hence arise the particular characteristics of [Andrewes’] style.” In comparison with our own time, which has “a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing,” a prose stylist of Andrewes’s intellect and sensibility, feeding off the vitality of the moral and spiritual debates of his time, take “a word and derive the world from it” (an echo there, perhaps, of the line regarding the Christ Child that Eliot, in “Gerontion” in 1919, had borrowed from Andrewes: “the word within the world, unable to speak a word”). It is in comparison not with the modern instant that is the early 20th century, however, but with John Donne, Andrewes’s contemporary and near rival as an outrageously inventive prose stylist, that Eliot truly makes Andrewes shine and takes readers into the heart of his thesis. “Of the two men,” whose sermons are often so similar in their vigor of tone and style and imaginative illustrativeness as to be nearly indistinguishable, “Andrewes is the more mediaeval,” Eliot intones, and this is because Andrewes “is the more pure, and . . . his bond was with the Church, with tradition.” The cornerstones of Andrewes’s sense and sensibility were theology, the liturgy, and prayer, while Donne, influenced, Eliot suspects, by his own earlier Jesuit training, is “the more modern . . . [and] much less the mystic . . . much less traditional.” Rather, Donne is “primarily interested in man.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot’s equating, through Andrewes, the traditional with the church and the liturgy, while equating the modern, through Donne, a poet whose sensibility Eliot otherwise greatly admires, with the human seems to be a rather unfortunate bifurcation—unless one realizes how, in more contemporary terms even than his own, Eliot is not inveighing

286 “Lancelot Andrewes” against Donne as a spokesman for a common humanity but as a purveyor of what subsequently came to be known as secular humanism. To accept this line of reasoning, however, the reader must be prepared to acknowledge Eliot’s sense of an inextricable interrelatedness between thought and feeling in cultures. This interrelatedness the poets both mirror and help create, in the process having much more of an effect on our capacity to think and to feel than is ever recognized in living memory. In his far more celebrated essay from 1921, “The Metaphysical Poes,” in which Eliot coined the phrase dissociation of sensibility, he had originally singled out the English metaphysical poets, among whom Donne was the foremost practitioner, as a generation of poets capable of devouring experience in a language that balanced the most forceful thoughts with the most highly charged passions. Thereupon followed, however, in Eliot’s view, that dissociation of sensibilities from which English poetry had never recovered, so that the harmonious expression of thought and feeling in a single work has never subsequently been achieved with such remarkable clarity. Andrewes, though a prose stylist, can be placed in that school of Donne. In fact, Eliot offers Andrewes even more accolades than Donne in the essay at hand, and that is due to another series of associations that “Lancelot Andrewes” has for Eliot’s continuing development as a social critic. Beginning with an essay such as “The Function of Criticism” in 1923, Eliot’s literary criticism, which had always evinced a measure of cultural conservatism, began to take on more and more decidedly sociopolitical overtones that had, meanwhile, a more and more orthodox religious bent to them. In short, Eliot began to espouse what he would proclaim to be his self-styled characteristics as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,” formulations that he would officially declare in his preface to a 1928 volume of essays to which “Lancelot Andrewes” provides the title piece. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order would be published in 1928 by Faber & Gwyer, the London publishing house with whom Eliot had been employed since 1925, and in it he

more or less declared his independence from any notion that he wished to represent the interests of free thinking and radicalism that were otherwise typical of mainstream modernism. This “sudden shift” did not really come as a surprise to most. The poet of The Waste Land, that modernist text that in 1922 had come virtually to embody the chaotic turmoil and fear typifying the present, had by 1927 become a convert to Anglicanism and a British subject. In the same preface, he announced three future works, including one to be titled The Principles of Modern Heresy. One of the principal architects of modernism as a literary phenomenon was essentially declaring war on modernism as a way of thinking and behaving, and by 1934 he would follow through on his promise with After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, a veritable conservative manifesto in which he disowns most of his fellow modernist poets and their beliefs. “Lancelot Andrewes,” coming as it does from a more quiescent, earlier moment in the shaping of these developing retrenchments for Eliot in literary, social, and historical matters, provides insights that, outside this broader context, might otherwise be missed entirely. That is not to say that, for the most part, “Lancelot Andrewes” is not, as was stressed at the outset, primarily an appreciation of the 17th-century divine and prose stylist of the essay’s title. That Eliot does not make much of a distinction between the one and the other suggests how inextricably language and belief (attitudes of belief, that is to say, rather than their content) are bound together in this poet’s critical imagination. In “Lancelot Andrewes,” as a consequence, the attentive reader will hear Eliot first coherently drawing the lines of battle along which he will wage his own lifelong campaign in what has come to be known as the culture wars. Eliot makes it clear that he is staking his claim with and on those who uphold the most rigid orthodoxy on all fronts. And yet, in a suitably contradictory fashion, Eliot’s first hero in this war, Andrewes, is a man whose motivating impulse, as an “English Catholic”—a Protestant—is to stand, with his sovereign, in open defiance of the prevailing orthodoxy of his time, Roman Catholicism.

“Literature of Politics, The”

Landscapes (1934) See MINOR POEMS.

“Literature of Politics, The” (1955) First presented on April 19, 1955, as a lecture at a literary luncheon organized by the London Conservative Union, “The Literature of Politics” was later collected in Eliot’s last collection of prose, To Criticize the Critic, which was published posthumously by Faber & Faber in 1965.

SYNOPSIS Eliot’s title suggests that he will devote the weight of his expertise to a topic that had fairly monopolized public interest as a matter of serious concern for virtually all of the 20th century and that continues to show no signs of abating in the 21st. While it may seem that a poet who had written so widely and for so long on the topics of poetry and belief and of poetry and philosophy, not to mention of society and culture in general, would have an abiding interest in political issues as well, as much is simply not the case. This is not to say that Eliot would not have had the same interest in politics as any reasonably well-informed and responsible citizen of one of the Western democracies. However, political writing, either his own or by others, was not his forte, nor did he ever make any attempt to claim that it was, including in this lecture on that very topic. Indeed, it seems that Eliot was the guest lecturer largely because of the literary associations that his name could conjure, above all his considerable celebrity, as well as for his decades-old credentials as a major conservative thinker. At the very least, in his opening remarks, Eliot does nothing to dispel that distinct impression, thereby confirming it. “I am merely a man of letters,” he confesses, one who has “never taken any part in politics other than that of a voter . . . and that of a reader.” Furthermore, in an apparent deference to his audience’s interest, he

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very quickly, and none too subtly, changes his topic from the literature of politics in general to the “literature of Conservatism,” an entirely different but hardly unrelated topic. As much established, he appeals to the bibliography to be found in Lord Hugh Cecil’s 1912 volume Conservatism to identify England’s most prominent conservative writers, among whom Cecil places the 17th-century philosopher Henry St. John Bolingbroke, the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, the romantic-era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the 19th-century politician and erstwhile novelist Benjamin Disraeli. Only Coleridge, Eliot notes, is a writer of his own ilk, that is, a poet, whereas the other three developed their political philosophies from varying degrees of practical experience. Using Lord Cecil’s list as a benchmark, then, Eliot proposes that it is unlikely that common principles can be found that might link the four as exemplars of skills that may be necessary to produce a “literature of politics.” Rather, Eliot suggests that if the four offer a range of degrees of skill and experience between the literary and the political intellect, it would itself suggest that such a literature can emerge as much from men of action as from men of thought and reflection, and that insight enables Eliot to formulate his central thesis: If by virtue of its literary heroes, English conservatism can be said to have set a single, common standard for itself through the centuries, then that standard requires that it foster a spirit of practical flexibility that is itself imbued with a consistent body of principles. In this regard, Eliot reiterates a point that he had stressed more forcefully and at greater length in his 1948 prose treatise, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, and that is to plead for a harmonious interaction in affairs of state between the so-called intelligentsia, or the clerisy—men of the mind, as Coleridge called them—and those men of action who are more commonly thought to be at home in the political arena. Eliot envisions “dangers for society” when those opposing but complementary functions become too divided and compartmentalized to the point that “men of one profession can no longer understand the mind and temperament of men of another.”

288 “Little Gidding” The long history of the literature of English conservatism powerfully suggests that that need not be the case, so that men of one cast of mind, the writers, can codify the behavior of men of another, those so-called men of action. “To know what to surrender, and what to hold firm,” Eliot writes, “and indeed to recognize the situation of critical choice when it arises, is an art requiring . . . resources of experience, wisdom and insight.” That is what the political writer can bring to the table in the midst of deliberations that often leave too little time for proper reflection before action must ensue. So, then, there must be “no complete separation of function between men of thought and men of action,” but the writer may often be swallowed up in such a maelstrom of short-term decisions and solutions. That there should be no complete separation between one function and the other does not mean that the writer, the man of thought, should not be wary of erasing the distinction himself in his own life and work. Eliot holds up the example of the archconservative French political thinker and activist Charles Maurras (1868–1952), a major voice for the reactionary monarchist principles of the Catholic Action Français. During his own youthful sojourn in France in 1910–11, Eliot had been attracted to the militantly traditionalist biases of the Action française movement, and some believe that his eventual move to classicism, royalism, and Catholicism found its roots there, although a fertile soil was also required to begin with. These many years later, Eliot holds Maurras up as an example of what a writer ought not to do in the political sphere. If, Eliot muses, Maurras had “confined himself to literature, and to the literature of political theory, and had never attempted to found a political party, a movement . . . then those of his ideas which were sound and strong might have spread more widely, and penetrated more deeply, and affected more sensibly the contemporary mind.” Eliot ends by proposing an entirely different tack for the writer when it comes to politics. Borrowing a term from an Oxford theology professor, Eliot refers to what he calls the “pre-political area.” It is the domain where the questions and issues are not practical but ethical, even theological, Eliot

asserts, and that domain, he concludes, is the proper domain for the literature of politics. There the thinking and the writing can be focused, in Eliot’s view, on the most authentic political considerations: “What is Man? What are his limitations? What is his misery and what his greatness? and What, finally, his destiny?” That sounds much more like the poet of the Four Quartets, however, than the conservative spokesperson, and that may very well be his point: that ultimately the literature of politics is poetry.

“Little Gidding” (1942) See FOUR QUARTETS.

“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (1915) No poet in memory has ever had quite so spectacular a debut as the young T. S. Eliot when his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was first published in Poetry magazine in 1915, thanks in large part to the good offices of another relatively young American poet, EZRA POUND. As with any other event of great moment in its particular field, hindsight may give an unfair advantage. Certainly the great world did not come to a standstill to witness let alone pay homage to the event of the poem’s publication. Nevertheless, for those who were avid supporters of the revolution in the arts then taking place, the publication of “Prufrock” signaled a turning point in the art of writing American poetry from which there would henceforth be no turning back. While it would be wrong to give either Eliot or his poem too much of the credit for creating a revolution in the art of poetry writing, the fact remains that readers of today do have the advantage of hindsight, so they come to “Prufrock” as a poem whose reputation precedes it—a remarkable feat considering that the work of literature in question is not some ancient text by Homer or

“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” Aeschylus, or even a venerable classic from the time of DANTE ALIGHIERI or WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, but was first composed less than a century ago, when its creator was barely 23. However, the poem strikes readers as being as fresh and new today as it was when Pound first encountered it, because, among its many other features, “Prufrock” remains a classic example of literary modernism, a work from that period in literary history that prided itself on its capacity for never repeating the same act twice. “Make it new,” Pound’s poetic rule of thumb became the rallying cry for an age of virtually ceaseless exploration, innovation, and experimentation in both the themes and the methods of poetry writing, and it casts some light on the quality of Eliot’s achievement that Pound would famously remark that, with “Prufrock,” Eliot had made himself modern all on his own. From the title itself to the ominously cryptic ending, in which an anonymous “we” drowns in sea of human voices, the poetry of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” continues to challenge readers’ expectations both of what constitutes poetry and what constitutes meaning. Does this “we,” for example, truly drown in a sea of human voices, or does it drown in some other sort of sea because those voices have awakened it, and if so, from what, and what, then, is that other sea? And why the editorial “we,” anyhow, when it is clear that Prufrock has been speaking till that moment of and for himself? But has he been? The poem opens, after all, with that invitation to “you and I,” a definite “we” again, no doubt, but not one that can be easily identified. Rather, the further the poem proceeds, the more it seems as if Prufrock is speaking to no one but himself, since one of the points that he continually stresses is that no one will listen to him in any case, no matter what he says or does. Those are just a few of the problems that the poem poses for readers to this day, and yet its enduring reputation as a masterwork of 20th-century literature serves as a reminder that the work endures not because of its critical reputation, which is considerable, or because of its difficulties, which are equally so, but because of its great beauty as a work expressing what Eliot would later call a per-

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manent human impulse. To give that permanent human impulse a body, Eliot would argue, is the function of poetry. Prufrock is just such a body.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS How so young and comparatively isolated a poet came to write one of the most famous poems of the early 20th century, itself one of the most productive periods of literary accomplishments and advances in English since the time of Shakespeare, remains something of a mystery. It is not atypical for a perfectly ordinary combination of experiences and opportunities to have an extraordinary result. In the case of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the primary shaping events seem to have been an unusually refined sensibility matched with a high, and highly educated, intelligence and an extremely dry wit. Eliot would later argue that one may never be certain what combination of perfectly everyday activities can nevertheless be altered, in the creative mind, into art, or into what he termed art emotions. Since Eliot wrote the poem after having spent some time in BOSTON, Massachusetts, and environs as a student, first at Milton Academy and later at Harvard College, it is easy to associate the poem’s social milieu, as redolent of a drawing-room society as it is, with that New England city, renowned to this day for being a socially upright and closed community. (Although it may be that reference, in the opening stanza, to oyster shells that brings a seaside town like Boston to mind.) We know, for example, that while Eliot was not himself a proper Bostonian, having been born to an old New England family but in the comparative wilds of ST. LOUIS, Missouri, the Eliots were a prominent, upper-middle-class family. So Eliot knew a world of morning coats and of afternoon teas and polite conversation about the arts and all the other finer things in life, including well-behaved if not even aloof young women. Eliot’s would have been a world, in other words, where matters of manners and decorum took precedence over more common human impulses, such as sexual desire, perhaps, not to mention something as simple as the longing for the natural ease of human interaction without the constraints of social proprieties. The young Eliot would himself

290 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” have inhabited a world where the longing to let one’s hair, and guard, down in formal social settings was very likely frowned on. The reader must be careful, however, not to associate the poet’s own life too much with the material of the poem. This is particularly true in Eliot’s case, for he spent much critical ink arguing for a separation between the person and the poem. In the case of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” it is fair to assume that Eliot is dealing with a relatively commonplace theme, and that is, again, the conflicts that are created when natural human impulses for dialogue and community are frustrated by rigid social norms. Where Eliot’s treatment of this thematic commonplace is lifted to a new level of poetic expression, thus making it a modernist achievement, is found in his approaching such a serious, and potentially pretentious, theme from an angle so aslant that the social criticism, real or implied, is obscured by the absurdity of Prufrock’s predicament, and for that Eliot has his education in the literary traditions of continental Europe, rather than just those of Britain and America, to thank. The young Eliot knew that world of real Boston tea parties, to be sure, but, thanks to the traditions of a liberal education in which he had been taught and to a mother who had an abiding interest in Italian Renaissance culture, he also knew the world that had produced a literary classic such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, from which the epigraph to “Prufrock” would be taken, as well as the world of the other foreign ingredient in this tale of what both nurture and influence can produce in the way of a literary achievement. That would be his near contemporaries, the French symbolist poets, in particular Jul es La f or g ue, for whom language and learning were as likely to be intellectual toys as meaningful tools. If Eliot had come to know his Dante largely through formal education, he came to know Laforgue and the French symbolist movement in general from a 1908 encounter with a book by Ar t hur Symons, The Symbo l ist Mo vement in Lit er at ur e. “Prufrock” the work and Prufrock the personage represent the end of an era and an order, the period from the Revolutionary War to the beginnings of World War I during which Americans,

with few exceptions, and those being the very rich and privileged, were by and large isolated from their literary and cultural roots in Europe and glad of it. Eliot implicitly underscores this shift back to a more Eurocentric worldview on the part of young, educated Americans by using a late medieval Italian poet, Dante, to create the atmosphere for the poem’s tone and mood, and by then turning to contemporary French poets, and French thinking in general, to find a more expansive range of poetic language and a fractured and thereby freed poetical grammar in and by which to convey that tone and mood. Indeed, though he had been experimenting with poetry writing throughout his undergraduate years, Eliot, recently graduated from Harvard, was spending his first year abroad in Paris during the fall of 1910 and well into 1911 when he wrote “Prufrock.” For any young, privileged American of his time and his class, immersion not so much in Europe as in the so-called City of Light, with its Latinate, Roman Catholic roots so alien to Eliot’s Anglo-American, Protestant background and upbringing, and with the French capital’s equally suspect reputation among Americans as a libertine city of sexual and social license also alien to Eliot’s Puritan moral bearings, was a rite of passage not to be ignored or dismissed. Nor should it be forgotten that Paris was also a major cultural mecca for young Americans seeking to overcome the somewhat unpolished rawness of the American experience with a good dose of the sort of sophistication and learning that only the Old World could provide. This was a particularly exciting time to be in Paris. The social and political ferment for which the French have always been renowned had overflowed into the aesthetic and philosophical realms. On the latter front, Eliot attended lectures at the Sorbonne, studying the work of the French philosopher Henr i Ber g son and the conservative political and spiritual thinking of Charles Maurras. He also struck up a friendship with a young Frenchman, Jules Verdenal, to whom he would subsequently dedicate his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, the title of the volume serving readers notice that this would be a poetry not of personal expression but of impression and reac-

“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” tion. The frenetic literary life of the French capital would also provide the incentive, the catalyst for experimentation and change. We are encouraged to think of literary modernism as a time in which literature, but particularly poetry, renewed itself. But despite the innovative work of Eliot’s American precursors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, poetry had first renewed itself not in America or even Britain but in France during the latter half of the 19th century. Eliot was already quite familiar with the work of French poets Arthur Rimbaud, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, and Jules Laforgue, thanks again in large part to Symons’s landmark study in English on these French symbolist poets. Their new kind of poetry, for the French, focused on the city and on the plight of the intellect, the will, and the spirit of modern city-dwellers, young, sophisticated, and well-educated but nevertheless overwhelmed by impersonal public and social demands in conflict with personal confusions and general chaos—individuals awash in a sea of contending private emotions and desires in a world of bureaucrats and paradox. Uniquely and together, these French poets, far more than either their English or American counterparts, had fashioned a poetic tool that, without sacrificing any poet’s first concerns, which are for language and uncensored self-expression, could comment nevertheless on a culture gone awry. Whatever else may have drawn the young Eliot to the composition of poetry in the first place, he found his mentors in these poets, Laforgue primarily, who seemed, for all their foreignness otherwise, to share his eye for finding the famished soul in the midst of life’s increasingly materialist feast. Is it any wonder, then, that Eliot dishes up, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that is like nothing that had ever come before it in English? It is as if the freedom that he was experiencing in Paris combined with the liberating spirit of the times, inasmuch as poetic expression was concerned, and the result was a poem that expressed a yearning for freedom and liberation in the language and settings of all the traditional social and cultural constraints to which Eliot, scion of an old, established, and prominent New England family, had become accustomed.

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In conceptualizing “Prufrock,” in other words, Eliot is able to play on his special knowledge as the insider to use the techniques of an outside culture, the French, to criticize the inside culture. A part of the great irony of the poem is that its speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock, is also an insider whose crisis is created by the fact that he feels like an outsider within his own small if not in fact tight social circle, an individual burdened with an immense social discomfort and riddled with both a fear of failure and a reluctance to upset the apple cart of his own sense of alienation. This doubling effect, precarious though it may be, is used to immense advantage by Eliot throughout the poem, which so perfectly matches topic and technique, for example, that it seems more a poetic exercise than a poetic statement, putting the reader continuously on guard but off his or her game, as it were.

SYNOPSIS The Title and Epigraph So pervasive are Eliot’s techniques and reputation by now that readers nowadays fail to realize how startling it might have been to an English-language reader of the time to come across a serious poem by an American poet with a title as silly-sounding as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and an epigraph in a foreign language, its source unidentified, yet one that turns out to be from the pages of the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno— that is, from the depths of hell itself. This literary classic would hardly have been an unknown commodity in academic circles, but given its Italianate, papist leanings, it would hardly have been thought of as mainstream, popular literature. For Eliot to cite it without any other species of textual citation was therefore either a daring or a thoughtless act— unless the very act of leaving his readers in the dark as to the epigraph’s source served the purposes of the direction and the purpose of the original poetry to come. To appreciate any Eliot poem, at least from the early periods of his career, readers need to understand Eliot’s most transparent literary technique, and that is his ability to mix up the most serious with the most frivolous elements without either warning or much indication as to which is which.

292 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” For now, however, it is important to observe in that particular mixing of the absurd (Prufrock’s name), with the ominous (an epigraph from a poem about hall) that only someone who knew intimately the life and lifestyle that was about to be portrayed in the poem could so thoroughly and simultaneously both echo and betray that world’s values. This dilemma is established as early as the poem’s title and epigraph. Readers regarding the title of the poem for the first time undoubtedly come up against a series of expectations that are no sooner set in motion than dashed. Whatever the idea of a love song may be in the most general terms, no one is likely to be thrilled at hearing that it is the love song of a man named J. Alfred Prufrock. Indeed, such a name reads more like something found on a calling card than in the title of an composition as intimate as a love song. Lovers, after all, do not refer to each other by their legal or formal names, unless it is out of some species of skewed affection, nor is a man who goes by a moniker as presumptuous as J. Alfred, with its profound hints of stuffed-shirtedness, likely to give the automatic impression that he should be either the subject or the originator of a love song. Whatever readers may make of all these troubling matters (even if it is only at that unconscious, subliminal level where Eliot the critic will later say the poem does its real work on us), they have been thrown off guard and invariably puzzled as to what sort of a love song they should be prepared to find as the poem begins. A comic turn or parody? Pretentious nonsense? Yet, before the poem begins, that strange—in the sense that it is literally foreign—epigraph intervenes. To learn that it is a passage from Dante’s Inferno works against the apparent air of a frivolity that has been established by the poem’s contradictory title. The epigraph also poses a puzzle until its source is identified and its words are translated from Italian into English, and this should be taken as the poet’s (not the speaker, a crucial distinction as far as the dramatic monologue is concerned) warning to the reader to be wary. All is not as it seems. Once translated, the epigraph may seem enlightening, but even that is only at first glance. Specifically, the words are spoken to Dante, who has made himself the protagonist of his own poem, by

a man named Guido da Montefeltro, who is being punished in the Eighth Circle of the Inferno, or pretty deep down in hell, for having given false counsel. These sinners are among the fraudulent in Dante’s scheme of things infernal, and for having abused the gift of human speech to deceive and, so, abused the good faith of others, these particular sinners, Guido among them, are imprisoned forever in tongues of fire, emblematic of speech, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Encountering and recognizing him, Dante wants to hear Guido’s story of how he came to be here among those damned eternally to hell, whereupon Guido, cautious about besmirching whatever good name he might still have among the living, tells Dante, “If I were to believe that I was speaking to anyone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to stir any further, but since no one ever returned alive from these depths, if what I hear is true, then without fear of infamy I respond to you.” Before jumping to conclusions, the reader should be warned that this is a highly textured passage in its original context alone. A quick take on the epigraph, once it has been deciphered, could lead the unwary reader to conclude that the poetry to come that the epigraph is ostensibly introducing should be read in the context of someone who imagines himself to be in hell, or at least a hellish situation. Such a conclusion, while it may have possibilities, would be hasty nevertheless. For one thing, the passage for Dante’s purposes alone is full of dramatic ironies—the speaker, Guido da Montefeltro, is a liar, after all, surrounded in hell by other liars, not to mention the fact that hell’s master, Satan, is called the father of lies. Yet with incredulity, Guido imagines that what he has heard is “true.” Who is he kidding—himself or Dante? For another thing, Guido has figured wrong in Dante’s case. Ironically, the person to whom Guido then proceeds, without fear of infamy, to tell the tale of his treachery turns out, in the fiction Dante has created, to be not only someone who will return to the world of the living but who is also a poet who will then write, in the Divine Comedy, an account of all that he has seen and heard, including, of course, this confession of Guido’s that has been given in the strictest confidence.

“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” Once put into such a complex context of the compounded ironies of the deceiver deceived, the Eliot epigraph from Dante obscures rather than clarifies the coming poetry’s tone or meaning, unless, that is, the reader puts the significance of the epigraph into the broadest possible context. In that zone of reference, the reader is encouraged to recognize two primary principles of human communication: that to be able to understand someone, one must know the language that the other is speaking, either literally (Dante’s Italian) or virtually (class defines language as well, after all), and that one speaks most freely when, like poor Guido da Montefeltro, he feels that he is in the presence of a kindred spirit, another damned soul like himself. The title and the epigraph to “Prufrock” both have prepared the reader for anticipating a struggle with meaning that will require rethinking interpretive processes of suspicion as well as discovery, because they have also prepared the reader to keep an open mind. In that sense, the opening verses, with their invitation to accompany the speaker on some not yet defined act of discovery, seem quite appropriate, and therefore it is not unusual for commentators to imagine that the “you” who is being addressed is the reader, which would be all well and good except that the poem is a dramatic monologue. The Dramatic Monologue Eliot carefully constructs the poem to keep all of its elements working at arm’s length both from him, the poet, and from its readers by using for the poem’s ostensible form the dramatic monologue. As a literary genre, the dramatic monologue had already been put to great and effective use by the English poet Robert Browning within decades of the time that Eliot was writing. Eliot’s is only “ostensibly” a dramatic monologue, however, because Eliot takes liberties and plays games even with the relatively uncomplicated rules governing the structure of the dramatic monologue. Such a poem should have a speaker who is clearly identified as someone other than the poet; here, the Eliot poem fulfills the requirement (as the use of the first-person pronoun “I” implies, unless J. Alfred Prufrock is to be

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regarded as an alias for Eliot, which is an absurd proposition). The second most critical requirement—that there is an audience within the poem who is also clearly identified—is paid an ironic lip service by Eliot. With Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” an example of a well-constructed dramatic monologue, a single reading will readily reveal that the speaker is the duke of Ferrara and that the audience is an otherwise unidentified emissary from a count who is apparently trying to arrange a marriage between his daughter and the duke. With “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” however, Eliot only appears to honor this second requirement of the dramatic monologue as well, inasmuch as, in the first stanza, he has his speaker, Prufrock, invite an anonymous “you” to accompany him on a speculative visit involving an “overwhelming question of insidious intent”—but that seems to be the end of it. As already noted, some take the “you” being addressed to be the reader. In keeping with the requirements of the dramatic monologue, however, the “you” is supposed to be someone to whom Prufrock is actually speaking in a dramatic context, so how can “you” be the reader, one might well ask. Other critical speculation has gone as far as to suggest that that personage is none other than Jean Verdenal, the young Frenchman to whom the volume (but not the poem) was subsequently dedicated and who had died in combat during World War I at Gallipoli. Others yet have speculated that the “you” is Prufrock’s alter ego, the person he would like to be but feels incapable of ever becoming. The only valid conclusion seems to be the conclusion that the text itself inspires, and that is that the “you” can be anyone and therefore is very likely no one—certainly no one in particular. Unlike in the example taken from Browning’s poem, in which all the duke’s remarks are addressed to and, so, governed by his relationship with the count’s emissary, turning readers of the poem into eavesdroppers, a further problem is that this “you” introduced early in “Prufrock” virtually disappears as an effective presence from the scene, or at least from Prufrock’s ken of reference, so that ultimately he or she barely even exists any longer as any sort of

294 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” controlling factor in the direction that Prufrock’s musings take. There is one final requirement for the dramatic monologue. In keeping with the idea of its being dramatic poetry, the dramatic monologue is supposed to sound like speech in the act of being uttered. Anyone who has ever had to deal with the abrupt shifts and unexpected turns in Prufrock’s monologue knows that, for all the beauty of the language as it rolls off the tongue, while it may be a model of speech’s natural rhythms, it is not in any way a consecutively coherent commentary. Indeed, it goes out of its way to insist that it is no use to regard it in terms of the logic of a natural language that we have ever heard or encountered before. Those are the more rudimentary elements of the dramatic monologue. When it comes to the real issue of presenting a speaker whose predicament both engages the reader’s attention and keeps the reader’s interest, however, Eliot again breaks all the rules, such as they are. Instead of an engaging characterization, Prufrock comes through as an unsympathetic character whose main claim to fame, and to his making demands on our attention and interest, is that he is seeking sympathy or lamenting his ability to obtain it. There we have the doubling effect again. One half of the equation—Prufrock is unlikable—cancels the other—Prufrock wants to be liked—leaving readers with the withering sense of a universal naught that seems to have Prufrock in its vague and paradoxically vacant grip. The Text The charm of a poem like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is found in its radically altering the traditional focus of poetic composition away from theme, what the poet “means,” and toward gesture, what the speaker is meaning to say, and why. In the truest sense of the word charm, by which is meant the fascination that the poetry continues to hold over readers, from the novice to the most expert and sophisticated, “Prufrock” is charming. But Prufrock himself is not. That that speaker is imaginary makes for a reading experience that is as rich and strange as Prufrock is, as a personage, boring and bland. Indeed, a large part of Eliot’s achievement in the poem is that he makes his read-

ers not only listen to but struggle to understand a man who is telling them that he is so insignificant in his own social circles as to be hardly noticeable, and it is in this very tension, the gap between what the reader is being told and who is telling it so that the language of the poem seems both to separate from and to create reality, that “Prufrock” both finds and defines its distinctively modernist qualities. So, then, the critical principle that has been established thus far, and by which a reading of the poem will now proceed, can be stated as follows: To understand “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the reader must understand the speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock—not what he is saying so much as why he is saying it—and from that angle the poem can be most profitably approached. Prufrock’s dilemma is not that he is trapped but that he thinks that he knows that he is trapped, and it is that awful knowledge on his part, be it right or wrong, that then controls the confused thoughts and feelings that emerge through his monologue. This dilemma is what philosophers called an epistemological one—an intellectual problem, in which there are conflicts in dealing both what is known and how it has come to be known. If readers cannot easily make sense out of what Prufrock is saying, it is because he cannot make sense of it himself. As has already been pointed out, Eliot magnifies this kind of a dilemma, for both Prufrock and the reader, by casting the poem as a dramatic monologue. Someone besides Prufrock—that vague and mysterious “you”—has been fixed in the reader’s mind as a key to the solution to Prufrock’s problem, yet the identity of “you” is never clearly established, itself an ironic twist whose effects are impossible to calculate. And yet, too, that “come hither” opening—“Let us go, then, . . .”—allows the poem to sound rather like a traditional love song, and maybe that is its purpose. There cannot be a love song, after all, without someone or something to love. Aside from the fact that Prufrock’s particular brand of love song will quickly prove to be more a lament for his incapacity or lack of opportunity to love, that opening pitch of his to go to where the evening is spread out against the sky sounds appealing, even alluring enough—until it leads the reader right into the surprise of the disjunctive image that then comes. The

“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” invitation does not set the scene of a pleasant summer night but of a patient who has been etherized and is lying on a table, ready for surgery. So many shocks to the reader’s sensibilities in such quick order cannot be easily overcome, and as any reader of the poem knows, there is no getting back on track from that point on. The reader moves more and more deeply into bewilderment and confusion as the first stanza continues with a sort of relentless onslaught of data that promise much but deliver nothing, so that by its conclusion, any notions of whether this is a love song or questions as to whom the speaker is addressing have been forsaken, not for lack of interest but because they seem to be irrelevant. Something of real significance has been accomplished nevertheless; the reader knows that he or she is not here to be educated but to listen—as Dante must listen to Guido da Montefeltro. As the reader listens, he or she will begin to hear what needs to be heard, and that, rather than the reader’s assumptions and suspicions, is what will bring him or her, finally, to an understanding of who Prufrock is—or, rather who he thinks he is, that being, ironically, a man to whom no one has ever listened and to whom no one has ever paid any real attention. So, then, the women coming and going while they talk of the great Renaissance Italian artist Michelangelo—or is he the handsome young immigrant gardener?—are women whose main fault is that they are not talking about, let alone to, our hero, J. Alfred Prufrock. He does not tell his putative listener as much, of course, for the simple fact that he is not aware of a listener. Here Eliot utilizes the dramatic monologue to its best advantage, allowing for dramatic irony whereby Eliot enables his readers to see things that Prufrock cannot see about himself but that he nevertheless reveals as he continues his love song, which turns out to be, rather than a dramatic monologue, a monologue about himself. In that manner, the reader can imagine that everything that Prufrock is saying, including his observations of both the landscapes and the people around him, is true, but only from his point of view and only inasmuch as it reveals his state of mind, a state of mind that revolves primarily, perhaps even exclusively around himself.

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The notorious yellow fog that encircles the house in stanza three suddenly makes perfect sense if the reader sees it as an emblem of how trapped Prufrock is (a device that Eliot would later call an objective correlative). The yellow fog is, no doubt, a typical urban blight of the times caused by the burning of coal with a high sulfur content. But the yellow fog in its lurid haziness is also a detail that comes in startling juxtaposition to the drawing room scenes that Prufrock has otherwise been evoking. Seen that way, the yellow fog calls to mind again that doubleness, those outside in, inside out dislocations and combinations that drive the poem forward. They both mimic and illustrate Prufrock’s own sense of being trapped within a body, within his formal clothing, within the formal settings, and within the closed society in which he lives and which, like the fog, envelops him. What provides him his point of reference also reminds him of how limited his horizons are, so that the evening sky can be figuratively interrupted by its resemblance to a recumbent and nearly lifeless body, and the fog can, catlike, both circumscribe and constrain Prufrock’s connections to a world beyond his narrowly defined social environment. The fog, then, represents the hopelessness of a limited vision, a vision limited by fixed ways of thinking and feeling, so that the more he might squirm or might conspire to escape the enclosed social space within which he feels himself trapped, “pinned and wriggling” under both imagined and real evaluative gazes, the more he becomes exposed. Eventually, Prufrock clearly becomes someone who thinks of himself only as he imagines others think of him. Is he getting thin? Is his hair getting thin? Does his tie look all right? This corrosive self-consciousness would be bearable, the reader/ listener is led to imagine, except that Prufrock wishes not so much to break out as to connect with and affect this social order that circumscribes and dictates his behavior, embodied for him in the behavior of women who seem to judge him but otherwise ignore him. He has noticed the hair on their arms, a rather animal and somewhat sexual if not erotic detail, but he cannot imagine any one of them deigning to speak to him even if he were to claim that he was Lazarus risen from

296 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” the dead and capable of telling them the most startling truths. Lazarus is a figure from the Gospels, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead, and Prufrock also thinks of himself in other biblical terms—as John the Baptist, whose head was brought in on a platter at the behest of Salome after she danced the dance of the seven veils for Herod Antipas—as well as in literary terms, for example, as the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century love poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” The biblical and literary allusions, besides giving the reader insights into the fact that Prufrock is widely read, suggest further how paralyzed Prufrock’s imagination has become, for he uses the allusions only to further excoriate and castigate himself. He is, by his own admission, not Hamlet, only some officious fool. Even were he Lazarus, he imagines, one of the women would put him in his place, so he comes by starts and stops to try to recognize and accept that place for what it is, to admit that he is not the star of the show, but a lesser character, taking up space, willing to be used, to be ignored, and not to be missed. The man who cannot decide whether to disturb the universe or eat a peach, who sees either action of equal duration and importance, is not likely to stay fixed on any one thought or conclusion for very long, however. The poetry’s constant vacillation between the ridiculous and the sublime, the high minded and high sounding and the vulgar and the lowlife, a vacillation that the attentive reader experiences from the poem’s title onward, follows through all the way to the end of the poem. Prufrock, inflating and deflating his ego and expectations in virtually every other line, cannot finally arrive at any satisfactory conclusion without betraying the very real qualities of social and emotional—and imaginative—paralysis that Eliot has created with the poetry. Toward the end of his monologue, whose dramatic quality is that it is not dramatic at all, Prufrock is left imagining mermaids who do not like him, parting his hair behind, dressing more casually so that he can walk along the seashore—anything but taking his own present circumstances in hand for what they are and accepting them, particularly if they prove to be (as they apparently already have

proved to be) incapable of being changed. So too, the man who, little more than a voice, begins by disgorging all his pent-up frustrations and confusions on everyone and no one, thereby disburdening himself of what amounts to nothing more than petty complaints and frivolous dislikes, winds up being drowned by or in, of all things, human voices.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY It is easy to get so lost in the work as to lose sight of the worker, the maker, the poet who gives us the poem. For its point must finally be Eliot’s, not Prufrock’s, since Prufrock’s point cannot be Eliot’s. What then is Eliot’s point? Prufrock knows, or appears to think that he knows, that he does not have the strength necessary to force the moment to the sort of crisis that will free him, and he thinks that he knows why he does not have that strength—that he is a lesser, not a greater man. Even that, however, is a sort of self-congratulatory self-dramatization on Prufrock’s part, for his vision, like anyone’s, is limited by what he has seen and by what he can see. In that sense, Eliot the poet has succeeded in making his characterization of Prufrock seem to be as real as the rest of us, and that is an incredible achievement in and of itself. The poet, however, is not limited by his vision, since he contains it and has created Prufrock for the sake of seeing what is real but must otherwise remain invisible. To divide the creation from its creator, Eliot would argue from early in his literary critical career, is a necessary action if the reader is to benefit from the creation, and this rule is especially true in Eliot’s case in general and in the case of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in particular. The temptation to identify the poet with the poem is a powerful one. Eliot certainly understood that, and a poem on the order of Prufrock begs the question. In many respects Eliot’s life, or at least his background, appears to be duplicated or at least reflected in the poem, and these resemblances, casual though they may be, appear to extend well beyond matters of social class and ethnic and regional associations. Eliot, too, was often described by friends and acquaintances alike as diffident, stiff, and formal to a fault and more aware of proper manners and of

“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” keeping one’s distance socially than could easily be regarded as typical even for someone of an uppermiddle-class background. Just how much the poet’s personality, let alone personal detail, is reflected in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is open to endless speculation, of course. That it would be fair to regard Prufrock as Eliot’s alter ego would be risky critical business at best, nevertheless. For just one outstanding discrepancy, Eliot was a very young man when he composed “Prufrock,” while it seems obvious from those elements of self-description that emerge from Prufrock’s monologue and from his tone of worldweariness that Prufrock is approaching if not in fact in his early middle age. Any poet writes out of what he knows, but that is the end of it. Readers tend to think of the creative mind as one that is endlessly inventing; in common parlance, we speak of someone as having “a wild imagination,” as if those two words form a necessary conjunction. Most of the time, however, the imagination functions not to invent but to transmute what is already there in the experience of the artist into something that, as art, becomes a part of universal experience, still recognized as coming from the artist’s general experience but no more his or hers otherwise than it is mine or yours. Surely that was the case with Eliot, according to his critical pronouncements from as early as the time of the 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It stands to reason that his character Prufrock would move among well-heeled individuals in the formal settings of the drawing-room culture that flourished among the venerable old families of America at the end of the 19th century, not because that was a special culture, although it may appear so to a typical reader of today, but because that was the world that the young Eliot knew. But to conclude, then, that there is some sort of autobiographical connection between Eliot and the speaker of his poem would be to miss the point that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, after all, a poem, intended not to record the poet’s life but to explore the poet’s observations. Those observations, if truly regarded as the products of the poetic imagination, must inevitably involve not only people unique to Prufrock’s—and Eliot’s—

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time and place and class, but all of us. Nor it is merely playing with words or coining a coy phrase to talk of a poetic imagination. The oppositions and startling juxtapositions and unsettling dislocations and disjunctions that the poetry of “Prufrock” creates throughout serve a purpose that is neither journalistic (making the poem autobiography, for example) or psychological (making the poem a case study) but rather aesthetic in nature. That is to say, they are intended not to inform or to persuade but to engage the reader in the processes of creation and thereby force the reader to make sense not of the social or personal or psychological but of the delicate balances among perception, experience, and language that form, for the most part, what is generally called reality. That may seem to be an immense, almost impossible task for the poet to take upon himself, let alone credit to a work of literature, but that is what Eliot the poet is out to achieve and that is what certainly makes this particular poem one of the earliest masterworks of literary modernism, as Ezra Pound so astutely observed it to be. If Eliot is correct and poetry deals with permanent human impulses, “Prufrock’s” is a basic, perhaps even essential human conflict between the desire to be noticed, which makes one dependent on what other people think, and the desire to be self-defining and self-directed, which requires one not to care what people think. Most manage to separate the requirements of maintaining group dynamics from the sense of one’s own self-worth, but Prufrock appears to be incapable of resolving the conflict, and so his dilemma is created. That does not make “Prufrock” the poem nothing more than a psychological study, however. Prufrock the person is not even a characterization; rather, he is a verbal construct, a creature made up of words, as Hamlet once said, and thus far less substantial than even a phantom of smoke and air. Without diminishing the more or less full-bodied individual who nevertheless emerges from the words, their tone and color and mood, it is not difficult to imagine that, rather than any truly living being, Prufrock represents, embodies, the masculine principle, self-centered and vain, awash in a sea of feminine reserve that is itself closeted and

298 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” yet somehow inviting, certainly alluring. Whether Prufrock is a man obsessed by women or by their apparent lack of interest in him, or he is a person dissatisfied with his station in life or with the life that fate has dealt with, or he is an individual uncertain of his sexual identity or simply a lonely person craving only a sympathetic ear, his importance as a literary creation rests on what his condition reveals of the human condition. Prufrock is that not-untypical human creature at odds with both himself and his social and physical environment who is struggling nevertheless to find an accommodating reality or even just an accommodating point of view whereby he might be at peace with himself and at ease in the world. The reader who can see in Prufrock, for all the apparent idiosyncrasies of class and the times that he might display, not the hero, as he tells us he is not, but still the agon, suffering the social and moral ills of the ordinary man, can find in him as well the uniquely modernist nature of Eliot’s particular creation, a poem that focuses, for all the startling breaks with the past that his new kind of poetry might require and result in, the typical life led by a typical person in the real world, where nature is only a reflection of inner turmoils and the unspoken tells more than words ever can. Whatever else they may hope to find there, readers are ultimately drawn to Eliot, to the poem, for what Prufrock’s plight may tell them of their own inner conflicts and turmoils, and of their own incessant effort to find the words to express those truly shaping forces. Primarily his is the desire to be accepted not for what but for who he is, but he appears weak and indecisive because he knows that he is unable to reconcile that dilemma himself. Only others can, so he winds up imagining that his only hope is to get away from everyone else. At the poem’s end, Prufrock may be thinking of committing suicide by drowning himself, but it is the sound of the voices of other humans, creatures like himself, that awakens him from his self-centered reverie. There are worse awakenings than his. No one likes to be a specimen, his nerves displayed for all the world to see, and Prufrock knows that. But Eliot, by having made his creation a specimen of what it is to be alive and to be human,

exposes his readers to the very sorts of lessons that only great art can teach—enduring lessons in the human heart. What, however, distinguishes Eliot’s treatment of those tried and true lessons that have been grist for the literary mill since time immemorial is that Eliot, taking a page from his mentor Laforgue, requires his readers to engage their heads, their minds, rather than their own hearts in deciphering the depths of mixed hopes and despair, frustration and encouragement, that, though only the heart can truly plumb them, nevertheless all too often fall on deaf ears, exactly as Prufrock is certain that his complaints, his lament, may do. Thus, while Prufrock the speaker may sound sentimental or seem to sentimentalize his condition from time to time, “Prufrock” the poem, by sending such a variety of mixed verbal and social signals to readers as have been enumerated here, neither sounds sentimental nor sentimentalizes Prufrock’s condition or his social milieu. Although this desentimentalized approach may often strike the unprepared reader as sounding instead cold or dispassionate, it is nevertheless in keeping with the modernism that Eliot, with poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” helped usher in as a literary movement that, ironically enough, saved overt expressions of sentimentality as a literary mode by removing from them their patina of a romantic excessiveness. It bears repeating that Eliot accomplishes that feat by deflecting his readers’ attention from the poet to his speaker, putting all the sentiment, such as it is, into the mouth of a figure as unromantic and, dare we say, insignificant as Prufrock, thereby depersonalizing those very sentiments. This methodology is in keeping with the poetics that Eliot would shortly delineate in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and the curious reader would do well to consult the entry on that essay. The novice reader, daunted by the apparent complexities of the poetry, would do well also to approach “Prufrock” not as thematic poetry intended to state some specific meaning or to expose an otherwise abstract truth, but as a character study whose carefully contrived and manipulated nuances reveal not simply the nature of the speaker but the social coordinates of the world in which he

“Marie Lloyd” resides. A person who has to “prepare a face” for his encounters with others in his social environment and who ineffectually imagines escaping from it is, after all, uncomfortable not just with all those other people but with being inside his own skin, from which there is no escape. It is through this careful examination and exposure of a single human being that Eliot introduces not some preconceived thematic considerations or universal truths to his readers so much as the means humans devise to cope as social beings. Such means become a constant theme in Eliot, albeit a necessarily unstated one.

FURTHER READING Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Scribner’s, 1949. Everett, Barbara. “In Search of Prufrock.” Critical Quarterly 16 (1974): 101–121. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. New York: Dutton, 1950. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante. London: Macmillan, 1989. Matthiessen, F. O., and C. L. Barber. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Ricks, Christopher, ed. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, by T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, 1997. Sigg, Eric. The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Unger, Leonard. T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966.

“Marie Lloyd” (1923) Though it is the briefest essay among all the Selected Essays, running barely more than three pages, Eliot’s 1923 appreciation of the English music-hall performer Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) is, despite its

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popular appeal, jam-packed with insights from him into the nature and purpose of the performative arts, as well as providing an intriguing defense for cultural diversity.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS With her saucy petulance and coquettish innocence, Lloyd was a fit topic for such a dual-purpose treatment. Primarily a comic artist who had become a living legend, she was an early species of the genuine superstar. Known as the Queen of the Music Hall, Lloyd was affectionately referred to by her working-class fans as “Our Marie,” and her death was mourned by tens of thousands when she passed away on October 7, 1922, after a career that had spanned more than three decades and earned her fame throughout the English-speaking world. It was virtually during the same period, beginning roughly in 1850, that music hall, as it is called, had also been coming into its own as a uniquely English form of popular entertainment. The typical Music Hall venue perfected the song-and-dance and comedy performances traditionally provided to keep people dining and drinking at their favorite tavern or pub, turning those acts into large-scale, polished, and lucrative stage productions called variety shows.

SYNOPSIS Eliot’s first most salient point in his appreciation is that Lloyd knew and connected with her working-class audience. Her comic turns managed to express these people in a way with which they could identify. Although it may seem so to the casual observer, that is no small thing—to see one’s very nature expressed on the stage. Indeed, Eliot goes on to say that Lloyd raised this ability to empathize and reach across the stage lights “to a kind of art,” and for that reason “her death is itself a significant moment in English history.” Eliot can make such a statement, as bold as it is generous, because he is afraid that the lower classes to whose lives Lloyd’s immense talents gave expression will soon, as a result of her loss, go the way of the other English classes, the middle class and aristocracy among them, for whom there is no longer any expressive figure on the public scene. “The lower class still exists; but perhaps it will not exist for long.

300 “Marina” In the music-hall comedians they find the expression and dignity of their own lives,” Eliot observes. Soon, however, Eliot fears, they too will become homogenized by the standardization of popular entertainment that movies, recordings, and cheap means of personal transportation are bringing about, so that everything and everyone will be the same. Eliot then makes a telling observation regarding the arts in general: “The working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd . . . was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art.” His point is that that necessary collaboration disappears when there is no longer a link between art and the lives that individuals lead and that will be the inevitable conclusion to a civilization in which popular entertainment does not so much erase class distinctions as transcend them.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY By serving such a profitable need, English music hall would have been, by Eliot’s time, the equivalent of television, so widespread were its commercial successes and influences on popular culture. One outstanding consequence was that its stars, Lloyd chief among them, enjoyed the same kind of celebrity as a television or film star would nowadays and suffered the same degree of intense and sometimes harsh and unforgiving public scrutiny. With the added advantage of being an outsider to English culture, Eliot was an astute enough observer of popular culture, however, to see how those new media such as the radio, recordings, and the cinema would eventually supplant the popularity of music-hall entertainment, and it is with this prospect in mind that Eliot both commemorates and laments Lloyd’s passing. He envisions a more and more homogenized and lackluster popular culture as a result of the appeal of mass entertainment, and Eliot had already proved through his poetry that he knew whereof he spoke. The Waste Land, whose initial publication in Eliot’s Criterion in October 1922 virtually coincided with Lloyd’s passing, is as much a new kind of poetry for its snatches from, and in the rhythms of, the ragtime music of its day—“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag,” as

Eliot puts it—as for its freely borrowing from the poetry of the past. Furthermore, he was a great fan of popular mystery novels, even planning at one point to call Murder in the Cathedral more brazenly The Archbishop’s Murder Case—and he carried on a modest but continuing correspondence with the zany film comedian Groucho Marx, a signed photo of whom hung on Eliot’s office wall in later years. So Eliot’s revealing himself as a connoisseur and devotee of such an ostensibly lower-class form of popular entertainment as music hall would not have come as a surprise to most. The fact remains, however, that the journalistic touches of his comments conceal, only barely, critical gems. Toward the end of his essay on Lloyd, Eliot had reflected on a recent study that comments on how the native people of Melanesia are dying out—literally “dying from pure boredom”—because of the likeness of common experience that an outside “Civilization” is imposing on them. The loss of empathetic entertainers such as Lloyd, coupled with the increasing imposition of mass-media entertainment, leads Eliot to ponder the possibility that “the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.” It is interesting, to say the least, that in his just-published The Waste Land Eliot took his lead from the French symbolist poet CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, the first great voice of the urban apocalypse, in identifying boredom as the great bane of the modern urban landscape. Without that necessary collaboration between the artist and his audience, the life of a civilization is lost, Eliot claims, and yet his own poetry was prominent among that contemporary verse that seemed to exclude the reader intentionally. The point, it seems, is clear. Civilization has already died, and modernism is its funeral. This would become a constant refrain in Eliot’s prose criticism and poetry throughout the rest of the 1920s and well into the 1930s.

“Marina” (1930) Although the first three poems that Eliot composed for Faber’s Ariel poems series were occasional

“Marina” pieces written months if not years apart, these same three poems nevertheless constitute the consecutive development of a common theme, with conflicts between birth and death, old ways and new, pagan and Christian beliefs, and the flesh and the spirit, all these conflicts measuring themselves out in a steadily forward progress toward some definite resolution. In other words, the Ariel poems to this point were more a poetic sequence than mere chronological gathering. Then “Marina” broke the pattern. What does this last poem in the series have to do even with the Christmas theme, let alone all those other theological and spiritual ponderings in which the first three had clearly engaged? As usual, however, Eliot’s subtle mind circumvents the doubts of even the most diehard literary skeptics, not to play coy with his own cleverness, but to surprise them into meaning, which is always the best way to come upon revelations of any significant import. Still, on the surface, for all its touching human qualities, the matter of “Marina” does seem to be miles away from the other three poems in the sequence. True, as in “Journey of the Magi” and “A Song for Simeon,” Eliot is again composing in the spirit of the dramatic monologue, whereby the speaker of the poem is Pericles, king of Tyre and the protagonist in the Shakespeare play of the same name. Pericles’ story is an interesting and touching one, and Eliot is relying on his readers’ fairly close acquaintance with the play for his own poem to operate successfully. Eliot held Shakespeare’s Pericles, lesser known though it may be, in high esteem. In an address, “Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist,” given at Edinburgh University in 1937, he had been quoted as saying that “the finest of all the ‘recognition scenes’ ” comes in act V, scene i, of Pericles. It is this recognition scene that Eliot attempts to replicate to his own poetic and thematic ends in “Marina,” but like most such scenes, the entire Shakespeare play leads to it. According to Shakespeare’s story, Pericles’ wife, Thaisa, apparently dies giving birth to their female child in the midst of a terrible storm at sea. The crew prevails upon Pericles to bury Thaisa’s body at sea immediately, lest further disaster befall them.

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The grief-stricken king, meanwhile, names their daughter Marina, in recognition of the unique circumstances of her birth at sea. Pericles subsequently leaves the infant Marina in the care of a royal couple whom he had benefited earlier, thus allowing him to take care of affairs at home. Marina grows into a young woman of great grace, beauty, and talent, so much so, indeed, that the queen resolves to have her killed since her splendid nature makes the queen’s daughter’s own qualities pale in comparison. Before the killer can accomplish his task, however, Marina is taken captive by pirates and sold into slavery in a neighboring kingdom, where her native graces and great beauty and kindness again make her so beloved that the king of that land even thinks of marrying her. In the meantime, Pericles, his own affairs in order, goes to fetch his daughter, the only token that he now has left of the wife who died so tragically. The evil queen, led to believe that Marina had been murdered as she had commanded, tells Pericles only that his daughter is dead, news that succeeds finally in breaking him. Distracted by an inconsolable despair, he withdraws into himself, till none can reach him. As the sad ship bearing him back to Tyre passes by the kingdom where Marina now resides, the king there, hearing of Pericles’ profound depression, thinks that perhaps the sweet Marina, whose kindness and compassion have made her such a treasure to all who have come to know her, may be able to save him, if anyone can. He brings her to Pericles’ ship, where she meets with him in private. Imagining that if his despair is the result of such great hardship and disappointment, then hearing a tale of similar hardships suffered by another may cure him, Marina tells him her own sad story of how she was the daughter of a mother who died giving birth and of a father who had entrusted her to people who sought only to give her deadly injury. When, the more they talk, she tells him that her name is Marina and a king’s daughter, Pericles is dumbfounded, for it was a name that no one but his own daughter had ever been given. Fearful that the gods are doing this only to torment him further, Pericles nevertheless presses her for more details, until it is clear to him that there can be no mistaking it: The daughter that he

302 “Marina” had thought was now lost to him forever, just as her mother had been at Marina’s birth, was now standing there before him, as great a beauty as ever her mother had been, miraculously restored to him. The play ends with Thaisa being restored to Pericles as well, for she had not died but fallen into a deep swoon and had spent the intervening years as a vestal in the temple of Diana. But Eliot is right in saying that nothing in the play equals the recognition scene when Pericles, withdrawn from all human company and virtually from life itself, is brought back to himself by the sudden realization that he is speaking to the daughter that till then he thought had been given up to death.

SYNOPSIS Eliot brings this recognition scene from Pericles to the attention of his readers in the poem “Marina.” The reader first encounters an epigraph from Seneca’s Hercules Furens, in which that great hero, having been driven into a mad fury by the goddess Juno, has first just awakened, not knowing where he is. (The Latin translates, “What place this, what region, what quarter of the world?”) Once he comes fully to his senses, he will learn the horrible truth that, in the throes of his madness, he slaughtered his children. For the reader as aware of the significance of the allusion to Seneca as of the allusion to Shakespeare’s Pericles, the contrast is startling and undoubtedly intended: One hero awakens from madness to discover all his children lost, another to discover a lost child restored. If Eliot is up to anything, he is using the lingering memory of Hercules’ tragic loss—in the Eliot poem, Pericles begins his monologue with a virtual translation of the epigraph—to underscore how much more remarkably joyful Pericles’ miraculous reunion is in the vast scheme of things. Simply put, a person is far more likely to lose a beloved than to regain one. As Eliot’s Pericles continues his monologue, Eliot plays on the same idea as Shakespeare had in the original recognition scene, allowing dream, reality, and nightmare to merge. The reader should recall that when, in the Shakespeare play, Pericles first began to have an inkling that he was in the presence of his “dead” daughter, his initial reaction

was to fear that some incensed god was setting him up for mockery. Then to hear that that this mysterious young woman’s name is Marina deranges his sense of a discernible reality still further, so much so that, doubting her true nature or purpose, he asks her: “But are you flesh and blood? / Have you a working pulse? and are no fairy?” Eliot takes care, too, to locate his Pericles in that twilight kingdom where the hollow men reside, in the state between waking and sleep where the epigraph from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure places the speaker of “Gerontion” as well, in the zone between “ ‘is and seem’ ” that, in “Animula,” “[c]onfounds the actual and the fanciful.” Suspended between all possibilities, it is love, Marina’s, that will bring Pericles to the single possibility that the truth he seeks is the truth he sees, bringing him ultimately to the one reality that is real, and it is the one right there before his eyes. While he may be bewildered by the maddening possibility that this may be his daughter, she is driven only by the thought that she is doing a kindness to another individual who, despite his high earthly station, has suffered in life as much as she, an orphaned slave and outcast, has, so she makes him listen. Eliot’s making his speaker Pericles ask his own uncertain questions mimics these aspects of Pericles’ querulousness in Shakespeare’s recognition scene. To admit confusion is to identify it as such, and “images return” because Pericles is willing to persist in pursuing their meaning. In the process, it is all that which connotes death for Pericles that ultimately, rather than she, “become unsubstantial . . . / [b]y this grace dissolved.” Those things that he has named as death are emblems of the rapaciousness of this-worldly pursuits, the getting and the taking of things. Pericles turns from them, for in the absence of his daughter, the world and all its vanity no longer bring him joy in any case, otherwise he would not have been rendered so desultory by the news of her death. Freed from such shortsightedness, the myopia of the here-and-now, bit by bit, Eliot’s Pericles finds what is there become just that—what is there, his daughter, and that willingness on his part to see the world for what it is rather than for what he would make it becomes, in his case, his deliverance from the pain of an

“Marina” unbearable existence bereft of love. Love has found him willing to be found, no small miracle for a man beset by cares, distractions, and grief. As the poem continues, Pericles begins to hear children’s laughter, an image that Eliot is fond of using to mimic the presence of absent joys, and Pericles’s memory enlarges to encompass other realities, figured as a ship, a skiff, perhaps, derelict now, that the speaker (here Eliot, an avid amateur sailor well into his young adulthood, may be intruding bits of himself into his speaker’s recollections) comes upon and realizes had once been his own, a thing “[m]ade . . . unknowing,” as any person forges links between himself and as well as between himself and things. These forgotten contacts, all the created things, that make a life unique, although they may have been joined “half conscious, unknown, my own” then, suddenly act as powerful reminders now. (“Familiar compound ghosts” is what the poet will ultimately call them.) As the familiar becomes ever more familiar, from out of these kinds of recognitions dim and faint Eliot manages to illustrate, in Pericles’ coming to himself as he comes to his daughter, the soul itself, the animula, awakening, enlivening, and renewing itself in its quest for life. For that which lives, for “the hope, the new ships.” As the poem closes, and as Pericles apparently is only repeating the bewildered questioning of the opening verses, in fact the repetition of “what” that had earlier echoed the tragic bewilderment of Seneca’s Hercules now takes on the vigor of new enthusiasms for what his eyes behold, all sights colored by the new man he has become, so the repeated “what” signals not questions now but exclamations of great joy and excited interjections. So, too, the “woodthrush calling through the fog” is just that, exactly as the recognition closes, as it must, upon the same natural acceptance that this, too, Marina alive, is what life has to offer: “My daughter,” not dead, but alive. Not there, but here.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Indisputably, “Marina” is a beautiful poem, as fully realized and executed as any in the Eliot canon, perhaps one of Eliot’s few genuine love poems to boot. But how, for all its undeniable lusters,

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it belongs to the Ariel series remains the nagging question. Perhaps by now, however, the answer to that question may be entirely obvious, especially, “Marina”’s linkage with the earlier “Animula.” At the very least, it would be reasonable to imagine now that it is not that Eliot had run out of Christmas themes and so began to rummage among Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays for subjects that might be suitable to the season. Even then, one would be hard-pressed not to make a connection between a father rediscovering a daughter whom he thought to be irrevocably lost with “Animula,” with its use of the Hadrian/Dante trope that the human soul is like a little female child in its relationship to God the Father. Seen in that light, the powerful sentiments of the recognition scene from Pericles provide a dramatic equivalent for Eliot to exploit in his own poem, an equivalent to that sought-for moment in which the Dantean simple soul recaptures its own bearings and recognizes its being in that same joyful creator who had initially sent her, the soul, forth from his hand. Indeed, should the reader recognize in the Pericles/Marina reunion a fair reflection of the same miraculous instant of the soul’s return to its place with God, then one can go a step further, although perhaps to a lower plane of reference as well, to see the father-daughter connection as an equally effective poetic and dramatic way for Eliot to manifest symbolically as well the body-spirit connection that Hadrian coyly plays upon in his famous epitaph. What more powerful reunion, or reintegration of being, can there possibly be for the individual in the theocentric universe that Eliot seems to have posited, after all, than that the father/body embrace the daughter/soul? Thereby only can the former be awakened from its numbingly lethargic resignation—that state of body, mind, and spirit typical of the hollow men, of “Gerontion”’s speaker, of the magus, and of Simeon. In poem after poem, virtually from the time of “Gerontion,” Eliot has proposed that the freight of worldly cares has cast an overwhelmingly immense spiritual and moral lethargy upon the individual in the modern world, who then, Pericles-like, is thus sunken into that same pool of pointless selfpity and vacuous longings, nervous needlings, that

304 “Metaphysical Poets, The” spawn the crowd of the living dead that Eliot’s readers find flowing over London Bridge at the end of “Burial of the Dead,” the opening section of The Waste Land. In “Marina,” Eliot proposes that love is the answer. It would seem too, then, that whether or not he conceived of them in that way to begin with, Eliot’s four Ariel poems as they are gathered in his Collected Poems are a sequence, and a singular one at that, marking the same sort of spiritual commentary that he would attempt to execute at virtually the same time in those units of poetry that would eventually become “Ash-Wednesday.” In the Christian calendar, after all, Christmas is the season of Advent. It is the time of Christ’s coming into the world, but it is also symbolically and literally the time of Christ coming to each individual soul as well. The notion of communion, of the joining together in one spirit of all things, is the conclusion to which Eliot carefully and gracefully moves the poetry that constitute these four Ariel poems, culminating in the reunion of Pericles and Marina that becomes a type for the communion of the body and soul in the one spirit of Christ. Eliot is composing poetry, not Christian apologetics, however. He may be, on examination, writing out of the faith tradition of his own people and ancestors, but he is not pretending to justify those traditions. For that he has prose essays. In his poetry, and in particular in the Ariel poems, he is attempting to demonstrate through language the wide range of the strategies whereby individuals escape the natural conclusions of their own immortal longings all the way to the point where they embrace those same conclusions with joy and thanksgiving. It is in part a tribute to Eliot’s not wanting to color this fascinating exploration of a universal human phenomenon with the trappings of any particular doctrinal assent that he selects, for “Marina,” a far more vital demonstration, not some particular Gospel figure, of whom there would be many, but a wholly fictional characterization of that emotion in action on an entirely earthly but no less impressively enlightening plane. Love’s power to transform the individual, and with him or her the created universe, is the theme of “Ash-Wednesday” as well, owing its place there to DANTE ALIGHIERI once more, this time through

his quasi-autobiographical poem, La vita nuova (The New Life). That love’s power to transform the world and all those who people it is also the heart of the Christmas story is not coincidental, but it is not necessary for a reader to accept it as a corollary in order to appreciate the conclusions of “Marina,” which are the conclusions of the Ariel poems.

“Metaphysical Poets, The” (1921) There are a handful of indisputable influences on Eliot’s early and most formative period as a poet, influences that are corroborated by the poet’s own testimony in contemporaneous letters and subsequent essays on literature and literary works. Foremost among those influences was French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE, from whom Eliot had learned that poetry could be produced out of common emotions and yet uncommon uses of language and tone. A close second would undoubtedly be the worldrenowned Italian Renaissance poet DANTE ALIGHIERI, whose influences on Eliot’s work and poetic vision would grow greater with each passing year. A third influence would necessarily come from among poets writing in Eliot’s own native tongue, English. There, however, he chose not from among his own most immediate precursors, such as Tennyson or Browning, or even his own near contemporaries, such as W. B. YEATS or ARTHUR SYMONS, and certainly not from among American poets, but rather from among poets and minor dramatists of the early 17th century, the group of English writers working in a style and tradition that has subsequently been identified as metaphysical poetry. The word metaphysical is far more likely to be found in philosophical than literary contexts. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophical inquiry and discourse that deals with issues that are, quite literally, beyond the physical (meta- being a Greek prefix for “beyond”). Those issues are, by and large, focused on philosophical questions that are speculative in nature—discussions of things that cannot be weighed or measured or even proved to exist yet that have acquired great importance among

“Metaphysical Poets, The” human cultures. Metaphysics, then, concerns itself with the idea of the divine, of divinity, and of the makeup of what is called reality. That said, it may be fair to suspect that poetry that is metaphysical concerns itself with those kinds of issues and concerns as well. The difficulty is that it both does and does not do that. Thus, the question of what metaphysical poetry does in fact do is what occupies Eliot’s attention in his essay to the point that he formulates out of his considerations a key critical concept that he calls the dissociation of sensibilities.

SYNOPSIS Eliot’s essay on the English metaphysical poets was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement as a review of a just-published selection of their poetry by the scholar Herbert J. C. Grierson titled Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. In a fashion similar to the way in which Eliot launched into his famous criticism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in “Hamlet and His Problems” by using an opportunity to review several new works of criticism on the play as a springboard to impart his own ideas, Eliot commends Grierson’s efforts but devotes the majority of his commentary otherwise to expressing his views on the unique contribution that metaphysical poetry makes to English poetry writing in general and on its continuing value as a literary movement or school. Indeed, as if to underscore his opposition to his own observation that metaphysical poetry has long been a term of either abuse or dismissive derision, Eliot begins by asserting that it is both “extremely difficult” to define the exact sort of poetry that the term denominates and equally hard to identify its practitioners. After pointing out how such matters could as well be categorized under other schools and movements, he quickly settles on a group of poets that he regards as metaphysical poets. These include John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Henry Cowley, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Bishop King, all of them poets, as well as the dramatists Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. As to their most characteristic stylistic trait, one that makes them all worthy of the title metaphysical,

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Eliot singles out what is generally termed the metaphysical conceit or concept, which he defines as “the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.” Eliot knows whereof he speaks. He himself was a poet who could famously compare the evening sky to a patient lying etherized upon an operating room table without skipping a beat, so Eliot’s admiration for this capacity of the mind—or wit, as the metaphysicals themselves would have termed it—to discover the unlikeliest of comparisons and then make them poetically viable should come as no surprise to the reader. Eliot would never deny that, while it is this feature of metaphysical poetry, the far-fetched conceit, that had enabled its practitioners to keep one foot in the world of the pursuits of the flesh, the other in the trials of the spirit, such a poetic technique is not everyone’s cup of tea. The 18th-century English critic Samuel Johnson, for example, found their excesses deplorable and later famously disparaged metaphysical poetic practices in his accusation that in this sort of poetry “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Eliot will not attempt to dispute Johnson’s judgment, though it is clear that he does not agree with it. (Nor should that be any surprise either. Eliot’s own poetic tastes and techniques had already found fertile ground in the vagaries of the French symbolists, who would let no mere disparity bar an otherwise apt poetic comparison.) Rather, Eliot finds that this kind of “telescoping of images and multiplied associations” is “one of the sources of the vitality” of the language to be found in metaphysical poetry, and then he goes as far as to propose that “a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry.” What that means, by and large, is that these poets make combining the disparate the heart of their writing. It is on that count that Eliot makes his own compelling case for the felicities of metaphysical poetry, so much so that he will eventually conclude by mourning its subsequent exile from the mainstream of English poetic practice. It is this matter of the vitality of language that the metaphysical poets achieved that most concerns Eliot, and it is that concern

306 “Metaphysical Poets, The” that will lead him, in the remainder of this short essay, not only to lament the loss of that vitality from subsequent English poetry but to formulate one of his own key critical concepts, the dissociation of sensibility. The “Dissociation of Sensibility” Eliot argues that these poets used a language that was “as a rule pure and simple,” even if they then structured it into sentences that were “sometimes far from simple.” Nevertheless, for Eliot, this is “not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling,” one that brings about a variety of thought and feeling as well as of the music of language. On that score—that metaphysical poetry harmonized these two extremes of poetic expression, thought and feeling, grammar and musicality —Eliot then goes on to ponder whether, rather than something quaint, such poetry did not provide “something permanently valuable, which . . . ought not to have disappeared.” For disappear it did, in Eliot’s view, as the influence of John Milton and John Dryden gained ascendancy, for in their separate hands, “while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.” By way of a sharp contrast, Eliot saw the metaphysical poets, who balanced thought and feeling, as “men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility,” becoming thereby poets who can “feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” Subsequent English poetry has lost that immediacy, Eliot contends, so that by the time of Tennyson and Browning, Eliot’s Victorian precursors, a sentimental age had set in, in which feeling had been given primacy over, rather than balance with, thought. Rather than, like these “metaphysical” poets, trying to find “the verbal equivalents for states of mind and feeling” and then turning them into poetry, these more recent poets address their interests and, in Eliot’s view, then “merely meditate on them poetically.” That is not at all the same thing, nor is the result anywhere near as powerful and moving as poetic statement. While, then, the metaphysical poets of the 17th century “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” Eliot imagines that subsequently a “dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Nor will the common injunction, and typical

anodyne for poor poetry, to “look into our hearts and write,” alone provide the necessary corrective. Instead, Eliot offers examples from the near-contemporary French symbolists as poets who have, like Donne and other earlier English poets of his ilk, “the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.” To achieve as much, Eliot concludes, a poet must look “into a good deal more than the heart.” He continues: “One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The point of this essay is not a matter of whether Eliot’s assessment of the comparative value of the techniques of the English metaphysical poets and the state of contemporary English versification was right or wrong. By and large, Eliot is using these earlier poets, whom the Grierson book is more or less resurrecting, to stake out his own claim in an ageless literary debate regarding representation versus commentary. Should poets show, or should they tell? Clearly, there can be no easy resolution to such a debate. Eliot would be the first to admit, as he would in subsequent essays, that a young poet, such as he was at the time he wrote the review at hand, will most likely condemn those literary practices that he regards to be detrimental to his own development as a poet. Whatever Eliot’s judgments in his review of Grierson’s book on the English metaphysical poets may ultimately reveal, they are reflections more of Eliot’s standards for poetry writing than of standards for poetry writing in general. That said, they should serve as a caution to any reader approaching an Eliot poem, particularly from this period, since he makes it clear that he falls on the side of representation as opposed to commentary and reflection in poetry writing. In addition to its having enabled Eliot to stake out his own literary ground by offering, as it were, a literary manifesto for the times, replete with a memorable critical byword in the coinage dissociation of sensibility, as Eliot’s own prominence as a man of letters increased, this review should finally be credited with having done far more,

“Milton I” and “Milton II” over time, than Grierson’s scholarly effort could ever have achieved in bringing English metaphysical poetry and its 17th-century practitioners back to some measure of respectability and prominence. For that reason alone, this short essay, along with “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems,” has found an enduring place not only in the Eliot canon but among the major critical documents in English of the 20th century.

“Milton I” (1936) and “Milton II” (1947) Though not originally intended that way, Eliot’s two essays, “Milton I” and “Milton II,” are companion pieces. “Milton I” was originally published as Eliot’s contribution to a collection by the English Association titled Essays and Studies, which was published in 1936. “Milton II” was the Henrietta Hertz Lecture delivered before the British Academy and then at New York’s Frick Museum in 1947. Both essays were subsequently collected in On Poetry and Poets in 1957.

SYNOPSIS “Milton I” In his initial essay on Milton, when Eliot finally gets down to cases, it is to complain that “[a]t no point is the visual imagination conspicuous in Milton’s poetry.” For all Eliot’s apparent coldness that the basis for his judgment lies in the fact of Milton’s eventual physical blindness, Eliot makes an effort to emphasize how much his is a critical and not a personal judgment. For Eliot, Milton’s experience was too much entirely from books, his imagination almost wholly aural, so that the blindness only exacerbated but did not in itself contribute to Milton’s writing a poetry virtually devoid of contact with experience as a sensory phenomenon. To render the experience of reality in its complex interrelatedness is “no part of the intention” of Milton’s verse, which renders instead, of “actual speech or thought,” a rhetoric whose sole aim “is determined by the musical significance, by the

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auditory imagination.” It is as if experience were words as sounds, and only words as sounds. The result is not pernicious, but it is “bad in relation to the historical life of the language as a whole.” And that is the danger of Milton’s poetry. Eliot fears that its great prominence on other grounds, the profundity of his theme of Christian redemption not least among them, may have fostered a tendency in the development of English poetry to cut poetic language off from its roots in sensory experience and in the language as it is spoken rather than thought. “Milton II” Eliot takes up essentially the same cudgel in “Milton II” somewhat more than a decade later, but he applies it with less vigor and rigor. In general terms, Eliot’s ways of thinking through those sociocultural questions that influenced and were influenced by literary matters had become less strident. Throughout the early 1940s, in essays that would eventually become his Notes towards the Definition of Culture published in 1948, Eliot was becoming more and more concerned with trying to discern the delicate interplay of developments among a people’s beliefs, their language, and their culture. Still, Milton does not fare well, but he does fare better. In a 1944 essay, “What Is a Classic?,” Milton’s had already been declared not to be “a classic style” but rather the “style of a language still in formation . . . whose masters were . . . Latin and to a lesser degree Greek.” Despite those apparent shortcomings, Eliot is prepared now to concede, in this 1947 essay, that “Milton did much to develop the language,” and that is much more of an encomium that Eliot had been willing to give Milton in 1936. Then, one should recall, Eliot wrote that Milton had “done damage to the English language”—quite a different story. By 1947 and “Milton II,” Eliot had become much more generous in his assessment of Milton’s place in English literature and the development of the English language. Still, Eliot puts himself in the posture of qualifying and defending his previous position rather than radically modifying it. After preliminaries, Eliot gets down to the bone of contention on which he had ended “Milton I”: “. . . the charge that he is an unwholesome influence.” This charge, by the way, Eliot regards as a “positive

308 “Milton I” and “Milton II” objection,” and he goes on to point on how and why it is such. Using Shakespeare as a complementary example, Eliot observes that “Milton made a great epic impossible for succeeding generations,” just as “Shakespeare made a great poetic drama impossible.” That, he says, is an inevitable situation, inasmuch as “[f]or a long time after an epic poet like Milton, of a dramatic poet like Shakespeare, nothing can be done.” That said, Eliot goes on to consider, despite these constraints, wherein Milton’s greatness as a poet lies and, from that, to attempt to adduce how he might best influence poets to come. The problem with Milton was that his style was too eccentric and idiosyncratic to be what Eliot calls a “classic style,” which is any that can set a tone of poetic speaking that others may profitably emulate. Instead of this “elevation of a common style” to the level of great poetry, Milton’s is virtually a language of its own, “a perpetual sequence of original acts of lawlessness,” creating a “poetry at the farthest possible remove from prose.” Thus, the distinctive “greatness” of Milton’s verse is found in the fact that he is “probably the greatest of all eccentrics.” Indeed, it is in this very “remoteness of Milton’s verse from ordinary speech” that his greatness lies. But, while even minor poets can learn from a DANTE ALIGHIERI or Geoffrey Chaucer, Milton’s very uniqueness of idiom creates the ironic situation that “we must perhaps wait for a great poet before we find one who can profit from the study of Milton.” This should not be regarded as damning with faint praise on Eliot’s part; it is his taking that very feature of Milton’s versification that he had earlier found to be problematic and turning it instead into an unparalleled challenge to future poets. Dryden and William Wordsworth, Eliot concludes, had, in their various ways, done English poetic idiom a great service by wresting it away from a diction that had “ceased to have a relation to contemporary speech,” but now Eliot no longer regards it as a disservice that Milton, at an extremely opposite extreme, “when he violates the English language . . . is imitating nobody, and is inimitable.” Nevertheless, Eliot says that he and his kind sought a verse style that “should have the virtues of prose . . . before aspiring to the elevation of

poetry.” Coming from its own far remove, Milton’s poetry “was only a hindrance” to that search. Still, at Eliot’s own remove, there is what he sees to be “the danger of a servitude to colloquial speech and to current jargon.” As a check on a possible drift too far in that direction, whereby poetry and prose run the further risk of becoming indistinguishable, there will always be the model of Milton as a versifier, at which task he was “the greatest master in our language of freedom within form.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY It is clear that these two essays on Milton were not originally meant as companion pieces for the simple reason that “Milton II” is a readjustment, though not a recantation, of the particularly harsh view that Eliot had taken in “Milton I,” which he concludes by saying that Milton had “done damage to the English language from which it has not wholly recovered.” Indeed, as late as 1961, in the lecture “To Criticize the Critic,” as it was subsequently titled in a 1965 collection of the same name, Eliot emphatically denies that “Milton II” was intended as any sort of recantation at all and was, rather, a further “development [of “Milton I”] in view of the fact that there was no longer any likelihood of [Milton’s] being imitated.” Eliot was not afraid to call a spade a spade when expressing, on the basis of taste and other evaluative measures, his assessment of the relative merits of other writers, but especially poets, both ancient and modern. In the case of Milton, the celebrated author of the Christian epic Paradise Lost, itself regarded as one of the greatest singular literary achievements in the language, Eliot takes issue virtually entirely on literary grounds. That tack makes his original negative assessment seem to be more onerous than critical, since here Eliot appears to be flying in the face of a long-established tradition of Milton’s accepted worth. Still, by founding his judgment on grounds of quality rather than ideological agreement or other matters of amicability, Eliot manages to make his dismissal not so much of Milton’s importance as of his benefit to the future development of the language as a literary tool even more damning. Indeed, he makes Milton’s unassailable importance in English letters the very crux of the problem.

Minor Poems Eliot’s friend and fellow poet EZRA POUND perhaps put it best when he called Milton the Chinese Wall of English poetry, clearly implying that a poet of his genius and intensity ruins the language by setting a standard that dwarfs the competition by virtue of the sheer bulk of his achievement. Eliot’s own issue with Milton is more far-reaching and long-ranging and therefore complex, however. He cites the poetry both of Milton and of his near contemporary John Dryden as the primary exemplars of that famous “dissociation of sensibility” that Eliot sees entering English thought and feeling in the 17th century. Because of this shift in the poetry’s capacity to render a vivid relationship between what one thinks and what one feels, the language also loses that elasticity, so the range of thought and feeling that the culture is capable of processing in its private and public activities is duly straitened as well. It is not so much a matter of whether or not Eliot is right. Nevertheless, if Eliot is right, then Milton’s perniciousness extends beyond the realm of purely literary considerations. Milton, in summary, needed to be, and needs to be, assessed in the far more realistic, less idolatrous, and more evenhanded manner that Eliot has been modeling. For it will be only as the result of a measured evaluation of the sources of Milton’s greatness and uniqueness that his influence can become salutary rather than pernicious and restrictive.

Minor Poems (1936) In Collected Poems, 1909–1935, Eliot included a modest sheaf of poems that he chose to identify collectively as minor poems. Whatever else may have prompted him to identify them thus, he clearly did not want them to survive only in the obscurity of the attention of scholars, or why include them in his permanent corpus? By the same token, making them an official part of his corpus, even if only marginally so, requires them to find some secure place in the Eliot canon that must otherwise be wholly speculative. Eliot’s aim for including them at all, in other words, must forever elude even the most scrupulous

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of scholars, and yet they cannot, like the French verses that he composed during an earlier “dry” period, be happily or easily excluded, since there in the author’s own selection of what he hoped would be preserved of his work they forever sit.

PUBLICATION HISTORY The poems in question have both a varied publication history and no particular or readily noticeable commonalities, at least as a total grouping, accounting for Eliot’s gathering them together in such blandly nondescript terms, condemning them for all time as minor poems. The first two, “Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears” and “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock,” first appeared in the autumn of 1924 in the Chapbook, along with “This Is the Dead Land,” under the general heading “Doris’s Dream Song.” “The Wind,” meanwhile, had earlier appeared in somewhat different form as “Song to the Opherian,” under the pseudonym “Gus Krutzsch,” in Wyndham Lewis’s Tyro in 1922. “Eyes” shares some affinities with “Song” as well. More significantly, the third named of these so-called “dream songs” ended up as part III of one of Eliot’s most celebrated poems, “The Hollow Men,” making the first two even more notable for having been rejected for inclusion in that much more substantial sequence. “Doris,” meanwhile, clearly harks back to “Sweeney Erect” as well as laterally, as it were, to “Sweeney Agonistes,” the failed verse drama that Eliot was also working on by 1924. “Eyes” and “The Wind” share, then, the singular distinction of having been twice deemed unworthy of inclusion in more major undertakings. Such a tangled pedigree for both no doubt betrays mixed or confused intentions on Eliot’s part, and that ambiguity of purpose seems to infect “Five-Finger Exercises” as well. First published in the Criterion in January 1933, while Eliot was lecturing in America, they appear to be related by the fact that the five parts share, in their respective titles, the tag “Lines to . . . ,” but on that coyly and mock pretentious note—“Lines to a Duck in the Park”!—all resemblances apparently end. Finally, “Landscapes” may seem, too, at first glance to be an organized whole, but it is one whose symmetry, upon consideration, is more a matter of

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afterthought than intentional construction. Of the five, “New Hampshire,” “Virginia,” and “Cape Ann” all have a common heritage, inasmuch as they were composed in 1932, during which time Eliot was back in the United States for the first time in more than 15 years. He visited in New Hampshire with his brother, Henry; very likely paid at least a visit to, and certainly would have been frequently put in mind of, Massachusetts’s Cape Ann, where his family had had a summer home on Gloucester’s Eastern Point; and spent some time in Virginia, where he delivered a series of lectures at the university there that would eventually emerge as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresies. So it makes a certain sort of logically discernible sense to group these three poems together, although how precisely each is a landscape is not readily apparent, each seeming to be more an impressionistic response to one’s presence at the site in question than a description of it. Nor does any of that sort of musing explain the far less impressionistic and more verbally depictive “Usk” and “Rannoch, by Glencoe,” which intervene between the second and third of the American “landscapes.” Those two poems were composed in 1934 and have for their locales areas in Wales and Scotland instead. Indeed, by calling up images of ancient strife (there was a massacre involving the MacDonalds by Glencoe in 1692) and sites enchanted by spells, ancient magic, and profound belief, the two seem to have more in common with each other than with the other three. Finally, there is “Lines for an Old Man,” also from 1934, whose title makes it seem as if it has gone astray from “Five-Finger Exercises,” yet which shares none of those poems’ apparent whimsy.

SYNOPSIS Once Eliot’s principles and practices of composition are established, it may be possible to view these socalled minor poems in a context that, while it may not quite reveal Eliot’s intentions for including and grouping them as he did, nevertheless should allow one to benefit from what the selection and arrangement tells of what Eliot has done, can do, and will be doing. In the first category are those poems that, if they have anything in common, it is an aspect, from

the point of view of 1935 at least, the year the collection was assembled, of looking back toward a poetry and tone that Eliot was no longer composing or composing in. This category would include “Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears” and “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock,” emerging as they do from the period and poetic vision that produced the lugubrious poetry of “The Hollow Men,” to cite just one spectacular example. This category would also include several of the poems gathered under the general heading “Landscapes,” specifically, “Usk” and “Rannoch, by Glencoe,” as well as “Lines to an Old Man.” Despite their being among the latest composed, these latter three poems all intimate a violence, be it physical or emotional or perhaps even spiritual, that has been done or is about to be done, and hint unrelentingly, too, at betrayals and discomforting possibilities, the tragic consequences of nameless acts as well as of inaction. Even in their sentiment there is something vaguely threatening—threatening because vague. The eyes “hold us in derision.” “The Wind” offers a “face that sweats with tears,” and it ends with an image of barbarian horsemen who “shake their spears.” “Usk,” meanwhile, speaks of stealth and a lance, and “Rannoch, by Glencoe” of “broken steel” and pride that has “snapped,” whereas the “tiger in the tiger-pit” of “Lines for an Old Man,” whom commentators presume to be the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, may remind one of “Christ the tiger” of “Gerontion” fame or of the three white leopards and the singing bones of part II of “Ash-Wednesday.” The point is, no matter how the imagery in these five poems may strike the reader, they seem to be artfully intended not to sit well. “Five-Finger Exercises,” with the gay abandon of their language, rhythms, and conceits, offer a startling contrast, meanwhile, or do they? Beneath the surface of their nearly nonsensical whimsy is a cruelly evocative violence as well. “Lines to a Persian Cat,” with its echo of Keats’s nightingale ode in its allusions to “songsters of the air” and “the dull brain,” leaves unspoken but clearly implied what it is that cats are liable to do to birds, and that it is nothing pretty. This poem’s other echoes, parodic though they may

Minor Poems be, of Eliot’s own earlier musings in a line like, “When will the broken chair give ease,” are amplified in the next poem in the sequence, “Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier,” with its ludicrous image of a small dog cowering in a landscape worthy of The Waste Land. A field is “cramped and brown,” a tree “cramped and dry,” under a “black sky,” and the poem ends with its own species of graveyard humor by further parodying Shakespeare’s touching lines on what becomes of golden lads and golden lasses. In Eliot’s world, even undertakers “come to dust.” The whole idea of a five-finger exercise, of course, comes from the frequent but tedious practice that keeps the concert pianist’s fingers perfectly nimble. These poems, Eliot is suggesting, are his way of keeping on top of his form, but if so, it is a form that he had virtually abandoned with the quatrains, wherein the absurdly comical and the deadly sinister mingled with such abandon that readers to this day are perpetually flummoxed in trying to discern Eliot’s intentions. A few years hence, in 1939, he finally would purge himself for good, or perhaps merely outgrow, his need to be ludicrous from time to time. He then published the delightful collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, wherein words make sense for no more than a moment at a time. For now, however, the “Five-Finger Exercises” less look forward to Old Possum’s Book than they hark back to the quatrains of 1917–18. “Lines to a Duck in the Park” may bring to mind “The Hippopotamus” in the manner in which both evoke religious mysteries—“Bread and Wine”—in the most unsuspecting way, and then Eliot ends with an atrocious pun on Andrew Marvell’s famous chastisement of his coy mistress’s chastity. Exercises IV and V end the erstwhile sequence by forming an equally coy pairing, one apparently in honor of fellow contemporary poet Ralph Hodgson, the other—surely the most famous of the exercises—self-deprecatingly painting a self-portrait, or at least a sketch, of Eliot’s perceived public persona. Even here, however, there is a subtext. Hodgson, though a personal friend of Eliot’s, was one of the leading practitioners among the Old School poets of his time, the Georgians. By making everyone “want to meet him,” there is the implication that, intentionally or not, such poetry panders to public taste. These poets permit the public to equate

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light verse with serious poetry, thus fostering the sort of undue demands that market forces make on the efforts of poets like Eliot, less popular and less understood, to improve and maintain the art of poetry writing. “How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot,” indeed, when the reading public has poets like Hogdson to flock to. Thus far, then, the minor poems provide a compendium of styles and of issues that had engaged Eliot’s energies and interests for quite some time. “Landscapes,” at their best, were for Eliot the way of his future. No other poetry that he had written thus far comes near them, with the possible exception of “Marina,” another poem in which the details in the physical environment around the speaker become objective correlatives for his transformative vision. Very soon, however, in the poems “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding,” each of them inspired by and infused with the influences of a particular locale, a landscape, Eliot would compose his masterwork, the Four Quartets. Eliot had always been something of a landscape poet, but not in conventional ways. Although there was little of the bucolic in his poems, what else are “Morning at the Window,” “Preludes,” and “Rhapsody on Windy Night” than urban landscapes, for which Eliot had an unerring eye? Some of the most powerful moments in “Prufrock” come when the speaker is describing the urban setting where Prufrock’s story unfolds, nor would anyone doubt that many of the most memorable lines in The Waste Land occur when Eliot describes the banks of the Thames River after a nighttime’s fruitless carousings. To see inner landscapes in outside details, to capture the very essence of otherwise inchoate feelings and memories in the way that the sunlight fills an empty pool, to catch in the songs of birds or laughter of children the aching longing for peace and understanding and contentment—it is toward a poetry of this kind and away from the bitter abstractions of “Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears” or “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock” that Eliot is moving. Away, too, from the empty cleverness of “Five-Finger Exercises.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Although they were never intended as a unified whole, the 13 brief poems included as “minor poems” have some common features when they are

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viewed collectively. It is not from the point of view of theme or even of style, but of the lessons that the poems offer regarding Eliot’s scattered aims and efforts as a poet during the relative dry period following the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Seen as compositions that are not so much failed as displaced, these minor poems can then be separated into three different categories. They are either a part of the purging of the existential despair that had permeated Eliot’s poetry writing more and more, culminating in The Waste Land, or a taming of the opposing, frivolous side of his nature as a poet, his sort of manic depressiveness. Best of all, they may be a tentative but sure reaching into new zones of interest and expression wherein abstract qualities of thought and feeling could be profitably invested in the immediacy of lived experience, as will shortly occur to great effect in “Burnt Norton,” the beginning of his mature masterpiece, the Four Quartets. The representation in minor poems of a variety of not otherwise noteworthy efforts that go back as early as 1922 and that are as recent as 1934 says much regarding the difficulties that Eliot was having with achieving a sustained compositional effort at this time while, paradoxically, pointing toward his eventually successful resolution of these same conflicts. What they share most notably is that they are all unmistakably Eliot, utilizing little in the way of allusion unless it be to comic effect—the allusion to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the “Baskerville Hound” of “Lines to Ralph Hogdson Esqre.,” for example, or the opaque allusion in “The Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock” to “Tartar horsemen,” unless it be an allusion to another of “death’s other kingdom,” Tartarus. These poems are each, too, outstanding examples of a technique that he utilized consistently throughout his career. One of the most notable features all along of Eliot’s poetic technique that made it so markedly different from the kinds of poetry that had preceded it and that, as a result, made it “modern,” is that he seldom if ever wrote poems that had discernible beginnings, middles, and ends. While his sequencing of the various parts and patterns that typically make for form in poetry—alliterative series, image clusters, juxtaposition of verses, stanzas, and stanza breaks, and so

forth—might make perfect sense when viewed after the fact, there is often no compelling logical reason why one part should precede or succeed another. This is not to say that Eliot did not compose with some particular order of detail in mind, but that order is never immediately apparent and often may appear to have been intentionally obscured. With an older kind of poetry, on the other hand, such as William Wordsworth’s “Line Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” or John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” for all the difficulty that there may be in deriving meaning from statement, these poems follow a logical ordering of details and events from which the poet and his reader are led to a certain series of observations and conclusions that build, logically again, upon each other. By sharp contrast, there is nothing particularly compelling about the ordering of details in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example, or, except for its counting out the hours, his “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” or even one of the quatrains, such as “Sweeney among the Nightngales.” The Waste Land is also notorious for its unceasing parade of apparent non sequiturs, wherein often one line of verse does not logically succeed another, let alone whole stanzas or complete parts, in either thought or feeling or tone, let alone “meaning.” As for tone itself, Eliot had become equally notorious for mixing them without warning. A line could sound deadly serious in its opening, yet be wholly whimsical if not frivolous by its termination, and vice versa. This constant undercutting of overstatements surely, then, is another hallmark of Eliot’s poetry up to, and including, The Waste Land. Such a method not only of composition but of presentation allowed Eliot, particularly as he moved into his mid-career following the publication of The Waste Land, to compose poems—by which would here be meant the sequencing of short lyrics into loosely related wholes—in a piecemeal fashion, so piecemeal, in fact, that he may not have been composing the longer sequences at all but rather perhaps discovering or inventing these sequences, as it were, upon the completion of individual pieces that may have had no more in common to begin with than a like-minded tone or reflection of his own state of mind as it arranged impressions into poetry,

“Morning at the Window” poetry into poems. What had in the earlier phases of his career been something of a strength, even going as far as to give Eliot’s poetry that hallmark of a distinctive obscurity of intention that quickly came to embody modernism, however, may have become, following the success of The Waste Land and the attendant celebrity of this technique, a serious weakness, preventing him from seeing a project through to a conclusion for the simple reason that there may not have been a project to begin with. This is hardly demeaning to Eliot’s skills as a creative artist, only a description of them, and it is a way, too, of further introducing these so-called minor poems of his. Eliot was always one to put the piece of one poem inside another, or find a home for a discarded passage in a new package. Examples abound, but here are two especially egregious ones. One of the most critical passages in The Waste Land, “Death by Water,” is virtually a direct translation from the French of his own poem, “Dans le restaurant,” composed some four years earlier. The entire Four Quartets, meanwhile, seems to have sprung from his desire to find a home for lines discarded from Murder in the Cathedral. He would eventually find a place for them in the opening passage of what would subsequently become “Burnt Norton,” the first of the quartets. From as early as 1921 or 1922, then, to 1935, when he compiled the poetry, including these minor poems, included in Collected Poems 1909– 1935, Eliot seem to have been incapable of completing a coherent piece of work organized from start to finish. “Sweeney Agonistes” and “Coriolan” are self-admittedly preserved as “unfinished.” Other poetry from this same period was individually commissioned—the Ariel poems, for example—or poems were cobbled together from poetry displaced from other works or individually composed and then sequenced. This latter mode of “composition,” such as it is, resulted in two of the best-known works in the Eliot canon, nevertheless: “The Hollow Men” (1925) and “Ash-Wednesday” (1930). But this kind of haphazard creative activity also meant that there would be a lot of loose ends that had nevertheless served some order of worthwhile purpose. The “minor” poems found no particularly impressive home, but they enabled the poet to get

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his bearings better, as well as to exorcise the no longer compelling demons of past performances that would prevent him from “moving on.” By way of summary, success may have come too easily for Eliot. Surely, after the incredible success of The Waste Land, which made his name virtually synonymous with literary modernism, he may have became fearful that he would be remembered only as a clever plagiarist who knew how to weave other poets’ lines into complex pastisches. And yet the next major poem, a work as ambitious as The Waste Land, eluded him throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s. He became, as it were, a poet weaving complex pastisches out of his own shorter poems, achieving such works as “The Hollow Men” not quite by chance, perhaps, but neither by sheer dint of a preconceived effort either. Not to make anything more out of them than the poet himself did, the fact remains that the “minor poems” provide a pivotal representation of where Eliot had been and of where he was hoping to go. In them, readers can hear the last of Eliot, the sagaciously bitter wit and moralist, and the first of Eliot, the child of the Earth, listening for the sounds of a more permanent meaning in the wind and the sea and in bird calls and children’s laughter.

“Morning at the Window” (1916) First composed in September 1914, although it was not initially published until September 1916 in the same issue of Poetry magazine that contained “Conversation Galante,” “Morning at the Window” is vintage early Eliot. However, unlike “Conversation,” along with which it was subsequently collected in 1917 in Eliot’s first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, “Morning” is not written in the mordantly witty style of the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE, under whose considerable influence Eliot composed throughout most of the first decade of his poetic career, from 1909 to 1919. Rather, with its relatively oblique view of urban life in a crowded, modern metropolis, “Morning” partakes far more of the tone and style of another

314 “Morning at the Window” powerful early influence on the poet, the fellow but far more renowned French symbolist poet CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, whose bitter city landscapes invariably lacked the saving grace of a self-deprecating Laforguean wit.

SYNOPSIS If anything, the tone of “Morning” is one of selfdegradation on the speaker’s part, as he seems to confess to an intense but nevertheless ambiguous interest in the presumably young working-class women who prepare the morning breakfasts in the basements of the houses of the wealthy who inhabit the speaker’s world. Indeed, the reader is set up in fairly typical Eliot fashion by a title that suggests anything but the morally and physically murky scene that ensues. The idea of a “morning at the window” will no doubt call up any number and variety of images in a reader’s mind, but few contemporary readers of the poem would have been prepared for the dark and threatening scenario that gradually develops. It is, of course, the ambiguity of both motive and expectation on the speaker’s part that makes this short poem peculiarly Eliot rather than the product of a poet like Baudelaire. After the initial auditory effect of the sounds of “rattling breakfast plates,” a touch in keeping with whatever pleasant associations the poem’s title may have called up, the poetry rapidly sinks into a series of images that smack of the squalid if not the sordid. These are “basement kitchens,” a not uncommon phenomenon, to be sure, in the brownstone mansions occupied by the wealthy, wherein the service personnel and facilities such as the laundry, kitchen, and furnace would have been housed below street level, but from them eventually emerge “the damp souls of housemaids.” (Perhaps this occurs at first only in the speaker’s imagination, since he will shortly be seen to be observing the street from a perch well above street level.) That the housemaids’ souls are “damp” suggests, of course, the heat and sweat in which they labor, fixing the food, cleaning the dishes, washing the laundry, and so forth. Still, it is an odd way to describe a soul, and these creatures are seen to be not only inhabiting the “trampled edges of the street” but “[s]prouting despondently at area gates,” like so

much other dirt and mold and mildew, perhaps, or perhaps like wildflowers ready for the plucking. The reader, aware of this choice or not, is forced to wonder what the speaker makes of these somewhat sorry spectacles, since his description of them as if they are refuse colors the reader’s own response. But the speaker does not otherwise tell the reader what he, the speaker, thinks or feels about the sight of such souls, only that he is “aware” of them. Never has the word aware carried such an ominous foreboding, however, as if it is what the speaker is not telling that really matters. That technique is itself a large part of the methodology that Eliot had been developing under the tutelage of his French symbolist models. In good Eliot fashion, no matter what the reader may end up thinking and feeling, the speaker has the reserve of suggestive silence into which to withdraw his own moral engagement with the events or sights that somehow nevertheless inspire his words. In any case, in the second, final stanza, the reader is left to struggle with and make sense of the implications of the series of images that ensue and that become less and less pleasant and more and more ominous as they do. It becomes amply clear that the speaker’s vantage point is above the social fracas that he is witnessing, a superior posture that was only suggested in the first stanza by the speaker’s supercilious and detached tone. The housemaids’ “twisted faces,” hardly a complimentary description, are tossed up to him by the “brown waves of fog” emanating from the “bottom of the street,” the level of existence that they are compelled to traverse. The impression is given that the speaker may be glancing down at them from the relative comfort and security of a front parlor, that he is gazing at them with all the rapt attention of a biologist studying the behavior of a lower order of being, who are compelled to breathe in the foul air from which he, at his higher station, is immune. Thus, when that “aimless smile” is sent his way, perhaps, by a passer-by with “muddy skirts,” it can easily vanish “along the levels of the roof” only if the speaker himself raises his eyes from such a chance encounter to make it clear to her, should she catch his downward, clinical gaze, that she should not think that she is where his interests

“Morning at the Window” lie. If, that is to say, he now must look up to the roofline across the way, it is in order to look away, because he does not want to appear to have been touched by anything as human as an aimless smile coming from one of these poor creatures, who can only then remain in his eyes the curious specimens that they seem to him to be.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The poem presents a critique of a whole culture that is undergoing a serious disconnect, represented by Eliot from the perspective not of himself but of an intellect that has been corroded into an unfeeling hardness by the wearing down of what might be called, for lack of a better term, the moral sentiment. Not only would it be as wrongheaded to imagine that the anonymous speaker of “Morning at the Window” is Eliot as to imagine that Prufrock or the speaker of “Portrait of a Lady” is, but it would also be as unlikely an angle from which to approach the poem as any that could be adopted. Eliot’s interest in giving a fictive slant to the lyric mode, whereby he might dramatize not himself personally but a particular kind of person, is most notable in this poem. Though written several years after, “Morning at the Window” seems to take up where his “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and the “Preludes,” those other early bleak urban excursions, had left off, right down to the twisted faces. (There are four instances of twisting in “Rhapsody.”) What he may be after in this kind of poetry, so different because of its unsettling darkness from the poetry of the dandified wit and eloquent bravado in which he also excelled at this time, is the exposé, through a type characterizing its values, of a culture on the brink of a serious breakdown—but keeping that fact a secret even from itself. There is no hope left in the world that “Morning at the Window” portrays because there is no belief, only dead eyes staring in fixed abandoned at an urban landscape that contains no meaning for the possessor of those eyes, his speaker. As a point of contrast, at least the speaker in “The Boston Evening Transcript,” another erstwhile urban poem from the same general period and locale, presumably Boston, finds some perverse pleasure in the empty ritual of bringing his Cousin

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Harriet, who seems to be as dead to externals as he is, the evening paper. Empty ritual though it may be, it at least connects and, so, provides continuity. There is no connection, however, in “Morning at the Window” among the speaker, the morning, the brown fog, and the housemaid’s aimless smile except that they all happen to be present on the same surreal canvas. When those details part, they vanish into the empty space above the meaningless city. This vision of the modern city and, with it, its multifaceted human community at a critical crossroads whose twists and breakneck turns it might yet not survive would be ultimately most fully essayed in The Waste Land in 1922. Eliot’s more pointed criticism of the coming catastrophe and its causes, however, would eventually emerge only in the controversial prose of After Strange Gods, a work wherein he attempts to tackle headfirst the agony of a culture that has lost its way amidst the absence of a literature that might help it find it again. For many reasons, After Strange Gods, which may seem preachy and even bigoted to some, is not for every intellectual palate. It harbors some severely narrow class hatreds that Eliot was usually able to keep under wraps. But this somewhat bitter analysis of traditions that are giving way to “new thinking” merely for the sake of change should be read with the spirit of the poet of “Morning at the Window,” this son of the AngloAmerican experience, in mind. Seeing Eliot’s as an experience that is, after all, as valid and unique a human experience as is any other, then some of the apparent prejudices and biases that that later Eliot prose text seems to revel in will be revealed for the bitter social analysis that they are intended to be. One must describe the crime in order to indict the culprit, but in order to describe the crime, one may also run the risk of appearing to endorse the motives that compel it. Eliot’s ultimate aim is to admit that here we are all victims, and an early poem such as “Morning at the Window” illustrates that fact in vivid terms to the reader who can see the speaker as much as hear him. What that reader will then see is a person more to be pitied than the pitiable humanity that he thinks he sees flooding the streets of his city, for he has come to the point where he fails to see himself in the crowd.

316 “Mr. Apollinax” Isolated by wealth and class and privilege from the rest of humanity, the speaker of the poem is tragic because he has come to regard his isolation as an earned benefit rather than as a self-inflicted curse. His tragedy is compounded because he fails to have the slightest inkling that it is transpiring.

“Mr. Apollinax” (1916) First published in Poetry magazine in September 1916 and subsequently collected in Eliot’s first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, this delightful but otherwise minor poem of Eliot’s emerges from that period between the bold experimentation with form and theme of his earliest poetry and the more advanced sobriety and maturity that would characterize his poetic output during much of the 1920s, beginning with the publication of “Gerontion” in 1919.

SYNOPSIS In his 1950 essay “What Dante Means to Me,” citing the influence of CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, Eliot noted that one of the gifts that the French symbolists gave him was the poetical possibility afforded by a juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact with the fantastic, a rule of composition that could as easily be applied to the so-called doubling methods of Laforgue as well. It is the method of composition that Eliot employs to such great and reasonably uncluttered effect in “Mr. Apollinax.” Someone wanting to study that poetic technique of Eliot’s in isolation would do well to begin and end here. The poem’s comparative clarity of purpose makes reading it line by line much like discovering a sketch in which an artist has blocked out all the elements for a projected painting but has not yet complicated them into a finished composition, where the transparent blocking would disappear into a whole effect, as it necessarily must. In “Mr. Apollinax,” in other words, the ways in which Eliot achieves the otherwise befuddling effects for which he was famed are exposed very near to the surface because the finished poem is itself little more than a highly polished surface exercise.

One of the first features of the poem is its title, which is simultaneously familiar and put-offish, yet in neither case to the achievement of any demonstrable “poetic” result. Of course, to be unpoetic in the very process of writing poetry was one of the primary aims of the modernist movement in literature, and Eliot’s own poetry had from the first been received as a leading example in this regard. To begin with, the Mr. Apollinax of the title is an immediate problem for the reader who wishes to encounter some reference or tag that is immediately familiar and recognizable in a poem’s title. Even J. Alfred Prufrock, the title character and speaker from what would have been, at the time that Eliot was composing “Mr. Apollinax,” his most celebrated work to date, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is introduced to the reader as someone who has at least a popular genre, the love song, connected to his name. Instead, there stands Mr. Apollinax, hardly a common-sounding name, but nevertheless naked and bare, with little more covering than the formal mode of address, “Mr.” Arguably, both Prufrock and Apollinax might seem to be unlikely names for the subjects of a poetic treatment at first glance, but there is still both virtually and literally a world of difference between the effect of the one name and the effect of the other. That is to say, the American experience may be multicultural, but it is still to this time an English-language experience, and that was especially so in Eliot’s time. In that context, J. Alfred Prufrock, while it may not be a name that an English-speaking reader of the period would have been used to coming across in the context of poetry, nevertheless has the ring of fairly familiar things and associations—an upper-class gentleman, perhaps, the moneyed rich, a captain of industry. The name, in other words, calls less attention to itself and more to its power to evoke certain values and lifestyles. Mr. Apollinax, on the other hand, the formality of the form of address aside, sounds foreign to an ear familiar with Englishlanguage sounds, suggestive, perhaps, of Apollo and so of Greece and its environs. These kinds of associations need not work directly on the reader; indeed, the more they act subliminally, the more they achieve the modern poet’s aim, which is to keep readers off their game in order to surprise

“Mr. Apollinax” them rather than inundate them with “meaning.” Surely, then, this process of moderate disorientation is continued into the epigraph, which is attributed to Lucian, the second century A.D. Greek rhetorician and satirist; the epigraph is presented in the original Greek, characters and all. Eliot frequently used epigraphs, often entirely unattributed, from Greek and Latin, as well as, in the case of “Prufrock,” Italian, but in this particular case, recalling WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s famous turn that the incomprehensibly alien Greek to an English speaker, the Greekness of Apollinax is subtly reenforced. Indeed, that seems to be the epigraph’s only function otherwise. Whereas an Eliot epigraph, once its source is revealed, usually provides an ironic counterpoint or comments in some especially revealing way on the poem to come, in this case Lucian’s words, which, translated, read, “What a novelty, Hercules, what a wonder! Man is an ingenious and wily creature,” do little more than provide a preview of all the outlandishly ingenious ways in which the speaker will go on to present this mysteriously exotic Mr. Apollinax to the reader in the poem. That initial suspicion that this Mr. Apollinax, meanwhile, is no ordinary man and may in fact be a foreign personage as well is fulfilled in the opening line, telling the reader of the time that Mr. Apollinax came to the United States, which quietly confirms the associations with foreignness that have been insinuated into the reader’s reactions to begin with. The reader should notice how careful Eliot is being to set just the right tone and to make the tone a meaningful component of the poetry. Had he not used “Mr.” and had he said “America” instead of “United States,” the variety of associations for the typical English-speaking reader would have been quite different, suggesting instead, perhaps, an immigrant from southern Europe having just arrived here in search of a fabled “better life,” a common enough occurrence during the period that the poem was composed. By saying “Mr. Apollinax” and having him come not to America but to the United States, however, Eliot establishes the distinct impression that Mr. Apollinax is a celebrity of some sort, the epigraph from Lucian further suggesting—all of this subliminally—that his celebrity is of a literary or academic nature.

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From this point on, the poetry quickly clarifies its intentions by moving rapidly into the realm of the satirical. First, however, the reader should consider the idea that has been proposed but not too convincingly supported otherwise by some later commentators that Mr. Apollinax is meant to be the brilliant British analytical philosopher BERTRAND RUSSELL. Eliot did take a postgraduate seminar under Russell at Harvard in 1914, while Russell was a visiting professor honored at at least one academic tea that Eliot attended, and Eliot and Russell did become complicatedly involved with each other largely as a result of their equally complicated relationship with Eliot’s first wife, Vivien. Such a suggestion, then, may ground the poem more satisfactorily for some readers, by giving it a vaguely autobiographical twist, but otherwise the suggestion lends nothing in particular to an understanding of the poetry that follows, which is by and large a self-sustained exercise in poetic license. The clues that the reader is primarily caught up in the realm not of the biographical but of the purely satirical are not too difficult to come by or discern. For one thing, and this particular feature is very unusual in any Eliot poem from virtually any period in his long poetic career, the abrupt matter-of-factness of the opening line makes it appear that the reader is being addressed in rather confidential terms, as if the whole of the poem is an anecdote that the speaker is now about to share with no one other than the reader. Being drawn into the speaker’s confidence in this manner, the reader also becomes a conspirator, privy, as it were, to “inside” information regarding the presumptively “famous” Mr. Apollinax. Furthermore, whoever he may be, the first detail of Apollinax’s visit that is called to the reader’s attention is how boisterously infectious his laughter was, at least from the speaker’s point of view, and the further detail regarding teacups makes it equally as rapidly apparent that, during his visit, Mr. Apollinax moved only in the best circles of society. To this day, a tea is an exceptionally formal affair. Indeed, as the poem continues, it would seem that Apollinax’s laughter and name-dropping are the only things that are of any concern to the speaker regarding Apollinax’s otherwise fabulous

318 “Mr. Apollinax” visit to our shores. Among a variety of ambiguous allusions to such a mythological creature as Priapus, the Roman god of the phallus, and to a famous syrupy-sweet French rococo painting by JeanHonoré Fragonard (1732–1806) called The Swing, the speaker paints, as it were, his own picture of delighted company and appropriately surreptitious peeping Toms, the sort of behavior the visit of a man of Mr. Apollinax’s charm and celebrity would be expected to bring about. The use, meanwhile, of such unlikely names as “Mrs. Phlaccus,” with its undergraduate-humor magazine connotations of flatus and phallus, and the incongruous conjunction of “Professor Channing-Cheetah” support the notion that the tone of the entire poem is satirical, although precisely what is being satirized is left equally ambiguous. It could be academic social gatherings or visiting academic celebrities or both, or more, including even someone with the sensibilities of the speaker, who reveals his own shallow values (though wide reading and exposure to art) by reacting to such a supposedly momentous event as Mr. Apollinax’s visit with nothing more than his own sophomoric humor. In summary, no one and nothing is spared the speaker’s barbs, but to what end is never really explained. Not that it should be, but satire, to be effective, is supposed to provide not only a definite target but a positive alternative. As the poem continues, the speaker’s view of Mr. Apollinax becomes increasingly mixed with metaphors and allusions that take the reader hither and yon but ultimately to no place in particular. His laughter is first summed up as that of “an irresponsible foetus” and then becomes “submarine,” a not unlikely association if one thinks of the fetus in its amniotic sac within the womb. But then Mr. Apollinax is transmuted, by association perhaps again, into another Greek as a mythic allusion to Proteus, the shape-changing “old man of the sea,” intervenes, bringing with it not more laughter but images of the “worried bodies of drowned men.” And Proteuslike Mr. Apollinax remains, shifting his form this way and that as the poetry continues to drift on a sea of fun-loving nonsense. Rather like a character from Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, he grins over a screen after his head has rolled under a

chair. The laughter gone now, his “dry and passionate talk”—contradictions in terms there—sounds like centaur’s hooves, another classical allusion, as his conversation literally “devours” the afternoon, recalling the rather carnivorous association of Professor and Mrs. Channing-Cheetah’s surname. Perhaps the reader is being encouraged to imagine that the speaker had attended the formal reception under the influence of recreational drugs in order to survive the boredom. Whatever, the poem concludes by summarizing the typical sort of postmortem comments that invariably ensue once the notable and noteworthy guest has departed. By the time they are through with him, the host and hostess and the other guests have all apparently concluded that Mr. Apollinax, whatever his particular claim to fame that had brought him to these shores to begin with, was not all that he had been cracked up to be. But as a surrogate for the now-maligned celebrity, the speaker has the last laugh by suggesting that they, both hosts and guests, were then even less than that. Indeed, all that the speaker claims to remember of the rest of them, on the tail of all the rich even if confusing associations that Mr. Apollinax and his visit and conversation had brought to his mind, are a few details as ludicrous as their names—“a slice of lemon and a bitten macaroon.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY While the reader would be wrong to make too much of “Mr. Apollinax,” it would be equally as wrongheaded, on the other hand, to dismiss it as nothing more than a bit of witty fluff. In writing “Mr. Apollinax,” Eliot was still a young, new literary talent trying to gauge the range of poetic daring rather than the depths of poetic feeling. As such, the poetry teases the reader in a manner typical of Eliot at the time, still under the influence of the French symbolist JULES LAFORGUE. Such poetry of his virtually defined early modernism, filled with its promises of rewards for efforts at understanding that do not materialize, of meanings that do not finally cohere, and of intentions that are not quite ever fulfilled, perhaps because they are never really either initiated or realized by the poet, who may ultimately be more interested in technique than in statement. Perhaps for all those reasons, “Mr. Apollinax” can provide the attentive reader nevertheless with

“Mr. Apollinax” an excellent case study in the distances that Eliot could create between the text and the context. Any reader of a typical Eliot poem, particularly from this period in his career, during which much of his creative endeavor was being expended in composing the sometimes delightfully witty and clever but always opaque quatrain poems, knows how much he can strum the tensions between what the poetry on the page seems to be saying and what the poetry may be proved to be saying as one moves beyond the text into the possibilities for meaning suggested by sources, allusions, and so forth. “Mr. Apollinax” is no exception to that rule and may be, as has been already noted, an excellent case study in demonstrating how those tensions, even when they may seem to be in conflict, can often be found instead to create new and unexpected harmonies rather than disjoin them. The most genuine fruits of that kind of virtuoso technique eventually emerged in Eliot’s first genuine literary masterpiece, The Waste Land, in 1922, but in “Mr. Apollinax,” as in the quatrain poems to come, a comparison between the sort of meaning that can be elicited from the poem’s surface detail and what further meanings can be deduced from the contexts indicated by biographical data and allusions may not necessarily enrich the experience of the poetry, but neither will it frustrate the reader desiring to come into possession of the modernist poetic grail—a single, acceptable reading of the poem. What results from exercising such an approach is a recognition of why this early poem has garnered much critical attention through the years yet remains a minor achievement for the simple reason that the poet himself seems to go out of his way to assure his reader that nothing significant is at stake. Following the lead of such writers as Baudelaire and Laforgue, Eliot’s first aim in virtually any poem from this period is to avoid sounding anything like what readers had come to expect poetry to sound like. Influenced largely by the stately formalism and ornate diction of 18th- and 19th-century poetry, and colored by the powerful sentimentality introduced into serious poetry by the English romantics of a century earlier, the typical poetry of Eliot’s time would not have sounded to the untrained ear much different in form and

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tone from those earlier models. The trained ear would have discerned definite differences among a Poe and a Longfellow, a Tennyson and a Browning, but the range of those differences would have been predetermined by what were regarded as the fixed rules of English prosody that had been in place virtually from the time of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney in the late 16th century. There were some experimenters and innovators, the American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson primary examples among them, whose foremost aim was to extend that range, but they either were not widely read or were regarded as so independent in their innovations as to be separate cases unworthy of imitation. While these experiments in vers libre, or free verse, may now be regarded as precursors of modernism, it was not in fact these American poets or even another stylistic innovator, the English priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who gave shape to the modernist technique that Eliot explores and exploits in “Mr. Apollinax” so much as those French poets already named. Laforgue, Baudelaire, and others of their generation liberated not only the length of the poetic line but poetry’s range of topics and scope of language as well. Any experience, and any level of language, from the most technical and scientific to the most vulgar and vernacular, became fit for serious poetry and for manipulation within the same poem. Within this context, it can be easily seen that Eliot is playing this new poetic game by attempting, in “Mr. Apollinax,” to take an extremely unpoetic topic and venue—a formal reception being held for a visiting academic dignitary—into the domain of the “poetic” in a manner that poetry in English had never quite been written before and that redefined what could be meant by the poetic. Eliot employs the comparatively common but otherwise new tactics of surprise and rapidly shifting associations, suggested as much by pressures of word choice as by the poet’s own conscious intentions, to contrast the diaphanous, private impressions made on the speaker by the visiting celebrity with the dense, public expectations of the event’s organizers. Rather than trying to impress his readers with a profound theme presented in elevated language and by literary devices, Eliot shows how

320 “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” language itself both operates and can be manipulated in order to create the very impressions that the event, itself not particularly noteworthy otherwise, may make upon an observer who is himself well suited to literary imaginings. Meanwhile, since the event is not ultimately of much importance in the vast scheme of things, it is easy for the poet to deflate the entire experience of the poem by the end, so that the reader generally ends up feeling not edified but set up. If there indeed is a fly in the ointment of the new poetics that Eliot was at the time proposing, it was that very problem. If by poem’s end readers are left to feel that their struggle toward understanding was a fruitless one to begin with (otherwise why would the poet close by undercutting his own effort), then there is the chance for concluding that modernist poets such as Eliot are satirizing nothing more than serious poetry itself, or worse, are satirizing those who read serious poetry. Barring that, the last laugh still may be on the poet, who, after all, has not stinted in his technical virtuosity. Rather than feeling exposed, however, to a new range of poetic experiences and emotions, the reader of a poem like “Mr. Apollinax” was (and, perhaps, still is) more likely to come away from the poem imagining that it was little more than an exercise in light verse of a wholly satirical nature and the ostensible subject of the satire hardly worth the reader’s attention. In fine, the application of the new poetic principles according to which Eliot composed “Mr. Apollinax” and which he was thereby espousing may be too subtle to achieve the effect that he is after. Rather than extending the possibilities of poetry and the range of poetic language and topic, Eliot may instead merely seem to be constraining the entire effort to the realm of relatively vacuous satire of interest to a very few. That will indeed come to be the case shortly with the publication of The Waste Land, an indisputably serious poem that many contemporary readers took to be a poetic parody. To his credit, in “Mr. Apollinax,” a poem about a misunderstood celebrity, Eliot himself may be raising a warning flag, announcing both to those who are devoted to the new poetics and to those who see it as a travesty of everything that poetry ought to be that tastes, like art, are protean and liable to change form and focus at a moment’s notice.

“Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (1918) “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” makes it clear from word one—“[p]olyphiloprogenitive,” which essentially means “producing many offspring”—that it is about the Word, of which John’s Gospel tells and which, as the final line of Eliot’s first stanza echoes, was there in the beginning. The poem, however, is one of Eliot’s quatrain poems, those exercises in elevated nonsense and lowlife high jinks that bleed a reader’s credulity dry at the same time that they suddenly become deadly serious in the midst of their frenzied and wordy zaniness. Eliot and his close friend and literary advisor, the American poet EZRA POUND, were experimenting heavily with the quatrain form that they had borrowed from the mid-19th century French poet, Théophile Gautier. Pound, for example, would use it to great effect in his Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1919). Eliot employed the quatrains mainly in this handful of exercises composed between 1917 and 1919. While the dating of each of the seven quatrains, composed collectively between 1917 and 1919, is not quite exact, it is known that “Mr. Eliot” was first published in September 1918 in the Little Review.

SYNOPSIS Just how irreverent the poetry of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” may be is suggested by the epigraph from Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, an Elizabethan drama that also provided an epigraph for Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady.” To describe the clergy as caterpillars, creatures that undulate as they move, suggesting both a sluggishness of spirit and a predictable, sing-song redundancy of thought, certainly does not suggest any high regard for the religious vocation, and the first stanza does not stint in offering the reader a like view of those who manage the church. In the second stanza, the Word that began all things is shown to go through a devolutionary process once it falls into the hands of those whom the poem will shortly called the “sabled presbyters.” These “sutlers,” that is to say, mercenary peddlers, of the Word, in their ornate robes are again portrayed as being redundant, hence close to useless. For Eliot has them fertilizing an ovum that has

“Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” already been well fertilized by the Word itself; that, at least, is the meaning of superfetation. If it requires a dictionary to keep up with Eliot’s wordplay, that is his very point about these neutered descendants of Origen, a second-century Christian theologian who was so extraordinarily chaste in his relationships with female converts that it was rumored, perhaps maliciously, that he had castrated himself as a young man in order to maintain his sexual purity. That sort of putting-the-cart-beforethe-horse religious zealotry is exactly what Eliot is fearful of and, so, exposes to a merciless ridicule as the poem continues. It is not, then, too far an alliterative stretch from the sutlers of the first stanza through the sable presbyters of the fifth stanza to the “masters of the subtle schools,” their contemporary descendants, for whom religion is controversial and multifaceted (polymath denotes wide learning) but not, apparently, religious. If the Word has been taken over by the slicers and dicers of the Word and of the flesh, there is still the original vision, embodied in a fresco of the baptism of Christ, in which “the wilderness,” this lowly plain of the soul’s earthly existence, is “cracked and brown” except for the life-giving water. There is also the world of nature itself, where bees carry on the processes of pollination that permit regeneration rather than stultification and desiccation, the drying out of all natural impulses. Earth’s nature, however, is a fallen nature, the poem reminds the reader. From the bees’ instinctive efforts comes a sweet by-product, honey. That is not the case with much human endeavor, nevertheless. The priests may be self-removed from the realities of the world and the Word. Their young charges are not, however. They are depicted as being “pustular,” pimpled-faced, with the juices of their own individual early sexual awakenings, and in the midst of it all sits man the brute, Sweeney, thinking only of himself and of the flesh, as he “shifts from ham to ham” in his bath. Surely there is a satirical echo of the murdered Agamemnon, who will appear in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” and it is hardly an appetizing vision of humanity, despite its porcine overtones.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY By their fruit they shall be known, the gospels intone. If so, Eliot makes it clear in “Mr. Eliot’s

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Sunday Morning Service” that he does not think very much of the fruit of 2,000 years of Christian history, although it is equally as clear that he is reserving judgment on Christianity itself. His tone alone tells readers as much. With their four-beat lines and four-line stanzas rhyming on the second and fourth lines, Eliot’s quatrain poems lend themselves to the sort of verbal musicality and clever wordplay that might make even the most serious material sound lighthearted or frivolous. “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” is no exception. In fact, in many ways it may be the spiritual father of the lot, even if this is not chronologically the case. Partaking, as it does, of features found in at least four of the other quatrains although not shared among all five, “Mr. Eliot” straddles the scope of the major concerns that Eliot addressed in the various poems as a group. With its emphasis on and scathing critique of what is generally called organized religion, for example, “Mr. Eliot” takes a place alongside “The Hippopotamus” and “A Cooking Egg” in exposing the hypocrisies that can result from an excess of ritual and doctrine, but the present poem does so in much more direct and obvious terms. Some of Eliot’s critique of organized religion here, however, may also be the result of his trying to stay true to form in the poem’s self-evident homage to the cleverly anticlerical subtleties of a JULES LAFORGUE, Eliot’s own French symbolist mentor. Then, too, “Mr. Eliot” is one of the three of the quatrains, along with “Sweeney among the Nightingales” and “Sweeney Erect,” to give his comic creation, the notorious “apeneck Sweeney,” Eliot’s type of the natural man, some brief space in which he might do his beastly things, as it were. To repeat, “Mr. Eliot” combines into itself themes and elements that are developed independently in at least four of the other quatrains, a claim to inclusiveness that none of other six quatrain poems can make. Furthermore, these themes and elements reflect what will increasingly become abiding interests in both Eliot’s poetry and his prose. A mistrust of human systems and a distaste for behaviors, lifestyles, and ways of thinking that fly in the face of tradition and common sense head that list. Selfimportant pomposities and a self-centered intellectual and spiritual smugness easily bring up the rear.

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If Eliot’s other early poems either prefigure his theme of the urban wasteland, such as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” or the “Preludes,” or else display the ambivalence of his treatment of themes related to love and human sexuality, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” treats mainly the topic that will gradually subsume all those others as the most important focal point for Eliot’s creative genius: the vagaries and varieties of religious experience. “Ash Wednesday” and “Little Gidding” are still years away, however, and with “Mr. Eliot” the young poet is still close enough to the vicarious nature of his childhood religious experiences as the grandson of a prominent Unitarian thinker, WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT, and a highly devout mother, Charlotte, to be adolescently whimsical and wholly irreverent in his treatment of one of literature’s most enduring themes, the religious impulse. On balance, the Eliot poem is guardedly anticlerical and antidogmatic but not necessarily antireligious and hardly anti-Christian. As the poem’s title wryly suggests, for “services,” this particular “Mr. Eliot” must be spending his time at home Sunday mornings, contemplating the catastrophe that organized religion has become in helping to define humankind’s place in a universe of the birds and the bees, castrated theologians, and hygienic secular sensualists. There is the powerful suggestion that, if history is a struggle between the Origens and Sweeneys, the Sweeneys will win, much to everyone and everything else’s considerable dismay, even if no one cares enough to notice.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935) T. S. Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral was first performed in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral the evening of June 19, 1935, before an opening night audience of 700 as a part of the Canterbury Festival.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS The idea for the drama had originally been proposed to Eliot the summer before by George Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chichester, while Eliot was

staying as a weekend guest at Bell’s episcopal palace. Eliot was then just coming off the success of The Rock, a pageant play that had been performed before 1,500 spectators at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London between May 28 and June 9, 1934. Eliot nevertheless had done little more than write the text for The Rock, his first real venture into live theater, in keeping with others’ directions. E. MARTIN BROWNE had written the scenario for the play, intended to aid a church building fund for the Diocese of London. Browne was working from a story line based on historical episodes suggested by yet another individual, the Reverend R. Webb-Odell, and it was under these considerable constraints that Eliot wrote the actual choruses and dialogue. Browne and Eliot, who would collaborate on all of the poet’s subsequent original dramatic works, beginning with Murder in the Cathedral, had first met at Bishop Bell’s palace in December 1930. During that weekend visit, Eliot had read from his just-published sequence “Ash-Wednesday.” Browne, an actor by training, had turned his hand to theatrical production and direction after having been tapped by Bishop Bell to reinvigorate the long-standing relationship between drama and religion in the English church, being appointed the diocesan director of religious drama. After Browne and Eliot’s successful collaboration on The Rock, it seemed inevitable that, when Bell suggested that Eliot prepare an original work for that next year’s Canterbury Festival, Eliot should again turn to Browne for his expertise with staging and directing, not to mention the personal rapport that they had already developed through their work on The Rock. The choice of topic for the dramatic contribution that Eliot, with the assistance of Browne’s theatrical and directorial expertise, would consequently make to the Canterbury Festival was perhaps the easiest element of the proposed project to arrive at. Alternately called Fear in the Way and The Archbishop’s Murder Case, the verse play that ultimately emerged as Murder in the Cathedral, despite the melodramatic implications of its various titles, could not help but benefit from an increasing focus on the public uses of poetry in Eliot’s verse writing and criticism. Given the fact, too, that the finished play would be performed within 50 yards of the site where Becket’s murder occurred, the play’s

Murder in the Cathedral theme can also be seen, on careful consideration, as something of a foregone conclusion as well. Whatever new interests had already drawn Eliot to a poetry that had as its primary aim weighing the relative merits of an intense private morality operating within the sphere of expedient public values, that had certainly been the ostensible theme of “Coriolan” and had as well, despite the happenstance of its composition, been at the heart of the choruses from The Rock. Meanwhile, both The Uses of Poetry and After Strange Gods, although they have as their major thesis Eliot’s take on the issue of the proper role and degree of the expression of belief in poetry, comment nevertheless to a great extent on the relationship between poetry and society. Most important, since the time of Eliot’s composition of the poetry that became both the Ariel poems and “Ash-Wednesday,” Eliot had been dealing not so much with belief in his poetry as with the individual’s engagement with matters of belief. Indeed, it can safely be argued that such considerations go back as far in Eliot’s poetry as the time of his composition of The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” poems that focused on individuals either inhabiting a world without any coherent patterns of belief or being incapable of engaging them. In the light of this history, anyone familiar with the story of Thomas à Becket’s confrontations with King Henry II, the details of which follow, could imagine nothing less than that Murder in the Cathedral would become, in Eliot’s hands, the trenchant exploration of the catastrophe that results when worldly power conflicts with the personal values of an individual mindful of the dimensions and pitfalls of an equally powerful spiritual commitment.

THE ORIGINAL STORY The story of Thomas à Becket (1118–70) no doubt makes for great drama. Well placed in English society at the time as the son of a wealthy merchant who had also been sheriff of London, Becket, trained as a lawyer, had by 1154 become the archdeacon of Canterbury, the chief aid to the archbishop of Canterbury, foremost in authority among the English prelates. When the archbishop introduced Becket to the newly crowned king, Henry II, the two hit it off famously, so that he made Becket his chancel-

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lor, the chief civil administrator after the crown. Then, in 1161, on the death of the seated archbishop, Henry, seeing an opportunity to strengthen his own hand by having such a close friend in the most powerful religious position in his realm, named Becket, who had been invested as a priest so that he might be qualified for the post, the new archbishop of Canterbury. This action set off a series of events that make the story of Henry and Becket into a near classical example, equivalent to Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, of the tragic consequences that occur when issues of church and state contend with each other, and matters of duty, friendship, and conscience are forced into conflict. In his new role, Becket saw his first allegiance now as being to the authority of the church, so, when Henry sought to extend his power further by bringing any clergy charged with wrongdoing under the authority of the king’s courts, Becket defied the order. Henry reacted by changing the pertinent laws, a move to which Becket refused to agree. Henry’s next step was to question Becket’s handling of finances during his period as chancellor, making it clear to Becket that the king was aiming to bring charges of theft or worse against him unless he relented. Rather than surrender his principles, Becket fled to France, which at that time was also under the influence of English (that is, Norman Plantagenet) rule. After a six years’ absence, in 1170, Henry and Becket, who had never officially relinquished his position as archbishop, appeared to have resolved their differences. On November 30, Becket returned to Canterbury, but he still refused to absolve several bishops whom he had earlier excommunicated for siding with Henry in the original dispute. Henry is reported to have been driven into a murderous rage by this continuation of Becket’s apparent stubbornness, demanding of no one in particular, “Who will rid me of this mettlesome priest?” Four knights at court took Henry at his word and set sail for England, arriving at Canterbury on December 29. They sought out Becket, who, realizing their intent, fled to the cathedral where a service was in progress. There all four slew him at the altar with repeated blows from their broad swords. Becket quickly became recognized as a martyr, and subsequent reports of miracles occurring at his

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tomb led to his canonization. In 1174, Henry did public penance at the site of his tomb for his own questionable part in the murder of the archbishop, his dear friend, and Canterbury became a popular shrine visited by many pilgrims for the next several hundred years. Indeed, by the end of the 14th century, the English civil servant and poet Geoffrey Chaucer would use the annual spring pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury as a plot device around which to organize his Canterbury Tales, and Eliot allegedly alluded to Chaucer’s famous opening lines, here rendered in modern English, “When April with her sweet showers . . . ,” in his own equally famous opening to The Waste Land: “April is the cruelest month.” So runs the story of St. Thomas à Becket, a tale that by Eliot’s time had become one of England’s greatest national treasures. Now a foreign-born poet, albeit of English ancestry, was about to make that treasured story into a verse drama for a contemporary audience among whom even the most devout had been steeped in the healthy skepticism of a secular, modernist culture. The challenge must have seemed breathtaking in every way.

SYNOPSIS Part I As the first act, part I, opens, the setting is the Archbishop’s Hall on December 2, 1170, the day that Thomas Becket, as Eliot identifies him in the play, returns to Canterbury. There, within a matter of weeks, Becket will be murdered. Eliot stays true to the historical detail, but, in good dramatic fashion, not to mention good storytelling, does not waste any time in getting down to business. On this day, after all, from the point of view of the various persons of the drama, Becket is at last coming home to Canterbury after an absence of seven years. An event that should be a cause for great celebration under any other circumstances will find instead only degrees of trepidation in each welcoming heart, in view of the straitened circumstances of the strained relationship that Becket and Henry continue to maintain. A chorus composed of the women of Canterbury sets the mood and tone of the opening scene and the entire play with their expressions of a sense of foreboding, “some presage” to which they feel

themselves to be compelled “to bear witness.” Eliot borrows from the traditions of classical Greek drama by introducing a chorus, and by virtue of this structural allusion to ancient tragedy, he also implies that a drama of cosmic proportions is about to transpire. In keeping with common practice, the chorus in Greek drama, more than setting a mood and tone, is free to feel and express the common woes, confusions, and fears. In their bewilderment, then, the women of Canterbury throughout the play give its language, rather than dramatic force, its poetic scope, as they describe the dull drudge of their daily lives. This is their role: to speak of duties and obligations centered in the common sphere. They are simple people, women used to hardship and suffering, and they are reluctant to take even a subsidiary part in some great moment that they know they cannot stop and may never understand. “Content if [they be] left alone,” they are aware that they, too, are among the martyrs—that being what martyr means, to bear witness—so, with no illusions about the nature of power, its brutal capacity to make its will everyone’s will, they know that for them, who represent the “most of us” in the Eliot play, “there is no action, / But only to wait and to witness.” The chorus thus fulfills its role of setting the mood and the tone for the coming action by commenting on it trepidatiously from the distant angle of those whose hard lives are little changed by the memorable events that are generally thought to move the world. Appropriately, it is now time for more individuated characters to step onto the stage in the persons of three priests. They each represent a different point of view regarding developments closer at hand—what the pope and Henry and Thomas and the French king are up to as each of those power centers maneuvers for the most favorable position. Eliot also uses the priests’ conversation to fill in informational gaps. If from the chorus of Canterbury women the audience has gotten a taste of local color, emotional and psychological as well as social and economic, from the priests will come the factual details, such as that it has been seven years since Becket’s self-imposed exile and that the king is as much at odds with the barons as with the stubborn archbishop.

Murder in the Cathedral Shortly, as a herald appears to tell them that Becket has landed in England and is at that very moment on his way to the cathedral, it becomes clear that Eliot uses the three, furthermore, to express the three distinctly different responses that those nearest to the events, from a religious point of view, may feel. The first priest is fearful of what now may ensue for both Becket and the church, knowing that the stalemate of the conflict between the king and his archbishop, the state and the church, is about to end one way or another. By contrast, the second priest is filled with joy, confident that, now that he is back in England, Becket will give them the guidance that they have been missing so that the church can once again be a balancing force between the contending centers of power that are dividing the nation. The third priest, as might be expected, is resigned, ready to accept whatever may come of events that are foreordained in his eyes. He views the coming confrontation, for good or ill, in terms of the working out of forces that the lead characters only manifest, exactly as Eliot casts them. Here is one point, however, where poetic drama serves the purposes of the kind of ritual that drama often is when it is best conceived. The three priests might have come through as rather wooden characters had they spoken their joys and doubts and fears in a plain and unenriched language. Instead, the elevation of speech permitted by Eliot’s use of verse gives their varying emotional appeals the color of three-dimensional characterizations, although the three remain as nameless and faceless as the chorus. Like the priests in their generic anonymity, a herald now appears with word of Becket’s imminent arrival at the cathedral. Like them, too, the herald speaks with a greater authority and more ominously than if he had merely been an ordinary character in an ordinary play. Though it may appear that Eliot is reducing everyone else on stage to their functional roles in order to let Becket stand out with that much more clarity in relief, the ultimate effect is to make it obvious that everyone, Becket included, is playing out a compulsory part in an unfolding tragedy whose conclusion is inevitable and that is larger than any of them. There is in every word, then, the sense that something momentous, something historical, is about to occur. Therefore, the herald speaks a spe-

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cies of prophecy as well with his talk of Becket’s “pride and sorrow,” of a peace that is “nothing like an end, or like a beginning”—of things, in other words, not being quite right, not quite adding up. Like Agamemnon in the Aeschylus tragedy of the same name, Becket appears onstage soon after his approach has been announced by the herald. First, however, the chorus of women must itself speak out again one more time, sensing the violence that is to come. Mistrustful of the motives of the great and powerful, they know little more than that whatever may come, it will not relieve the misery that they have been born to endure. As if to avert another of the ceaseless setbacks that the poor suffer through age after age (“Shall the Son of Man be born again in a litter of scorn,” they had queried earlier), now they plead for Becket to return to France, to leave them “to perish in quiet.” It makes it all the more ironic, as a result, that as Becket now appears on stage virtually on the heels of their words, with their fatalistic foretaste of doom, the first word out of his mouth is, “Peace,” and he directs it at the second priest, who has been chiding the women for their glumness. Eliot quickly establishes Becket’s as a winning personality by portraying him as sympathetic to the fear and foreboding that the women are experiencing, and that response quickly establishes his selflessness as well, for who would blame him if he were distracted instead by the ambiguities of his own situation? Here is, after all, the man of the hour, both literally but also in a tragically ironic sense. That his first thoughts should be of others commends his character. There are those who have “sworn to have [his] head,” Becket makes clear, but an even worse challenge awaits him, he reveals, a “strife with shadows,” as each of four tempters now step forward, one after another, to try both his resolve and the depths of his commitment to serve neither Henry nor himself but God. Like the priests, who, though real characters, still each represent a particular aspect of the response among his devoted followers to Becket’s return, the four tempters, too, while they are scripted as clearly defined characterizations with full-fledged personalities, each represent an aspect of the sorts of psychological and spiritual confusions that can

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scuttle not Becket’s mission but his destiny. He has no focused mission, after all, no specific course of action, for he knows that “acting is suffering / And suffering is action,” and all are fixed on the wheel of fortune now, playing their part as it spins and comes to a stop. Becket is easily, perhaps even all too smugly prepared to face each of his tempters, for he knows what is at stake, and that requires him merely to play his part to the end. Failure can come only if he allows any one of the tempters to distract or sidetrack him from achieving that end, and he faces them, each in succession, confident in the fact that that will not happen. The first tempter calls back to Becket’s mind the good old days when he was “Old Tom, gay Tom, Becket of London,” the king’s great friend and confidante. There is the suggestion but never the promise—temptations cannot make promises—that that amity with the king can be rekindled, not just for Becket, but among all the clergy. However, Becket cannot be fooled. One cannot “turn the wheel on which he turns,” Becket rejoins, sending the first tempter on his way. The first tempter vanquished, Becket faces the second, who tries to convince Becket to make hay out of the opportunity that this turmoil among the powers that he has created. According to him, Becket should make a grab for very sort of temporal power that he used to wield when he was Henry’s trusted chancellor. That, of course, would require Becket to abandon his spiritual calling or mission, thereby giving up the principles that he has sought to assert and defend, all for the expediencies of power and glory. Once more, Becket overcomes the temptation, rejecting such a choice as beneath his dignity as a man of God, although such a defense now makes him susceptible to succumbing to pride and vanity and, so, perhaps flattery as well. The third tempter is much more devious in expressing his particular blandishment, and that tactic is in keeping with the temptation that he represents. Becket must coax it out of him, and it is essentially that one should doubt the possibility of any reconciliation with Henry for the sake of forging a “happy coalition” with Henry’s enemies, including the French and the pope. Becket rejects this temptation to commit treason for the sake of

what may be a greater good for both himself and for England. He has, it seems, overcome all those temptations that might have kept him from fulfilling his sacred destiny. There was one thing that Becket had not banked on, however, and that is that there might be a fourth tempter. This fourth tempter represents the worst temptation of all: one’s own desires—to be true to oneself but to neglect God as the source of one’s being and action. This is not as subtle a temptation as it may sound on the surface, and that may be why Eliot has Becket invoking Samson in Gaza just before this fourth and final, unexpected tempter appears. The idea is to do what is necessary, but not to do it because one wills it for himself, but because God wills it. The fourth tempter allows Becket to realize that even becoming a martyr can be regarded as act of vanity and pride: “To do the right deed for the wrong reason”—not for God’s glory, but for one’s own (even if that glory then seems nevertheless to serve God). Becket had thought that he had already encountered and overcome all those possible weaknesses— the lust for glory and power, along with those personal failings and misgivings that might conceivably sidetrack him from fulfilling God’s purpose for him and for the sacrifice of his martyrdom. It is in this confrontation with the fourth tempter that his true agon, or struggle, begins, however. Eliot’s recourse in the allusion to Samson, calling to mind the 17th-century English poet John Milton’s portrayal of the biblical hero, gives Becket’s dilemma the profound scope that it deserves. Blinded by Delilah’s treachery and a captive of the Philistines, Samson is also tempted by others suggesting what he might do to escape his fate, whereas he knows that what he must actually do is find the will to abide until God is prepared to act through him. So, too, Becket must overcome the prospect of martyrdom, not because that very likely is going to be his fate in any case, but because he cannot desire it and still do God’s will. As a result, part I comes to an end with the chorus, the priests, and the tempters all exhorting Becket in every direction but the direction that he knows his life must take, and that is to accept God’s inscrutable will on God’s inscrutable terms. The man who had earlier proclaimed that

Murder in the Cathedral “acting is suffering, / And suffering action,” words that the unexpected fourth tempter, the embodiment of his personal desires, has thrown back at him, now sees the impossible light: “I shall no longer act or suffer.” He is instead prepared to wait. The Interlude During the interlude between part I and part II, Becket gives a sermon on Christmas morning. While from the point of view of the dramatic action the key event, Becket’s tragic murder, is yet to come, from the point of view of the theme, which is to describe through Becket’s martyrdom the way of the saint, the rest of the drama is anticlimatic. Becket has come to know his true purpose, which is that he has no purpose that he should know if he is truly to serve and follow God. So, then, Becket must be “still and still moving,” which is how Eliot will express a similar requirement in “Burnt Norton,” a poem whose composition was virtuously contemporaneous with Murder. Like Samson, Becket now must wait for God to act. This, then, becomes the theme of Becket’s homily, in which he muses on the Christian paradox that allows for mourning and rejoicing “at once for the same reason.” Just as each Mass celebrates the Passion and Death of Jesus, so does the Christmas Mass in particular also celebrate his birth, Becket observes, and then he calls to his congregation’s attention the fact that the following day’s Mass will honor the first martyr, St. Stephen. Here again, Becket notes, just as there is a simultaneous mourning and rejoicing found in the birth and the death of Christ, there is also the opportunity to “rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs.” He had already taken an opportunity to comment on the present troubled state of affairs in England, where the king and the barons are at odds, to illustrate the nature of Christ’s peace, by taking for his text Luke 2:14: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, good will toward men.” Now he takes the opportunity of the reference to Stephen to comment on the martyrdom that appears to be awaiting him. In doing so, he is able to bring to bear the lesson that he learned from the earlier encounter with the fourth tempter. Martyrdom, Becket concludes, is “no accident,” but still less is it the result “of a man’s will to become a Saint,” as

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another man might will to rule. Rather, and quite to the contrary, a martyr or saint is “always made by the design of God,” in order “to warn them . . . and bring them back to his Way.” Eliot, using the device of the sermon, thus enables Becket to clarify his commitment in no uncertain terms. He has found his peace in “submission to God,” exactly as the model of Samson had proposed in part I. With that, the central principle of the action established, Becket and the drama at hand are now prepared to move on into the closing action of part II. There will occur the martyrdom that has been looming as the inevitable conclusion of Becket’s agon, and he closes the sermon with the observation that this likely will be his last sermon. Part II This closing part, which is divided into two scenes, the first in the archbishop’s hall, the second in the cathedral, takes place on December 29, the day of Becket’s murder. Aside from the four tempters, the same speaking characters will be appearing on the stage as in part I—the chorus of women, the three priests, and Becket. It is an effective dramatic strategy that the tempters of part I, who had represented the instruments of psychological, social, political, and spiritual forces arrayed to prevent Becket from accepting his destiny, are gone now but find a dramatic symmetry in the four knights who replace them in part II. It is these knights, after all, who are the instruments not of the king’s wrath but of the fulfillment of Becket’s destiny as God has designed it, just as Judas is only the instrument, not the instigator, of Christ’s fulfillment. As part II opens, the chorus of women picks up the note of Becket’s just-ended sermon from the interlude. The idea that there should be peace on earth and good will among men leaves them puzzling out the ceaseless conflict that characterizes the affairs of men. Meanwhile, they know that they must go on with their labors, as each season requires, obliged only to wait, although “waiting is long.” If the chorus of common folk possess their souls in their patience, the knights, who now appear on the scene are, like the priests, subjected to the whims of the forces of the world of another kind of human activity. There one finds the working out in action and suffering not of God’s will or of his works so

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much as of the abstract tedium of the maneuverings of powers and interests organized against one another like pieces on a game board. The knights make two things clear from the outset: They have not come to pay a social call, and they are not pleased with the way in which Becket either has handled the power and station bestowed upon him by the king or has repaid the kindness of the king’s mercy by permitting Becket to return peaceably to Canterbury. As they see it, in fact, Becket has at every juncture served either his own interests or those of the French king and the pope—has, in other words, betrayed both the king’s trust and his own loyalty. Becket defends himself, arguing that he has only been doing what the responsibilities of the office that the king has bestowed upon him compel him to do, not to mention his duty to the church. The knights will have none of that, and Eliot makes sure to keep to the historical reality that they do not listen to the reasoning of Becket’s arguments regarding protocol and obligation. Instead, like the fanatics that they are, doing not what the king commands so much as what they think, in their misguided loyalty, will please him, the knights start to attack Becket soon after their interview with him begins. Their violence is prevented only by the intervention of the priests and other attendants on hand. Still, Becket continues to give them a hearing, and they boldly tell him that the king commands him to return to France, a command whose authenticity Becket tells them he regards as dubious. Furthermore, he proposes that he shall not desert his flock again. The knights accuse him of treachery, leaving him in no doubt that his life hangs in the balance, and as they exit the hall, Becket’s words that he is prepared for martyrdom follow after them. The chorus now launches into a macabre litany recounting all the putridness that flesh and death are capable of connoting, for they sense that the “death-bringers,” as they call the four knights, have come at last. They apologize to Thomas for their inability to be stronger and more supportive at such an hour, and Thomas consoles them. All this suffering and death and confusion, he tells them, shall bring “a sudden painful joy” when God’s purpose is completed; for now, he counsels, they should

know that “[h]uman kind cannot bear very much reality,” an observation that Eliot will repeat in the soon-to-be-penned “Burnt Norton.” The idea is not easily grasped, and that is Eliot’s point. But the chorus’s dilemma dramatizes his meaning. They are aware that something of a great and terrible significance is occurring, but they have no way of putting the impending event into any kind of perspective. The priests, too, know that a terrible moment is at hand, and they urge him to flee to safety; them he assures with the words that “I am not in danger: only near to death.” For Becket, danger would be something that imperils the fate of his immortal soul; to die a martyr is not, then, any danger. No matter what, he will not flee, but the priests, fearful what will become of them should Becket die, forcibly carry him off, against his will, to the cathedral, ostensibly to preside at vespers but in truth to conceal him from the knights. Thus begins the second scene of part II. The chorus sings a “Dies Irae,” or Day of Wrath, pleading for God’s help in the “last fear,” the fear of impending doom. But for the ordinary person that doom is death, while for Becket, once more, it is the death of the soul. The priests, caught up in a temporal distress—Becket’s life is at stake—order that the doors be barred, whereas Becket, who knows that it is in fact the fate of his immortal soul that is at stake, orders that the doors be kept open, for the church can endure any assault. He will not have it that the ways of the world will be triumphant. Rather, he proclaims that he is willing to give his life to “the Law of God above the Law of Man.” Obeying his command, the door is opened, and the knights, slightly tipsy now, enter the cathedral. As might be expected, that single event toward which the entire drama has been leading, the murder of Becket, takes place in fairly short order on the reentrance of the knights. Their previous headstrong wrathfulness now that much more emboldened by drink, they call out for Becket, the so-called traitor to the king, and he as boldly announces himself, secure in both the justice and the sanctity of his cause. Speaking as one in four-line stanzas, one line to a knight, the knights will have as little to do with his defense as Becket will have to do with their charges. Nevertheless, might is on their side; if

Murder in the Cathedral Becket has the Cross, they have the sword, and they strike him down where he stands as he commends his cause and the church to God and to the communion of saints, who have also served God’s will. The chorus of women cries out with a passion that far exceeds their previous resignation. Blood has blinded them, they exclaim, and nothing will ever again be the same. Not only has Becket been murdered, but he has been struck down and blood has been shed in the house of God. The whole world has been rendered “wholly foul” by such a dastardly deed, and they cry out that not just the stones, but the sky, the wind, the sinew, and the bone be cleaned as a result. For their part in this bloody history, Eliot now strips bare the mask of myth, ritual, and drama in which that history has been cloaked until now to give the four knights the honor of their actual identities as they all four advance to address the audience, identifying themselves one by one. Reginald Fitz Urse speaks first, pulling the old warrior’s ploy of excusing himself as a man of action rather than words. Nevertheless, they now wish to plead their own case before the bar of justice, that is, the audience. Fitz Urse, clearly the group’s leader (it was he whom Becket had condemned by name only moments before his murder), now lets the others speak, all in their own behalf. The youngest, William de Traci, speaks next, in the same prose as Fitz Urse. The poetic drama of a martyr’s murder is done, Eliot signals his audience, and now begins the prosaic postmortems. De Traci talks the lingo of a working-class bloke after a night of pub crawling; he identifies himself and his three buddies as “four plain Englishmen who put our country first.” While admitting that it may not have been quite right to kill an archbishop, he wants it to be clear that they did not get a penny for doing the dirty deed. It is as shallow a way to defend one’s cause as can be imaginable. Now Hugh de Morville speaks. He argues that they were only executing the will of the people, people like those sitting in the audience, people who know that a man cannot serve two masters, in Becket’s case, his convictions and the king. Becket, by asserting allegiance to a higher power, a higher order than the king had violated his trust as a servant of the king.

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The final speaker, Richard Brito, makes the most specious case of all: Becket was his own executioner. Brito argues that it was Becket’s own desire for martyrdom that put him on the collision course with the king in the first place. The verdict: Becket died a “Suicide while of Unsound Mind.” There is, of course, as strong a measure of the ironic as of the ludicrous here. Becket was, from the point of view of those who worship the world and all its empty promises, as the four knights most certainly do, of “ ‘unsound mind” inasmuch as he threw away incredible opportunities for worldly success and power and glory all for the sake of his principles and religious convictions. Their case, in their view, made, the knights depart, in keeping with their no-nonsense, businesslike demeanor. And now it is left for the priests, the only ones who have not spoken in the aftermath of Becket’s death, to pick up the pieces of what may yet be left of faith and of virtue in a world such as the knights have just described and defended. The first priest, who had, at the drama’s outset, expressed his fearful misgivings, sees a church withered and in disarray as a result of the catastrophe that they have just witnessed. It is, however the third priest, he of the earlier resignation, who now speaks the play’s final summation before the chorus will launch into the “Te Deum,” a song of praise, on which the drama ends. In his estimation, this in fact is the day on which the church will have been seen to triumph, for it finds its strength in the adversity and suffering that produces martyrs while the world, in the persons of the knights, proceeds on its merry way “forever in the hell of make-believe / That is not belief.” As a result, the third priest now finds cause for rejoicing instead in the fact that God has “given us another Saint in Canterbury,” for, in his view, that is what endures in the nature of belief. Now the chorus of Canterbury women, who have been themselves transformed by the event of Becket’s death, just as the third priest has, sing a song of praise. It is they who virtually throughout the play had been the glum prognosticators of the expect-nothing school of human misery. There will always be those who, whether in the face of miracle or martyrdom, will, like the first priest, for

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whom nothing has changed but the cause of his perpetual fearfulness, find nothing to alter their notion that the world is what it is, but it is through the chorus of the women of Canterbury that Eliot can reveal what he calls “the type of the common man.” These are the “most of us,” as he will call them in the Four Quartets, who witness the significance of the world as it unfolds in action and who never quite understand it, but who accept that limit in themselves, rather than flaunting such ignorance as a badge of honor. The chorus shows that even the hopeless and helpless who have been downtrodden by both nature and their fellow man, particularly in the guise of those who would lead and benefit them, can now find a renewed sense of both their own and life’s worth in a tragedy such as Becket had just endured. Thus, they can genuinely rejoice, praising and thanking God in the midst of such an awful moment, with a praise and thanksgivings that reach beyond despair. For them, Becket’s tragic end was not his death but that he should have died being, as it were, too good for the world—which is not his, but humanity’s tragedy. “[T]he blood of the martyrs and agony of the saints / Is upon our heads,” they say, confirming what the knights had argued, but seeing it as their own admission of a guilt for Becket’s loss, the beginning not of make-believe but of belief. Through Becket’s having died in the spirit of his cause, which is what matyrdom, bearing witness, is all about, he has proved that death is no bar to the fulfillment of the human spirit that devotes itself not to the pursuits of the world but to discerning the will of God. In so doing, Becket has come, in death, to embody the essence of the Christian faith that he died professing. As Eliot’s Becket himself had predicted in his Christmas sermon, embraced by the spirit of Christ, of both his birth and his death, one can both mourn and rejoice, and with their “Te Deum,” the chorus does just that, singing the play to an end.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot’s succcesss with Murder in the Cathedral can best be appreciated from the point of view of the collateral benefits that Eliot was able to reap at this time from this new avenue for creative expression that his

work on theatrical pieces was providing. Virtually from the time of the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot’s creative energies had been seriously flagging. From this vantage point, a person looking back at Eliot’s poetic output in the period under consideration, from 1923 to 1935, might see nothing but success after success—“The Hollow Men,” “Ash-Wednesday,” the Ariel poems—whereas in fact there were few sustained efforts. “The Hollow Men” appears to have been cobbled together from bits left over from the unfinished “Sweeney Agonistes,” while the first three sections of “Ash-Wednesday” were also published separately and independently, as had been all four of the Ariel poems. The latter poems, meanwhile, inasmuch as they were a part of Faber & Faber’s annual Christmas promotion, were more in the nature of commissioned than inspired pieces. Indeed, during the 1930s Eliot had come to feel that he was marking time as a poet and had again become convinced, as he had been at a number of other key junctures in his career, that he had “exhausted [his] meager poetic gifts.” Aside from “Ash-Wednesday,” published as the decade began, there was the unfinished “Coriolan,” which comprised another Ariel poem, “Triumphal March,” and “Difficulties of a Statesman.” Furthermore, like The Rock, this was a poetry more in keeping with Eliot’s social and political concerns—public themes, that is, rather than with the sorts of intensely personal, private themes that had generally beleaguered the typical Eliot speaker to this time. So, then, Murder in the Cathedral signals the first time in some 13 years that, beyond such prose works as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism and After Strange Gods, themselves efforts that had emerged relatively piecemeal out of the processes of series lecturing in 1933, Eliot had conceived and executed a coherent literary piece from start to finish and beginning to end. With the story of the historical confrontation between Henry and Becket for his primary material, it is highly unlikely that a poet of Eliot’s skills, imagination, and religious convictions would have failed to produce a drama of the towering proportions that he did. All of that conflict’s various elements, after all, are the stuff of great drama and theater, what with an archbishop

Murder in the Cathedral at odds with a king, and two former friends at odds with each other, where there is also the age-old conflict of values that results when conscience runs a collision course with duty. In his usual manner, nevertheless, Eliot allows all the themes to have their day in court. The theme of the tragedy that can result when a powerful social impulse—one must obey the codes and traditions of the civic community—runs afoul of an equally powerful religious conviction—one is compelled in the final analysis to obey the higher law, which is God’s—is at least as old as Sophocles’s classic treatment of it in the fifth century B.C. in his great drama, Antigone. Eliot is writing his version of that classic conflict nearly 2,500 years later in the midst of a modern bureaucratic state in which the everincreasing pressures on individuals to be “good citizens” at the expense of their own moral consciences were already beginning to have more and more dire effects in dictatorships such as Russia and Germany. Indeed, Becket’s last words virtually uphold the authority of the church over the state, a cue also required in the face of the increasing secularism of the so-called Western democracies as well. The strength of Eliot’s dramatic treatment of Becket’s death, however, is that he does not leave it at that. Dealing with the belief system of a Christian universe in which the individual has a personal relationship with God, Eliot is able to do the Sophocles theme one better. The drama that Eliot crafts therefore also exposes the audience to the incredible agony that Becket must undergo in the private arena of his soul, represented on stage in his encounter with the four tempters. Had Eliot limited his handling of the dramatic material to that aspect of its conflict alone, he still would have created a play worthy of attention for the manner in which it explores how the good person hoping to do God’s will must act against all human instincts, including his own purest motives. Finally, Eliot does not leave the audience out of the fracas. The knights, in their defense of their action, and especially the chorus, in the selfindictment of their closing “Te Deum,” make it obvious to any thinking, feeling person who may have been watching the drama unfold that no one is merely a spectator. All conspire to bring about

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the circumstances by which the martyr or saint may emerge to permit God to edify his people, as Becket may himself have explained it. As for Eliot, a child of the modern, secular world that his own earlier poetry had helped formulate, while the personal issue may still be a theological one, the poet and playwright is not caring to bring doctrinal matters of belief to the forefront, but matters of individual moral and ethical responsibility. “All are punishéd,” the prince proclaims in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. That at least is the case in Murder in the Cathedral, but all are edified and enlightened as well, if they wish to be, both on stage and off. Once more, then, when history lays a story as good as Becket’s in the poet’s lap, it is difficult not to produce a major-league effort—which is not to say, however, that it was an easy task. All Eliot needed do was be true to the original material, but even that required facing more of a challenge than might appear to have been the case on the face of things. For example, what may at first glance appear to be a strength—Eliot already had his story in hand full-blown—can be seen as a serious weakness, if not an insurmountable barrier that must be somehow skirted. If everyone in the audience already knows how the story will turn out, or at least ought to, there has to be some other solution for the first order of business for any stage performance, and that is keeping the audience’s attention. Unlike with The Rock, the scenario of which had already been sketched out in detail, to succeed with this present dramatic project, Eliot not only needed to write the sort of great verse that would be expected of a poet of his public reputation. He needed as well to make critical choices in matters of characterization and plotting in order to tell in the most arresting manner that he could manage a story that was already quite well known to his audience. Eliot’s challenge would be to tell a story that had become an indelible part of English history and of the religious character of the English nation in a way that was not merely convincing and illuminating but that, too, would do authentic justice to both the monumental nature of the original events and to the demands of a stage production. Then there was the additional problem of the nature of dramatic poetry itself. The constraints on

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verse that is prepared to be read at one’s leisure and verse that must be spoken in a live context with all the dramatic energy that a theatrical performance requires are so divergent as to be two entirely different kinds of writing. The solution that Eliot fell on was to exploit both the religious nature of the drama’s setting—the murder did in fact occur in a cathedral during services—and the ritual nature of a story whose chief purpose is its moral and spiritual edification. He does so by using the model of religious ritual drama from the classical theater of the ancient Greeks. In a later essay, “Poetry and Drama,” Eliot would comment on the chief difficulty of composing a drama in verse, which is to keep the verse unobtrusive until the moments for great poetry comes. By the same token, for Eliot to have chosen to tell the story in a naturalistic or realistic way would have hampered the development of its true theme and purpose. If Eliot was aiming to produce not only a successful evening at the theater but a work of literature (which are not the automatically the same thing), then it would be necessary for him to involve his dramatic presentation not with what had happened to Becket at Canterbury or even with why it had happened—those, after all, had been topics of discussion of one form or another for centuries—but with whatever what had occurred at Canterbury those many centuries before might still mean to each member of the audience as individuals. Each one of them, it would be a safe bet, would be struggling in his or her own way with the same sorts of dilemmas, whether they were conscious of the struggle or not. As late as March 1933, in his final Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard, the lecture series that would eventually become The Use of Poetry, Eliot had already proposed that the theater was the “ideal medium” for the composition of a socially useful poetry. To that time he had only the nevercompleted “Sweeney Agonistes” to his credit as a work in which he had tried his hand at writing specifically for the stage. Nevertheless he used it as an example of what one might hope to do with dramatic poetry written for the purpose of performance before a paying audience. In his view, writing in verse for the so-called legitimate stage forced certain kinds of practical consider-

ations on the poet, requiring him to think in terms of a multiplicity of points of view and for a wide variety of audience members. Not everyone in the audience might grasp the central idea or even the same ideas, just as among the characters on stage all would be sharing in the unfolding drama but none, except for the protagonist, if even he, might ever have a perfect understanding of its actual dimensions. Still, by the same token, no one should be excluded from sharing to some degree in either expressing, if on stage, or comprehending, if in the audience, the varied significances that could be derived from the action. For a poet who had achieved his renown by writing a complex poetry whose appeal hardly cut across all strata of society, such a challenge must have seemed both exhilarating and daunting. However effectively Eliot may have achieved that goal in The Rock, with Murder in the Cathedral, and with Browne there to guide him in terms of what might or might not work in actual production, Eliot was free to follow his own lights. Using the dramaturgy of such Greek classics as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon for his models, and perhaps even a far more recent work such as John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Eliot’s plan of attack was to dramatize by representing the dynamics of the unfolding catastrophe through an anonymous chorus identified only as the women of Canterbury, just as other equally anonymous characters would be identified only by their social or psychological function, as the case may be, thus maintaining the illusion that the audience would not be witnessing reality unfold, but rather something in the nature of a moral mathematics with cosmic consequences. Just as Sophocles and Aeschylus were each able to take a bare-bones story from Homer that had acquired its own immense cultural significance over the passage of time and then shape that story to their own thematic ends with incredible passion and conviction, and just as Milton was able to do so with the story of the Old Testament hero Samson in the hands of his people’s enemies, the Philistines, so Eliot takes, not the story of the rise and fall of Thomas à Becket, a 12th-century politician and cleric, but the agon or conflict of the day that a martyr is murdered for his faith, to create a

“Music of Poetry, The” drama that is entirely his own and yet worthy of such a momentous event. What might be lost in terms of a naturalistic verisimilitude was gained, and then some, in the freedom that such stylized characterizations thus allowed Eliot in getting right to the point of the drama—not those sweeping historical details, but its direct impact as a single defining event on those affected by it and the significance of that impact as it resonates to this day. Thanks to Eliot’s effort, that resonance now has acquired a magnificent undertone, unique to the tenor of these times, and it is one that will accompany Becket’s story henceforth for centuries to come.

FURTHER READING Browne, E. Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Donoghue, Denis. The Third Voice: Modern British and American Verse Drama. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959. Jones, D. E. The Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Raveendran, N. V. T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: A Study in Style. Madras, India: Emerald Publishers, 1995. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicage Press, 1974.

“Music of Poetry, The” (1942) This essay was first presented as the third W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture at Glasgow University in 1942 and subsequently collected in 1956 in On Poetry and Poets.

SYNOPSIS Eliot is more than a third of the way into the essay before he finally clarifies what he means by “music” with regard to poetic composition. Till then he had been commenting on how each poet derives his or her own individual style. As Eliot sees it, style is itself an extension of the poet’s taste in poetry, to the result that the poet “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or . . . wants to write.”

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He admits, for example, that he was personally never very good at scanning lines of poetry, that that shortcoming has never troubled him because he was more interested in any case in determining why one line of poetry was good and another bad, a matter that no consideration of scansion could ever successfully resolve. In fact, “only the study, not of poetry but of poems,” he explains, “can train our ear.” That study enables the individual to develop not so much the capacity to imitate as to assimilate the styles of the poet or poets that each new, young writer most admires and, so, aspires to sound like. In this way, too, aspiring poets are as likely to be exposed to the familiar as the eccentric and even foreign in the search for those manners of expression that they might associate with language that sounds like poetry. Even so, one law of nature must always prevail, nevertheless, Eliot asserts, and that is “the law that poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary language which we use and hear.” It is at that point in his presentation that Eliot finally introduces his topic, arguing that there is a close connection between the music of poetry and conversation inasmuch as the music of poetry is inextricably bound up with its meaning. That meaning, he further contends, is not what the poet may or may not intend for the poem to be saying but is what there is about the poetry that moves the reader so much so that “if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.” Eliot defines the music of poetry for his reader as that quality of its sound that meaningfully moves readers or listeners. While this may seem to be either a very amorphous or extremely technical definition of the term, Eliot’s meaning here may be better understood by comparing Eliot’s definition to the experience of hearing a song sung in a foreign tongue. The listener cannot understand the words at all but derives some not only satisfactory but frequently moving sense of their meaning nevertheless. Eliot uses this analogy to singing himself when he summarizes his position in this way: “. . . poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, [but] it remains . . . one person talking to another; and this is just as true if you sing it. . . .”

334 “Music of Poetry, The” Eliot continues in this vein, making it clear that poets should not attempt to achieve in their poems a poetry that sounds exactly like the speech that they hear around them, but the music of such poetry, nonetheless, must be the music latent in the ordinary language of the time. The ideal is that readers will think not that the poetry reflects how they sound but that it reflects how they might sound if they could “talk poetry.” In modern times, for example, poetry is meant to be not sung but spoken, yet that does prevent the poetry from possessing a “musical pattern.” As Eliot defines it, this pattern is one of both sound and meaning, and it is “indissoluble and one.” He raises a similar point in 1952, in the essay “Poetry and Drama.” There he implies that the chief benefit of writing drama in verse is that it enables a dynamic range to the language by which the playwright can virtually modulate the audience’s emotional and intellectual responses, and that sort of a modulated or, perhaps, orchestrated range of sound and sound quality, as opposed to mere lexical meanings, is denied prose. In this present essay, as might be expected, Eliot eventually delves into the issue of dramatic poetry as well, noting that the dependence of verse on the spoken language is much more direct in dramatic poetry than in other types of verse. Yet English prosody has long since exhausted the resources of blank verse, the celebrated unrhymed iambic pentameter line in which virtually all English dramatic poetry and much great epic and lyric poetry, too, had been written for some 300 years, from the time of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE to the late 19th century. In matters such as these, the poet is controlled by the necessities of the period. That the English blank verse line no longer holds the potential for successful exploitation that it once did is an accident of history and of the great versatility that blank verse provided to poets as different as Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. In the end, it was such a successful form that its widespread use eventually exhausted its potential. In all cases, however, the poet’s main task is “to catch up with the changes in colloquial speech, which are fundamentally changes in thought and sensibility.” Poetic language, Eliot argues, using the development of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry for his

example, moves between controlling artificiality with simplicity and then elaborating on that simplicity. The poet who can contain those opposing tendencies adds to the resources of the spoken language of the time, but at no time should it be the primary aim of the poet to effect a revolution in the language, for then sounding new or different would take a debilitating precedence over the first requirement of poetry, which is that it should make sense, even if that sense is not always easily come by. It follows that Eliot should then turn his attention briefly to the revolution in poetic speech that was effected by the early modernists, himself included, and that was primarily the introduction of VERS LIBRE, or free verse. Eliot observes that it is generally assumed that “modern poetry has done away with forms,” but he disagrees with that assessment. “Only a bad poet,” he asserts, “could welcome free verse as a liberation from form.” Free verse, he insists, was “a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form or for a renewal of the old.” In that regard, he brings his essay to a close by proposing that the last 20 years have seen poets engaged in the “search for a proper modern colloquial idiom.” There, though he confesses to having little technical musical expertise, he recommends that in this search poets should think of those properties that poetry and music have in common, “the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY At the time Eliot prepared those remarks that became “The Music of Poetry,” he was developing “Little Gidding,” the final of the four long poems that he would then collect under the title Four Quartets. Eliot’s most pertinent recommendation is that poets begin to think more in terms of the concert hall than the opera stage for their musical models. “There are possibilities of transitions in poems comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet,” he suggests. Like Shakespeare’s individual development, Eliot asserts, language itself progresses by developing at extremes, between musical elaborations and the simplicities of direct speech. While Eliot seems to imagine that his is a time for musical elaboration, he no doubt endorses keeping an ear out for the simplicity and directness of ordinary speech as an anchor on

Notes towards the Definition of Culture the sort of overinventiveness that deadens rather than invigorates the natural connection between the spoken language and the language of verse.

Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot himself gives an uncustomarily detailed account of the publication of Notes towards the Definition of Culture in his brief preface to the booklength edition first published in November 1948. Four years earlier, what he calls “a preliminary sketch” of the eventual work was published, under the same title, in three consecutive issues of The New English Weekly, accounting for Eliot’s apparent coyness later in calling such a thoughtful work, as the completed study turned out to be, mere “notes.” He goes on to tell his readers that those preliminary notes were subsequently perfected into a longer paper, “Cultural Forces in the Human Order,” and published in a 1945 volume, Prospect for Christendom. Revised, it is the first chapter of the finished book. He also tells his readers that the second chapter is a revised version of a paper first published in The New English Review in October 1945, and that there is an appendix compiled from three radio broadcasts he had made, in German, to the German people in 1946. While Eliot may not have had any specific intention behind presenting such a detailed bibliographical history for the material at hand, the reader ought to be impressed by the fact that the ideas expressed therein did not simply spring full-blown onto the page in some effort of Eliot’s to write a book on the topic, but were themselves the products of much working out of issues and nuances over an extended period of time and in a variety of contexts and venues. One can go further than that, however. So much did Eliot’s literary criticism begin to merge with social criticism, social criticism with religious criticism, and religious criticism with cultural criticism, that anyone would have to say that Notes towards the Definition of Culture, his last major published prose work, is a culmination of Eliot’s thinking to date on a wide range of issues, all

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of which can be safely gathered together under the single heading, culture, at least inasmuch as he will set about defining the term. So much, indeed, are these earlier positions and opinions, though modified, embedded in the text of Notes that, for the sake of moving on into a consideration of its content, it would be more effective to contrast Eliot’s earlier with his present views as these relevant issues are raised and brought to bear by him the pages of Notes towards the Definition of Culture.

SYNOPSIS Eliot states at the outset that his sole purpose, rather than to propose a social or political philosophy, is to define culture, a term that he feels “has come to be misused.” He imagines that, as a result, perhaps, of the destructiveness of the recent war, the term has come to be used by journalists, for example, as if it were a term synonymous with civilization. Eliot does not deny that those two words may be interchangeable in certain contexts, so his aim is not to erect any artificial distinctions between them but to define the one, culture, in such a way that it will not continue to be easily mistaken for being a synonym for “art” in general or, even more vaguely, for “a kind of emotional stimulant.” It is the latter case that he implies, and fears, is becoming the more and more common. As he outlines his approach to the topic in the coming essay, Eliot also reveals, of course, his personal bias, which is that there is a relation between culture and religion, so much so, indeed, that “the culture [of a people] will appear to be the product of the religion, or the religion the product of the culture.” Furthermore, he believes that a culture is “organic,” that is, that it grows and changes so that it may be transmitted through succeeding generations; that it should be reducible to more and more local manifestations, as is implied by regionalism; and that, as far as religion is concerned, it should reflect both unity and diversity. By way of an example of his meaning here, readers familiar with the ideas that Eliot had already expressed in his book-length essay The Idea of a Christian Society a decade earlier would already be acquainted with his hope that, at least in the Christian nations of Western Europe, a universality of doctrine would be mitigated, but not diluted, by local devotional custom and practice. Where

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these three conditions—transmission through generations, regional flexibility, and diversity in unity—are not met, Eliot goes as far to say, a high civilization is not possible. Finally, Eliot promises that any such discussion must close itself by “disentangling” just such a definition of culture from any consideration of the educational and political life of the community. Here Eliot freely admits that he is liable to trample on what others may regard as sacred ground by appearing to be elitist or exclusive in his definition of culture. That, however, he argues, underscores his very reason for wishing to define the term: If a culture is to be sacrificed in the name of other social and political goals, so be it, Eliot would say. But, he would add, let it be clear what one means to sacrifice when they speak of sacrificing culture. This is an Eliot who, far back in his own career as a social commentator, in essays such as “The Function of Criticism” in 1923 and After Strange Gods in 1934, had been arguing, sometimes stridently but always with a passionate cogency, against literary and other intellectual forces that he saw to be at enmity with his own cherished beliefs and attitudes. Now he appears to be ready to accept that such intellectual and moral conflict is inevitable as long as it is recognized as a necessary conflict, not as a foregone conclusion. He seems to be ready to make peace with those positions with which he does not agree by continuing to explain why he does not agree with them rather than by trying to present the opposing position as patently disagreeable, as he had done in many an earlier diatribe. Here now, Eliot makes every effort to establish himself as one who is opposed neither to change nor to opposition. Rather, he is opposed to those who “have believed in particular changes as good in themselves, without worrying about the future of civilisation, and without finding it necessary to recommend their innovations by the specious glitter of unmeaning promises.” Eliot would like to see enter such dialogues a “permanent standard” by which one could compare one civilization with another, not just one’s own with others’, but one’s own with the civilization that it has been at various times or may be becoming. So, then, his essay will ask “whether there are any permanent conditions, in the absence of which no higher culture can be expected.”

Culture, for Eliot, is not something that one can “deliberately aim at” achieving, nor, one might suspect, changing either. The conditions of culture, he asserts as he concludes his introduction, are “natural” to human beings. If he places quotation marks around the word natural, it is only to suggest that one need not know what it means in order to recognize that it does nevertheless apply. In any event, it will be this emphasis on the naturalness of culture, as opposed to the idea, for example, that it can or should be consciously manipulated, that the reader should keep in mind, for Eliot certainly will as he continues to frame his definition. Chapter 1 In his first chapter, Eliot discusses “The Three Senses of ‘Culture.’” (Again, putting quotation marks around the word culture reminds the reader that these are uncharted seas that nevertheless seem deceptively familiar.) Culture, then, can describe the development of an individual, he says, a group or class, or the society as a whole. Since the last comprises the other two, it is there that he wishes to begin. Normally, however, it has been the other way around, Eliot argues, for he demonstrates convincingly that sociological and other treatments of culture, such as MATTHEW ARNOLD’s Culture and Anarchy, generally begin and end by focusing on the class or group if not even, as in Arnold’s case, just the individual. Such lapses, Eliot contends, give the term culture the “thinness” with which it is often popularly associated. Furthermore, there are various contexts in which one may think of culture—in terms of manners, for example, or of learning, of philosophy, or of the arts—and these are all too often neither taken into account or accounted for. The net result is that people are thus encouraged to think of themselves as persons of culture when they are versed in one area of it but are totally unaware that there are other areas as well. Eliot’s point is that all these various senses, then, and all these various levels of culture must be taken into account in a coherent manner if anything approaching an adequate definition can ever hope to be achieved. These various characteristics and categories of culture overlap; there is, for example, even in more primitive cultures, distinct separation between art and religion or between the activities

Notes towards the Definition of Culture of the individual and the goals of the group. The more advanced a culture, the more abstract distinctions are forced on these critical activities of any culture, specifically, religion, science, politics, and art, so that there begin equally abstract struggles for dominance of one over the other three. Those tensions, Eliot argues, may further become tensions within individuals, citing for his example the contention between the demands of the state and the demands of the church that form the basis for the tragedy in Sophocles’ Antigone. A culture in which these kinds of conflicts begin to occur represents a very advanced stage of civilization, Eliot proposes, for it requires an audience already aware of those tensions in order for a dramatist to articulate them. Little by little then, the culture of the class or group emerges from the intracultural tensions formed between the individual and society. These more highly cultured groups—groups, that is, whose motive for being is shaped by cultural tensions—lead to further specialization, and that, of course, can lead to cultural disintegration, a point that enables Eliot to begin to focus his discussion on the contemporary scene. “Cultural disintegration,” he writes, “is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures,” and this can result from a separation of classes as well. The religious sensibility becomes separated and distinct from the artistic, for example, or manners become a class distinction unique to a particular economic stratum within the society. This process of disintegration and stratification leads inevitably to a decline of the total culture, a decline manifested, internally, in social ailments and, on a global scale, in relations among nations. In the latter case, it becomes a matter of defining a nation or people in terms of its state or political identity rather than on the basis of each people’s own cultural cohesion, abstracting human-to-human interaction all that much more. These difficulties ultimately influence matters of education as trivial-seeming on the surface as the decline of a national cuisine, since that implies a lack of cohesion in the culture resulting in a disconnect between the requirements of life and the quality of life. “Culture,” Eliot can say at this juncture, “may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”

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Thus, Eliot’s presentation arrives at a critical moment: “[N]o culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.” Indeed, Eliot goes even further in linking a people’s culture to their belief system by noting that all that he has just said by way of describing how a culture may decline and disintegrate may also be said of the same phenomena as they would occur in the history of a religion. Here, of course, he can again bring to bear as evidence present conditions in Western Europe, a situation that he had already addressed in 1939 in The Idea of a Christian Society. The divergence of belief in Christianity that commenced in the 16th century may not be, in Eliot’s view, anywhere near as pernicious a sign of its decline as a cultural mainstay as much as an increasing tradition of a nurtured skepticism is. Not only can culture, as Eliot views it, not be preserved or extended in the absence of religion, but in the absence of a religious foundation, it is possible, Eliot is afraid, to adopt an indifferent attitude toward culture. Rather, Eliot would like to imagine a society in which “both ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ . . . should mean for the individual and for the group something toward which they strive, not merely something which they possess.” Religion can thus be “the whole way of life of a people, . . . and that way of life is also its culture,” or it may be a way of life that a people share with other peoples but with whom they do not share a common culture, as in the case of Christian Europe. Ultimately, then, if culture “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people”— and here Eliot cites numerous English interests and activities as disparate as Derby Day and beetroot in vinegar—then all those interests and activities are “also a part of our lived religion.” But if culture is a people’s lived religion, the converse is not necessarily true: that religion is a people’s lived culture. “[T]he actual religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or purely anything.” Indeed, Eliot contends, “behaviour is also belief,” and the purity of line between how a people believe and how a people behave colors every aspect of their being and constitutes, ultimately, what may be called their culture, even if it is not seen exclusively as their religion. Or, as Eliot puts it, “bishops are a part of English culture, and

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horses and dogs are a part of English religion.” Put yet another way, a people’s culture is “an incarnation of its religion,” no matter how well they profess the particular faith that they otherwise adhere to. The truth or falsity of a faith, then, does not matter as far as culture is concerned, so that a people with a “truer light” may have a culture inferior to a people who live a lesser faith with a greater intensity. Eliot is wise to avoid particular examples, but who would deny that a people who do not believe in the values by which the culture claims that lives ought to be led are leading a sham cultural existence that cannot long sustain itself? Eliot therefore can conclude his first chapter by proposing that “any religion, while it lasts, . . . gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the framework for a culture, and protects the mass of humanity from boredom and despair.” Chapter 2 Eliot begins his next chapter, “The Class and the Elite,” by carefully addressing two sensitive issues even for his time: the notion of higher civilizations versus lower or primitive societies, and the notion of cultural elites. It has understandably become more and more difficult if not embarrassing to pronounce a particular way of life as more “advanced” than another or a particular social class as more inherently privileged than another, yet qualitative differences, whether or not such distinctions are openly addressed by a society, are made nevertheless and permeate every human society. Indeed the potential for allowing the pernicious nature of these ways of thinking and of behaving to dominate a society’s way of life and treatment of others is increased especially when distinctions of that kind are not openly addressed, analyzed, and questioned. For then it becomes an unspoken commonplace that the making of such judgments is “the way it’s always been done.” Eliot’s addressing the entire matter, then, forms a very real part of the analysis that he is carrying on in order not to prescribe but to describe those elements that constitute a “definition of culture.” Seen from that perspective, his interest in describing how class and, ultimately, a class of elites eventually emerges in so-called higher civilizations is

a way neither of justifying or condemning such a state of affairs but, rather, a necessary part of the analytical processes that enable definition. That said, Eliot quickly in his second chapter establishes a fact that is presented not as something to be praised or lamented, but merely understood. While a classless society remains the ideal at higher stages of development, a culture divides into classes. Higher classes emerge wherein “superior individuals” in political administration, the arts, science, philosophy, and physical prowess form “into suitable groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps with varied emoluments and honours.” These groups, he tells his readers, telling them nothing that they do not already know, “are what we call élites.” Not to belabor the matter, but it is necessary for the reader to note that Eliot is neither defending nor attacking a cultural elitism, only describing the manner in which such a state of affairs comes about. Indeed, he imagines that at some future point in the development of a society stratified by class distinctions, congregations of elites will replace class structure by transcending it. Today such an idea might be called a meritocracy, and it seems to foster its own inequitable divisions. Nevertheless, all that Eliot is really suggesting is that when a culture begins to identify inherent skill and talent, class distinctions are seen for the artificial criteria that they are and thus class is not a measure or reflection of the relative merits of an individual’s potential for contributing to the larger community. The result of the emergence of elites would, therefore, be that “all positions in society should be occupied by those who are best fitted to exercise the functions of the positions.” The danger of investing all cultural integrity in the hands of elites, however, is that they tend to become further and further isolated, one group from another, whereas the notion that there is within a culture, guiding and forming it, the elite enables its various groupings to interact more harmoniously for the common good. Eliot takes up the views of Dr. Karl Mannheim to espouse his own opposing view. Mannheim, Eliot tells his readers, fails to distinguish between elites, with their tendency to cluster and become isolated in their various fields, and the elite, who

Notes towards the Definition of Culture through separate interests would nevertheless operate in concert in support of the common interest of a common culture. This elite may represent or be constituted of the ruling or governing class in some instances, but “in concerning ourselves with class versus élites,” which is what for Eliot has been a primary focus of his argument throughout, “we are concerned with the total culture of a country, and that involves a good deal more than government.” It may be that, rather than a “classless” society, Eliot is making a case for what a society should want its so-called “ruling” class to be. So, then, “[w]hat is important is a structure in which there will be, from ‘top’ to ‘bottom,’ a continuous gradation of cultural levels.” This culture must, meanwhile, be transmitted primarily by the family rather than what Eliot calls educationists, inasmuch as the latter will dispute whether or not there ought to be a class structure present in the society at all, while the family, rather than concerning itself with the pros and cons of a class structure, will naturally represent the values of the culture in miniature, whatever class the particular family embodies or belongs to. However, in order to ensure the viability of the family unit, Eliot ends his second chapter with what sounds like an impossible requirement for a modern industrial state such as England: that there must be “groups of families persisting, from generation to generation, each in the same way of life.” And he follows that stipulation by sounding once more his ominous caution that while such conditions may not bring about a higher civilization, “when they are absent, the higher civilization is unlikely to be found.” Chapter 3 Eliot’s chapters 3 and 4 are continuations of each other, inasmuch as he now sets out to describe how a unified culture must nevertheless both enable and express diversity in order to remain viable. In a manner of speaking, Eliot’s entire essay throughout to this point has been tacitly endorsing the same proposition, what with its talk of higher and lower levels of society acting in concert to make a way of national life constitute what, by his definition, can be rightfully called a culture. None of this should come as any surprise to present-day readers, who should already be well schooled in the idea

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that differences among and between groups and regions, nations and peoples, are both inevitable and welcomed. Eliot’s contemporary readers would have been as equally well versed in that same proposition, however. Those political organizations that are now defined as “nations,” which may by now seem to have been the building blocks of diverse human societies since time immemorial, are actually fairly recent historical developments. There was not, for example, any such political entity as Germany or Italy before 1865, less than 100 years before the time of Eliot’s writing, and even Great Britain’s “United Kingdom” of England, Scotland, and Ireland is a political invention of the late 18th century. For Eliot to speak of regions and sects and cults within the context of a Christianized Western Europe is mandatory, then, since post-Reformation Europe, even within the relatively insular realms of the British Isles, had long ago become as fragmented religiously as it had always been regionally and, in the oldest sense of the term, tribally. “Unity and Diversity,” the general title that Eliot gives to chapters 3 and 4, is hardly proposed as an original conceptualization by Eliot, who then discusses “The Region” in his third chapter and “Sect and Cult” in his fourth. Instead, it is his yielding to the social, spiritual, ethnic, and even geographical realities of the varied peoples of the very English culture that he had earlier defined as the “whole life of the whole people.” If these two chapters have a common thesis, as Eliot’s titulary way of linking them suggests that they do, it can be found in the epigraph from the 20th-century British thinker A. N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World that Eliot cites at the opening of chapter 3: “A diversification among human communities is essential. . . . Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.” In summary, if differences inspire competition, that competition ought to be itself inspired by emulation. From that, the health of the entire human community emerges. What is true of the benefits

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of a healthy diversity between nations and peoples, Eliot happily and wisely contends in his next two chapters, must be true as well of the diversity among an otherwise common people sharing what, from the outsider’s point of view, appears to be a common culture. Eliot’s is always the time-honored media via, middle way, of the Anglican tradition of England that was itself inspired by that people’s desire, during the Reformation, to be free of the dominance of what they regarded as a foreign culture, Rome’s, over their national religion and yet to remain true, by and large, to long-standing Catholic Christian practices, rituals, and devotions. Thus, Eliot is always taking pains to point out that a totally classless society is as pernicious to the maintenance and growth of a healthy national culture as a society that is very rigidly organized by class distinctions. Rather, he writes, “[t]he unity with which I am concerned must be largely unconscious,” that is to say, it should not be something that is being perpetually identified and celebrated, “and therefore can perhaps be best approached through a consideration of the useful diversities.” Region is one. Citizens, then, should be encouraged to think of themselves as citizens not of the nation, but “of a particular part of [their] country, with local loyalties.” By the same token and in the same spirit, however, one’s loyalty to a locality or region, no matter how exotic or unique its cultural heritage may seem to be in its own right, cannot be fostered in such a way that it ends up taking precedence over one’s sense of belonging to those ever-enlarging groups that eventually make up the whole people and the whole culture. Nor is this sense of locality or region limited to geographical entities, even when it may seem to be defined or interpreted in that manner. Dialects provide a point of immediate reference, and Eliot uses the Irish for an example. While as a people they had long since, at least in Eliot’s time, lost their own language and were for the most part, as a result of English colonial policies in Ireland, English-speaking, the English that they speak retains idiomatic and other markers of their original Gaelic tongue. Furthermore, it would be unfair to define their ethnic background and the dialect and other

idiosyncratic habits that have emerged from it as distinctions peculiar of a region inasmuch as Irish could be found in every major metropolis in England itself. Still, such distinctions can nevertheless be identified as “regional” for all the other reasons already cited. These satellite cultures, as Eliot comes to call them, using Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as outstanding examples, must be encouraged to maintain and nurture their original identities as well, but not so much as to cut themselves off completely from the primary culture, in this case England’s, through which they are linked to Europe and, through Europe, the world. Eliot does take a tangent here, however, that may not find universal agreement. When a satellite culture has become united by language to another, he argues, it ought to abandon its own language in favor of the central culture for literary purposes. This sort of cultural imperialism should certainly strike most as inexcusable, including even Eliot, who only a few years earlier, in “The Social Function of Literature,” had rightfully commended the Norwegians, just recently liberated from the control of Nazi Germany, for tenaciously clinging to a national, Norwegian-language literature and arguing that it is vital that every people do so for the benefit of all other peoples. A special exception could be made in the case of English, nevertheless, as a common tongue for all the peoples of the British Isles. (The same phenomenon, for example, has occurred in modern Italy, a land of many dialects and of long literary traditions in each, where, nevertheless, the Tuscan dialect of DANTE ALIGHIERI has, since national unification, become what the world knows as the Italian language, a situation of which Eliot would have been well aware, although he does not cite it.) His argument, in any case, regards the transmission of a culture, not the dynamics of its political and often military history. A culture, he insists, is “a peculiar way of thinking, feeling and behaving.” He continues: “[F]or its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue to be a literary language—not necessarily a scientific language but certainly a poetic one. . . .” Regarded from that point of view, in fact, his comments on the main-

Notes towards the Definition of Culture tenance of Norwegian as a literary language under Nazi rule are no less in keeping with his remarks here on the various peoples of the British Isles writing solely in English, although all individuals of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish extraction might not find themselves in agreement with his position. Eliot himself would go as far as to defend and encourage such disagreements, for they too form a part of a culture. Whereas friction in the mechanical universe may be a waste of energy, in human cultures, all those frictions created by class and region, including those just discussed involving satellite cultures that have been reduced to secondary roles, “by dividing the inhabitants of a country into . . . different kinds of groups, lead to a conflict favourable to creativeness and progress.” As he puts it, paraphrasing the Whitehead epigraph for effect, “One needs the enemy.” Indeed, the disastrous transformation of Italian and German cultures by the ideological single-mindedness of fascism provides Eliot with a vivid and recent illustration of what can occur when dialogue and debate cease within a culture. As the reader might have already observed, Eliot appears to be proposing a model of culture that involves ever-widening but concentric circles, from the village to the region to the nation to the world. The difficulty there, of course, is that once one transcends the idea of a national culture, one has to abandon most of the political associations that culture also implies. The United Nations had already been formed by the time of Eliot’s writing, and the visionary ideal of a world government had become a utopian commonplace ever since U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s proposing a League of Nations following hard on the catastrophe of World War I in 1919. Still, Eliot contends that if his pleading for the integrity of local cultures has any practical validity, then “a world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all.” Eliot is forced to conclude that although we are “pressed to maintain the ideal of a world culture,” we are at the same time forced to admit “that it is something we cannot imagine.” Indeed, the “colonization problem,” as he terms the imposition of one culture on another by force by an outside power, would

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only be exacerbated to an intolerable degree by any effort to impose a world culture, since cultures do not all follow the same processes of growth, a condition that such an imposition would require. Some areas of the world, Eliot notes in ending his remarks on unity and diversity as regional issues, citing as an example India, where a Hindu and Muslim culture existed side by side at the time, have seen the evolution of competing cultures to a degree that would make Eliot’s comments on British regionalism seem a mockery. Chapter 4 In his fourth chapter, as previously noted, Eliot takes up the topic of cultural unity and diversity as it is affected by cults and sects. Specifically, he defines his topic as “the cultural significance of religious divisions.” He begins by lamenting, in what he terms “more developed societies” such as one might find in Western Europe, the sort of cohesion between religious and nonreligious activities that one would expect to find in more primitive or less developed societies, keeping in mind that he is speaking of degrees of complexity and abstraction here, not quality and significance. As he puts it, the more conscious belief becomes, the more conscious unbelief becomes, leading to habits of indifference, doubt, and skepticism. In The Idea of a Christian Society a decade earlier, Eliot had already addressed many of these same difficulties attendant on maintaining a meaningful national religious life in a postindustrial, highly materialistic, and contentious modern society. Now, however, he emphasizes that he wishes to explore those same issues not from the point of view of the Christian apologist but from that of the sociologist. As a result, “[m]ost of my generalisations are intended to have applicability to all religion, and not only Christianity.” If, then, he nevertheless appears to be discussing matters that are wholly Christian, it is because he is “particularly concerned with Christian culture, with the Western World, with Europe, and with England.” Finally, he emphasizes as well that whether one is a believer or an unbeliever, no one can be so completely detached from the religious experience as to approach and discuss it in a wholly objective manner.

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That said, he continues by undertaking a consideration of “unity and diversity in religious belief and practice” in order to “enquire what is the situation most favourable to the preservation and improvement of culture.” Those religions that have the greatest universality, as he sees it, are most likely to “stimulate culture,” and their universality is determined in part by their being able to appeal to and be accepted by peoples of different cultures. Christianity certainly fills that bill; however, Eliot observes that there is always the danger that too broad a cross-cultural appeal can also result in the dilution of a religion’s core values. These general premises established, Eliot announces that he will devote the remainder of this discussion to the relation of Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe, as well as to the diversity of sects that Protestantism has itself produced. It serves his purpose, for he finds himself compelled to admit that Europe since the 16th century, a convenient period reference for the Protestant Reformation, has certainly not suffered in terms of overall cultural development. While he must also admit that it is impossible to say what sort of cultural developments may have occurred instead had Europe remained Catholic and Christian, he cannot avoid the obvious conclusion that, based on the European experience, “[e]ither religious unity or religious division may coincide with cultural efflorescence or cultural decay.” When he uses England itself as the focus for a similar discussion, however, he is less sanguine, for while the two dominant religious cultures in England are both Protestant—the Established Anglican Church and the various Protestant sects that have splintered from it during the centuries—the English atheist still shares in the religious life of culture when it comes to signficant social events such as births, marriages, and deaths. Nevertheless, Eliot sees the major Protestant cultures of Northern Europe, where the Protestant Reformation suffered its widest and most enduring successes, as having cut those regions off from the mainstream of European cultural development, which is largely Latin in origin. While he avoids evaluating the pros and cons of that separation for the cultures of the north, he returns again to its consequence for the English.

Since Anglicanism as an offshoot of Catholicism was the result of a decision made at the top, in this case by Henry VIII in his own dispute with Rome, whereas the Protestant dissenters were opposing themselves on native ground specifically against what they saw as little more than a national expression of Catholicism, England may be culturally more stratified religiously in ways that are themselves modified by cultural distinctions among classes. This Eliot is willing to attribute to the regional divisions based on ethnicities that he desribed in the preceding chapter. In the most basic terms, he is willing to concede that the British Isles’ having been home to many peoples makes it ripe for frequent dissension and stratification in all areas of culture, but especially religion. The next logical step is to consider the ecumenical movements that are becoming more common. After making a distinction between intercommunion and reunion, he observes that complete reunion would entail a “community of culture.” The result would not, however, be that dreaded uniform culture worldwide, but rather a “Christian culture” manifested in its various local components. Here again, the danger would lie in such a Christianity’s attempting to be all things to all people, reducing “theology to such principles that a child can understand,” which he sees as a cultural debility. A worse danger, in keeping with the modern tendency to be polite to avoid the risk of appearing assertive, is that a sort of “cultural equality” may begin to prevail, and again the lowest-common-denominator approach to both theology and ritual might very well follow. When it comes to determining whether there should be an international church—Roman Catholicism—or a national church—here Anglicanism would provide a good example—or separated sects, Eliot takes the moderating position as he so often has done in this present treatise, proposing that the maintenance of a persistent tension among all three possibilities is desirable. “Christendom should be one,” but “within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas.” Chapter 5 Eliot devotes his last two chapters to culture and politics and culture and education. That he treats both topics in a far more cursory fashion than he

Notes towards the Definition of Culture had culture and class, culture and region, and culture and religion suggests that he does not view those last two categories as being as critical to the maintenance and transmission of cultural values. However, culture and religion, politics, and education together form a broader category, which is culture and the nation. Politics and education, from that point of view, are relatively equal to religion in forming the bedrock of a people’s culture as a nation, although the reader should recall at all times that, as far as Eliot is concerned, religion and culture are virtually inseparable. No wonder, then, the short shrift that he gives to politics, which is in and of itself, though dominant in the short term, a transitory aspect of any culture’s ongoing health. Still, Eliot is enough a child of his time to recognize the importance that the culture itself, particularly in the postwar environment in which he is writing, attaches to the political sphere, so he treats it gingerly but with a profound respect for its genuine even if superficial importance. The political, for one thing, bandy the word culture about quite freely. Yet, while all may engage in the political process, by voting, for example, or paying taxes, few actually engage in politics, so that, in view of the considerable power that they wield, these few form a virtual elite unto themselves. It is that idea, if not practical reality, that Eliot hopes to short circuit somewhat as he now defines what he sees to be the place of the political in a culture. “In a healthily stratified society,” he observes, “public affairs would be a responsibility not equally borne.” Nevertheless, the governing elite must not itself become one “sharply divided from the other elites of society.” To achieve this aim, he would not like to define the governing elite as opposed to the other elites as if the first were men of action as opposed to men of thought. Rather, he says, the relationship should be regarded as one “between men of different types of mind and different areas of thought and action.” A society that is graded accordingly, Eliot contends, with “several levels of power and authority,” might find the politician “restrained” in his use of language by his fear of censure if not ridicule from “a smaller and more critical public,” composed of those other segments of the elite who are

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not directly involved with the governing elite. In other words, these “men of action,” the political, would not be isolated in their own dangerously and disproportionately powerful subculture but would instead be subject to the judgment of those who respect thought over action. This governing elite should, then, be required to study history and political theory, so that they are inculcated in the life of the mind. Eliot has a pointed reason for bringing the political to the broader cultural table: “Today, we have become culture-conscious in a way which nourishes nazism, communism and nationalism all at once; in a way which emphasises separation without helping us to overcome it.” A more culturally astute governing elite would obviously go a long way toward overcoming those separations that are otherwise exposed to the exploitation of unscrupulous parties with agendas of their own. Eliot cites present-day communist Russia as an example of a culture attempting to export their revolution to all kinds of disparate cultures throughout the world by presenting theirs as a culture condoning the equality of cultures at all cost—a successful strategy despite its patently obvious contradictions. The democratic West, meanwhile, does little better. Eliot cites the British Council, an official body created to promote “cultural exchanges,” to show how those tactics are little different, since it too makes the transmission and exchange of culture a function of the state apparatus. Eliot rightfully wonders when it “again will be possible for intellectual elites of all countries to travel as private citizens.” As should be apparent, he imagines that that can occur only if there is a governing elite who do not imagine that the national culture and its dissemination and transmission is not the exclusive prerogative of the state. Eliot concludes chapter 5 on culture and politics by reiterating that we cannot “slip into the assumption that culture can be planned. Culture,” he says emphatically, “can never be wholly conscious.” Chapter 6 When Eliot, in chapter 6, takes up the topic of culture and education, the reader may recall that Eliot had, in chapter 2, argued that culture is better

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maintained and transmitted by the family than by those he calls educationists for the simple reason that the family unconsciously embodies the culture, while education, to be successful, must be a conscious process. And, as the reader is amply cautioned at the conclusion of chapter 5, culture can never—should never—be a “wholly conscious” affair. Rather than revisit that earlier argument in chapter 6, then, Eliot analyzes the general expectations associated with the idea of education by the culture, in order to extrapolate a more general idea of how education might best serve cultural purposes. To do so, he first sets out to examine and set in order the prevalent assumptions regarding education. The first examination, involving the prevailing notions of the purpose of education, entails the most extensive summary on Eliot’s part, citing such contemporary authorities as H. C. Dent, Herbert Read, and C. E. M. Joad. In each instance, he convincingly demonstrates that to varying degrees education has come to be seen as an instrument for advancing social ideals. He remarks that it is therefore unfortunate if education as a means for individuals to acquire wisdom, knowledge, and a respect for learning is overlooked in the interest of serving broader social aims. If nevertheless it is finally agreed that education’s purpose is “making people happier,” then that assumption ought too to be examined. Eliot quickly concludes in this particular case that “education is a strain” that very often “can impose greater burdens upon a mind than that mind can bear.” Eliot deals with his three other “assumptions” regarding the value and purpose of education in equally quick succession. (He could have as easily called them “myths” except that he has a poet’s respect for the meaning of words.) Thus, he is happy to debunk the notion that everyone wants an education. (“A high average of general education,” he observes, “is perhaps less necessary for a civil society than a respect for learning.”) He dismisses the notion that education makes for an “equality of opportunity” (he imagines instead that expanding educational opportunity can as likely lower educational standards) and the somewhat related notion that an exposure to education will unleash

latent abilities that may otherwise lay dormant (the “Mute Inglorious Milton dogma” he calls it, invoking a central image from Thomas Gray’s sentimental masterpiece, “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”). If there is a commonality to these assumptions that he raises only to challenge them, it is that they all emphasize the social benefits of education rather than promoting it for its own sake and as a force to help shape individual lives. The emphasis on opportunity and education, for example, he sees as indicative of the “depression of the family” and the “disintegration of class.” The reader should recall how integral Eliot sees the role of the family and class to be in the maintenance, dissemination, and transmission of culture. Eliot goes as far as to assert that in the modern world education has become an abstraction, “remote from life” and implying a disintegrated society. Meanwhile, education is thought to be the panacea for “putting civilisation together again.” If by education in that regard, Eliot continues, we mean “everything that goes to form the good individual in a good society,” then he has no problem with that, revealing in the process his own definition of education. If, however, education means a standardized curriculum mandated by government bureaucracies, then “the remedy is manifestly and ludicrously inadequate.” Ideally, education, he continues, defining the term as he goes, is the “process by which the community attempts to pass on to all its members its culture.” But when in practice education becomes what today would be called a government-sponsored and -directed entitlement, thereby bringing preselected aspects of the whole culture to bear in order to satisfy social and political agendas, the more systematically is the root culture betrayed. “Whether education can foster and improve culture or not, it can surely adulterate and degrade it,” Eliot concludes, imagining a future in which, the root culture lost to living human memory by the distortions of programmatic education, all that would be left of the culture would be “barbarian nomads . . . encamp[ed] in their mechanised caravans.” Eliot closes by reminding his reader of what he clearly thinks is a cardinal point, perhaps the cardi-

Notes towards the Definition of Culture nal point of his entire presentation thus far: “. . . we cannot set about to create or improve culture, . . only will the means which are favourable to culture.” To do as much, returning to his purpose for composing the essay at hand, one must at least know what one means, what values of behavior, habits, and institutions one refers to, in invoking the term. European Culture In an appendix, which comprises the English-language transcriptions of three radio broadcast talks that Eliot originally made in German in 1946, he comments on the unity of European culture. Addressing a German-speaking audience in their own language within a year after they had suffered a deserved and total defeat in World War II, Eliot introduces himself as a poet and editor—a man of letters. He begins by commenting on the rich variety of languages that make up modern English, which he identifies as the best language for writing poetry, for that reason. It has extensive elements from German, Scandinavian through Danish, French through the Normans, not to mention the Celtic that has infiltrated the language through the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish peoples of the British Isles. He goes on to comment on the other great contributions that Europeans, in particular the Italians, French, Germans, and English, have made in painting, music, and poetry, but he ends by singling out the advances that the French made in poetry in the 19th century under the leadership of poets such as CHARLES BAUDELAIRE and Paul Valéry, who influenced later poets such as W. B. YEATS but who had themselves been influenced by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe. Musing so, he points out the irrefutable fact that “no one nation, no one language, would have achieved what it has, if the same art had not been cultivated in neighbouring countries and in different languages.” From there, using the experiences of the American contemporary poet EZRA POUND, Eliot also establishes the influences of Asian, in this case Chinese, poetry on the languages of modern Europe to make a further point: “For when I speak of the unity of European culture, I do not want to give the impression that I regard European culture as something cut off from

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every other.” He holds this to be as true of painting and music as of poetry, and in the second of his three broadcasts, he extends the notion that there is a unified European culture as much to be found in ideas as to be found in the arts. Besides the fact that the thoughts expressed in this appendix are a reflection of Eliot’s overall thinking at the time, as they tended beyond his earlier parochial considerations toward broader and far less exclusive views of what values and behaviors ought to prevail in the human community, the appendix is appropriate to the overall topic of human culture. Throughout the book, Eliot has been defining culture as those inherited values, behaviors, and institutions that define the same people living in the same place, an idea borrowed somewhat from the early 19th-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel’s definition of nation. That while this culture is the expression of the whole people, that expression is continuously being modified, revised, and adjusted by the sometimes conflicting interactions and goals of the various groups, classes, and regions that make up any single culture. Furthermore, because a culture so defined is as living and as organic a thing as any other natural product of the thinking, feeling universe, it is best transmitted by the human families that compose its most central collective unit. In any event, what must be most avoided is any effort by the state or other more rigidly organized entities, such as educators, to “stage-manage” cultural developments and dissemination in any conscious way, since that will automatically truncate the natural processes of growth and change that any culture requires. It should be apparent that Eliot would then, of necessity, take a long step back from English culture, which, sensibly enough, had been the primary focus of his presentation till now, to take a look at the same phenomena from the point of view of a larger cultural sampling, the European experience. As he continues his survey of European cultural unity, he is indeed able to bring his own experience to bear by recounting in general but nevertheless detailed terms the 17 years, from 1922 to 1939, that he edited a literary review, the Criterion. Though it was published in English, he made every

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effort to publish, in translation, continental writers as well, particularly those who might otherwise be overlooked by the general reading public. In the process, he was in regular contact with other, similar reviews. That all these reviews failed he regards as the result of “gradual closing of the mental frontiers of Europe.” After 1933, the year that the Nazis came to power under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, for example, contributions from Germany became less and less easy to find; the same could be said of Fascist Italy, although in that case it had occurred even earlier. “A universal concern with politics does not unite,” Eliot can report with considerable authority, “it divides.” Before then, foreign ideas, in all senses of the term, had been welcomed “without hostility, and with the assurance that you could learn from them.” More, there was the sense that within Europe there was “an international fraternity of men of letters” who were as united by a common respect for ideas as others were by a national or religious loyalty. That Eliot mourns the passage of such a time and spirit is very clear, but it also permits him, in the third and final part of his presentation, to introduce the idea of a European culture. There can be no such thing, he asserts, if the countries of Europe are isolated from each other, as they had been, catastrophically, for the decade or more preceding his talk. After defining culture much in the same terms as he subsequently does in Notes, he makes it clear that, ultimately, there is no demarcation totally separating one human culture from another; still, he can insist on a unity of European culture. That unity is based, he feels, on Christianity, not as a communion of believers but as a common tradition. “If Asia were converted to Christianity tomorrow,” he says in order to illustrate his meaning, “it would not thereby become a part of Europe,” because although Asia would have embraced Christian beliefs, it would not have acquired the traditions in the arts, law, and thought that have developed over centuries in Europe as a result of its own unique Christian experience. So, then, Eliot can assert as well that “[t]o our Christian heritage we owe many things besides religious faith,” and that “this unity in the common elements of culture . . . is the true bond between us,” a

bond that, unlike political or economic bonds, does not require one loyalty; indeed, it may flourish best under many. Universities across Europe, however, should have “their common ideals” and “their obligations to each other.” Eliot concludes on an ominous note regarding circumstances unique to the times, but that may reoccur without warning at any time. Because of the economic and other restrictions on personal freedom brought about by years of devastating warfare, men of letters throughout Europe are not as free to travel and to communicate with each other as they ought to be. They can try, he nevertheless pleads, to preserve the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel to which Europe is heir, for, as he sees it, “these spiritual possessions are also in imminent peril.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY For the present-day reader reasonably well-schooled in the idea of culture, there may not seem to be anything new about Eliot’s observations in their most general sense. Since the Smithsonian Institution decided to include Elvis Presley’s guitar among those artifacts that define American culture, for example, individuals had become used to the idea that culture is not limited to highbrow pursuits and interests but is, much as Eliot defined it, the whole expression of the whole people. A critical point not to be missed, however, is that that very dramatic and necessary sea change in the common perception of what culture means and of what it constitutes has Eliot’s own work and thought on the topic in part to thank. From early in his career as a literary and social thinker, Eliot had invoked the idea of tradition and had taken his stand more and more as a conservator of those practices and beliefs and attitudes that he personally associated with the Anglo-American experience and, with it and by extension, the European experience as well. That he equally as often associated those concerns with England and Europe’s Christian background and traditions gave even him, perhaps, the impression that his was an exclusionary and conservative stance, one that may have beguiled him into making his extremely unfotunate remark regarding “free-thinking Jews” in After Strange Gods.

Notes towards the Definition of Culture As his career as a social commentator and Christian apologist continued, however, it seems to have become apparent to him that his defense of Christian England and its traditions was not any endorsement of being Christian and English. Rather it was an argument that any individual should foremost be mindful of and loyal to the cultural legacy of his or her own people, not to the exclusion of an exposure to and respect for other cultures and their values, but in order better to appreciate those other cultures as a part of the continuing and mandatory dialogue regarding not what it is to be English and Christian, but what it is to be human. At least that is the turn that Eliot’s thought begins to take in The Idea of a Christian Society and that terminates in his literally definitive statement on this important matter in Notes towards the Definition of Culture. To define culture, Eliot attempts to demonstrate in that work, is to define humanity at all its various levels—individually, ethnically, regionally, nationally, globally. Whether or not he succeeds in doing as much, his title boldly suggests that his is only a preliminary contribution to a dialogue that, once begun, can never be abandoned. Cultures may best develop unconsciously, but humanity can never be too overly conscious of how much the interactions of the world’s various cultures through time form what is called history. To shape that history to everyone’s benefit requires each person’s mindfulness of the culture that has nurtured him and an equal admiration for all those other cultures that nurture others. It is Eliot’s considered view that only the broadest and most generous definition of culture can acquaint individuals with the importance of that ongoing endeavor. Meanwhile, there are other crucial considerations, to say the least. In a nutshell, the increasing abstractedness of the state and its more and more total control of the instruments of education at the expense of more natural units of human association, such as the family and the region, can result only in the stultification of culture, a prospect that humanity has never contemplated before. The shape of that future, Eliot would be the first to admit (as he was also one of the first to contemplate), is anybody’s guess, but its arrival is ensured if the maintenance and transmission of culture

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become consciously treated as the official prerogative of bureaucratic and commercial interests. As a bulwark against that possibility, Eliot envisions an elite of individuals in the arts, sciences, religion, philosophy, and government who are respected not for their inherited or appointed position in the culture but for the inherent capacity that they each exhibit for keeping the cultural life of the community viable and active, so that change occurs as a result of the shaping power of natural talents and skills among individuals, and most certainly not of preconceived public policies. It is possible, however, that after all is said and done, Eliot may have missed a critical beat in his analysis of what makes human cultures work and develop, a lapse for which he can be forgiven but which still should be brought to the attention of interested readers. Quite simply, the processes by which cultures are formed and fostered may themselves have been undergoing a radical transformation in the 20th century, one that required an entirely new assortment of social methodologies for maintaining and transmitting them. Eliot himself had been able to speak of progressive stages and levels of cultural development. As much as such terms may make thinkers nowadays blush, he could point to primitive and high cultures in explaining how different rules and practices apply as cultures advance. If primitive and high were to be replaced by simple and complex, or if those words, too, seem too prejudiciously evaluative, then perhaps cluttered and uncluttered might do as well. The point is that the more complex or cluttered a culture becomes, as the cultures of Western Europe certainly have over the past several hundred years of their development, the more they need precisely what Eliot, from his vantage point, is justified in regarding as the death blow of a viable culture, and that is a conscious management imposed from above. Perhaps there is, in other words, a point at which culture ceases to advance best by advancing unconsciously, and Eliot could not possibly have known that he was living through just such a period of not catastrophic but cataclysmic change, bringing with it not an end but the sort of new beginning that Eliot otherwise has always cherished. No doubt it remains to be seen how

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much the increasing pressure of both population growth and widespread urbanization on a virtually global scale during the 20th and 21st centuries may alone require an entirely new set of paradigms than Eliot’s. The only certainty is that Eliot’s efforts in that same regard and in the midst of that same pivotal century should at least provide a worthwhile point of reference for future thinkers and thinking on this critical and sensitive topic.

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) T. S. Eliot published his first successful contemporary verse drama, The Family Reunion, in 1939. This work the author himself declared to be his most despairing work to date. In 1939 he published as well the prose work The Idea of a Christian Society, which, for all its celebration of the possibilities of a coherent community in England based on Christian principles, actually was a lament for the loss of the viability of just such a community in an increasingly secularized England and a harbinger of the disastrous conflict of World War II, which broke out the same month that the book was released. Yet 1939 was also the same year that Eliot published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and any reader familiar with the whimsical humor of the 14 poems, some as much as two pages in length, in the volume knows that it lives up to the mock serious nature of the title.

SYNOPSIS Eliot had always been one to entertain friends with his salaciously witty and scatological poems regarding the fictional King Bolo, and it is said that some of the poems in the Practical Cats volume may have been written originally to delight the Faber children. Whatever the case may be, Eliot had apparently been planning the volume for some time, even while he was engaged in a far more serious project, the composition, in 1935, of “Burnt Norton,” that wistfully philosophical sequence destined to become the first part of the Four Quartets. As early as 1936, Faber & Faber, Eliot’s publisher and the

publishing house with which he had been employed as both editor and board member since 1925, had been announcing the appearance of a volume of poetry by Eliot devoted to cats. Still, for all that such a collection would appear to have been a left-hand activity for Eliot to be engaged in while more ambitious projects were calling on his main attention, there is something of a farewell performance in the volume’s pages, as if Eliot, consciously or not, had rolled up all the youthfully precocious whimsy remaining in him into one considerably consistent effort in order to get his penchant for nonsense finally out of his system. Whether or not that was the point, after the publication of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Eliot would never write whimsy again—at least none that has ever subsequently seen the light of day. And yet, although on the surface, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats may seem to be, in comparison with his other literary efforts at the time, refreshingly lighthearted and devil-may-care in the sheer energy of its play of both language and imagination, lurking just beneath the surface of the volume may very well be all the potential of a darker intent, just as the potential of an ironic intent peeks continuously out from behind the lines of Eliot’s more sober and serious literary endeavors. Readers of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats have to decide rather quickly whether they are in the realm of make-believe or a realm where nothing is as it seems—and be able to discern the difference. The volume’s 14 poems are composed in a variety of rudimentary stanzaic patterns, ranging from quatrains to stanzas whose lengths vary as much by content as any preconceived structural principle. For all that he and his close friend, the American poet EZRA POUND, had virtually invented that freedom from regular structure that quickly became known as vers libre, or free verse, under Pound’s tutelage and encouragement, Eliot had been wont to use quatrains as well as far back as 1917, so there is nothing new or daring in technique here. One outstanding prosodic feature, nevertheless, is the nearly complete use of rhyming couplets, although several of the poems—“The Naming of Cats,” “The Song of the Jellicles,” and “Old Deuteronomy”—

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats employ the more authentic quatrains, utilizing an abab rhyme scheme throughout, that Eliot had used in his own so-called quatrain poems back in the late teens. “Of the Aweful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles,” in fact, goes as far as to use three-line rhymes virtually throughout. The poetry saves the best inventiveness, however, for the cleverness of its language, although at times, by approaching the sing-song quality of nursery rhymes and nonsensical doggerel, the obvious delight that Eliot finds in naming his various cat characters may lose some of its sprightly good humor. Still, who with an active imagination and no more than a tolerance for felines can resist Jennyanydots, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, Bustopher Jones, and Skimbleshanks, a random selection of the various cats that will appear representing as good a sampling as any of the sheer fun of it all. Eliot stresses that a cat’s name is in and of itself significant. In a complete sequence of poems that will close on how one should go about addressing cats, it is appropriate that the opening poem should be titled “The Naming of Cats.” In that opening piece, such delicious sounds as Coricopat and Jellylorum meet the eye and fill the ear, while the 12 poems composing the main body of the text each deal with a very particular, individualistic sort of cat. Old Gumbie Cat’s ironically nurturing treatment of mice and roaches makes for “well-ordered households,” while Growltiger is a criminal cat whose “last stand” burlesques the violence found in the Lost Boys, pirates, and Indians of Sir James Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) or Bertolt Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera (1928). A feline like Rum Tum Tugger, on the other hand, is the very model of the contrariety cats are fabled to be blessed with, while a pair like Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer add to the high jinx by making a shambles of their adoptive household. Then there are those other cats who seem to clearly portray human types. The title roles in “Bustopher Jones: The Cat about Town” and “Gus the Theatre Cat” should strike the reader as nothing more than outlandish versions of the sorts of cads and ne’er-do-wells who inhabit the demimonde of any modern city.

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The reader may detect what seems to be a definite movement in the sequence as further poetry introduces the criminal exploits of the Great Rumpuscat, who puts the battling Pekes and Pollicles on their ears, or Macavity, a “master criminal” “called the Hidden Paw,” who, aside from his being a four-legged rather than two-legged animal, could have stepped straight out of the pages of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about his famous fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes. If there is no more violent or intractable creature in all the animal kingdom than cats, the hero of “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” is a rather winning sort and model citizen—the very thing that most cats are not. His task in life is to see to it that everything runs smoothly on the various mail runs. Whether the poetry represents cats as they are, even if a bit extravagantly, or cats as they could be if they were otherwise human, two notes come through consistently and clearly: Cats do as they please, and their self-possessed swagger is no laughing matter. The volume’s final poem, “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” gets to the nub of the matter: There is no getting the better of cats. A cat must be addressed by his name, the reader is told, but the first poem in the volume, “The Naming of Cats,” had already insisted that each cat has a name only “the cat himself knows, and will never confess.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Thanks to the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical Cats, the volume could as well be called Old Possum’s Book of Popular Cats, even if the best-known song from that 1980s extravaganza, “Memory,” is a delightfully maudlin travesty of a much earlier and genuinely serious poem of Eliot’s, the youthful— 1911—effort, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Not to say that there was not always a bit of the lugubriously ludicrous in even the most serious Eliot poem. Indeed, up to the time of The Waste Land, perhaps, Eliot could always be counted on for writing poetry that seemed as liable to evoke mad laughter as sober reflection. Prufrock’s wondering whether or not he should part his hair behind, apeneck Sweeney rising from his bath, even Gerontion’s nervous Nelly tedium, all point as much to the ludicrousness of parody

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(sometimes self-parody) as to the searing honesty of a coldly dispassionate take on the vacuity of modern life. The Waste Land itself has its moments—many of them, indeed. One thinks of Madam Sosostris and her “wicked pack” of cards, or of the friend, socalled, going on in the pub about Lil and Albert’s troubled marriage. When, by the mid-1920s, Eliot’s vision seemed to darken in such efforts as the unfinished verse drama, “Sweeney Agonistes,” and the disheartening poem sequence, “The Hollow Men,” Eliot never quite lost his touch for the hysterically erudite stretch, the school of mock seriousness and faux humor. Sweeney proposes to make a “neat” cannibal stew of Doris; the hollow men call up a silly image as they lean together, their heads filled with straw. Eliot, even as he labored on the poetry that would eventually become, in 1930, “AshWednesday,” continuously tried his hand at poetry in a light and clever vein. The “wopsical hat” of the “unpleasant” Mr. Eliot of “Five Finger Exercises V” is only that minor sequence’s most obvious example of a poetry that is meant to be enjoyed, as it were, and surely not profoundly engaged. So, then, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats may not have come as a complete surprise even to those readers who had followed Eliot’s drift into darker and deeper waters than ever were plumbed by him before with his work, in the early 1930s, on religious drama, most notably 1935’s Murder in the Cathedral and such a contentiously polemical prose work as After Strange Gods, ominously subtitled A Primer of Modern Heresy, from 1934. On the whole and on balance, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is clearly intended as light verse. Indeed, when one notices that, along with someone identified only as the Man in White Spats, there are four other individuals to whom the volume is dedicated in appropriately weighty terms regarding their “encouragement, criticism and suggestions,” all of whom are the children of friends, including Geoffrey Faber and Christopher Morley, the argument is clinched that Eliot’s aim for the volume was to please himself and others by paying meticulous attention to perfectly delightful tomfoolery. A clue that these were Eliot’s intentions is further found in his choice of title. “Old Possum” was

the Pounds’ nickname for Eliot, the sobriquet referring to what Pound perceived to be Eliot’s ability, possumlike, to play at being what he was not, as the possum plays dead to thwart the plans of potential predators. Eliot’s forte in much of his serious poetry is the allusional hint that is as likely to lead readers up a blind alley as toward some revelatory meaning. That he would, then, choose to allude to Pound’s identifying him as a trickster in the very title of a volume of poetry that appears to be children’s verse bordering somewhere among the whimsical, the satirical, and the nonsensical, is encouragement enough to warrant reading the poetry with a mildly jaundiced eye. This is not to say, however, that Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is composed of anything in the of way animal fables such as one might find in the tales of the ancient Greek fabulist Aesop or of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. Eliot maintains too much the authentic tone of someone who is mainly having fun with the words and images and characterizations for one to imagine that that is not his primary if not only goal. Still, it would be as wrongheaded to assume that there is no serious intention whatsoever to the poetry. For all the heady erudition of his major works, Eliot was always a fancier of popular forms and appeals to the popular mind as audience. Hanging on the wall of his office at Fabers was a photograph of the popular film comedian Groucho Marx, with whom the poet developed a personal friendship through correspondence and whose work shared with Eliot’s a love for twisted irony and absurdist parody. Too, Eliot had written an essay on the passing of Marie Lloyd, an equally popular comedian of the English music-hall stage. Eliot was also a lover of popular mystery novels, often personally reviewing them for his otherwise lofty literary review, the Criterion. As an example of his affinities for popular culture, Murder in the Cathedral, his first successful play on the murder of Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was originally and more appealingly titled The Archbishop Murder Case. Even in his major poetry, Eliot was as likely to allude to popular song lyrics as to the Greek and Roman classics, and as his celebrity as a particularly obscure and erudite poet grew, he was always one

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to eschew the incredibly complex interpretations applied to his work, arguing that poetry can communicate before it is understood, and once going as far as to observe that the best audience for poetry was one that could neither read nor write. Whether he meant by that that an illiterate or a preliterate culture was more conducive to poetic production and appreciation, it should be clear from the preceding record that Eliot did not regard poetry as the exclusive preserve of highbrow scholars and critics. He spoke for the auditory imagination, the one that is most stimulated by intriguing sound patterns, and for what he called the music of poetry, that is, its ability to transmit degrees of meaning through tonal variations in structure and rhythms rather than through processes of pure intellection. Taken together, the foregoing ought to suggest rather powerfully that Eliot was as serious about the poetry of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as he was about any of his other poetry. More intriguing, however, is the fact that, despite the work’s having gone through a gestational period, during the time that Eliot was finally conceptualizing and organizing the volume, he was also just beginning to be extremely engaged in composing a most serious and philosophical poetry that would later become Four Quartets, with its complex exploration of the interrelatedness among God, person, and nature in terms that are as universally spiritual as they are personal and Christian. It cannot be mere happenstance that one of the 20th century’s most Christian poets also focuses on an animal as self-absorbed and likely to do as it pleases as the domesticated cat, or that the poet who virtually first gave voice, in The Waste Land, to that major cultural crisis that has since been termed the “urban apocalypse” has created a cast of primarily city cats. Like all good art, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats first should delight readers by giving them the pleasure of enjoying words beautifully used, where the cleverness of invention meets the sonority of sense. A couplet such as “Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, / For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity” means absolutely nothing in the sense of some “hidden” meaning in a line of verse, but it “means” absolutely nothing in that sense of the word precisely because

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it means exactly what it is saying. It would be too much to say that the very same Eliot who, for a while, made himself a subsidiary career by successfully denying any intention behind all the cosmic meanings readers and critics had drawn from The Waste Land would go out of his way to conceal profundities in the verses of Old Possum. Nevertheless, one must wonder why Eliot would expend so much serious effort on a volume of light verse, no matter how delightful, that also has the potential for being thinly disguised reflections on standard modern urban types, these coming coincidentally from a poet who, it is worth repeating, virtually wrote the book on modern urban verse in English. Whether a reader would be making much ado about nothing or missing the boat by a mile, depending on whether the poetry is read as a coded commentary on modern city life or is read for saying what it does and leaving it at that, such considerations still bait the key question, and that is that Eliot more or less single-handedly forever changed the face of poetry by suggesting, in poem after poem, that poetry is what readers, not poets, make it. Great art is anything that can survive changes in taste and fashion without being transformed into a travesty of itself. No one, we imagine and must hope, will ever read Hamlet as a social comedy or will not appreciate the timeless dual theme of young love and tragic love in Romeo and Juliet. But we can only imagine that. On its publication, The Waste Land was thought of by some as a parody of the excesses of modernism—which, ironically enough, it displayed in abundance. “Ash-Wednesday,” on the other hand, has an unmistakably serious tone, as do “The Hollow Men” and “Burnt Norton.” Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by having such a definite tone of whimsy, encourages some readers, oddly enough, to imagine that they may be missing something. Even more oddly, it is Eliot who, more than any other figure in 20th-century literature, has created such a sophisticated wariness in readers. Perhaps, then, it is best to make of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats exactly what one will because, as Eliot himself would observe, that is exactly what each reader does with any poem— make of it what one will.

352 “Philip Massinger”

“Philip Massinger” (1920) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

“Poetry and Drama” (1951) Presented as the first Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture in 1951, “Poetry and Drama” was later collected in On Poetry and Poets in 1956.

SYNOPSIS Inasmuch as Eliot is able to, he lays out not so much rules as guidelines based on his own experiences with composing poetic dramas. He begins by proposing that a play should not be written in verse if prose is an adequate medium to begin with. How that is determined is a matter left ultimately to each playwright, of course. Eliot does provide a rule of thumb that may be applied, and that is that, when all else fails, the play itself should be intense enough that attention is not called to its medium of expression. There is a great deal of food for thought here because it reveals something of what Eliot sees to be the proper relation between language and drama. If the language of the drama appears to be more important than the action that is transpiring on the stage, then, Eliot would argue, the work may be good poetry, but it is not good drama. In this same regard and by an application of the same rule of thumb, Eliot can make a convincing argument that prose dialogue is no more natural-sounding a medium of actual human speech than is verse dialogue, to the end that “prose, on the stage, is as artificial as verse,” or, interestingly, that “verse can be as natural as prose.” Once more, the guiding critical principle here is the unspoken conviction that drama is action first, language second. By the time that Eliot was penning these remarks, he had already seen three verse dramas produced for the stage, including Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party, the last of which had been commercially successful. It is quite likely, then, that his readers are getting the practical benefit of his own learn-

ing experiences as a poet-turned-dramatist. In any case, he emphasizes, the effects of style and rhythm in dramatic speech, whether it be prose or verse, should be unconscious lest they call attention to themselves at the expense of the dramatic action. Thus far, however, Eliot’s approach appears to be neutral. That is to say, he does not seem to be taking up for any one style of dramatic writing at the expense of the other. That is perhaps because his purpose is in fact twofold: to promote poetic drama, but not at the expense of dramatic poetry. If the distinction between prose and verse written for the stage is, in its continuous use, a minimal one, since either is as far removed from natural speech as the other, there is nevertheless the danger that such verse “will not be ‘poetry’ all the time,” and will and should, in fact, be poetry only when the dramatic intensity requires it. The point is, of course, that at such a time, a play written in verse can match that dramatic intensity with an appropriate elevation of the language from verse to poetry, whereas one written only in prose to begin with cannot change pitch without striking a note of discordance that will draw attention away from the action and toward the language, thus violating Eliot’s primary rule of leading with the action. As Eliot has been taking pains to emphasize all along, no self-respecting playwright will want to do that. Using the opening of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s Hamlet for his example, Eliot easily demonstrates how this modulation of pitch that a verse-poetry continuum allows for also enables the playwright to modulate the audience’s emotional response to the action. Much of the dialogue could as easily be prose until the ghost appears and is challenged, at which point the leap from verse into poetry heightens the action without drawing one’s attention away from it and toward the language. The problem then presents itself that the poet is writing for those few kindred spirits, some of them critics, who can respond to his or her vision as it has been expressed in words, whereas the dramatic poet is writing to communicate a dramatic sequence of events to a live audience during a live performance, an audience whose attention cannot be allowed to flag or wander. If there is, then, an ultimate criterion to test what constitutes the validly poetic

“Poetry and Drama” in a verse drama, it comes when Eliot again turns to Shakespeare. Using lines from Macbeth—“Tomorrow and to-morrow and to-morrow”—and from Othello—“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them”—for his examples, Eliot cites two key principles by which such an introduction of the purely poetic into the dramatic moment can alone be justified: It neither interrupts the action nor sounds out of character. Rather than the audience feeling that the playwright has thought of a beautiful line that he wishes to fit in, in instances like these, Eliot explains, the lines may surprise, as the sudden intrusion of the genuinely poetic would, but the ultimate effect is that they either fit the character to begin with or, equally as effective, compel the audience to adjust their conception of the character in keeping with the poetic statement. Such a discussion finally enables Eliot to define dramatic poetry (as distinct from verse or poetic drama) as poetry that “does not interrupt but intensifies the dramatic situation.” Earlier, Eliot had brought his own, first tenuous experiences as a dramatic poet to bear to expose some of the pitfalls that the writer of verse for the stage will want to avoid if at all possible. With Murder in the Cathedral, for example, the subject of as legendary and sainted an historical figure as Thomas à Becket lent itself so readily to a treatment in verse that writing it had not enabled him to resolve “any general problem” of verse style for the stage; in summary, “the play was a dead end.” Determined as a result that in order for verse or poetic drama to achieve prominence again, it had to “bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives,” he made his next dramatic effort a contemporary drawing-room melodrama, The Family Reunion, loosely basing it on the Oresteia of Aeschylus. There, however, by focusing so intently on issues of versification for the contemporary stage, he encountered a different kind of problem: “I had given my attention to versification at the expense of plot and character.” Eliot concludes the essay by returning to a consideration of his personal experiences with writing verse for the stage. Still focusing on the shortcomings of The Family Reunion as he now views that play, Eliot comments on some of its more obvious

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flaws: He had neither too loosely nor too closely adapted Aeschylus’s original, rearranging it as a strange mixture of adaptation and recasting that could only totally bewilder the attentive playgoer. He had spent too much time establishing premises in the first part and then gone on to establish even more in the second, thereby running the risk of both betraying and losing his audience’s attention. Finally, his introduction into a contemporary setting of the ghostly Aeschylan Furies (in the play itself he refers to them as the Eumenides, a closely related but entirely different concept) made for ludicrous staging problems. Learning from these mistakes, with his succeeding effort, The Cocktail Party, he decided to use his Greek source, Euripides’ Alcestis, as a point of departure rather than as a helter-skelter parallel plot, and he dispensed with trying to model a Greek chorus. Finally, he had let the necessities of plot and character development take precedence over the problems of versification, so much so “that it is perhaps an open question whether there is any poetry in the play at all.” Eliot concludes the essay by wondering if poetic drama is possible any longer but proposing its achievement as an excellent goal to pursue in any case.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The essay “Poetry and Drama” provides Eliot’s most single-minded and personal treatment of a topic that, as he himself observes in the opening paragraph, has nevertheless occupied his attention, first critically and later creatively as well, for the better part of his professional life. That topic is, of course, poetic drama. Indeed, when one regards the largely dramatic nature of much of his finest early poetry, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” to “Gerontion” and that crowning achievement, The Waste Land, Eliot can be seen as one who was always treading that very thin line between the poetic—language expressing all the nuances that words can bear—and the dramatic—character isolated by action and presented without the benefit of a guiding narrative commentary. Eliot does not generally tell stories in his poetry; rather, he dramatizes characters through

354 “Portrait of a Lady” their use of and response to words. This methodology continued well into the late 1920s in other notable poetry such as “The Hollow Men” and all of the Ariel poems as well, with the exception of “Animula.” That he subsequently followed his own lead, to the extent that most of the latter half of his creative life would be devoted to writing for the stage, comments that much more on the increasing importance that poetic drama held for him as a literary form. When, then, he turns his equally acute critical eye, as he did in this present essay, to attempt to discern the why’s and wherefore’s of using poetry in drama, there is much to be learned by paying close heed to his remarks and to the distinctions that he takes pains to make. Only in such drama, he believes, can human action and its moral consequences approach the sort of harmonious balances normally associated with music, yet not dissolve into the inarticulate. Art, he concludes, imposes a “credible order upon ordinary reality,” thereby allowing the reader or listener to perceive “an order in reality.” It is that kind of perception, Eliot believes, that brings individuals to “a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconciliation.” If he is correct, that is no small achievement for poetic drama to accomplish, and yet it can be accomplished only by applying the requirements of poetic discourse to the purposes of trenchant and engaging dramas.

“Portrait of a Lady” (1915) Composed during the same period of early creative energy, innovation, and experimentation of 1910–11 that produced “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “Preludes,” with which it was later collected in his first major collection in 1917, Prufrock and Other Observations, “Portrait of a Lady,” published in Others in September 1915, shares with those other early creations Eliot’s fascination with the use of a dramatized voice, disjunctive associations, and unusual observations that shock or surprise the reader with their tonal imbalances and unexpected shifts of emotional focus.

SYNOPSIS The Epigraph For his own part, Eliot may have learned his tactics for discombobulating his readers’ expectations from the French symbolists, but in “Portrait,” which is perhaps the most original, in the sense of its being the least derivative of Eliot’s work from this time, the skill at keeping readers off their guard seems to be all Eliot’s. By the same token, however, “Portrait” may not achieve the same level of poetic intensity as “Prufrock” does and therefore is not overall as successful or memorable a poem. Nevertheless, Eliot’s merely playing “Portrait” ’s title off against the epigraph from Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan drama, The Jew of Malta, tells readers that the poetry to come will be neither an ordinary poem nor a typical poetic experience. On the one hand, the reader is presented with the idea that this is somehow to be a portrait of a lady. The trope of a poem as portrait contrasts, of course, with the other poems of his from this period, whose titles most often contain musical analogies: “love song,” “rhapsody,” “prelude.” The reader’s imagination is automatically set up not only for a visual as opposed to an aural experience but also for the further cultural connotations that a portrait brings to mind, with its overtones of a formal and studied sitting; a measure of graciousness and beauty, not to mention wealth and prestige, in the subject; and, last but not least, cultivated tastes. The reader is compelled by the title to see in the mind’s eye all of life’s finer things, in no set order surely, but the point is maintained that a lady is not just anyone. And then the very first words that the reader encounters call up the immediate and vulgar image, from Christopher Marlowe’s verses, of a fornicating wench. The contrast is a startling one, to say the least, and no doubt intended that way. The reader is already puzzling out what sort of a lady is about to be encountered, but then has to deal with the fact that entry into the poetry seems to be an intrusion into private intimacies. The Poem A voice is speaking, but it is addressing the lady of the title apparently, “you,” and not the reader, in

“Portrait of a Lady” which case the speaker would have referred to the lady in the third person, “she.” With any modernist poem, but especially one by Eliot and particularly at this point in his development, it is best not to imagine that the poet, rather than some invented mask à la JULES LAFORGUE, is the speaker. (In the case of “Portrait,” there is not even good reason to imagine that the speaker is a male.) Surely approaching “Portrait” as if it is not veiled autobiography but a character study with two characters—the speaker as he is revealed through his friendship with and unspoken attitudes toward the lady, whom the reader meets as well through her quoted conversation—will allow the reader more latitude in coming to terms with the poem’s otherwise enigmatic content. Coming upon this text as if there is a key to it to be found in some information outside the text—the “real” identity of the lady in question, for example, or Eliot’s relationship with her (assuming that there was a real lady)—all too often results in false confidence and falser readings. Approaching the text instead as a self-enclosed world, while limiting the information base to the text alone, nevertheless expands the range of defensible readings. What a reader approaching “Portrait” in this manner, having survived the blow to the sensibilities that is struck by the double-edged sword of the contrast between the genteel title and vulgarity of the epigraph, discovers very quickly, then, is that the speaker is engaged in a one-sided conversation, a device that Eliot picked up from Laforgue and would use to great effect in the opening gambit in “A Game of Chess,” part 2 of The Waste Land. In “Portrait,” the words of the lady, enclosed in quotation marks, are apparently being spoken in some context or another; the words of the speaker, on the other hand, are his unspoken reflections on her and her utterances, either at the moment that she is speaking them or later when, in private, they recur to him. Surely there is a hint in the “let us say” that, as much as she may have let the “scene arrange itself,” the speaker, too, is arranging a future scene, or rearranging a past scene, either of which will expose the lady’s true nature (which is what a successful portraitist always aims to do). For if one thing is certain, it is that “Portrait” is not is a love poem. If anything, the speaker seems to be a

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bit put out and put off by the lady—her conversation, her tastes, her habits. They apparently attend social functions together; she speaks of a Chopin concert. But they are otherwise rather like characters in a tale by Henry James, the then-reigning serious American fiction writer, one of whose major works is also entitled “Portrait of a Lady,” although that is an entirely different story from Eliot’s. The personages of Eliot’s “Portrait” are more reminiscent of May Bartram and John Marcher from James’s 1901 short story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Those two keep company for many years, but the reader is encouraged to imagine that they shared little more than each other’s social company through all their years together, although they may have shared that intimately enough, a secret between themselves. While James gives the reader both sides of the story—as Eliot does, sort of—the tragedy of the James tale is built around Marcher’s being so self-absorbed in his own destiny that he never takes the time to notice that May has become an integral part of it. The tale ends poignantly with Marcher suddenly coming upon the discovery, a year after May’s death, that she had been in love with him all along. In his defense, Eliot’s speaker lacks Marcher’s density and does not to appear to be in any danger of becoming sentimental. If anything, Eliot’s speaker seems to know all too well what is going on, and he does not, on balance, like it. The temptation to link the speaker with the poet is always a strong one, of course, and since Eliot was still a young man of 22 at the time of the poem’s composition in March 1911, there is also a strong temptation to imagine that this may be a May–December sort of pairing, a younger man with a much older or at least not quite as callow woman. That might explain the none-too-thinly veiled eroticism of the epigraph—wishful thinking, or just plain old frustration. Surely there is little doubt that the speaker is dissatisfied with the kinds of activities in which he and the lady engage during their time together and seems to be wishing, or at least delights in imagining, that they might let their hair down, as it were. Still, the reader should be looking for evidence of this in the text, not making the speaker a stand-in for a youthful Eliot.

356 “Portrait of a Lady” As the poem opens, the speaker recounts a day, an afternoon, an evening, perhaps all three, that he and the lady have just recently spent or will shortly spend in each other’s company. He recounts the events with a sort of begrudging deference that borders or an insolent and mocking cruelty. If she seems overly polite and cordial, he seems to be reacting to her cautiously familiar formalities with a secret desire that she were less of a stuffed shirt. If, then, she is in a “darkened room” that reminds him of Juliet’s tomb, the implication is assuredly not that he is regarding himself as a young swain on a dangerously erotic adventure, but that she is past her prime and conceals time’s fabled ravages by keeping the lights low. As they converse, she seems to be always making elaborate excuses for this or for that, excuses that he, on reflection, resents but that he apparently otherwise suffers gladly as she makes them. And so, as part I ends, he can speak of “a dull tomtom . . . / Absurdly hammering” and of a “Capricious monotone” as he then suggests, rather wryly, and certainly not to the lady’s face, that they would do better to go out for cigarettes and beer. It should go without saying that that would not be the kind of activity that any self-respecting lady of the time in which Eliot is writing would be caught doing, no matter who was her escort. The other two parts of the poem continue in this same vein, and if “Portrait” has a flaw that makes it far less successful an achievement, finally, than the contemporaneous masterpiece “Prufrock,” it is that “Portrait” strikes a note but then never much develops or varies it. Once the parameters of their relationship are defined in the first part of the poem, the lady continues to patter on about her lost youth, his youthfulness, and their friendship. The speaker continues to listen in what must be a respectful silence that she takes for acquiescence but that is actually a colossally petulant boredom that he nevertheless is polite enough to conceal. With their pity-me honesty, his reflections do take on a tone and style that equal some of the best urban sophisticate poetry that Eliot was at the same time turning into poems such as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and the “Preludes”: “I mount the stairs . . . / And feel as if I had mounted on my

hands and knees.” There are great turns of thought and speech as well: “(But our beginnings never know our ends!)” is a concept that, with only slight modification, will serve Eliot well as one of the themes in one of his greatest poetic achievements, Four Quartets. Otherwise, however, the lady’s selfdeception and the speaker’s self-serving deception must become as tiresome for the reader, after a while, as they do for the speaker. Very likely, however, that is the very effect that Eliot wishes to achieve, and the reason why reading the poem as if it were semiautobiographical rather than a fictive construct diminishes both Eliot’s efforts and the poetry’s effectiveness. Like “Prufrock,” to which “Portrait” is in many ways a companion piece that also has as one of its aims exposing the limits of social interaction in polite society, “Portrait” comments tragically on the dilemmas that human communication, which ought to be a means toward self-revelation and interpersonal fulfillment, can create when the process is turned inward. The lady is talking to hear herself talk; the speaker is talking about her, but not to her. Both are missing the point of what human conversation is all about, which is to talk to each other. Toward the poem’s end, as the lady expresses her belated, perhaps, realization that they will never now be friends, since he is leaving, his language reaches its greatest capacity at expressing the frustrations that their strained relationship has caused for him. He imagines himself “a dancing bear . . . a parrot . . . an ape.” He goes to extremes trying to characterize his frustrations, granted. The problem remains that he never speaks them and never has spoken them, not, at least, to her. So it is proper that the speaker is left to ponder, at poem’s end, the imponderable: “Well, and what if she should die. . . . / . . . should I have the right to smile?” If the musing sounds cold-heartedly detached, it should nevertheless not strike any reader as surprisingly so. The portrait that the speaker has “painted” is as much a portrait of himself as of the lady, perhaps even more so. By poem’s end, then, even that sort of a prospect, that she may die, sounds like a minor bump in the speaker’s obligatory sense of attachment to the lady, not to mention his social calendar.

“Portrait of a Lady”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY If Gaston Leroux’s popular early 20th-century novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910) had any powerfully mythic energy at its core, it was that the great and fragile beauty that one expected of high art emerged from sources that were all too often horrifying and terrible to behold in their original form. The idea that the insane jealousy of the disfigured “phantom” underpinned the beautiful musical talent of the young heroine merely mimicked, even if only unintentionally, what modernist art of the time, particularly in poetry, was attempting to do, to abandon the commonplace notion that art had to be beautiful. This it replaced with the manifesto that it only had to be truthful. “Truthful,” however, all too frequently came to mean a reality that was sordid and ugly. The French poet CHARLES BAUDELAIRE had already led the way with his volume of poetry, first published in 1857 and tellingly titled Les fleurs du mal, or The Flowers of Evil, and younger French poets had followed by continuing to rewrite the book on what sort of language and themes properly constituted that increasingly vague literary category, the poetic. Among them was Eliot’s own youthful idol, the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE. That same devotion to an unflinching truthfulness, however, often manifested in a more than usual emphasis on life’s more turgid, torrid, or sordid aspects, also seemed to require heavy doses of subtle ironies and inverted logic as well, all to keep readers on their toes and off their game of second-guessing, generally wrongly, a poet’s intentions. If the older poetry had somehow allowed readers to feel easy, comfortable, and familiar, the new poetry aimed to keep them ill at ease in order to confuse them into discovering a meaning all on their own or missing it entirely. In “Portrait,” this sort of intentional ambiguity is illustrated vividly in the speaker’s own dilemma: He cannot come to honest terms with his relationship with the lady whom he is portraying precisely because he cannot speak honestly to her. Whether she fascinates him or repulses him is impossible to determine for the very reason that he cannot determine as much himself. The self-absorbed selfimportance of her one-sided conversations leaves him wishing not to be gone but to be daring, yet he

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confesses to having to drag himself to their assignations, as if it were a chore, and to finding the prospect of her death a mildly pleasant one. This otherwise inexplicable love/hate relationship of the speaker’s with the lady makes sense only if the reader imagines that Eliot is using the same Laforguean doubling ploy in “Portrait” as in “Prufrock,” but in a context that makes it more realistic. Whereas in “Prufrock” a single characterization runs the gamut from pathetic fool to tragic agon, sometimes from one line of verse to the next (“I grow old. . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”), in order to create the extremes of dramatic tension that give the poetry its particularly unsettling effect, in “Portrait” Eliot eschews the same sort of Laforguean doubling of the mask that enables him to make the poetry, without warning, now tragic, now comic. By now these techniques may have become commonplaces of poetic composition, at least as far as the influences of modernist poetry still remain, but in their time, just after the close of the first decade of the last century, they were liable both to confuse and to put off readers with their unabashedly frank and intentionally difficult approach toward subjects that had formerly been treated by artists in any medium—music, literature, painting, sculpture— with respect, delicacy, and clarity, even if that last quality often depended on a strict adherence to formulaic conventions of poetry writing. In essence, the reader knew what to expect from poetry, and the poet’s job, by and large, was to satisfy those expectations without necessarily catering to them. The self-appointed task of the new, young poets like Eliot, in contrast, was to discombobulate their readership, overturning those ingrained expectations by playing off against them. In “Portrait” Eliot divides the disparities of personality required for maintaining a dramatic tension—or at least makes those disparities more plausible—by creating two entirely distinct personages in the speaker and the lady. Doing so, Eliot permits them to play out their ying/yang, chatterbox/ silent commentator, frigid socialite/closet debauch relationship, a relationship that in “Prufrock” must be manifested in the conflicts between his private aspirations and public frustrations. Either way, the

358 “Preludes” thematic thrust of both poems is the same. The poetry exposes our ability to hurt without being hurt, to be hurt without hurting back. The unutterable painfulness of adult relationships that lack communication is palpable in the poetry of “Portrait,” so palpable, in fact, that it and the poetry are inseparable. The reader sees emerge from the poet’s words one enduring image of humans engaged in discourse but saying absolutely nothing, whether it is Prufrock expressing for the reader’s benefit but otherwise harboring his innermost feelings for fear of being rejected or the speaker of “Portrait” resenting the lady for her obtuseness but failing to call it to her attention or to let her go. As Eliot will say in another of his poems, written decades later, “Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.”

“Preludes” (1915) First published in the July 1915 issue of Wyndham Lewis’s Blast and subsequently collected in 1917 in Eliot’s first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, “Preludes” are four somewhat interrelated poems offering vignettes of the more steamy, less genteel aspects of modern city life.

SYNOPSIS Search for it in vain, there is likely nothing more than that mood unifying the four parts, and yet, as Eliot will himself establish years later, in the 1942 essay “The Music of Poetry,” often the play upon those similarities and contrasts of mood and tone are all that are required to make a sequence, or even a single poem, work. Each of the four identifies or is addressed to a different personage, for example. Preludes I and III are addressed by an anonymous speaker to an equally anonymous second person (although in III this anonymous “you” is at least given a bit more specificity by a detail suggesting that she may be a woman—she had “curled the paper from your hair,” that is, just finished giving herself a permanent). On the other hand, the tone of II is formal and impersonal, identifying the human presence in the poem with the indefinite pronoun “one.” Finally,

IV seems almost to be a short narrative poem as it speaks, in the third person, of an unlikely male character, “his soul stretched tight across the skies” (an image reminiscent of Prufrock’s famous evening sky that itself calls up, for the speaker, the image of a patient etherized upon a table). That fourth and final segment ends, however, with the sudden introduction of a first-person persona who seems to summarize all of the preceding vignettes and thus ties them together, somewhat, by telling the reader that he, the speaker, is “moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images.” What especially unites the four segments is, of course, the social and moral milieu that they evoke. Rather like “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” the “Preludes” are four short poems that offer snapshots of urban landscapes that give glimpses of a very private and provocatively intimate world, one that seems to hover on the brink of moral disaster and that certainly has been embraced by despair and decay. In a word, no one caught in its grip seems to be content. The reader is called upon to think of “a thousand furnished rooms,” “a thousand sordid images,” of restlessness and sleepless nights, booze and cigarettes. If these are not desperate lives, they are at least vacant lives, and the only question, as the speaker observes these lives and events as if he is a dispassionate clinician on his rounds, is whether the reader is intended to suppose that the creatures under “observation” are themselves aware of their plight. To unravel that conundrum, the reader is forced to regard the speaker. The poetry’s prevailing mood, the ruling metaphor, is insomnia, the same that haunts the verses and streets of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” It is the same disorder that may afflict J. Alfred Prufrock, as he, too, wanders “certain half-deserted streets” and knows “restless nights” and “lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY On the basis of the discovery of manuscript copy of Eliot poems from this same period, collected by him under the title Inventions of the March Hare, scholars now know that Eliot was working on poetry that would eventually become the “Preludes” as early

“Preludes” as 1909, while he was still an undergraduate at Harvard. No doubt as independent pieces, this sort of poetry was distinct from the more Laforguean pieces with which he was also experimenting at this time, so called because they were heavily influenced by, if not outright imitations of, the poetry of the late French symbolist JULES LAFORGUE. That latter experimentation generally resulted in pieces that were coyly elegant and self-mockingly witty and clever. In poems of that sort, Eliot’s self-dramatized and often self-deprecating speaker shared his aslant view of society and learning with a reader who was thus honored as being equally as clever and detached. Readers would come to know this Eliot best in the seven quatrain poems that he would later write between 1917 and 1919. The early experimentation that would lead to the “Preludes,” however, was of a different order, certainly, at least from the sort of poetry that might be produced by modeling one’s craft on Jules Laforgue’s example. This other kind of poems had titles such as “First Caprice in North Cambridge” and “Second Caprice in North Cambridge,” both composed in November 1909, and their subjects were cityscapes that focused, in a handful of spare lines confined largely to descriptive techniques, on the underbelly of inner-city living. In these are the first of the inklings of yellow evenings, gutters, streaked window panes, piles of refuse, tinny pianos, and even cheaper music—“minor considerations,” the poet calls them, although they seem, in the poems, to occupy a great deal of his time and attention. There followed several more “caprices,” a categorization taken from a musical term that ironically enough denotes a short and lively musical piece. These later caprices were a result of Eliot’s 1910–11 study sojourn in Paris: “Fourth Caprice in North Cambridge” and “First Caprice in Montparnasse,” the famous Left Bank or student/bohemian district of Paris that would subsequently be immortalized in the 1920s for English-speaking readers in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway. Along the same lines as these caprices are other urban, gritty Eliot poems with titles such as “Interlude in London” and “Interlude: in a Bar.” As originally cast, the “Preludes,” too, had much a more place-specific emphasis in their indi-

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vidual titles. They were first called, in order, “Prelude in Dorchester,” composed in October 1910; “Prelude in Roxbury,” also composed in October 1910; “(Morgendämmerung [German for “morning twilight”]): Prelude in Roxbury,” composed in July 1911; and “Abenddämmerung ([“evening twilight”]),” composed after Eliot had returned to the United States, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1911. The prominence of Dorchester and Roxbury as locales is easily explained: They are to this day other working-class towns located near Cambridge, the sort of places a young man of means might haunt when he was up to no good or just “slumming it,” as the saying used to go. By his later removing the place names, retaining only the consecutive numbering from the final printed pieces, and combining them into a sort of musical suite, Eliot instantly turns minor set pieces that would have had only a sort of sketchbook interest into mood pieces behind which might lay that sort of an insidious but otherwise formless intent with which he loved to dally in his earliest work. Furthermore, by making the four relatively disparate pieces that had been linked by nothing more than the same interest in a certain level of contemporary urban experience appear now instead to be pieces combined by a unified and consecutive theme, the mood of the poetry—its vague but very real discomfiture—becomes all that the reader can cling to for refuge, inasmuch as that similar mood is the only element that the four poems, as individual composition, have in common. The poem presents the reader with a “physician heal thyself” paradox. The empty lives that are being witnessed are colored by the observer’s own empty life, and therefore his conclusions are liable to be tainted, so that the poetry compels the reader to form his or her own conclusions. Like any other paradox, however, this is one not easily resolved. Unlike “Rhapsody,” which will end with “the last twist of the knife,” or Prufrock, which ends with “human voices wak[ing] us, and we drown,” the “Preludes,” for all the bleakness of their accumulated observations, end on not one but several positive notes. There is, foremost, the speaker’s sudden admission—sudden for the very reason that it is doubtful

360 “Reflections on Vers Libre” that any reader of the poem has ever been prepared for it—that he, in the midst of all these images of the squalid and the sordid, is moved nevertheless by “the notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” Whatever else that may mean, it certainly offers the reader, as well as the speaker, the hope that there is something else, perhaps even something more to life than he has thus far witnessed. That hopefulness, meager and vulnerable though it may be, is subsequently reinforced in the next and final stanza, where the speaker again addresses an anonymous “you,” who is encouraged to laugh. The reason given is that “worlds revolve”—our realities, like our perceptions of them, come and go—“like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.” Small though that action, too, may seem in the vast scheme of things, one cannot gather fuel without a faith in the future, even if it is only a faith that there will be one. That there will be a need for fires to prepare the food over, to keep out the cold and the night, and to keep the beasts at bay—these are reasonably healthful expectations. “Preludes,” as the name suggests, is a beginning, an introduction to worlds not yet realized. Out of the long night that these four short poems describe comes day, which is, if nothing else, at least a brighter prospect.

“Reflections on Vers Libre” (1917) In his final collection of prose criticism, To Criticize the Critic, which was published posthumously by Faber & Faber in 1965, Eliot included two critical pieces from very early in his career as a poet and critic. These were “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” and “Reflections on Vers Libre.” Both had originally been published in 1917. “Reflections on Vers Libre” first appeared in the New Statesman on March 3, and the appreciation of Pound was published anonymously later that year as a book-length pamphlet by Alfred A. Knopf on November 12. More important than that synchronicity, they share an aim in introducing the reading public to what was then an entirely new way of writing poetry.

SYNOPSIS If there was any one particular feature of literary modernism that, when it was just coming into some public prominence as a cultural phenomenon, first raised eyebrows and set tongues to clucking, it had to be VERS LIBRE, or free verse. A poet could write totally incomprehensible twaddle, but as long as it marched across the page in fixed-length lines and stanzas, like squadrons of well-disciplined and orderly troops on parade, poetry was behaving itself and all was well with the world—or at least the literary corner of it. The bolder of the modernists seemed to have grasped this idea intuitively—if you wanted to blow the public’s mind, topple the longcherished idea that poetry was distinguished from any other species of writing by virtue of the fact that it had a fixed number of syllables to each line and, if at all possible, rhymed. Poetry in English, a language system more limited in the opportunity for rhyme than the Romance languages with their vowel endings on nouns, adjectives, and verbs, had long been permitted the option of the blank verse or the unrhymed line, but even then it had to have a fixed number of syllables or “feet,” that is, stresses, per line. Into that orderly world came vers libre, setting so many teeth on edge and poetasters aghast that, as a liberating device, it may actually have backfired. What was partly a way to outrage and, so, reorient public taste in poetry was actually and primarily an effort on the part of such poets as Eliot and his close friend and mentor EZRA POUND to revivify poetic language in order for it to approximate more naturally the intensities of living speech rather than sound like an artificial language. That indeed would be part of Eliot’s and Pound’s complaints regarding the turn that English poetry had taken since the 17th century, beginning with John Milton: The English used in poetry began to sound more and more like a language that was encountered only in poems. Gradually, it seemed to be, too, that it expressed sentiments and feelings and even situations that were encountered only in poetry, further separating the poetic from the commonplace. Despite the efforts of individual poets like the early 19th-century English romantic poet William Wordsworth to bring the “real language of

“Religion and Literature” men” into his poetry writing, the young Pound and Eliot, aside from a poet like the American Walt Whitman, were unable to find, as Eliot would express the dilemma much later, in the 1953 essay “American Literature and Language,” “a single living poet, in either England or America, . . . whose work was capable of pointing the way to a young poet conscious of the desire for a new idiom.” As Eliot would famously put it, he found himself being drawn instead to foreign sources of influence, particularly the vers libre of French symbolist poets such as CHARLES BAUDELAIRE and, most particularly, JULES LAFORGUE. The purity of both this effort and its motives was, however, somewhat lost, it is worth repeating, in the shock effect that free verse worked upon the public mind. A sincere attempt to “resuscitate the dead art of poetry,” as Pound would characterize it in his 1919 poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, became instead confused with a means of gaining undue and undeserved attention by outraging public tastes and sensibilities for no other purpose than to “rock the boat,” as it were. Essays such as Eliot’s “Reflections on Vers Libre” were intended primarily to counteract, if not halt, this tendency to confuse the serious efforts of the modernists to craft a new poetic language with a puerile desire on their part to be nothing more than noticed. Eliot does not take long to get down to cases. “Vers libre does not exist,” he proclaims by the end of his second paragraph, going on to explain before the close of the second page that that is because “there is no freedom in art.” Hence, “the so-called vers libre which is good is anything but ‘free.’ ” He had made a similar point in the anonymous introduction to his essay on Pound’s metric: Pound could write a free verse only because he had “worked tirelessly with rigid forms and different systems of metric.” Whether or not Eliot means exactly what he appears to be saying is quite another matter, however. He is implicitly defining free verse in the way that its detractors like to characterize it, as if it were synonymous with a lazy carelessness and licentious arrogance. Naturally, then, it is easy for Eliot to argue convincingly that there is no such thing, since, in fact, there is not.

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CRITICAL COMMENTARY According to Eliot’s widow, Valerie, writing in a short note introducing the 1965 collection To Criticize the Critic, he had included the two items on Pound and on vers libre “in response to many requests,” and that is likely true. By the mid-1960s, these early comments of Eliot’s on, among other modernist phenomena, vers libre, or free verse, had acquired, in addition to their intrinsic value as literary criticism, a historical value as well. They remain an integral part of the living record of a watershed moment in English literary history, transcribed by one of the principal participants as the events were themselves occurring. As such, there is much to be learned from them, but one must be careful to separate the passions and interests of the moment from the more enduring benefits that can be gained from Eliot’s commentary. The attentive reader can hear the critic in Eliot speaking out of the lived moment, not his later memory of it. Thus, he can perhaps be more taken at his word, even if the conclusions that they lead to are not earth shattering. Based on such authentic early testimony, it is clear that, from Eliot’s point of view, vers libre implied, for the poet committed to its practice and spirit, not any freedom from an abiding respect for rhythm and meter—in a word, craftsmanship—in poetry, but from a slavish conformity to preset verse forms that were themselves arbitrary in their origins. Thus, Eliot can safely say that “freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation.” And he can as safely conclude by insisting, as he began, that “vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.”

“Religion and Literature” (1934) Another essay from that period in Eliot’s career as a social and literary critic when he was staking out the parameters of his conservative views, “Religion and Literature” was originally from a lecture organized by the Reverend V. A. Demant and published in

362 “Religion and Literature” the volume Faith That Illuminates. Subsequently, in 1936, Eliot himself collected the essay in his Essays Ancient and Modern, a somewhat revised version of his own earlier collection, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, from 1928.

SYNOPSIS Eliot’s apparent aim for the essay is not to prove who is and who is not failing to meet the bar that he sets for dealing with spiritual matters or matters of belief in literature, so much as to establish which “explicit ethical and theological standards” can be properly brought to bear in the realm of contemporary literature. He makes this case because he feels that literary criticism requires “a definite ethical and theological standpoint.” His further, and more urgent, point is that in our own time, there is no agreement on what that standpoint should be, making it all that much more imperative that individuals scrutinize their reading accordingly, particularly since the “greatness” of literature “cannot be determined solely by literary standards.” In the immediate context of his remarks, Eliot specifically identifies these individuals as Christians, given the further fact that, in his view, he was as much fighting a holding action for asserting the Christian basis to European culture as attempting to resolve this particular critical conundrum. Eliot is correct in pointing out the obvious: “[M]oral judgements of literary works are made only according to the moral code accepted by each generation, whether it lives according to that code or not.” The point is indisputable: Whatever its source, however it may categorize itself or be categorized, a moral code directs our judgments of human behavior, including behavior that is manifested or explicated in works of literature. The operating principle that he establishes as he commences his actual process of analysis is that his concern will be not religious literature, “but with the application of our religion to the criticism of any literature.” He does not get down to doing that, however, until he establishes the three senses in which one might refer to religious literature in the first place. One is in the same way as “we speak of ‘historical literarture’ or of ‘scientific literature,’ ” and that would constitute works that are well writ-

ten and delightful to read, but whose primary claim to any reader’s attention is their significance in regard to the field of endeavor or study or interest that is being addressed. Another sense is as what is called “devotional poetry.” This often suggests the limitation, however, that that sort poetry is minor poetry. At the very least, Christian poetry in English, Eliot believes, “has been limited . . . almost exclusively to minor poetry.” The third sense in which one might refer to “religious literature” is in regard to works that advance some specific religious viewpoint. These kinds of works do not interest Eliot in his present critical effort because he wants, he says, a “literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and defiantly, Christian.” Now Eliot is ready to get down to critical issues raised by the dual topics of religion and literature. The primary one is that “we fail to realize how completely, and yet how irrationally, we separate our literary from our religious judgements.” Using the 19th-century English novel for his case in point, he divides the development of this separation between religion and literature into three phases. In the first, faith was omitted entirely from “the picture of life” that these novels portrayed. In the second, faith was “doubted, worried about, or contested.” It is the third phase, the one “in which we are living,” that causes Eliot the most concern. From this concern of his, only the Irish novelist JAMES JOYCE is excepted, and it is that by now “the Christian Faith [is not] spoken of as anything but an anachronism.” The absence of the notion of a viable and living religion from contemporary literature is a serious problem because, in Eliot’s view, “what we read does not concern merely something called our literary taste, but . . . affects directly, though only amongst many other influences, the whole of what we are.” Omitting religion from literature as anything other than as an anachronism clearly also omits it, for the contemporary reader who has no way of knowing any better, from that very “whole of what we are.” The entire matter of literature’s more unconscious and unintended effects upon a reader’s total sensibilities, including the continuing formation

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” of his or her moral and theological standards, is at the heart of Eliot’s message. “The relation of what I have been saying to the subject announced should now be a little more apparent,” he is now finally able to declare. He continues: “Though we may read literature merely for pleasure, of ‘entertainment’ or of ‘aesthetic enjoyment,’ this reading never affects simply a sort of special sense: it affects us as entire human beings; it affects our moral and religious existence.” Eliot does not blame or condemn the individual writer and his or her values and beliefs either, such as they are. “[W]hat a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do.” Indeed, Eliot can confess, quite honestly, one must imagine, that “I am not even sure that I have not had some pernicious influence myself.” So, then, it is not so important to describe and define the relationship between religion and literature as to admit, and accept, that there always is one. While it is “our business, as readers of literature, to know what we like,” for Christian readers, it is “our business . . . to know what we ought to like.” Modern literature, Eliot concludes, is neither amoral nor immoral, although the implication is that it would be more suitable if it were because then those attitudes would be out in the open. Rather, the problem is that it either “repudiates, or is wholly ignorant of, our most fundamental and important beliefs,” thereby “encourag[ing] its readers to get what they can out of life while it lasts.” That sort of a hedonistic approach toward human existence, without any reference to the soul or eternity, is well within the realm of possible reasons given for living at any time, but Eliot’s cavil is with the apparently acceptable reality that, in our time, such a view is so prevalent a one as to seem to the typically unwary consumer of contemporary literature to be the only reasonable view.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY For the decade or more preceding “Religion and Literature,” Eliot’s prose writing had been forking off in two separate but complementary directions. In the one case, he was investigating the constituents of what he regarded as effective poetry and dramatic verse in essays on such subjects as Elizabe-

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than drama and dramatists and English metaphysical poetry, as well as on major literary figures such as WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and DANTE ALIGHIERI. On the other hand, and in a parallel vein, he was engaging in a quasi-literary debate dealing with the limits of secular humanism as an evolving, atheistic intellectual posture and contemporary ameliorative for social ills. These two areas of inquiry and critical opinion often merged in the matter of the spiritual or religious nature of human experience as an aspect of literary endeavor. Thus, Eliot was often raising and addressing questions related to the effective communication of thought and of feeling, the connections between poetry and belief and between poetry and philosophy, and the proper intellectual and historical foundations for assessing and maintaining moral and spiritual order and action. In “Religion and Literature,” Eliot is less contentious and more analytical with regard to the topic at hand, but he is still a Christian apologist. As Eliot sees it, there is only one solution to the culture and society’s increasing secularization of matters formerly left to religion, and it is a practical and practicable solution: Those with a view toward obtaining a religious view of life from contemporary works of literature must work “tirelessly [to] criticize it according to our own principles, and not merely according to the principles admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the public press.” There is always present in the culture a relation between religion and literature because they are two critical components of any human culture of any time. In our own time, Eliot believes, that necessary relation must be safeguarded, even if only for themselves, by individuals who care not what the moment may bring, but what eternity may.

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (1915) First published in the July 1915 issue of Wyndham Lewis’s Blast and later collected in the 1917 volume Prufrock and Other Observations, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” with its gritty emphasis on

364 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” the seamy underside of urban life, may strike a reader who has come to Eliot through the more genteel though no less disharmonious environs of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or “Portrait of a Lady,” with their afternoon teas and Chopin concerts, as very much out of keeping with this poet’s central concerns, which appear to focus on the awkwardnesses that can be caused by an individual’s social ineptness amid the expectations generated by a rigidly stratified class structure. Yet there is a very real linkage between these two kinds of poems emerging from the fledgling poet between 1909 and 1911, the period that produced the poems in question. What may at first seem to be depictions of two distinct if not opposing social venues and lifestyles drawing the poet’s interest—the seedy nightlife vistas of “Rhapsody” and the “Preludes” versus the stuffy drawing room melodramas of “Prufrock” and “Portrait”—have a common source in the French symbolist poets who had gained Eliot’s fascinated devotion in late 1908 on his reading of ARTHUR SYMONS’s The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE.

SYNOPSIS “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” with the musical connotation of its title, is, for all its bleakness, a rather lyrical poem, if by that is meant not simply that it is of a first-person or experiential order but that it is particularly melodic in its blending of rhythms, images, and sound patterns. Eliot had a lifelong habit of blurring the distinctions between art forms. From his earliest efforts he freely blended the associations of his poetry with musical forms— the love song, preludes, the rhapsody, the triumphal march, choruses—or other art forms—the portrait or landscapes—or, last but hardly least, the lyrical poem with dramatic forms. While it is not uncommon to associate the poetic arts with either music or painting, no other poet did so with as much consistency up to and including his final masterpiece, the suite of poems called the Four Quartets. Surely, consciously or not, this was Eliot’s way of calling all of the reader’s aesthetic and imaginative sensibilities to bear—the aural, the visual, the narrative, the theatrical. Even his love for freely mingling levels of discourse—the

working class vernacular with the stilted coded language of high society and the multisyllabic neologisms of science and the academy—borrowed as much from the music hall and vaudeville stage as from the models of the clever patois associated with the 19th-century French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE. Eliot was a wordsmith, a master of tone, voice, and mood, diction and wit. “Rhapsody,” from the beginning, exemplifies all these traits and talents in their earliest and most unabashedly fresh manifestations. It is no wonder that “Memory,” the most memorable song from the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical Cats, its book freely adapted from the nonsense verse of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, finds its lyrics in a poem like “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” instead. If there is a difference, it is that Old Possum’s Book is filled with an intentional whimsy; “Rhapsody” is not. For all its beauties as a created thing, that which is called for lack of a better term a work of art, “Rhapsody” details a world of loneliness and alienation, regret and bitterness, and the strong hint of vice and viciousness. In good Laforguean fashion, with a dollop of another 19th-century French symbolist poet, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, added for good measure, it is by presenting unpleasantries in comparatively pleasant terms that the purposes of art, in this case poetry, can be turned to making palatable the unthinkable if not the quite yet unspeakable. What reader reading the poem, its poetry flowing directly out of its relatively winsome musical title— shades of all those odes and hymns penned by the English romantic poets less than a century earlier—does not stop short as the first stanza comes to an abrupt end with the disconcerting image of a “madman shaking a dead geranium”? What does that mean? one may well ask. The inexorable point is that this is the new, not the old poetry, so it may mean whatever the reader wishes it to mean. The trouble is that none of those meanings are going to leave the reader feeling very comfortable. That is how the modernist poet, among whom Eliot was one of the first and remains perhaps the chief proponent and practitioner in English, surrendered one domain of control over the reader, with its promises of an accessible, commonly accepted

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” meaning, in return for another, greater control over the reader’s psychological and perhaps even spiritual prerogatives. The modernist like Eliot does not tell the reader what to think, but through a careful manipulation of language controls instead the far more pertinent zones of how the reader thinks and, so, by extension, feels. Recall that image of the lunatic with which the poem opens. Is the madman shaking the dead geranium in some insane effort to revive it? Is he shaking it with some sort of maniacal grin on his face, mocking death and the typical individual’s grief and fear in the face of it, even when its victim is only a flower? Is it merely a totally irrational act, the sort of which can drive a sane individual to the edge of a momentary madness the more he or she tries to force logic and order upon it? Whatever solution the reader arrives at, it is no real solution, and the windy night into which the poetry, like the sirens’ song, has lured the reader has only just begun, appropriately enough on the opening stroke of midnight. With each successive stanza, the poem and, with it, the speaker sink more and more deeply into a dark night of bored desperation and the menace of madness. The reader is forced to assume the psychological (but, it is important to note, not spiritual, for then there might be some reward for the distress) posture not only of a denizen of the socalled demimonde, the world of nighttime sexual adventures and drunken escapades, but as a denizen who is definitely not having any fun and is morbidly depressed and may in fact be mad.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY That there may have been some autobiographical biases in Eliot’s attraction, at that time, to scenes more reminiscent of fleshpot literature than social registers is possible, no doubt. These were Eliot’s undergraduate years at HARVARD University, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and nearby BOSTON’s working-class neighborhoods provided late-night diversions for well-to-do college boys interested in other things than their IQs and grade-point averages. A part of the poetry excised from The Waste Land, composed nearly a decade after these earliest poetic ventures, involved a racy, raunchy Night-

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town sequence of undergraduate carousing in a late-night Cambridge. Although that section may itself have been inspired by if not borrowed from the model of JAMES JOYCE’s Ulysses, its content nevertheless provocatively suggests that Eliot knew firsthand whereof he spoke from his own undergraduate days experiences there. Also, by the time he was first composing “Rhapsody,” in March 1911, Eliot had been living, since the previous October, in Paris, that longtime den of iniquity from the point of view of innocent Americans abroad. True, Eliot was there enrolled in a class at the Collège de France being taught by the renowned French philosopher Henri Bergson, but the young Eliot was also reading Charles-Louis Phillipe’s 1901 French novel, Bubu de Montparnasse, which recounted in explicit details the exploits and exploitation of a Parisian streetwalker of the times (and to which, for a 1932 English translation, Eliot happily provided a preface). Those autobiographical considerations marshaled and accounted for, nonetheless, it is far too facile and misleading an argument to suggest that these sorts of experiences, as common as they are in general and speculative as they very well may have been in Eliot’s case, account for the poetic realities of such a work as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” For those, the reader must reach back into the far more profound interest that the French symbolists held for the young poet, not as a young man about town but as an individual seeking to find a poetic voice and poetic themes unique to himself and to his time and his place. In that regard, what would later became known in critical circles as the urban apocalypse was a theme just then emerging in poetry. Fostered by the social and economic processes and problems of increasing urbanization in the industrialized nations of 19th-century Europe and America, the phenomenon gained an increasing measure of literary recognition in the English-speaking world by midcentury and later in the novels of Charles Dickens and poems such as James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874), among others. It was the French symbolists, however, chief among them in this particular instance Baudelaire, who did more than merely address the topic. Instead, in response to this urban nightmare, they

366 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” had created a new tone for poetry, one that combined, in the place of the sentimentalities of a romantic overkill, the understatement of bitterness and resignation into an oddly celebratory aesthetic. With it, they were able to reflect on the new, gaslit urban landscapes revealed only at night among an often sordid squalor in which bred a brutalization of the spirit and a collective despair that were only just then beginning to assault the human psyche. It must be admitted that it may be unlikely that Baudelaire in particular was one of Eliot’s guiding spirits as early as the time of the composition of “Rhapsody” for the simple reason that the French poet was not among the symbolists originally included in Symons’s introduction to their work and vision, a book that the young Eliot had read in 1908. Baudelaire is included nevertheless among those books which Eliot’s mother, Charlotte, listed in a 1920 letter to him as being among those of his to be moved from their St. Louis home, and since he had not been in the United States since 1915, the Baudelaire had to have been acquired well before then, perhaps even while Eliot was first in Paris in 1910–11. Indeed, for a while Eliot had contemplated staying on in Paris and writing poetry only in French. Otherwise, Baudelaire’s dark and forbidding urban vision, expounded in the volume Les fleurs du mal, containing a poetry infested with images of sexual license, physical decay, and self-loathing, undoubtedly helped shape Eliot’s and other contemporary English-language poetry. Surely there is more of Baudelaire than of the dandified and plaintively witty Laforgue in these urban nocturnes of Eliot’s, of which “Rhapsody” is the most outstanding and memorable example. For his own part, Eliot famously alluded to Baudelaire’s preface to Les fleurs du mal in one of the most urban apocalyptic moments in The Waste Land, in the “Burial of the Dead” section as the crowd of zombified urbanites crosses over London Bridge. Indeed, in 1950, Eliot wrote that all of Baudelaire’s influence on him can be summed up in two lines of the latter’s poetry, in which he describes the city as if it were a seething anthill, lines that Eliot more paraphrases than translates in The Waste Land when he describes London as the “unreal city.”

While Eliot’s execution of The Waste Land, his first truly major work, is still a decade or more away, poems such as “Rhapsody,” whatever combination of experience, influence, and poetic challenges may have finally produced them, were definitely the workshops and laboratories out of which that masterpiece would eventually emerge. So, then, the speaker of “Rhapsody” can be viewed as a Prufrock of sorts. (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was coming into its own final form at virtually the same time, March 1911.) Just as Prufrock can imagine mermaids who do not like him (or at least refuse to sing to him), “Rhapsody’s” speaker is out for a night on the town apparently for the sole purpose of making himself absolutely miserable. There is, of course, much keen observation of human nature here of the individual’s capacity to be his or her own worst enemy, but where this is great poetry is found in Eliot’s willingness to abandon not only an ostensible theme or meaning but even the merest hint of a discernible purpose for the sake of creating discomforting psychological effects, rather like a discordant piece of modernist music or abstract art. The poetry keeps up its inexorable sense of meaningless doom right down to the literalness of the “last twist of the knife,” the bleak and bitter note on which this poem, which had promised, with its title, all the harmonious comforts of a musical composition, ends. Not just the ear but the reader’s eye has been assaulted throughout as well, what with the speaker calling attention to soiled hems, rusted factory yards, a child with dead eyes, a barnacled crab, a streetwalker’s pockmarked face, all stained with the odor of female smells and of cigarettes and alcohol. These are not pretty sights or sounds or smells, nor are they intended to be, but due to the careful measure of the language—the idea that someone, even if it is only the poet, is in control—makes what may seem to be a brutal ugliness into genuinely beautiful art. “Rhapsody” achieves that rare thing: beauty that is not manifest in the events or the objects but that can be revealed through the manner in which it is presented. It does take a leap of the imagination to accept the premise that poetry can redeem the debasements brought about by nature and by human

“‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama” nature. The last twist of the knife may not betoken a pleasant ending, but it is still an ending, and a certain order has been imposed on the less attractive aspects of reality that otherwise gnaw at the edges of consciousness, disturbing the individual without enlightening him. This new poetic art that Eliot pioneers in a poem such as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” intends to be inclusive, to find a place in the poem for a madman shaking a dead geranium and soiled hems and cigarettes, since they too are all a part of the same common reality, which, if not celebrated, can at least be poeticized.

“‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama” (1919) In his 1927 essay “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” among those negative tendencies in Elizabethan drama against which Eliot defends the Roman playwright Seneca is that he is responsible for the bombast found in dramatic works from that period in English literary history. “Without bombast, we should not have had King Lear,” Eliot argues, pointing out a serious distinction between drama and life: Drama requires effects that are larger than life but that are still emotionally manageable. Dramatic poetry, of course, requires that it be a language containing more power of expression than is found in ordinary speech, and yet it cannot be so overdone that it sounds too theatrical to elicit sympathy. In this present essay, published nearly a decade earlier, Eliot addresses the difficult question of keeping dramatic poetry at a level approaching conversation without making that style itself into just another species of rhetoric—which he defines as “any convention of writing inappropriately applied.” “[I]f a writer wishes to give the effect of speech he must positively give the effect of himself talking in his own person or in one of his roles,” Eliot proposes, and to do so, he further proposes, necessitates an adaptation that moves from the rhetorical, as he has just defined it, to more refined ways of expressing ordinary thought and feeling. Such a development is “partly an improvement in language and it is partly progressive variation in feeling.”

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The playwright Eliot uses to illustrate this point at which mere rhetoric, or bombast for bombast’s sake, becomes viably dramatic is neither Elizabethan, however, nor, inasmuch as he is a relative contemporary, even English-speaking. Rather, it is the 19th-century French playwright Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand’s 1897 play featuring the 16th-century French wit and swordsman and his love for Roxanne. While having at first accused Rostand of utilizing a stage rhetoric that far outstrips any the English Elizabethans may ever have employed, Eliot concedes that in Cyrano’s famous speech on noses—Cyrano’s claim to both fame and wit being that he had a particularly noteworthy nose—the rhetoric matches the moment, whereby “the character, the situation, the occasion were perfectly suited and combined.” Eliot was still some four years away from first trying his hand at an original verse drama, with “Sweeney Agonistes” in 1923, and it would be more than a decade after that before he successfully completed another original one when, in 1935, Murder in the Cathedral was staged at the Canterbury Festival. In 1919, nevertheless, Eliot was already essaying the proper balance that must be struck between stage language and “real speech,” whatever that, as a particular kind of discourse, may be. For drama to satisfy, Eliot concludes, it “must take genuine and substantial human emotions, such emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions, and give them artistic form.” But the range of “typical” human emotions, as Rostand’s Cyrano readily attests, is a rather broad one, and it may sometimes entail the use of what one would normally call rhetoric if those kinds of emotions and their situations are to be given their day, too. If so, “we may apply the term ‘rhetoric’ to the type of dramatic speech which I have instanced,” Eliot writes, referring to Cyrano on noses, “and then we must admit that it [‘rhetoric’] covers good as well as bad.” To know how to strike that balance wherein high drama can be given its due while the natural language is not paraded across the stage as a parody of itself requires, as Eliot has already made clear, a confluence of character, situation, and occasion. In his 1951 essay, “Poetry and Drama,” Eliot astutely observes that writing drama in verse to begin with

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Sacred Wood, The

allows the playwright to bring all of the power and beauty of poetry to bear, but only when and as the dramatic action requires it. To know that moment is to know precisely how and when to use what Eliot, in this present essay, calls rhetoric in poetic drama.

Sacred Wood, The (1920) Eliot’s first collection of his prose criticism, The Sacred Wood was published simultaneously by Methuen in London and Knopf in New York in 1920. Aside from incidental reviews, the collection brought together work that Eliot had been publishing to that time in such outlets as the Egoist. This opportunity for getting his views out there in book form presenting itself, he also worked feverishly well into July of that year on original pieces to be included in the volume. Among the collection’s 18 items, excluding Eliot’s introduction, all but seven were subsequently collected in Selected Essays, 1917–1932. These included such notable early work as “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a 1919 essay that is mistakenly assigned a 1917 publication date in Selected Essay’s table of contents, and “Hamlet and His Problems,” also from 1919, which introduced the idea of the objective correlative. Among those pieces in The Sacred Wood omitted from Selected Essays was an early (1920) essay on Dante that was among the first to introduce Eliot’s notion that poetry could treat philosophical matters without itself becoming a mere substitute for philosophy. Eliot develops this notion most fully in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” in 1927 and in the longer “Dante,” published in 1929.

“Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” (1927) As the dry tone of the title suggests, “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” is really more of an extended piece of critical scholarship than one of the more trenchant kinds of literary essays that

Eliot was, and has remained, far more renowned for writing at this point in his career as a literary critic. Indeed, the essay was specifically commissioned by Charles Whibley, a friend and journalist who had introduced Eliot to Geoffrey Faber in 1925, leading to Eliot’s lifelong career as an editor and director with the publishing house Faber & Faber. “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” was intended to serve as an introduction to the Tudor Translation Series, accounting, no doubt, for its highly academic-sounding approach to the entire topic. As a result, the essay, inasmuch it was intended as a document to be studied, is laid out with a much more painstaking attention to a formal organization than is typical for Eliot, whose major critical work was often pieces intended as literary journalism or developed from lectures and other public presentations. By the same token, there is much in the essay that cannot easily be, and need not be, summarized.

SYNOPSIS The Tudor translations in question are the Tenne Tragedies, which had been edited by Thomas Newton and published as a complete collection in London in 1581. The translations of Seneca’s own first-century A.D., classical Roman adaptations of popular tragedies from the Golden Age of Greek tragedy during the fourth century B.C. were by a variety of hands, however, most notably Jasper Heywood. Heywood contributed no less than three of the 10—Troas, Thyestes, and Hercules Furens— and there were titles among the selection that had been issued separately from as early as 1559. The primary critical problem that these translations from Seneca’s original Latin into English represented virtually from the time of their publication as a finished editorial project in 1581 is how much and in what manner they influenced popular Elizabethan drama, which would have just then been coming into its own with the work of playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and John Marston in the late 1580s. For the most negative view of the influence that Seneca’s tragedies, which had been thus made generally accessible as a result of Newton’s collection, had on subsequent original dramas in English, the remarks

“Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” of Thomas Nashe in his 1589 preface to a play by Thomas Greene are most often cited. Eliot certainly had recourse to Nashe’s remarks. Nashe had commented on how a theatrical emulation of Seneca, whose own choice of themes was most often drawn from and exploited the most brutally violent of classical Greek drama, had brought nothing but blood and violence to the Elizabethan stage. It is this well-known note of disapprobation on which Eliot himself picks up most prominently as he begins his own consideration of what benefits the development of English drama in the Elizabethan period may have derived from the Senecan model to which young English dramatists were exposed by the Tenne Tragedies. Specifically, Eliot wishes to explore three areas of critical contention regarding the influence of Seneca. After establishing that the only point of agreement among critics regarding Seneca is that the five-act division in modern European drama is due to Seneca, Eliot identifies those three areas that he will consider: Seneca’s “responsibility for what has been called . . . the Tragedy of Blood . . . the horrors which disfigure Elizabethan drama; second, his responsibility for bombast in Elizabethan diction; and third, his influence upon the thought, or what passes for thought, in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.” Eliot is quick to preview his conclusions to each of the three: “the first . . . has been overestimated, the second misconstrued, the third undervalued.” On the first matter, Eliot argues that Seneca may have provided Elizabethan dramatist with “a pretext or justification for horrors . . . for which there was certainly a taste . . . which would certainly have been gratified at that time whether Seneca had ever written or not.” As for the Elizabethan love of bombast’s having been inspired by Seneca, Eliot does not deny it, observing that the Elizabethans themselves ridiculed the bombastic tendencies in imitations of Seneca’s style. However, he also imagines that such a trend was not unrelentingly harmful to English dramatic verse. “Without bombast,” he concludes, “we should not have had King Lear.” Eliot concludes the entire treatise by commenting on the Tenne Tragedies as texts in their own right.

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As he sees it, they have a “documentary value” not only as Elizabethan drama in its embryonic state but as texts representing the transformation of an older form of versification—the so-called fourteener— into a new one, that is, the unrhymed, iambic pentameter line called blank verse. That form would dominate English poetry for the next 300 years and more, well into the epoch of free verse ushered in by the modernists. More important, perhaps, these translations brought about what Eliot sees as a transformation of language and sensibility. “Few things that can happen to a nation,” he says with some personal experience of the phenomenon, “are more important than the invention of a new form of verse.” Eliot finishes with a paean to the age that had thus ended as a result of the influence of the Senecan translations. In Heywood’s Hercules Furens, Eliot writes, one hears “. . . the last echo of an earlier tongue, the language of Chaucer, with an overtone of that Christian piety and pity which disappears with Elizabethan verse.” “[O]ne feels,” Eliot says, “a curious strain on the old vocabulary to say new things.” It is an observation that is itself poetry. Surely Eliot will make it so in the poetry of his own Four Quartets, which were still a decade and more in the future.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY It is when Eliot touches on the topic of Seneca’s influence on what among the Elizabethans passed for thought, or one might say ideas, that Eliot reaches a conclusion that has far-reaching critical value. A persistent theme in Eliot’s criticism is the relationship—that is often better characterized as a confusion—between poetry and philosophy. Another persistent theme is his judging the worth of a poet on his or her having a mature view of life. Senecan thought among the Elizabethans, Eliot says, may be regarded as the foundation for that crucial poetical hallmark, which he identifies in this essay as “their attitude toward life so far as it can be formulated in words.” Eliot is not about to pretend, however, that such an “attitude toward life” as might have been expressed by Seneca, a pagan Roman, in his recounting of the more violent of the great and

370 “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” equally pagan Greek myths, could possibly be equal to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that influenced Dante. Nevertheless, that is not to the point, in Eliot’s view, because Shakespeare and Dante “were both merely poets,” so any “estimate of the intellectual material they absorbed does not affect our estimate of their poetry.” While Eliot deals with this question much more effectively and extensively in another essay from the same period, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” here he is much more succinct. It is true that readers make different use of Dante and Shakespeare as a result of the different attitudes toward life that inspired their poetry, but Eliot does not see it as a means toward judging the relative merits of each’s poetry as poetry. Indeed, Eliot concludes that it was Shakespeare’s “special role in history” and perhaps even “a part of his special eminence” that he was a poet capable of “express[ing] an inferior philosophy [meaning Seneca’s] in the greatest poetry.”

“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927) Like many another Eliot essay, the ostensible topic of this particular piece—the influence of Senecan stoicism on the philosophical premises underlying Shakespeare’s drama—is at first approached almost tongue-in-cheek. Quickly, however, it evolves into a treatise on the relationship between poetry and belief and, so, too, between the poet and the poem. That latter area had been and would remain fertile territory for Eliot’s unique contributions throughout much of the first half of the 20th century to the ongoing dialogue that is the field of literary criticism, contributions that began with his propounding an impersonal theory of poetry in the landmark essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919. In the present case, however, Eliot moves the debate regarding the validity of his famous separation between the man who suffers and the mind that creates as close as he ever will to his own personal circumstances as a creative intellect and also

invites consideration of the further question of the relationship between the poet and his age.

SYNOPSIS Eliot begins on a note that is far more jocund than it is profound, and that is for him to take stock of the number of “new” Shakespeares that are suddenly appearing on the literary scene. He is not referring to new editions of the bard’s works, but rather to treatments that purport to reveal exactly who the playwright “really” was, particularly to categorize him inasmuch as the value system—his system of belief, if you will—revealed through his dramas will allow. As a result, Eliot observes that there are now available to interested readers cases to make Shakespeare “a Tory [i.e., politically conservative] journalist or a Liberal journalist, or a Socialist journalist . . . a Protestant Shakespeare, and a sceptical Shakespeare, and . . . an Anglo-Catholic, or even a Papist Shakespeare.” Eliot’s aim here is not so much to question the wide range of disparities, which alone underscore the probability that someone must be wrong, as to wonder over “the remarkable resemblance” that each categorization happens to bear to its proponent of the moment. “I have not a very clear idea of what Shakespeare was like,” Eliot writes, “but I do not conceive him as very like either Mr. Strachey, or Mr. Murry, or Mr. Wyndham Lewis, or myself,” listing a number of the more prominent recent proponents. Though this is expressed with something of a mock incredulousness for humor’s sake, Eliot’s observation exposes a deep-rooted problem with literary source and influence hunters, and that is that they tend to find the sources and influences that they seek, particularly when they enter the especially murky zone between the poet’s life and the poet’s work. Here, introducing himself into his text “as a minor poet,” Eliot happily brings his own experiences with that sort of criticism to bear as a case in point for that methodology’s inherent weaknesses, if not outright wrongheadedness. In support of his view that “Shakespeare may have held in private life very different views from what we extract from his extremely varied published works,” Eliot goes on to assert that “I am used to having cosmic signifi-

“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” cances, which I never suspected, extracted from my work”: “. . . to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, . . . to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience. . . .” Convinced by this experience of his own that people who insist on using the text as a sort of personal seismograph of the poet’s ethical, spiritual, and philosophical ups and downs are as likely to be wrong about Shakespeare as they are about him, Eliot then tells his reader that he is therefore going to propose a Shakespeare influenced by the stoicism of Seneca, the great tragic playwright of the classical Latin stage, since such a proposal must most certainly be on the way in any case. (Indeed, in a longer, more scholarly, and considerably less flippant essay published in 1927, “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” Eliot will fulfill his own prophecy.) Thus far, so that the reader does not miss the value of Eliot’s position, though he is presenting it in a lighthearted manner, he is not attempting to be frivolous in citing the critical excesses. From this point on, he makes a brief but convincing case that there is as much of Seneca as of Montaigne and Machiavelli, otherwise the two reigning candidates of choice, in the Elizabethan mindset, although Eliot admits that he is “not so much concerned with the influence of Seneca on Shakespeare as with Shakespeare’s illustration of Senecan and stoical principles.” It is, as a distinction, one most worthy of critical note, drawing an implied contrast between poetry as a medium for the transmittal of ideas and poetry as a medium for the dramatization of them. In any case, it is a distinction that allows Eliot, several pages later, to go off on a fruitful tangent by regarding the relationship between the poet as thinker and the poet as poet (or qua poet, as Eliot liked to put it). Eliot finds it reasonable to imagine a Shakespeare not thinking “anything at all.” Eliot will not deny that, when the typical reader encounters a Homer or Virgil, Dante or Shakespeare, that reader imagines that he is encountering great ideas, but that is not because the poet is a “thinker.” “In truth, neither Shakespeare or Dante did any real thinking,” Eliot insists, for the very real and transparent reason that “that was not their job.” Rather,

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they were “occupied with turning human actions into poetry.” If poets are not thinkers, by this definition of the term, what then are they, one might well ask, clinging to the possibility that poetry can at least express ideas, even if it does not necessarily originate them. Eliot answers that question: Rather than being a thinker as such, “[t]he great poet, in writing himself, writes his time.” Poets are, as it were, messengers rather than the message—they do not make their age; they express it. As such, they are limited by what thoughts and beliefs their age is capable of thinking and of believing, but their capacity as poets is limited by nothing other than their imaginative skills. He concludes, “Thus Dante, hardly knowing it, became the voice of the thirteenth century; Shakespeare, hardly knowing it, became the representative of the end of the 16th. . . .” Nevertheless, Eliot insists, that each occupies such a position has nothing to do with the quality of their thoughts and everything to do with the quality of their poetry, which is quite another matter, harder to gauge and far more difficult to discuss in the intellectual terms required of criticism. Be that as it may, Eliot can conclude that “you can hardly say” that Dante or Shakespeare “believed, or did not believe” the prevailing philosophical systems that inform either their age or their work. Rather, the task of the poet, the great poet, is “to express the greatest emotional intensity of his time, based on whatever his time happened to think.” In Dante’s case, it was the coherent system of Christian belief codified by St. Thomas Aquinas, and that, not Dante’s capacities as a thinker, gave his poetry its remarkable coherence. In Shakespeare’s, it was a mixture of Seneca, Machiavelli, and Montaigne boiled in a free-spirited, free-thinking Renaissance stew, and that gave Shakespeare’s poetry its remarkable energy and range. Although Eliot takes his own closing argument there, rounding it out instead with some further considerations of those particular Senecan qualities that a reader might yet find in Shakespeare, the reader might well wonder how Eliot’s take on the relationship between a great poet and the age might play out in the age of modernism, which is

372 “Sir John Davies” characterized by so many varieties of thinking as to defy categorization.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot’s continual interest in the question of poetry, the age, and belief may have been profoundly inspired by his own awareness that muddled thinking does not produce clear anything. His equally constant effort to keep his eye on tradition and what he called orthodoxy may finally have more to do with an attempt to keep his own arsenal of fresh ideas well stocked with the tried and the true rather than with any overwhelming personal commitment to those same kinds of ideas. It is hardly splitting a difference to permit as much to come into consideration whenever one finds oneself confronting what appear to be beliefs of any sort in Eliot’s poetry. By the same token, at this time, 1927, Eliot’s own poetry writing was moving in directions that seemed to suggest a distinctly autobiographical basis to his choice of themes. He was undergoing a conversion experience that, by June of that year, led him to being baptized in the established Church of England, making him, in essence, an Anglo-Catholic whose orthodoxy made him about as far removed from the Unitarian apostasies of his ancestors as one could possibly be, short of becoming a Roman Catholic. Such details might encourage the reader to imagine that this further emphasis of Eliot’s, in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” on the separation between the biography of the living man and the products of the creative mind, with Eliot using his own creative output for a part of the case in point, may have been a smoke screen, or at least an effort to preempt whatever future critical bias such personal readings of his poetry would impose. The likeliest conclusion to such speculation would have to be that a person of Eliot’s astuteness and critical acumen would no doubt have anticipated the kind of intense personal scrutiny his own poetry would undergo in the critical search for the beliefs and philosophies that it may seem to express. Who, then, could blame him for hoping to add his own two cents’ worth of opinion to the question of poetry and belief? Eliot is not saying that a poet’s beliefs may or may not be found in his poetry; he is saying that

that is not what ought to make the poetry a thing of permanent interest to others. The example of the past is evidence that Eliot may be right. Homer’s “beliefs” were, for him, as real as anyone’s, but for any reader nowadays, they are simply an intriguing addition to the story that he tells.

“Sir John Davies” (1926) Eliot’s essay on Sir John Davies, which was originally published in the the Times Literary Supplement and subsequently collected, in 1956, in On Poetry and Poets, takes up succinctly what was during the 1920s so common a complaint of Eliot’s that the essay is well worth the reader’s attention despite its relative brevity. Davies, an early 16th-century English jurist and poet, was a contemporary of many other figures who also occupied Eliot’s attention at this time, including the prose stylist Sir Lancelot Andrewes and the metaphysical poet JOHN DONNE, as well as the celebrated circle of Elizabethan dramatists, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE among them.

SYNOPSIS In Eliot’s view, Davies the poet, whose primary claim to fame is Nosce Teipsum (Know Thyself), fares particularly well in such illustrious company. Why Eliot holds this high opinion of Davies, and what eventually compels him nevertheless to qualify it, offer insights into Eliot’s way of assessing and evaluating literature, insights that are otherwise not easily come by. To his credit, then, Davies was, in Eliot’s estimation, a poet who, “[i]n an age when philosophy, apart from theology, meant usually . . . a collection of Senecan commonplaces,” had an independent mind. Indeed, Eliot goes even further: For an Elizabethan poet, Davies’s “thought is amazingly coherent.” Eliot continues: “. . . there is nothing that is irrelevant to his main argument, no excursions or flights. . . . [T]he thought is continuous.” Perhaps most important, Eliot commends Davies for possessing “that strange gift, so rarely bestowed, for turning thought into feeling.” Coming from Eliot, that is high praise indeed. One need only have a limited awareness of Eliot’s

“Sir John Davies” attitude toward the disjunction between thought and feeling that he saw occurring later in the 17th century and that he famously termed, in the essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” the “dissociation of sensibility,” to appreciate how important it is, in Eliot’s mind, for thought and feeling to be expressed as inseparable components of human experience. Even more to the point for Eliot here, however, is Davies’s consistency of thought and feeling. Whereas a Donne “was ready to entertain almost any idea,” Davies has a greater capacity for belief and, so, “has but the one idea, which he pursues in all seriousness—a kind of seriousness rare in his age.” Echoing the praises that he had, in “Lancelot Andrewes,” poured out on Andrewes as a thinker and believer in comparison with Donne, Eliot here goes as far as to give Davies the laurel for a more medieval mind than Donne’s modernist, humanist bent—such terminology being as much code words in Eliot’s time and usage as they are in our own for the forces of orthodoxy and tradition in opposition to the forces for liberalization and reform.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY This essay, like “Lancelot Andrewes,” in which Donne is excoriated to Andrewes’s benefit, comes from that period in Eliot’s life when he was gradually converting to classicism, royalism, and Anglo-Catholicism, as he would himself phrase it. Someone more tradition-bound, as Eliot seems to be implying that Davies was, would be more likely to draw his praise and attention. Yet that does not necessarily mean that Davies, in the final analysis, earns himself a place in Eliot’s pantheon of conservative heroes. For for all his good features, as they have been enumerated here thus far, Davies nonetheless fails the most critical test, and that has to do with those very beliefs that he holds and seriously espouses with such a perfect balance otherwise of thought and of feeling. Before one proceeds into allowing Eliot to expatiate on Davies’s failing, however, it would be wise to grant to Eliot the same scrupulosity of thought and feeling that he expects of others. If, then, Eliot faults Davies’s beliefs, it will not be on doctrinal grounds—Eliot had been very well and very formally trained in appreciating that there is an

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extremely wide variety of human beliefs—but on the grounds of a doctrinal coherence. Even if that seems to be splitting hairs, it still admits that there are hairs to be split. What else is human thought, and particularly belief, if not its refinements? That, in a word, is what and where Eliot finds that Davies comes up lacking. To appreciate how and why, one would first have to have some acquaintance with Eliot’s take on Davies’s beliefs, or at least his expression thereof. Essentially, Eliot lodges against Davies the same charge that he had lodged against the late 18th-century poet William Blake in a 1920 essay and would level again against several contemporary poets, most notably EZRA POUND and W. B. YEATS, and the novelist D. H. Lawrence in 1934 in After Strange Gods. The gist of the charge is that such writers go to great trouble, both for themselves and for their readers, seeking to create whole-cloth or to modify existing systems of belief when a perfectly good one, time-tested and widely regarded as acceptable, is already in place. In Davies’s case, Eliot points out that his Nosce Teipsum is a “long discussion in verse of the nature of the soul and its relation to the body,” wherein Davies is “more concerned to prove that the soul is distinct from the body rather than to explain how such distinct entities can be united.” In so doing, Davies invariably gets himself entangled in other theorizing—for example, that the ear is whorled in order to keep sound from striking the brain directly and thereby confusing it—in order to support his primary one. Eliot is forced to conclude that, whatever the sources of Davies’s “theories,” “we cannot take them very seriously.” For Eliot, mixing philosophy and theology with poetry is never a good idea to begin with, as he will shortly argue at greater length in essays such as “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” in 1927 and, in 1929, “Dante.” The problem, as Eliot sees it, is an endemic one. Davies is a poet, not a philosopher, although “he had a gift for philosophical exposition.” Thus, his appeal is to feeling, not thought, not because poetry cannot appeal to both, but because Davies’s poetry does not appeal to both. Davies’s theory of the relationship between the body and soul, even if he had used better sources,

374 “Social Function of Poetry, The” still “does not matter a fig,” therefore, because it is not Davies’s theories but his poetry that ought to matter. As harsh as this dismissal may sound, Eliot is only being practical and, if the truth be known, fair as well. Poetry is to be judged as poetry, not as philosophy or theology. Readers must be careful to split the same hair in the same way as Eliot does here now. While he finds Davies’s so-called theories quaint, that is not the source of his dissatisfaction with them as poetry. Rather it is that they are made to seem to be the purpose for the poetry, whether they were quaint or not, rather than the other way around; that is to say, the whole purpose for the discussion of the soul and the body in Davies is to have grounds for the poetry. Eliot, in closing, can turn to a no less spiritual poetry on the same topic, that being the passage in DANTE ALIGHIERI’s Purgatorio that describes the soul as if it were a little child. (Eliot would himself shortly have recourse to this same passage as a source for one of his Ariel poems, “Animula.”) As a sign of how much Eliot, in disparaging Davies’s ideas, is not disparaging Davies’s poetry, Eliot suggests that, while Dante was, in comparison with Davies, a “vastly greater poet” depending on an “infinitely more substantial and subtle” philosophy, anyone who can appreciate the beauty of Dante’s verse “should be able to extract considerable pleasure from Nosce Teipsum.” The wary reader will readily note that Eliot emphasizes deriving beauty and pleasure, not philosophy and theology, from either man’s poetry, as it should be.

“Social Function of Poetry, The” (1945) In this essay, which was first delivered as an address to the British-Norwegian Institute in 1943, then further developed for delivery before an audience in Paris in 1945, and finally collected, in 1956, in On Poetry and Poets, Eliot focuses on this especially pertinent topic in its broadest possible terms.

SYNOPSIS Such an approach, as might be expected with a topic as broad itself in scope as poetry’s social function, thus enabled Eliot to make more useful pronouncements than he had previously made by focusing only on the more controversial kinds of social function that poetry might serve in the give-and-take of the contemporary moment. Freed from the necessity of having to apply or justify his conclusions on the basis of his own and his contemporaries’ practices and purposes, Eliot is able in this essay to establish what he sees to be poetry’s ultimate and, so, enduring social function. He lays out his case in a methodical fashion as well, beginning by establishing for his reader which of the commonplace functions assigned to poetry will not be of concern to him. Not surprisingly, he reiterates in convincing terms that a poet’s actual advocacy of or attack on a particular social attitude cannot constitute poetry’s social function for the obvious and simple reason that the poetry remains to be of some value to humanity long after the specific social causes that may have inspired it—if, for that matter, there happen to have been any—have quite literally become lost to history. While he does not himself cite an example, the classical Greek tragedian Euripides’ Medea provides a convenient one. Scholars rightly view the play as Euripides’ commentary on the deplorable state of affairs that resident aliens were forced to endure in the Athens of his time. Any reader or audience member who has subsequently been exposed to Medea, however, has undoubtedly been moved by its tragic dimensions despite being, for the most part, totally unaware of the social function that the play would have served for a contemporary Athenian audience. “Real poetry,” as Eliot astutely concludes, “survives not only a change of popular opinion but the complete extinction of interest in the issues with which the poet was passionately concerned.” Where, then, does Eliot see poetry serving a social function if it is not to be found in those issues that a contemporary audience or even the poet himself would have regarded as germane? To answer the question, Eliot suggests looking to those services that poetry traditionally provides to a soci-

“Social Function of Poetry, The” ety. For example, and with a large measure of selfassurance, he notes that poetry gives pleasure, and he identifies that service as a social function of poetry. It must be something more than mere pleasure, however, or it would not be the sort of pleasure that the greatest poetry provides. To do that, the poetry must provide as well the “communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for.” By doing so, poetry not only serves a social function by providing the high order of pleasure that only it can summon, but it “makes a difference to the society as a whole,” even for those who do not enjoy poetry. That is because poetry, Eliot observes, “differs from every other art in having a value for the people of the poet’s race and language, which it can have for no other.” It is on that observation that Eliot will then go on, in the rest of the essay, to establish what he sees to be the foremost among poetry’s social functions—its fostering of a culture through its maintenance of that culture’s people through the vitality and viability of their language. Indeed, Eliot will assert that “no art is more stubbornly national than poetry,” so much so that “a feeling or emotion expressed in a different language is not the same feeling or emotion.” With regard to poetry’s social function, the foremost duty of a poet, Eliot can declare, is not to the people but to their language. To fulfill this function, the poet’s orders with regard to the native tongue are “first to preserve [it], and second to extend and improve” it. By performing these tasks for the “dialect of the tribe,” as Eliot will elsewhere call a poet’s native tongue, the poet performs as well the task of “making people more aware of what they feel” by giving utterance to those feelings and impulses that would otherwise remain mute. So critical does Eliot view this particular function of poetry to be that he sees the deterioration of a people’s language through poetry leading ultimately to a deterioration of their whole culture, to the end that they might even run the risk of “becom[ing] absorbed in a stronger one.” Earlier, indeed, when he had asserted that “no art is more stubbornly national” than poetry, it was very likely

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for the same reason that it speaks most to those who are native to and in the language, so that it does not travel well. His strongly endorsing here an idea of this order may have come later as a surprise to Eliot’s Welsh, Irish, and Scottish writers of the British Isles whom he would in a relatively short time ask not to write in their native tongues but in English instead, for the sake of English culture. That would be in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, which he was busy writing during the mid-1940s and published in England in 1948. However, one could safely argue that Eliot is correct in the case of British literature, in which the most prominent Scottish, Irish, and Welsh poets such as Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, George Gordon Lord Byron, and Dylan Thomas did in fact write in English because it was the more dominant culture politically, economically, and militarily. Eliot’s insisting, then, that poetry “makes a difference to the speech, to the sensibility, to the lives of all the members of a society, . . . the community, . . . the whole people” is based on actual experience, for it must be regarded as virtually axiomatic that the dominant literary language, even in a multilingual culture, shapes the way that that culture thinks and feels far more than any other single feature of that culture. Eliot summarizes finally by saying that “what I mean by the social function of poetry in its largest sense” is that “it does, in proportion to its excellence and vigour, affect the speech and the sensibility of the whole nation.” A decline in poetic discourse, therefore, for whatever reason “would mean that people everywhere would cease to be able to express, and consequently be able to feel, the emotions of civilized beings.” Essentially, they would lose the habits of feeling that guide the shaping of cultures. Without having to provide evidence, since few would dispute the contention, Eliot observes that “when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless.” The same could happen to what he terms “poetic feeling.” He cannot deny that the feeling for poetry and for its typical material may one day disappear, an event that would “facilitate the unification of the world.” That is to say, if language were to be made universal, then feeling and

376 “Song for Simeon, A” thought would invariably follow suit. Eliot manages, however, to render that prospect as a totally undesirable one. For what would be lost would be the rich variety of human experiences that the race’s various cultures express for the ceaseless delight and edification of one another. In the final analysis, then, Eliot leaves in the reader’s mind the suggestion that such a world would be inhabited by an entirely different kind of humanity completely disconnected from all its traditions, or entirely dominated by a single one.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY For a more detailed consideration, on Eliot’s part, of prospects of this sort, the interested reader would be well advised to turn to the discussion on Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Nonetheless, “The Social Function of Poetry” is perhaps Eliot’s most definitive word on the relationship between poetry and the social makeup of the culture that it both serves and helps shape, touching as it does on a topic that had engaged Eliot’s critical attention from at least the mid-1920s. In his comments regarding poetry and belief in essays such as “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927) and “Dante” (1929), Eliot had generally taken the position that there is a considerable distinction between poetry and the societal values or beliefs that it may appear to suggest or propose. By the same token, nevertheless, in those same essays he would take the position, using Dante as his primary example, that the greater the system of beliefs and values that guided a society, the greater the poetry that that society might produce. Eliot had gone on to develop and refine this position of his further and with more apparent contentiousness in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism and After Strange Gods, both dating from 1934, as he began to take upon himself the role of a conservatively partisan spokesman in the debate regarding poetry and its possible functions in social as opposed to purely aesthetic contexts. By then, but beginning as far back as the 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism,” Eliot was approaching the subject of literature and its effective place in the overall culture in more contemporary and, as a consequence, far less general and,

confessedly, less forbearing terms. Indeed, by the time of After Strange Gods his focus repeatedly seemed to be on destroying the credibility of those who did not agree with him. That sort of a winner-take-all contentiousness can never make for reasonable critical discourse or a balanced critical viewpoint. On the other hand, perhaps it is because he was so sensitively attuned to the critical cultural issues of his own time that he felt the shape of the coming age that would emerge from his. Whatever the reason, in his later criticism Eliot does seem to have anticipated the very issues of globalism versus diversity that are now at the forefront of current social, political, and economic thought.

“Song for Simeon, A” (1928) If the Ariel series was intended as Faber’s cleverly commercial way to send out Christmas holiday greetings to their clients and other business acquaintances and friends, it is doubtful that anyone would have considered Eliot’s first contribution to the series, “Journey of the Magi,” a greeting filled with holiday cheer. Because, as a commissioned piece, it is intended for a far more general audience than a poet thinking strictly in terms of his own poetry writing may ever have otherwise composed, it is nevertheless a far more immediately accessible poetry than is typical of Eliot’s output to this time. Still, “Journey of the Magi” shares with all that earlier work, and with the contemporaneous effort that Eliot was then putting into poems that would subsequently emerge under the overall title “AshWednesday,” an attitude toward the religious that inflicts more psychological pain than it may ever be given credit for relieving. His next contribution to the Ariel series, “A Song for Simeon,” also seems to refuse to offer as much as a sop to the commonplace feel-good spirit associated with the Christmas season. This second poem of Eliot’s in the Ariel series, however, does “Journey of the Magi” one better by choosing for its subject an event with much more profound doctrinal associations with the Nativity, associations that a nonbeliever would not be likely to make. That is

“Song for Simeon, A” to say, in Christian countries to this day—and that most certainly would have been an accurate way to characterize the England of the 1920s when Eliot was composing these poems—a person of another religious persuasion or of no particularly strong religious beliefs of any kind whatsoever would still have been likely to have been exposed in a variety of ways—through carols, depictions, dramatizations, and so forth—to the story of the three wise men and their journey from the East, guided by the Star of Bethlehem. In stark contrast, one would have to be either an adherent or scholar of the Christian faith to know the no less obscure but hardly popular story of Simeon and his own connection with the birth of Christ. Simeon’s story is told in Luke 2:25–33, in regard to Jesus’s presentation in the temple. Simeon, a “righteous and devout” man to whom it had been revealed by the Holy Spirit that “he should not see death before he had seen the Messiah of the Lord,” was present in the temple when Joseph and Mary brought their infant child there, at which point Simeon “took him into his arms and blessed God.” He then pronounced the words that have since entered the Liturgy as the Song of Simeon: Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in sight of all the peoples, a light of revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.

Simeon then blessed Joseph and Mary as well, telling her that “ ‘this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted (and you yourself a sword will pierce) so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.’ ”

SYNOPSIS These are not the “tidings of great joy” revealed by the angels to the shepherds, but it seems that Eliot is not inclined toward reveling in that aspect of the Christmas story. Instead, Eliot weaves these more ominous details from Luke, and their theological and psychological implications, into the resulting poem, to whose title he gives an odd twist by

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calling it a song “for” rather than “of” Simeon, even though he clearly makes Simeon the poem’s speaker. Indeed, with the Gospel passage in mind, readers should find that there is not a more accessible poem in the entire Eliot canon because he virtually lets the poem write itself by imagining what it must have felt like to have been Simeon, a man who witnessed with his own eyes what he took to be the fulfillment of God’s purpose for his creation. That Eliot chose for his speaker another quasihistorical figure whose relation to the Christmas story is that he was there to bear witness to its somewhat terrifying significance rather than, say, someone who has benefited spiritually from it in some more immediate and commonplace way gives Eliot’s readers further insights into his intentions. As the reader comes quickly to realize, Simeon, for all the grace given him by the Holy Spirit so that he may know that he has seen God’s promise to Israel fulfilled, ultimately speaks of the occasion of the Christ’s coming into the world with the same trepidation and sense of foreboding as the speaker of the magi poem had. That trepidation and foreboding can only mirror anyone’s, believer or not, when an event beyond the ken of the human imagination nevertheless enters history in the form of a creature as small and helpless as a human infant. The obvious cannot help here because there is simultaneously both nothing and everything familiar in the moment of Simeon’s recognition. What is the great God of creation up to? one might very well ask, and Eliot seems to be doing as much. If, then, as with his first Ariel poem, there is a lack of any noteworthy Christmas cheer in Eliot’s second treatment of the Christmas theme, it is obviously because he is more interested in exploring the more ponderous aspects of that theme—not its superficial holiday joy but its awesome mystery and its capacity to beggar, quite literally, the human imagination. It is possible to see Eliot’s as a manifestation of a dourly puritanical Christmas spirit, in keeping with his New England ancestry, but it would be far more profitable and perhaps even more proper to see it as the manifestation of the awe felt by one both humbled and consternated by the idea of the godhead made flesh in the person of a mere infant.

378 “Song for Simeon, A” That person thus affected may be thought of as Eliot’s speaker Simeon or, by extension, as Eliot himself as the poet, or as, by further extension, the reader. The point is that it is not important to identify the person thus affected so much as to identify with him—which is the purpose of poetry as Eliot often describes it. A reader discovering, for example, that Eliot was himself experiencing, through a conversion experience, a reconfiguration of his own encounter with Christ, might then insist on finding some connection between that information and this particular poetry. Such a reader would do well, however, to consign the connection to little more than the fact that in both “Journey” and “Song” Eliot is, consciously or unconsciously, projecting that personal spiritual psychology into characterizations of those who were among the first of humanity to experience firsthand an encounter with the enduring Christian mystery of the Incarnation. Despite their significant but nevertheless superficial differences, then, in the face of this mystery each is the same person, whether it be the magus or Simeon, Eliot or the reader. And that same person is any person witnessing the end of his way of life because of his having been transformed by an encounter with Christ, God Incarnate. But as Eliot will essay shortly in the next poem in the Ariel series, “Animula,” a transformation of that order can leave such a puny thing as a mere mortal reeling with conflicting emotions of anticipation, doubt, and even despair over the simplicity that has been lost, with fear as well in the face of what complexities may yet be engendered. A religious conversion, in other words, is frequently not a pretty sight, and Eliot, in these two poems, seems to delight in reminding his readers of that. Like the magus, then, Simeon sees in the child not help but disaster, although in his case it is a disaster that he would be more than willing to see come to pass, for it is a disaster that will save the world from its dark night, that old dispensation of the pagan gods. Like Moses, however, Simeon shall not see the Promised Land but die in the wilderness, and he knows this. An old man, he was promised that he would live to see the Messiah’s arrival, not his fulfillment. Although Simeon can

grasp far more than the magus the universal meaning of this event, he can but barely see how any of it may come to pass except to be able to speak such dire warnings to Mary, that she who holds in her arms the savior of the world shall see her own heart pierced by a sword.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot captures this mixture of befuddlement and blessedness in Simeon’s clinging, like the magus, to selfhood, but Simeon is capable of acknowledging how much he is simply a supernumerary in an unfolding drama of colossal cosmic significance, and a supernumerary whose role in the drama is being written out even as he plays it. Again, in this regard he stands in for all the rest of us, like the ambiguously present but powerless speaker of Eliot’s The Waste Land, or that same poem’s Tiresias, who, Prufrocklike, has seen it all already but still must witness it again. Unlike the speaker of “Gerontion,” Simeon evinces not fatigue but resignation. This powerful sign that he has been awaiting also signals his own death, becoming another apt metaphor for the paradox of a spiritual transformation, inasmuch as, in order to live, the soul must die in Christ. And quite unlike the speaker of “Journey of the Magi,” who finds his joy in earthly pleasures now dampened by that long ago encounter with the Christ, Simeon finds joy in the simple things of nature—hyacinths blooming, the winter sun on snowy hills. “My life is light,” he says, and he knows that to be the truth, for he has followed the laws of the God of Israel and kept the faith is every way. But that same God, through the Holy Spirit, has permitted him to see what the magi can never find in their stars—the coming catastrophe this simple, humble birth forecasts. The time of sorrow will come, and there will be “cords and scourges and lamentation,” all elements in the arrest, beating, and execution of Jesus with which the journey begun with this birth shall end, and yet Christ is the same Lord God of Israel to whom Simeon, “who has eighty years and no to-morrow,” must still pray for peace and consolation. Simeon sees with a clairvoyant spirit the commitment to sacrifice and suffering, sorrow in this world for glory in the next,

“Sweeney Agonistes” to which the Christian ethos will subsequently call generations of humanity, but here is where Simeon shares again a common fate with the magi, for he is as much as they a prisoner of human history, too. Not for him, then, “the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer, / . . . the ultimate vision,” so his agony shall forever be that, though he shall not share that path, he can see it and where it leads. Still, it is in his sorrow for that deprivation that, paradoxically, he begins his own way to Christ, rather like the speaker of “Ash-Wednesday,” who intones in that poem’s opening section, composed virtually simultaneously with “A Song for Simeon,” “Because I do not hope to turn. . . .” Simeon does not hope to know Christ, and yet in that very fact embraces Christ’s nature nevertheless. And, so, he is able to ask the savior he shall not otherwise know, “Let thy servant depart, / Having seen thy salvation.”

“Sweeney Agonistes” (1923) After the effort of composing The Waste Land and dealing with both the celebrity and critical success that followed its publication in late 1922, Eliot found his creative talents laying fallow again, as they had following the equally successful publication of the slim but influential volume Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. Then he had spent the next several years composing little more than the quatrain poems while agonizing over whether his poetry-writing abilities had waned before he managed to achieve a new voice and vision in “Gerontion.” In this present case, however, the dry spell, such as it was, would not really end until the publication of “The Hollow Men” in 1925. That poem, too, however, was originally conceived of as a poetic sequence rather than a sustained and coherent piece, further indicating that the best efforts that Eliot was capable of producing during the years following The Waste Land were by and large fragmentary, including the verse drama now under consideration. It is not surprising, of course, that a poet should find it difficult to maintain a consistently high level of creative activities and

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achievement over long periods of time. For Eliot, nevertheless, these fallow periods typically resulted in somewhat fruitless experimentations that inevitably would culminate in a new and unexpected direction for his poetry.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS Eliot’s earlier experiences with the quatrain poems provide a case in point. In them Eliot carried to excess the sorts of archly ironic social and psychocultural commentaries that he had executed far more successfully in earlier poetry such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Yet the very excessiveness of the quatrain poetry, which mingled—and mangled—levels of language as capriciously as it mixed elements of light and of serious poetry, would pave the way for the far more ambitiously serious poetry of “Gerontion,” with its pointed if veiled commentary on a defeated and fatigued postwar Europe. Thus, “Gerontion” can now be seen as the first breaths of the poetic style that would become The Waste Land. Similarly, although “Sweeney Agonistes” is included among unfinished poems in the Collected Poems and denominated as an unfinished work in its subtitle as well “Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama,” this abandoned verse drama continues to occupy a significant place in the Eliot canon for the voice that it finally gives to one of his most brilliant characterizations, the brutish Sweeney. Commentators are divided on whether Sweeney, with his slavishness to his animal appetites, represents Eliot’s version of the noble savage, the natural man, or the primitive. His relationship to the character Sweeney Todd, the murderous 19th-century barber, is equally problematic and very likely coincidental. Whatever his source, the real point is that by the time that Eliot had begun work on “Sweeney Agonistes,” Sweeney had long since been occupying a key place in Eliot’s imagination, a fact supported by extensive evidence. Indeed, Sweeney had already previously appeared in three of the seven quatrain poems that Eliot had composed between 1917 and 1919. Twice it was in title roles, in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” and “Sweeney Erect,” and in the third case, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” Sweeney makes an appearance as a major

380 “Sweeney Agonistes” and perhaps even pivotal character. Meanwhile, Doris, another character in “Sweeney Agonistes,” appears in “Sweeney Erect” as well, and Sweeney and Mrs. Porter, yet another character who is at least mentioned in the course of “Sweeney Agonistes,” have walk-on parts in “The Fire Sermon” in The Waste Land. Eliot was evidently bringing together in “Sweeney Agonistes” a variety of character treatments and themes from these earlier poetic efforts, but the unfinished play is significant as well as for its being Eliot’s first real attempt at verse drama, a genre that would come more and more to occupy his creative attention during the succeeding decades. Whatever shape the finished drama that Eliot was planning to execute in “Sweeney Agonistes” would eventually have taken, comments that he shared with friends and other correspondents suggest that Eliot definitely conceived of “Sweeney Agonistes” as a work ambitious enough to be a suitable successor to The Waste Land. By the same token, he wanted it to be a wholly original composition in both its conceptualization and execution in order to contrast with if not repent of the obviously derivative quality of much of The Waste Land’s poetry. Some of the verse drama was written as early as September 1923, less than a year before The Waste Land’s publication, but whether it was due to an excess of ambitiousness at the expense of focus or to a plot and characters that were not equal to the demands of the projected work’s literary pretensions, Eliot could never quite seem to nudge the material into the sort of compelling shape and direction that could spell the successful conclusion of any enterprise of great scope and purpose. In any case, Eliot abandoned the project entirely in 1925, although excerpts were published in the Criterion in October 1926 and January 1927, and he reportedly viewed the poem sequence that would eventually emerge as “The Hollow Men” (the third part, originally called “Doris’s Dream Songs,” was published in the Chapbook for 1924) as poems related in their own originality of tone and theme to “Sweeney Agonistes.”

SYNOPSIS For all the burlesque qualities of its setting and characters, the denizens and habitués of a house

of prostitution, “Sweeney Agonistes” strikes a ponderous tone sufficient to make it seem now, with the possible exception of “The Hollow Men,” the last gasp of The Waste Land’s more despairing and depressing aspects, revealing the mordantly savage quality of verse that had become virtually a hallmark of Eliot’s poetry by this point in time. The high, or low, point in the play will come when Sweeney announces his existential trinity of “birth, copulation, death,” a philosophical perspective that certainly does not paint a very attractive picture of either life in general or the human condition in particular. Such pronouncements from Sweeney may leave some readers, no doubt, wishing that Eliot had kept the annoyingly uninhibited Sweeney speechless, notwithstanding that such a lugubrious vision of existence would not be at all out of keeping with the themes of human despair and degradation that appear to have been obsessing Eliot all along till now. Indeed, it may puzzle some that Eliot thought of “Sweeney Agonistes” as a new and original beginning for his poetry, so much does the fragmentary work echo past Eliot motifs and poetic strategies. In addition to the posture of a philosophical despair, most outstanding in this regard is Eliot’s ability to rag high art and serious literary endeavors while simultaneously relying on the accumulated authority of traditional themes and authors to insinuate a consideration of serious matters into a poetry which seems poised always—but only ever merely poised—at the brink of parody. Again, “Sweeney Agonistes” is no exception on this particular front, further making suspect the assertion that Eliot was seeking to establish something new and original for both himself and for modernist poetry in the work’s eventually discarded pages. The Title No reader familiar with English literary history can encounter Eliot’s title “Sweeney Agonistes” without immediately becoming mindful of the heroic poetic drama Samson Agonistes (1672) penned by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–74). There is absolutely no doubt that Eliot intends the otherwise oblique allusion, although to serve what

“Sweeney Agonistes” purpose is nowhere near as immediately apparent. Is he sending up the high seriousness of the Milton drama and other works of that ilk by virtue of the comparison, or is Eliot’s mocking gesture a way of broadcasting the far less than serious theme and plot of his own verse drama? Or is Eliot suggesting that, despite the centuries and levels of discourse and public values that may separate them, his and Milton’s plays have features in common, and, if so, then what may they be? The Milton piece selects for its topic the last few hours of the biblical hero Samson, who has been captured by the Philistines. By play’s end, in keeping with his Old Testament source, Milton’s hero brings their pagan temple down upon the heads of his Philistine captors in the midst of their revelries, assuring his own destruction as well. Milton’s real aim, however, is to present the agony, or conflict, that Samson must undergo as he struggles to discern God’s will for him in the midst of the surreptitious efforts of Samson’s fellow Israelites to free him from his captivity. Clearly the Milton play is rich in its exploration of metaphysical and spiritual considerations and struggles, the kinds of moral and psychological paradoxes that lend themselves to the making of a literary masterpiece. It is difficult to imagine, however, that Eliot, by introducing Sweeney into the equation, is aiming quite so high. Indeed, Eliot employs a similar strategy of characterizing Sweeney as an antiheroic lowlife by calling to mind a heroic literary classic in “Sweeney among the Nightingales.” There, by means of the epigraph taken from the Greek tragic play Agamemnon by Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.), Eliot compels his readers to think of Sweeney in terms of that work’s title character, the victorious leader of the Greek forces at Troy who is slain virtually at his doorstep by his wife and her lover on his return home from that war. While it may seem at first that there is little to recommend comparisons either favorable or unfavorable between the “apeneck Sweeney” and the Greek hero of the Aeschylus play, by poem’s end a certain measure of similarity between the worlds of betrayal and violence that each inhabit is established. In “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” what at first strikes the reader as an outlandish compari-

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son by any stretch of the imagination has, after due consideration, an authentic viability to offer, one that permits the reader to see connections among human motivations and aspirations that transcend time, class, and ethnicities and that may therefore otherwise escape notice. Eliot seems to be implying some sort of doubledealing approach in his play as well, which he subtitles “Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama.” Surely Eliot either is again being coy or is grossly mistaken (and given the nature of both his coyness and the extent of his education, the former option must assuredly be the case). Few if any readers familiar with the great Greek comedian Aristophanes (448–380 B.C.) would think of him as the writer of melodramas (unless, that is, Eliot is being even more precious than he seems at first glance to be and means by melodrama a musical drama). In any case, any claim to literary fame that Aristophanes may duly collect is based on plays of his that were undoubtedly comical and satirical in their nature and matter, if not lewd to boot. Shades of Sweeney’s sexual shenanigans to come, it may very well be Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which the women band together and vow to deny their men any sexual services until and unless the menfolk put a stop to their puerile warfare, rather than Aeschylus’s Agamemnon that comes to mind for a well-read reader first encountering Eliot’s Sweeney. If so, however, it is not because Lysistrata is melodrama, but because it is a sexual farce. These ambiguities of intention and implication cast an even more deceptive light on the proceedings in the fragments of the Eliot play to come when he then introduces in his epigraph to “Sweeney Agonistes” a tag taken not from Aristophanes, whom the subtitle has just introduced, but from Aeschylus. Indeed, although the subtitle teases with the promise of an Aristophanic melodrama, whatever that may be, the epigraph suggests that Eliot may be employing the same kind of strategy that he had in his earlier Sweeney poetry. His bringing to mind Milton’s drama of the biblical Samson’s spiritual struggle in his own title allows him to explore in the play that follows the potentials of both farce and tragedy in new and provocative ways, so that the play both is and is not

382 “Sweeney Agonistes” a serious commentary on the human condition, in the best modern way. The First Epigraph Eliot provides readers of “Sweeney Agonistes” with two epigraphs to guide them on their way, and unlike his usual practice of not identifying his sources, in both cases these epigraphs are attributed. The two are equally interesting in terms of the light that they may cast on the tone and theme of the poetic drama to come, but the first is particularly interesting for its connections to another source that Eliot had already used for epigraphical material in another, earlier poetic treatment of Sweeney. The speaker in the present case is the Greek hero Orestes, whose literary pedigree is a long and illustrious one. Indeed, for his particular exploit, he is one of the first personages referred to by Homer in the Odyssey—in the opening pages of that great epic poem, as a matter of fact. It is not to Orestes’ appearance in Homer that Eliot turns for his epigraph to “Sweeney Agonistes,” however, but to a much later source, a fifth-century B.C. drama called, in the original Greek, the Choephoroi, or The Libation Bearers. Both sources call attention to Orestes for the same singular act of heroism, which was to take vengeance on the murderers of his father, the same Agamemnon to whose death the epigraph to Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” mentioned earlier, relates. The connections between that epigraph of Eliot’s and this later epigraph to “Sweeney Agonistes” do not quite end there, however. An outstanding one is that the Choephoroi was also composed by Aeschylus, the author of the Agamemnon, from which the earlier epigraph to “Sweeney among the Nightingales” is taken. Furthermore, those two plays not only share an author, Aeschylus, but are the first and second installments in a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus that detail the especially bloody and awful history of the House of Atreus, a trilogy known to literary history as the Oresteia because they celebrate not Agamemnon or his murderers but rather his son and avenger, Orestes. Just why Eliot is obviously asking his readers again to draw comparisons and contrasts, if not outright parallels, between the tragic history of the

House of Atreus, especially as it involves Agamemnon and Orestes, and the ostensibly farcical history of the antiheroic Sweeney will, perhaps, become more readily apparent after Orestes’ own part in the ancient story is fleshed out more fully. The words that Orestes is heard speaking in the epigraph come near the end of the Choephoroi, whose action takes place some 10 years after Agamemnon’s slaying at the hands of his wife and Orestes’ mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Agamemnon’s first cousin Aegisthus. In the Choephoroi, Orestes returns home in disguise and gains access to the royal palace by convincing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus that he has arrived with news of Orestes’ death. Once he is in the presence of the royal couple, with their guard down, he wastes little time in revealing his true identity and killing them both on the spot, thus avenging Agamemnon’s death, exactly as the god Apollo had commanded him to do. Aeschylus, however, who is using what was for his own time a no less ancient story to explore the theme of the evolution of human justice, now introduces a new twist into the plot. Balance in the eye-for-an-eye universe that the characters inhabit has been restored inasmuch as the taking of Agamemnon’s life has been avenged by the taking of his killers’ lives, but a new imbalance has been created. In killing his father’s murderers, Orestes has also killed his own mother, Clytemnestra. Although the terms of the blood vendetta, one that even the gods as represented in Apollo endorse, have been satisfied, that has been accomplished by a child’s taking a parent’s life, and in terms of primal justice, that is the most heinous of crimes, even if it may otherwise appear to have been justified by the extenuating circumstances of Agamemnon’s murder and the command of the god Apollo. At the moment that Orestes is speaking, the Furies—three vulturelike hags who represent the pangs of natural conscience—have appeared. Their task will be a simple one: not to permit Orestes a moment’s rest henceforth in retribution for his having shed his own mother’s blood. When in Eliot’s epigraph, Orestes says, “You don’t see them, you don’t—but I see them: they are hunting me down, I must move on,” he is speaking to the chorus, and

“Sweeney Agonistes” the “them” of whom he speaks are the Furies, who have now appeared to him in reparation for his mother’s death. Aeschylus will resolve Orestes’ dilemma and this conflict in human justice in the third and last play in the Oresteia trilogy, the Eumenides, a drama that will itself form the classical underpinnings for another Eliot play, The Family Reunion (1939); but Orestes’ significance as a figure to introduce “Sweeney Agonistes” is limited by Eliot to his role in the Choephoroi, and that is a limit that readers should respect. Thus far the reader has had two distinct heroes, Samson and Orestes, called to mind by Eliot, each at his particular moment of agony or conflict, and each one a representative of one of the two cultural strains that constitute most of the value system of Western civilization—the biblical Judaic and the classical Greek. What that all may tell the reader about to embark on an engagement with the Eliot text can be summarized in three words from the French: Cherchez la femme (look for the woman). Samson, it should be recalled, was undone not by the Philistines so much as by Delilah, and while Orestes had neither a romantic nor an erotic attachment to Clytemnestra, his undoing was clearly the result of his challenging the awesome emotional and psychological power that a human mother maintains over her offspring. Orestes may have killed her despite her maternal appeals to his mercy, but the Furies symbolize the price that he must pay for trying to break a bond that will not be so easily broken. This reading of the allusive significances of Samson and Orestes would not be warranted were it not for the second epigraph, as well as for Eliot’s Sweeney’s own notorious regard—or ironic disregard—for women. They represent not so much the feminine in any literal biological or physiological sense as they do an attachment to the physical, the material plane, at the expense of a more fruitful and meaningful engagement with matters of the spirit rather than of the flesh. Behavior such as Samson’s and Orestes’ results not only in the soul’s being distracted from its goal of union with the spirit but in violence as well, a disruptive imbalance that each must seek to rectify if he is to find a personal peace.

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The Second Epigraph Readers of Eliot would have encountered already in his poetry representations of this species of spiritual conflict, most notably in “The Fire Sermon,” wherein the Buddha and St. Augustine are held up as emblems of those who have overcome a slavish devotion to desire of any ilk. In “Sweeney Agonistes,” however, the essential quality of that sort of ascetic detachment, which contrasts sharply with the violent engagement of a Samson or an Orestes, is cogently summarized for the reader in the second epigraph, which is taken from the writings of great Christian mystic St. John of the Cross: “Hence the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created beings.” How appropriate it is, then, that the reader of “Sweeney Agonistes,” fast on the heels of St. John of the Cross’s admonition to eschew the love of created things for the sake of divine union, this complex of directed meaning that Eliot has created by virtue of the thematic markers carried by the literary allusions in his title and epigraphs and moves into “Fragment of a Prologue,” wherein two “kept” women, Dusty and Doris, are carrying on a conversation about the various men in their lives. “Fragment of a Prologue” As the play opens, neither Dusty nor Doris sound quite comfortable with the “arrangements” that they have made. At the very least, although it is someone named Pereira who “pays the rent,” the women agree that “he’s no gentleman.” When the phone rings and it turns out to be Pereira, consequently, Dusty lies for Doris, telling him that she is not feeling well. The two young women then decide to entertain themselves by “reading” the cards. Again, readers of Eliot’s The Waste Land had already been introduced through Madama Sosostris and her “wicked pack of [Tarot] cards” to another of his metaphors for spiritual discontent manifested in an inordinate desire to know the future by “haruspicating,” as Eliot will call the practice of fortune-telling in a much later poem of his. Doris and Dusty, by their description, use a pack of ordinary playing cards. Nevertheless, the idea is the same: Anyone satisfied with his or her life and circumstances would

384 “Sweeney Agonistes” not care to know what tomorrow might bring and would, rather, be content with the here and now. As they cut the cards, their emotions swing this way and that, depending on the favorable or unfavorable prospect that each new card reveals. A whistle from outside interrupts them. It is Sam Wauchope, apparently one of Mrs. Porter’s “clients,” and he has brought with him an old army buddy, Captain Horsfall, and a couple of visiting Americans, Klipstein and Krumpacker—shades of Bleistein and Burbank—who also happen to be veterans. (Eliot seems to have been of the opinion that ethnic-sounding names sound comical to an American ear.) That these men are all veterans should not be surprising, however. Not only had World War I ended less than five years earlier (assuming that the play is set in 1923, the year that Eliot began work on it), but the allusion to Agamemnon by way of Orestes would already have called to mind Western civilization’s first great war, the Trojan War. Like the ill-fated Greek leader, these men now crowding Doris’s apartment have returned from conquest, and in the parlance of Eliot’s day, they would be wanting a “good time,” even if their war had not quite ended only just yesterday, as had Agamemnon’s. (These returning warriors with their “needs” bring to mind as well Albert from The Waste Land, who also had “been in the army four years, [and] he wants a good time.”) Men are always wanting good times provided by willing women, and Doris and Dusty certainly seem to be willing and able to do as much. As this “Fragment of a Prologue” draws to an end, then, the six are getting along famously, preparing the way for Sweeney to make his entrance in the play’s second surviving section, “Fragment of an Agon.” “Fragment of an Agon” Sweeney’s is quite an entrance. “I’ll carry you off / To a cannibal isle,” our man Sweeney tells Doris right off the bat, and they then go on for the next page or more carrying on a punning frolic that is ripe with the sort of psychosexual insinuation and innuendo that hovers between foreplay and rape. The pseudoreligious quality of their banter, wherein the “cannibal” Sweeney promises to “con-

vert” the “nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, / Juicy little, right little” Doris into a “missionary stew,” strikes just the right note of imbalance between a desire that is worldly and therefore corrupted by violence with the desire that is spiritual and therefore inspired by the divine. Sweeney even begins to paint a paradisiacal picture for Doris of “life on a crocodile isle,” where all the materialistic trappings of modern urban life are left behind. Doris is not biting—“I’d be bored”— and then Sweeney goes and gets philosophical on her in any case: “You’d be bored. / Birth, copulation, and death. / That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks. . . .” It is some of Eliot’s best poetry of despair, for Sweeney’s observation, in the universe circumscribed by the values and lifestyle that he and Doris and the others (Agamemnon and Orestes among them) represent, is indubitably a pretty empty venture wherever one spends it. For him, apparently, “[d]eath is life and life is death,” so no time is a good time. This second “fragment,” the reader should recall, is Eliot’s version of an agon. In the Greek models from which it is taken, it is the drama or melodrama or comedy’s argument, its central debate: “I’ve been born, and once is enough,” Sweeney concludes. The picture that the play, through its spokesman Sweeney, paints of human life—of life itself—is not an attractive one, nor is it meant to be, although there is always to be found in Eliot’s title and epigraph the fleeting hint and glimpse of the option offered in the contending choices made by Milton’s Samson, who elects to surrender to God’s will, and by St. John of the Cross, who also does. But that is the way of the saint. For most humans, as Sweeney puts it to Doris, somewhat echoing if not completing J. Alfred Prufrock’s “It is impossible to say just what I mean”: “I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.” What sounds like a tautology at one level is at another an apt formulation of Sweeney’s agony: Whatever he may mean, let alone feel, the event is reduced to words, which can never be adequate. That is both the human limitation and the human liberation. At the very least, it is the limitation and liberation that poetry provides. Since words are all we have, each individual is permitted to use them as best he or she can.

“Sweeney Agonistes” The songs, then, that interrupt Sweeney’s more and more lugubrious musings are both comic relief and antidote. As opposed to the existential gloom that Sweeney expresses, there are in the two untitled songs, the first sung by Wauchope and Horsfall, the second by Klipstein and Krumpacker, a less somber approach toward it all, if not a let’smake-the-best-of-it nonchalance. Based more or less loosely on the relatively popular 1903 song “Under the Bamboo Tree,” whose pidgin English lyrics are themselves meant to mimic a South Sea island insouciance, the songs attempt to entice Doris once more with a paradisiacal vision, this time a bit more lighthearted in scope. Rather than give up her city life, however, Doris insists that “I’d just as soon be dead.” It is at this point that Sweeney says, “That’s what life is. . . . Life is death.” But here, if the reader reads between the lines (and recalls, too, that elements from “The Hollow Men” echo within this poetry, and vice versa), then Sweeney is not being gloomy so much as truthful. In the sense of any meaningful existence, say, of the kind proposed by the choices made by Samson and St. John of the Cross, the lives of the Dorises and Dustys, the Sweeneys and the Wauchopes of the world are in fact a death of sorts. It is not a matter, after all, of whether there is a meaning to be sought; the poet of The Waste Land had already proposed, so much as that one seeks a meaning. As Doris protests Sweeney’s morbid assertion, remembering how, earlier, she had drawn the card representing the coffin, the others insist that she let him go on. She does not want to hear of death any more than she wants to hear of a primitive paradise, whereas Sweeney becomes more and more a spokesman for inclusivity: Without the awareness of death, there is no such thing as life. So he tells an awful tale about a man he knew, suggesting that it may be himself, who “did a girl in” and then kept the body in his apartment until he did not know if he was alive or dead or the girl was alive or dead: “For when you’re alone / When you’re alone like he was alone / Your’re either or neither.” Life—being alive, being engaged, being aware— is a state of mind as much as if not more than it is a state of physical being. That is what Sweeney

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in his agony is trying to tell Doris, for which of us, in the final analysis, is not alone, left to the awkwardly limited device that “I gotta use words when I talk to you,” even if it may be “impossible to say just what I mean”? Like The Waste Land, the drama ends with the notion that each of us is locked within himself or herself where “you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for you know the hangman’s waiting for you.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Few readers would have as their first reaction to “Sweeney Agonistes” the thought that it is a particularly enlightening experience. Perhaps because it is presented as fragmentary, its experimentation shows to disadvantage. It seems to be witty at the expense of clarity, clever at the expense of logic, and morbid at the expense of humor. Surely it is a new departure for Eliot inasmuch as, despite the typical appeal to the erudition suggested by the title, subtitle, and epigraphs, the play does not seem to be attempting to appeal to or to provoke thoughtfulness as virtually all of Eliot’s other poetic efforts to date had done. There are some who may see that as a positive result. To this day there are readers who are put off by Eliot’s notoriously unfailing ability to intellectualize even the taking of a toast and tea. With “Sweeney Agonistes,” however, despite Sweeney’s own tendency to muse philosophic, the level of thoughtfulness required for grasping the blowby-blow progress of the dialogue, which comes through as only so much inane banter, seems to be toned down considerably if not perhaps even entirely shut off. That may not be the case, nevertheless. Rather, since Eliot is working with drama here in which ideas are being expressed with an ear for characters interacting in real time and with an eye toward an audience who must grasp those ideas at least tentatively as soon as they are spoken, he may be trying to tone down the impression that there are great ideas flowing through his text. The trouble is that they are there just the same, for the very simple reason that poetry is meant to engage thought as much as feeling and to engage them both to the same thematic end.

386 “Sweeney Agonistes” Regarded strictly from the point of view of its thematic elements, there is much in “Sweeney Agonistes” that makes it conform to standard treatments of issues that had been engaging the Western literary imagination since perhaps as far back as the mid-17th century and the beginnings of a rationalist subjectivism in philosophical systems. If there is something called the truth, then for most of human history, there were only two approaches toward it. The truth is what is there to be heard, and anyone who seeks it will find it. Or the truth is what one should like to be able to hear, but here one can only ever hope to catch some glimpse of its distant shadow. In either case, it was a singularity—something “out there” for each individual. With the emergence of what historians have come to call the Renaissance, a new notion entered the picture: The truth is whatever one hears and wishes to label “true.” It is, for each individual, something “in here.” In summary, older, more hierarchical traditions that defined social relationships and the relationship between humanity and the natural universe according to the idea that the truth was a singular phenomenon began to be challenged if not supplanted by newer models of society and of nature that stressed the centrality of the individual and of experience in determining behavioral norms and the laws by which the natural order was governed. These new ideas embodying what has subsequently been called humanism have become the mainstay of present ways of so-called post-Christian thinking to such a wide extent that they can be quickly and easily identified and exemplified. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) would declare a typical human life to be something nasty, brutish, and short, dispensing with the idea that life served a greater unknown purpose, while fellow Englishman John Locke (1632–1704) and the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) would advance arguments making all human knowledge empirical, or based on experience, and declaring experience itself to be a function of mind, not body. Ideas take time to move from the intellectual to the social arena. In this case, by the late 18th century, the French social and political philoso-

pher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), no doubt influenced by these ideas that placed an increasing emphasis on subjectivity and materialism, would criticize social systems organized at the expense of individuality and argue that the human in his natural state is a more dignified and moral creature than one constrained by the hypocrisies of civilized mores. Indeed, Rousseau would question even the hierarchical organization of society and propose instead that states exist by virtue of a social contract, whereby each individual consents to be governed and, therefore, can reject that same authority if it impedes individual fulfillment. The increasing importance assigned to subjectively formulated choices and judgments altered not only social and political ways of thinking and behavior, giving rise to the democratic movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but aesthetic responses to experience as well, resulting in romanticism and eventually literary realism. Oddly enough, instead of celebrating this newfound liberation from outmoded ways of perceiving humanity’s place in the universe, each of these movements in its own way lamented the loss of innocence that the human race had apparently undergone in its centuries-long passage from an agrarian to a more and more urbanized and, hence, mechanically organized world. The very rationalism that had freed humanity had enslaved it to closed systems: Whatever was logical was true. That longing for more innocent times had its boons, obviously, but it also had its banes. Much of the escapism associated with 19thcentury art in all its various manifestations—music, poetry, drama, painting—finds its roots in the discontent to which such a longing gives rise. Then there followed those cynical responses to escapist art, culminating in the wittily vacuous poetry of the young JULES LAFORGUE, whom the young Eliot would later so admire. The reference in one of the songs in “Sweeney Agonistes” to the 19th-century French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who fled France for the South Seas in order to escape the same crushing boredom and pressures to conform that forced his contemporary CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821–67) to write the despairingly bitter poetry of his Les fleurs du mal, is Eliot’s way of summarizing what

“Sweeney Agonistes” had become, by his time, a social commonplace, one that his own poetry frequently addresses—that the human in the city is a sorry animal and a sorrier soul. Bereft of all the old magic, the indivual is also left bereft of all the old belief, and one lives in a universe that can be explained but does not make sense. “Sweeney Agonistes,” however, goes one step further, continuing to question what benefits to individual growth and contentment could possibly accrue from humanity’s present circumstances as prisoners of our own overly civilized and depersonalized “mind-forg’d manacles,” to borrow a phrase from William Blake. It also casts into doubt, however, whether there would be any benefits, either, as promised by the myth that a return to some sort of Edenic innocence or, at the very least, environment would save the individual by restoring to him or her that lost primal bliss and freedom. Just as Eliot’s characterization of Sweeney as a self-indulgent sexpot may be his way of critiquing the idea that man in a state of nature is a Rousseauvian noble savage, so may the almost comical emphasis in “Sweeney Agonistes” on “getting away from it all” be Eliot’s way of critiquing the idea that there is any going back. Rather, Eliot seems to be arguing that we have made the humanist’s post-Christian world our bed, as it were, and are trapped here, that there is in fact no going back, that, instead, there is only that waiting for the hangman to knock. It is this utter hopelessness that makes Eliot’s vision in “Sweeney Agonistes” peculiarly modernist, and perhaps the play is, as he had been proposing, his first truly unique work. Throughout the rest of the 1920s, Eliot criticized what he saw as the humanist agenda, its aim to supplant religion with a secular reasonableness. Then, in After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot the social critic emerged, sharply attacking those who settled for attractive half-truths in their efforts to reconstruct a meaningful universe out of the wreckage of the old. In “Sweeney Agonistes,” however, Eliot can only describe the human wreckage who inhabit it, as he had been doing since as early as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its hand-wringing bouts of self-degradation and self-absorption. If Sweeney’s frenetic commentary on life’s bewil-

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deringly absurd realities strikes a single note, it is not that each human creature will die but that all human creatures are alone and isolated, relying on such tenuous relationships as are defined by love and by friendship to keep them from drowning in what 19th-century English poet MATTHEW ARNOLD called the “salt estranging sea.” It is not for nothing that “Sweeney Agonistes” is set in what is essentially a brothel (the reference to Mrs. Porter of “Sweeney Erect” fame clinches that) and its characters are all purveyors of affection that is bartered for cash. This is Eliot’s way of stripping away all figurative illusions and getting his audience down to the brass tacks of which Sweeney will speak. In his continuing interpretation of the human dilemma, Eliot had consistently been portraying us as we are, stripped of the illusions of social conventions. He portrays us, for one contradiction, as individualists who are compelled to be social creatures and, for another, as spiritual creatures who are compelled by the necessities of our appetites and other biological functions to be animals. In “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot has simply taken this very human dilemma to its logical conclusion, which is that there is none—at least not in the new materialist universe that modern humans have created for themselves. Using the structures of Greek drama, in his play Eliot sets up an agon, a debate, incorporating the terms that the last several hundred years of human intellectual history have made the only pertinent terms, but employing them as each is represented not as an idea but by a person who is living according to the idea. That, after all, is drama. Doris is unable to understand the appeal that Sweeney makes to her, which is not to run away with him to a crocodile/cannibal isle but to see that that is what human relationships are if they are conducted without any reference point outside the self—lonely islands where, like the pathetic couple in “A Game of Chess” from The Waste Land, each devours the other for lack of anything better to do. The chorus in the play, meanwhile, composed of the old army buddies, bungles Sweeney’s case by trying to make it for him, reducing it to Eliot’s relatively close adaptation of the sappy lyrics of

388 “Sweeney Agonistes” a novelty love song, “Under the Bamboo Tree,” where “One live as two, two live as one, / Under the bamboo tree.” Ironically, that is, of course, the Edenic ideal. That Doris rejects it—she would “just as soon be dead”—reveals how impossible it is to achieve it any longer, leaving us all “alone in the middle of the night” waiting for the hangman, Death, to knock. Otherwise, as Sweeney intones just before the closing chorus, “that’s nothing to me and nothing to you,” which is all that there is left for anyone in this brave new humanist world. The reader will recall that Eliot never completed “Sweeney Agonistes.” It could be that he had come to recognize that in the play he had arrived at a creative impasse that might itself be reflective of an impasse in his ways of thinking of, or at least of perceiving, the human place in creation. He had created a fictive world in which, and from which, there was no salvation for the individual, only the frustration of feeling imprisoned and the knowledge that escape is impossible. This lack of any sense of peacefulness or purpose in the individual life is the one thing the humanist, postreligious readjustments fail to account for, and yet, in Eliot’s view, the individual still craves these absent assurances. Hence the persistence of the myth of the return to paradise that still haunts the culture. As Eliot’s mouthpiece in the play, Sweeney regards that myth as just that—a myth. For him, as for most of the denizens of The Waste Land, there is only that sense of frustration and futility. If in The Waste Land, for all its despair, Eliot had concluded by bringing the reader to a shore beyond the desert and a state of mind where peace, shantih, may be found, the Sweeney play’s savage wit had, in the final analysis, been reduced to only that: wit to no other purpose than to expose humanity’s apparently cosmic hopelessness. Aside from “The Hollow Men,” itself a poem composed with the thematic interests of “Sweeney Agonistes” in mind, Eliot would not revisit these themes of despair and emptiness again, however, except to dismiss them. Indeed, in his next major poem after “The Hollow Men,” “Ash-Wednesday,” with its opening phrase, “Because I do not hope. . . . ,” Eliot’s poetry took a decided turn not toward the religious, as some may think, as toward

the hopeful. So, then, it does seem that Eliot became aware that he was doing nothing more than covering old ground in the ostensibly “new and different” “Sweeney Agonistes” and made the choice to abandon it as a work that had served its purpose by giving his own work an entirely new direction, though not a new modus operandi. Such a supposition is borne out by two distinct sets of evidence. First, there is a telling comment that Eliot made nearly a decade later regarding his general aim for the play. In the winter of 1932–33, Eliot was delivering a series of lectures on literature as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University, and they were subsequently collected in a volume titled The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). In the last installment, delivered on March 31, 1933, and appropriately entitled “Conclusion,” he observed that “the ideal medium for poetry, to my mind, and the most direct means of social ‘usefulness’ for poetry, is the theatre,” and he went on to explain that that is because in that medium the poetry affects the auditor at all levels. By way of an example of what he was intending to say, he mentioned having once drafted a few scenes of a verse play, undoubtedly referring to Samson Agonistes, explaining how he had planned it so that one character would have a “sensibility and intelligence . . . on the plane of the most sensitive and intelligent members of the audience,” while the other personages of the play to whom that character addressed his remarks “were to be material, literal-minded and visionless.” The idea was that Sweeney’s remarks would be addressed as much to those in the audience who shared his sensitivity and intelligence as to those characters on the stage who did not. While in relative terms Eliot’s Sweeney may not seem a model of intelligence and sensitivity, it is not hard to imagine his words—“I gotta use words when I talk to you”—as having two levels of meaning that, while they do not contradict each other, nevertheless have more portent than Doris or the army buddies can pick up. If nothing else, and if there should be any further doubt, Eliot’s remarks in the Norton lectures reveal Sweeney’s critical role in the play as a prophetic voice whose vision exposes an otherwise unutterable truth that no one else in the play can hear, but

“Sweeney among the Nightingales” that the audience can discern: These characters are us, the victims of a soulless cosmology, and they are all hopelessly lost. The other set of evidence requires the reader to return to a consideration of that oddly incongruous selection of characters alluded to in the play’s title and epigraph: Milton’s Samson, Orestes, and St. John of the Cross. In this reading, each of them prefigures for the play’s reader the key to Sweeney’s own agony, for each has come to his moment of desperation out of the necessity of choosing between social and cultural demands—escape, revenge, worldliness—or the claims of his individual soul to serve his god’s will. Now perhaps it is possible to answer the question posed near the outset of this entry, regarding Eliot’s intentions for his allusion to Milton’s Samson Agonistes in his own title. Surely it must be apparent by now that Eliot was indeed suggesting by the allusion that, despite the centuries that may separate the two texts, his and Milton’s plays have one outstanding feature in common, inasmuch as they each deal with the hard choices that the individual must make in a world in which faith in God is a questionable endeavor and unpopular pursuit. The only difference would be—and it is no small one—is that for Milton, it was his protagonist’s choice that was at stake; for Eliot, it was his own. Sweeney is not himself personally involved in a struggle between belief and a scientific rationalism. His barely formulated lust for a more meaningful life merely gives that struggle voice for anyone capable of discerning the causes of Sweeney’s dilemma. It is his creator, Eliot, who has tried in the play to come to terms with the conflict of values that his poetry has been dramatizing to one degree or another all along, the conflict between the demands of personal salvation and the pressure to be reasonable and tolerant of humanist rationalism, and he has found those terms wanting, thus accounting for his abandoning the play but not disavowing it. If “Sweeney Agonistes” exposed a flaw in Eliot’s approach toward one of the major intellectual and emotional crises of his age, it was that the time for such clever subtleties as these had passed. Although there would be work still to be done to clarify his position, beginning with “Ash-Wednesday,” he

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would present forthrightly and unabashedly and, inasmuch as the contingencies of poetry might permit, in a wholly personal context the terms of the spiritual dilemma with which he saw humanity in the 20th century struggling, himself included.

FURTHER READING Dillingham, Thomas F. “Origen and Sweeney: The Problem of Christianity for T. S. Eliot.” Christianity and Literature 30, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 37–51. Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

“Sweeney among the Nightingales” (1918) Composed in 1918 and published in 1920, “Sweeney among the Nightingales” employs in a much more troublesome manner many of the same innovative and idiosyncratic techniques that Eliot had already introduced in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and that he would shortly use to greater advantage in composing The Waste Land. The influences of the French poet and ironist JULES LAFORGUE remain present in the poem’s apparently insouciant criticism of social norms and public mores, but the effective use of a beguilingly compounded irony that will make The Waste Land an enduring literary text is beginning to emerge.

SYNOPSIS Like The Waste Land, “Sweeney” is a poem in which Eliot eschews meaning in the sense of any commonly derivable or acceptable theme for the sake of providing his readers with a firsthand representation of the lurid and the absurd. Despite that tactic, however, Eliot does not hesitate to keep his readers on task by also providing them with the mediating intervention not so much of a subtext or even of undertones as much as of a backdrop drawn from the Western literary tradition, in this case the ancient Greek tragedy the Agamemnon by Aeschylus. By constructing what is ostensibly a modern sexual farce on the underpinning legitimacies of a

390 “Sweeney among the Nightingales” literary classic, Eliot leads readers to a satisfactorily discoverable meaning in the poem’s climatic moment of tragic insight, an insight contingent on readers’ knowledge of the larger, mythic context for Agamemnon’s “stiff dishonoured shroud.” As it spins readers on an associative merrygo-round of denotative and connotative mayhem that mimics the poetry’s ribaldry, the final effect achieved by these disorienting techniques employed throughout the text is to keep readers distracted from thinking or even feeling long enough for the full force of the disjunctive connection between “apeneck Sweeney” and the murdered Argive king to hit home. Examining these elements in more detail should provide some further indication of how well and effectively Eliot utilizes the chaos of apparently disparate surface details to create his own scheme of meaningful relationships both within the poem and with other literary texts. The Title and Epigraph True perhaps to the fabled frugality of his New England forbears, Eliot follows the Yankee wastenot, want-not adage by making even the poem’s title and epigraph function effectively in creating both a tonal disparity and an undercurrent for meanings not realized. The incongruities of the title give readers pause. Although it is a common enough surname, Sweeney, which would have had for a person of Eliot’s class and social background its Irish-American, Roman Catholic connotations of a working class tough, seems out of place among nightingales, a species of songbird renowned for its rich symbolic significances, literary refinement, and associations with the delicate, the fragile, and the beautiful. Surely, for an English reader, John Keats’s famously beauteous poem “Ode to a Nightingale” would not be far from mind, while Sweeney might strike one as the name of a prizefighter at best, an impression hardly discouraged by the opening image of “Apeneck Sweeney.” Before readers can get to that opening image, however, they must first pass through the cryptic epigraph, which is presented not only without the benefit of any identified source but in the original Greek as well. To know that the epigraph translates “I am struck with a fatal blow within” may not

be any more enlightening than the original Greek. To learn further that they are the words spoken by Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces who have just conquered Troy, who has returned home to be murdered at his very doorstep by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, may be of some help but of no particular usefulness. Still, the epigraph serves as a talisman of sorts, a warning that a reader thinking that he or she is in relatively familiar territory may prove to be entering zones of meaning quite foreign, perhaps even hostile. In the Greek drama, Agamemnon cries out from behind a door that has been closed to both the chorus on the stage and the audience in the auditorium, the easier for the two lovers to kill the king, who has been duped by his own pride into imagining that he has stepped inside to have the dust and grime of battle and travel washed from him. Instead, entangled in the robe that they have given him to prepare him for his bath, he is stabbed to death. If nothing else, then, the epigraph acts as a sort of metaphorically closed door to the poem, a door that readers must open at their own risk. Once within the poem, that risk to discover meaning in puzzling incongruities is virtually compounded in verse after verse and stanza after stanza. The Text “Sweeney among the Nightingales” changes tone and direction and even putative locale so rapidly, a great part of both its enjoyment for and its challenge to readers is its steadfast unwillingness to follow any conventional pattern of exposition or thematic development or to pursue a line of thought or even imagery for very long. Sweeney’s “apeneck,” “zebra stripes,” and giraffelike jaw, for example, may put the reader in mind of Africa, but then there is a reference to the River Plate, which is in Argentina, which may explain the woman in the “Spanish cape” who tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees. (The Paraguayan capital city of Montevideo, where Eliot’s poet-hero JULES LAFORGUE was born in 1860, also happens to be on the River Plate.) Meanwhile, the introduction of Rachel Rabinovitch may put more knowledgeable readers in mind of Central Europe, a popular setting, at the time, for equally popular Broadway operettas, and that possibility

“Sweeney among the Nightingales” may make the melodramatic quality of the action, with its hint of a torrid mystery and suspense (the woman in the cape and Rachel are “thought to be in league”), make a certain kind of sense. Returning to those apparent references to the African veld, they could as likely be references to a public zoo and so an urban setting, accounting for the café society setting for Sweeney’s ostensible and frustrating amorous adventures, just as surely as the circumscribed “golden grin” of the surreptitious men in the mocha brown coat calls to mind Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland. Eliot is so skillful, in fact, in dazzling his readers with wit and erudition, mixing hints of a serious intent with large dollops of delightful nonsense, that two of the key elements of any act of communication—the identity of the speaker and the intended audience—hardly enter the picture as items for consideration. The poem appears not to be in the lyrical mode. At the very least, a first-person speaker never reveals himself. But neither is the poem dramatic, and if it is an exercise in narrative poetry, the exposition is so intentionally haphazard as to encourage readers not to expect a coherent story, with a traditional beginning, middle, and end, to emerge. A reader left to ponder whether the poem is describing action taking place in a zoo, a funhouse, a crime scene, or a house of ill repute, for example, also must be left equally puzzled by the bumpy ride the poem’s diction takes. Granted, there had been the warning in the epigraph in Greek that an element of learnedness is required of anyone attempting to negotiate the poetry’s treacherous terrain. Nevertheless, levels of discourse are mixed as freely and as readily as tone and attitude, and with as much of an apparent aim toward nothing more than further bedevilment. What, for example, is one supposed to make of a speaker or poet who can use the word maculate—to spot, speckle, or stain—correctly, and should that put a reader in mind of the Immaculate Conception, since later we hear of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, bringing to mind a group of women devoted to Christ? The speaker is also up on his astronomy with references to Orion and the Dog star, Sirius. The mention of “Death and the Raven,” while broad and generic,

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may nevertheless bring to mind the love-crazed speaker of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” yearning for his lost Lenore. If Sweeney is also love-crazed, however, it seems to be more a problem of a bestial appetite gone awry than of any profound spiritual longing for a reunion with a dearly departed beloved. And then comes the ominous notion that Sweeney “guards the hornéd gate.” The sexual connotations of the horn aside, the hornéd gate has a particular meaning. In Greek mythology, also the source for the puzzling epigraph from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the hornéd gate is the gate through which true dreams come to humans; false dreams, meanwhile, come through the gates of ivory. The ancient Greeks placed great stock in their dreams, imagining that the gods spoke to them in their sleep, but they were also aware that dreams can be deceiving. In a poem whose chief aim seems to be recondite deception, it is possible that Sweeney is guarding the hornéd gate to protect the portal through which divine truths emanate; conversely, perhaps he is there to prevent those truths from emerging. Since Sweeney, along with the other characters in the poem, seems to embrace the code of sexual violence, either open or implied, it is hard to imagine that Sweeney might be up to any good in guarding the hornéd gate. Another Eliot poem from the same period, “Sweeney Erect,” with its connotation of both male sexual arousal and its play on a simianlike demeanor and behavior, reenforces the supposition that Sweeney is Eliot’s commentary on the human as brute, an idea further supported by images of Sweeney and his disreputable cohorts despoiling nature’s abundance—“oranges / Banana figs and hothouse grapes”—by fouling their own nest with self-indulgent feeding frenzies and sexual escapades. In “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” the reader finds violence even in movements. People are described as slipping and sprawling and overturning things, as if they are clumsy or merely inebriated. If Sweeney is “apeneck,” then Rachel has “murderous paws,” and the “silent man in mocha brown” is later called a “silent vertebrate” whose movement “contracts and concentrates,” as if he were a mutated insect specimen, wormlike in its

392 “Sweeney among the Nightingales” movements. Perhaps the poem is suggesting that humans the likes of Sweeney and human behavior the likes of his are somehow subhuman and so are an impediment to a truer vision of our humanity, a more godlike view of ourselves. Ironically, however, nightingales, which seem to suggest a measure of gentility and gentleness, play a key role themselves in Greek mythology, one that also links sexuality and violence in the story of Philomela, which Eliot will reintroduce in The Waste Land. Raped and mutilated by her brotherin-law Tereus, she contrives a way to tell her story to her equally abused sister Procne. When Procne takes her revenge by killing her and Tereus’s children, he pursues the two sisters to wreak his further revenge on them. Procne is transformed by the gods into a nightingale, whose song is the saddest of bird songs, and Philomela into a swallow, and they are able to escape him. Sweeney among the nightingales, then, may very well be what he appears to be—the fox in the henhouse, the barbarian within the gates, bringing down all of that vision and insight and glory on his head and modern culture’s as well, with its emphasis on the cheap and the tawdry while the nightingales lament the ensuing catatastrophe. Yet just when a reader thinks that he or she might have solved the mystery that the poem proposes, there comes a different vision of the nightingale and of the mythic and its place in human consciousness. Instead of a symbol of high art and its transfiguring powers, the bird suddenly becomes just that—a bird, whose “liquid droppings fall” on Agamemnon’s bloodied corpse. The nightingales are there at the moment of Agamemnon’s so momentous death not to lament, but only to heed nature’s call and defecate in unadulterated innocence and purity of motive on the blood-stiffened bathrobe that has become his burial shroud.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY “Sweeney among the Nightingales” is one of the so-called quatrain poems, so named after a stanzaic form with which Eliot and his friend, the American poet EZRA POUND, were experimenting at the time. Borrowed from the 19th-century French poet Théophile Gautier, these four-line stanzas with

their shortened, four-beat lines (in contrast to the typical line of poetry in English since the time of Shakespeare, which would have had five beats) rhymed on each paired couplet to create a lively, breezy tone and pace. The shortness of both the stanza and the line, meanwhile, also encouraged a somewhat staccato rhythm. The end result was a poetic style that had a tendency to lend itself to the cloying, witty patter more typical of light verse if not, in fact, the English music hall stage, of which Eliot was himself a fancier. In typical Eliot fashion, it is when one thinks that the meaning of a poem of his has been caught and is now pinned and wriggling on a wall that it somehow always manages to slip away, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland. For what Eliot is perhaps showing his readers is that once the patina of age and tradition are removed from them, these ancient myths, venerated though they may be in our own time, also tell of the cheap and the tawdry, the mean and the brutal. The story of the rape of Philomela, as awful as it is, pales in comparison with the history of the house of Atreus, of which Agamemnon is a scion. That history is one, long horrendous tale of infanticide and unwitting cannibalism, sacrilege and blasphemy, betrayals and adultery, of which the killing of the conquering hero is only a chapter. Agamemnon, who is portrayed by Aeschylus as weak willed and vain, is murdered primarily for the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, a sacrifice that he permitted, without Clytemnestra’s knowledge, so that the Greek fleet might set sail for Troy. If Sweeney is a brute, then Agamemnon, for all that he is enshrined in our collective psyches as a problematic model of the hero and horribly cuckolded husband, was a beast. As honored and privileged as the mythic may be now, “Sweeney among the Nightingales” encourages readers to see that those old tales and their heroes too are stained, maculated, with human blood and other excrement—contaminated, as all things as things are with the corruption of the animal universe in which humans themselves must reside right along with the apes and the zebras, the nightingales and the giraffes, despite our myths about hornéd gates through which true visions come.

“Sweeney among the Nightingales” However, through the complex interplay between past and present, high art and low art, startling erudition and farcical nonsense, the Eliot poem also encourages readers to recognize the commonalities as well as the anomalies. The same nightingales who sing and do their other things outside the Convent of the Sacred Heart also sang and did their other things for Agamemnon and his killers, too, and certainly for young John Keats, and—and this is where the poem takes off—for brutish Sweeney and his madcap cohorts as well. No matter how “Sweeney among the Nightingales” may finally be construed or categorized, its dislocating juxtapositions, vague and often conflicting generic clues and signals, and free intermingling of elements commonly thought of as high art (literary and classical allusions) with elements generally associated with low art (near-doggerel rhyme and rhythms, a self-mocking tone, socially questionable activities) combine into a reading experience that must have left even the most experienced poetry lovers of the time puzzled with regard to both the author’s intention and their own proper response, and that puzzlement continues to this day. And it is likely that this very effect of puzzlement and befuddlement formed a great of Eliot’s aim for the poetry. To trick rather than talk the reader into reacting to a line of verse is one of the hallmarks of literary modernism. Although these techniques may by now be a bit less discombobulating for a typical reader than they were back in those days when they were first being employed, Eliot uses them in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” to promote such an ambiguous thematic goal that the poem remains the center of critical debate, especially with regard to the work’s apparent ethnic slurs, among them its patent anti-Semitic overtones. However various interpretations of the poem may continue to be, the overall effect of the poem is to set up the kinds of startling and often shocking contrasts that make Eliot’s poetry of this period vivid object lessons in the very sorts of moral and cultural chaos that his poetry was generally assumed to be mirroring. The question remains, however, whether that chaos is unique to the modern age or is a condition of the physical and moral space that humans have inhabited since

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The Mary Institute in St. Louis, 1895. Eliot’s grandfather founded this girls’ school, located adjacent to the family home on Locust Street. Eliot’s sisters were educated there, and he used to play in the schoolyard. Some scholars see it as a possible model for the Convent of the Sacred Heart, referred to in “Sweeney among the Nightingales.” (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

time immemorial. Eliot most often falls on the latter half of that divide. Out of all those disparate events that constitute experience come works of art—Aeschylus’s tragedy, Keats’s ode, Eliot’s present poem. For all its homage to art, nevertheless, it is finally to the immutable, maculated world not of art but of nature that the poem “Sweeney among the Nightingales” and its poet bow. It is in this arena that humanity, although mimicking nature’s mindless and violent behavior, also mythologizes it, inspired by its shortcomings to conceive greater glories for the imagination than mere nature ever offers. In the final analysis, “Sweeney among the Nightingales” becomes a trope for the paradoxical contradiction of the human animal living in the midst of fictive splendors that are formulated by the creative mind functioning in the midst of an animal universe. The poem does not predicates these conclusions on the old style of persuasive and other rhetorical strategies but rather demonstrates its theme in the very collision of the old with the new, the living with

394 “Sweeney Erect” the dead, the symbol with the reality, and the word with the vision it both inspires and encounters.

“Sweeney Erect” (1920) “Sweeney Erect” is another among those poems in the quatrain mode with which Eliot and his close friend and literary adviser, the American poet EZRA POUND, were heavily experimenting between 1917 and 1919 when Eliot employed the quatrains in a handful of poetic exercises. The dating of each of the seven quatrains that Eliot composed is not exact. Some were published separately in 1918, while “Sweeney Erect” was not published until 1920 when Eliot brought out his second collection of poems, Ara Vos Prec. With their four-beat lines and four-line stanzas rhyming on the second and fourth lines, these quatrains lent themselves to the sort of verbal musicality and clever wordplay that might make even the most serious material sound lighthearted or frivolous. The two had borrowed the form from the mid-19th century French poet, Théophile Gautier, and Pound used it to great effect in his Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1919).

SYNOPSIS Should the reader miss the sundry implications of the title, “Sweeney Erect,” Eliot is less subtle when, little more than four stanzas into the poem, he identifies Sweeney with an orangoutang and remarks on how a “sickle motion from the thighs / Jackknifes upward,” an image of Sweeney getting up out of bed, but again suggestive of a male becoming sexually aroused as well. Before the reader meets Sweeney, however— aside, that is, from his introduction in the title, of course—the reader must pass the usual pickets and sentinels to meaning that it was Eliot’s wont to set up in his poetry from its earliest days. There is the epigraph, unattributed as is also often the case, and then nearly three full stanzas dense with allusions to classical myths to wade through before reaching the happy isle where Sweeney, about to awaken, rests. To know who Sweeney is, the reader must come at him through this swampy thicket of liter-

ary and cultural insinuation, but it will be in finding a commonality among these insinuations that Sweeney’s essential reality will, if not emerge, at least find its own common denominator. It is a major source of irony that allusions to classical myths and literary classics, which appear in abundance in virtually any Eliot poem but particularly in those written in the 1910s, are found in “Sweeney Erect” in an almost overabundance. It is ironic because it is doubtful that a character like Sweeney would be either well schooled or well read enough to recognize any of the allusions that Eliot employs in this particular poem. With regard to the unattributed epigraph, it may be equally important for the reader to regard its content as to seek to identify its source. In that way, the reader quickly discovers what it is reasonable to assume Eliot wishes the epigraph to imply: There is an arrogant or at least a domineering person commanding others to set a stage or a scene of desolation, and this speaker apparently has little regard for women, whom he (if the speaker in the epigraph is a male, that is) identifies as “wenches,” hardly a complimentary or polite form of address. By approaching the epigraph in this manner (or, for that matter, any epigraph to an Eliot poem, particularly when the epigraph is either unattributed or obscure and in English), then, when the reader comes to understand its source and context, the issue of its meaning for the poem will not be liable to become clouded by determinations and interpretations that have more to do with the original source than with Eliot’s own particular use of it. (The wise reader is warned, however, not to disregard the source meaning entirely, since Eliot is wont to delight in compounded ironies.) It will no doubt be a surprise for most readers to learn that the speaker of the present epigraph is Aspatia, a woman whose lover has wronged her in the Fletcher and Beaumont Restoration drama The Maid’s Tragedy. In the words that Eliot cites in the epigraph, Aspatia is directing her serving girls, as they weave a tapestry depicting the plight of Ariadne, to make the scene appropriately desolate in order to reflect Aspatia’s own present feelings. Knowing this, the reader can quickly connect the epigraph, in ironic and mocking ways nonetheless,

“Sweeney Erect” to the poem that follows—provided that one has some additional knowledge of who Ariadne was, of course. As the Eliot poem itself begins, it sounds as if Aspatia is continuing to give orders to her servant girls. At least, there is the continued use of the imperative mood: “Paint me a cavernous waste shore. . . .” The poem identifies the locale for this “waste shore” as the Cyclades, the 1000island archipelago south of the Greek mainland where Ariadne, who is now introduced by name in the second stanza of the poem, was abandoned on the island of Naxos by her lover, the Athenian hero Theseus. One story goes that Theseus did it intentionally after Ariadne had helped him defeat the Minotaur and he was running off with her to Athens where they were to be married. Another version tells that Theseus left her there for her own safety in the face of storms at sea. Either way, Ariadne died on Naxos without ever seeing Theseus again. Eliot seems to have it both ways: The reference to Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds, and the “insurgent gales” implies that storms at sea were responsible for Ariadne’s plight; the mention of “perjured sails,” meanwhile, clearly questions the purity of Theseus’ motives and intentions. Whatever the implications, the reader is hardly into the poem before he or she has encountered two abused examples of the human female, Aspatia and Ariadne. In the third stanza, Eliot distorts his original source a bit to introduce a third abused female. Eliot pairs Nausicaa, the maiden Phaiakian princess whom Athena used to bring the shipwrecked Odysseus safely to the king’s palace, with Polyphemos, the monstrous, one-eyed Cyclops who ate Odysseus’s men. Although the two appear in totally unrelated episodes in Homer’s great epic poem the Odyssey, Eliot’s pairing them again puts the reader in mind of the sort of tragedies and conflicts that can result when the vulnerable feminine is mixed with the aggressive male principle. These three instances of frail, trusting females, whom brutal, insensitive males have taken advantage of by abandoning or ill-using them, now find their mock complement in the remainder of the poem in Sweeney, or so it may seem at first glance. A certifiably brutish male, he is also “abandoning”

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a helpless female, although the exact circumstances are somewhat different, to say the least. In his case, he is doing so by climbing out of bed, apparently in a brothel, where the prostitute he leaves behind starts to suffer an epileptic seizure. Sweeney, however, is too busy shaving and otherwise arraying his comical physical self for the day ahead, so he blissfully ignores her plight.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY In his earliest poems Eliot’s poetic style may seem, to the novice reader, to be a lyric, or first-person, poetry. However, Eliot is in fact, from the beginning, as much if not more a dramatic than a lyric poet. While his poetry is often cast in the first person, the “I” speaker of the poem is not always easily identified with the poet-writer; indeed, there are instances when an identification between the speaker and poet is rendered unlikely if not impossible. The lugubriously self-centered title character of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a speaker who is definitely not to be mistaken as the poet, Eliot. So should the unnamed speaker of “Gerontion.” There are, too, the collective hollow men, the speakers in the poem of the same name, who come to life strangely but vividly nonetheless as they spell out their mind-numbing, choral confession of ill-spent, empty lives. Other times, even when the speaker, as in the case of “Portrait of a Lady” or “A Cooking Egg,” remains altogether anonymous, he still takes on the characteristics of a full-fledged personality. The context for his words to the equally anonymous lady being “portrayed” or about Pipit carry the weight not of personal revelation, it must be imagined, but of a dramatic situation of some order that has been imaginatively conceived by the poet in order to render his likenesses. The result of these dramatic skills of Eliot’s as a poet is that Eliot also happens to be responsible for having created a number of interesting if not necessarily engaging characterizations embodied by these dramatized speakers. Generally, too, these characterizations of Eliot’s strike the reader as being persons of some learning and, as it was phrased back in Eliot’s time, “breeding.” They identify themselves with aspects of and in allusions to high culture and

396 “Sweeney Erect” even higher education. Such touches lend themselves, perhaps, to readers’ often confusing these characterizations with the poet himself, since it is typical for any writer to write about what he or she knows best, and Eliot is no exception. The son of a relatively wealthy and socially prominent family, Eliot was himself a learned and well-bred individual, so it should come as no surprise that his characterizations commonly enough emerge from the same sorts of social settings and backgrounds. And then there is Sweeney. Although Sweeney would finally be allowed to speak for himself in “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot’s first and eventually abortive attempt at a poetic drama in 1923, otherwise, whatever else he may represent, Sweeney is, foremost and above else, the inarticulate lout who lets his actions speak louder than words. Indeed, it is a most telling commentary on what Eliot makes of Sweeney, and thus may want his readers to make of him—that Eliot seems not to trust Sweeney to have enough sense and, again, “breeding” to speak for himself at all, so that in his earliest manifestations in the three quatrain poems in which he appears, Sweeney is spoken about rather than speaks. That fact should say much as well about this fascinating characterization of Eliot’s nevertheless. For all that Sweeney’s is a presence that dominates “Sweeney among the Nightingales” and for all that he is a scene-stealer in the final stanza of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” it is in the third of these quatrain poems, “Sweeney Erect,” that our hero most reveals, and revels in, his true nature. There he is exposed, quite literally, for the creature that he is. The only problem is, it is never made quite clear exactly what that might be. To this day, critics remain divided on whether Sweeney, as a characterization, represents the ordinary person, free of the cultural and social baggage that burden many of Eliot’s other characterizations, or the human brute, not too pure but otherwise simple and all appetite. This critical dilemma may itself be partly the result of Sweeney’s literary pedigree, which, by the time of Eliot’s writing in the early decades of the 20th century, would have been, though of a fairly recent vintage, nevertheless a long though not precisely illustrious one.

Dichotomies between the values and attitudes of the country mouse and those of the city mouse are surely ages old. Still, the idea of the noble savage or the natural man had been a dominant one in European thinking, shaping poetic thought as much as public policy, from at least the time of the late 18thcentury French social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For him, man, meaning humanity, leads a more morally and socially open and innocent life in a state of nature than do his citified neighbors corrupted by changeable social mores and the cultural faddishness found in a typical urban environment of any day. That was the positive side of this particular point of view and was itself an attitude freely adopted by other thinkers and artists, prominent among them in the English-speaking world being romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. Such ways of thinking, with their emphasis on the natural goodness of the human creature unfettered by civilizing restraints and constraints, also helped shape both the ideals and the practical realities of American democracy and fomented the atmosphere out of which the French Revolution would emerge in 1789. There was, however, embedded in the intellectual and artistic communities a persistent critique of these same attitudes, one that saw humans in a state of nature as potentially if not essentially depraved creatures for whom the ameliorative actions of the processes of civilization were the only hope and bulwark against social and personal anarchy and selfserving fragmentation. These fears took longer to take form in public discourse but began to emerge in such 19th-century literary works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which exposed the unbridled monster of natural appetites lurking within the refined sensibililties of a well-educated English gentleman. JOSEPH CONRAD’s HEART OF DARKNESS essayed the same theme in an action novel that focuses on uncovering the bloodcurdling colonial policies of an otherwise highminded European social reformer, Kurtz, who had ventured into the African jungle to help if not in fact civilize the natives. Such a shift in thinking was no doubt accentuated by misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s

“Thomas Middleton” theories of evolution, which seemed to propose that only the fittest survived, giving rise to a view of nature as a bloody battleground “red in tooth and fang,” as the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson would put it. Also helping make the case that natural man was not an angel was the psychological theorizing of the late 19th-century Austrian physician and so-called father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, with his division of the human psyche into higher and lower forms of control. The everyday personality, the ego, stood between social and moral tensions created by a tug of war between the superego, which defined our best moral impulses and social skills, and the id, which was guided only by baser, self-serving instincts. The noble savage had been replaced, in short order, by the terrifying vision of the ape/man. The American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s work, The Hairy Ape, for example, is built on motifs and metaphors such as these. His drama presents the horrifying prospect of a humanity increasingly brutalized by interaction with machinery. Eliot, however, had already beaten O’Neill to the punch with “apeneck Sweeney,” as he is introduced without much need of further fanfare in “Sweeney among the Nighingales.” Similarly, it should be quite evident that the title “Sweeney Erect,” with its dual connotation of a simianlike creature (homo erectus is the scientific tag given to modern man’s, homo sapiens’s earliest ancestors) and male sexual arousal, another animallike addition, does not leave the reader much room for the free play of imaginative interpretations. It is not too difficult to imagine, then, that this is another one of those poems, typical of Eliot at the time and would culminate in “Gerontion” and The Waste Land, in which he appears to contrast an ennobled and imaginatively enriched past with a sordid and sadly diminished present. Instead of Theseus, the modern world has Sweeney. Instead of Ariadne, it has an epileptic and nameless whore. Nevertheless, in virtually the same way in which Eliot, in the other notable Sweeney poem, “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” compares more than contrasts Agamemnon, the cuckolded and murdered husband, with apeneck Sweeney’s escapades among an assortment of unsavory characters, this present poem also suggests that there are more fea-

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tures in common between the past and the present than at first meet the eye. Ariadne betrayed her father, King Minos, in order to help Theseus, who had been brought to Crete as part of a contingent of young Athenians who were periodically sacrificed to the Minotaur, itself a monster half-human and half-bull. Until then, Ariadne had had no trouble countenancing such a bloody and bestial sacrifice of the innocent, making hers hardly an ennobling and instructive tale. The Eliot poem ends with Doris, one of the other “girls,” saving the day by rushing to revive the epileptic with brandy and smelling salts. But if Sweeney, the modern stand-in for the heartless Theseus, does nothing for the poor epileptic’s sake, so much is true as well of Mrs. Turner, the madam, whose only concern is what sort of negative effect such a disruptive incident may have on her house’s good reputation, which is, of course, solely a business consideration and an odd one, too, considering the nature of her “business.” In the final analysis, if anyone or anything is being held up for cruel scrutiny in “Sweeney Erect,” a common practice in the quatrains, it is not the comical hero, Sweeney Erectus, but the whole vainglorious and loutish lot of us, homo erectus, the upright ape, who can never do a thing, no matter how small and self-serving it may be, without convincing himself that his motives are ennobling and worthy of consideration if not understanding. Maybe “Sweeney Erect,” both poem and character, is just a great deal more honest about its/his pedigree and motives. He serves best who serves himself, the poem mockingly suggests, making victims and victimizers of everyone.

“Thomas Heywood” (1931) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

“Thomas Middleton” (1927) See ESSAYS ON ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.

398 “Thoughts after Lambeth”

“Thoughts after Lambeth” (1930) This rather lengthy essay represents Eliot’s assessment of what was then the most recent of the Lambeth Conferences that the bishops of the Anglican Communion or Church of England hold virtually every decade at the invitation of the archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglicans’ chief prelate, whose official residence is Lambeth Palace. Eliot’s own conversion to Anglicanism in June 1927 had been followed by his becoming a British citizen a short time later. That he had now a personal interest in the moral, ethical, and spiritual directions that Anglicanism was taking is understandable, but his conversion had also completed his progress toward a more and more conservative social and spiritual position that had been evidenced to varying degrees in his literary criticism from as early as the late 1910s, in his constant emphasis on a respect for tradition.

SYNOPSIS Ironically, one of the most noteworthy of Eliot’s comments in “Thoughts after Lambeth” has nothing to do with the latest Lambeth Conference at all or even with the current state of Anglo-Catholicism, although the comment is inspired by an aspect of the bishops’ deliberations that particularly peeved Eliot. That was what he took to be the blather, inspired in his view in large part by the daily press, with regard to the relative well-being of England’s “Youth,” the younger generation. With his poet’s unfailing ear for the incipient vacuities of the popular idiom, Eliot says that he thinks of all this talk about generations as a peculiarly 20th-century phenomenon invented mainly to sell newspapers, in which there appear endless stories of some group or interest or progressive new idea or movement that is invariably “on the march” (“from nowhere to nowhere,” Eliot adds, a bit sarcastically). That the church should feel itself obliged to take up such inane drivel about generations compels Eliot to digress into the following and oftquoted observation on his status with regard to his own generation:

I dislike the word “generation,” which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the approving critics said that I had expressed the “disillusionment of a generation,” which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form any part of my intention.

A comment like this signals how much Eliot is using the forum of this commentary on the report of the Lambeth proceedings to come “out of the closet,” as it were. As if the process of his own intellectual and spiritual development has recently completed itself, he seems to be inordinately determined to make clear what should have been reasonably clear all along—that despite the apparent iconoclastic bent of his poetry and free form of his poetic technique, Eliot’s had never been a voice for radical reform. That same sense of a completion and “coming clean,” however, had already been more formally announced in the reflections on the present state of Christian English culture in “Thoughts after Lambeth.” In his 1928 preface to a volume of prose essays ostensibly devoted to a series of 17th-century literary figures, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, Eliot had declared himself a classicist, a royalist, and an Anglo-Catholic. These three stances in the parlance of any time, but particularly in the context of the violent cultural fluxes that characterized the 1920s—that freespirited postwar decade—aligned him not with the radical social and intellectual elements normally associated with the literary avant-garde, among whom he had become a veritable guiding light, but also with the stodgily conventional protectors of public morality, law, and order, the individuals and interests who would seem to be the avant-garde’s sworn enemies. In “Thoughts after Lambeth,” Eliot himself recounts the reaction that his apparently sudden split with the more liberal elements among the intelligentsia had caused. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplements, Eliot notes, wrote what amounted to “a flattering obituary notice”: “. . . I had suddenly arrested my progress—whither . . . I do

“Thoughts after Lambeth” not know—and . . . I was unmistakably making off in the wrong direction. Somehow I had failed, and had admitted my failure; if not a lost leader, at least a lost sheep; what is more, I was a kind of traitor.” Readers would be unsympathetic, or at the very least mistaken, to imagine that they now can categorize Eliot as an arch-conservative, however. In that particularly ideological period, one should hardly find it surprising to discover that Eliot had opinions and interests all his own. That he should suddenly start taking pains to express them in venues where such expressions are not only expected but appropriate should come as no surprise either. Nor was his taking a relatively conservative stance in matters religious all that sudden a development to begin with. He had taken an openly Catholic, classical stance in “The Function of Criticism” as early as 1923, where he had first excoriated his own personal “liberal” bogeyman, J. MIDDLETON MURRY. Murry, whose “Inner Voice” approach to creative inspiration and personal moral direction receives a final critical assault in After Strange Gods in 1934, finds his way into the pages of “Thoughts after Lambeth” as well. There, Eliot says, this social commentator’s “highly respectable new religion” of a relativistic and secular humanism is another phenomenon that the press is touting “continually . . . to be ‘on the march.’ ” What is different for these criticisms of Eliot’s now is that, as a professed member of a mainstream and relatively moderate Christian sect, he seems to be feeling a new freedom to explore the intellectual and moral implications of belief in personal rather than in abstract and critical terms. He has not so much “come out” as dropped all pretenses and evaded any causes for potential misunderstandings of his own position and its ramifications. The personal tone and vigor, then, with which Eliot engages in commenting on other positions that the Anglican bishops have taken as a result of their conferring should be taken as expressions of Eliot’s personal views as a person of faith (not to mention as a member of the Anglican communion) rather than as his own pontifications upon what drum others must march to as the world goes “on the march.” With regard to the young, he remarks that they will not be attracted “by making Christianity

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easy”—soft-peddling it, as it were—but by their “finding it difficult . . . both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions.” On the Anglicans coming out in favor of the use of contraceptives, a practice to which Rome was adamantly opposed, Eliot commends the general stance but questions the wishy-washy nature of an escape clause that puts the final determination for their use in the hands of couples “if perplexed in mind.” That sort of ambiguity he sees as a means for the Church to abrogate its own responsibilities to guide the faithful. (Eliot’s “Animula,” one of the Ariel poems, had touched on the dangers of this kind of lukewarm Church leadership not long before.) This is typical of Anglicanism, he feels: “In short, the whole resolution shows the admirable English devotion to commonsense, but also the deplorable Anglican habit of standing things on their heads in the name of commonsense.” The Church had also been exploring the possibility of “Reunion” with splinter sects at home and with the Greek Orthodox Church centered in Turkey. These ideas are only somewhat appealing to Eliot, however. Finally, Eliot, despite his own internationalism in matters cultural, insists that an English people must have an English church, a posture that he will perfect and argue to greater effectiveness of purpose in 1939 in The Idea of a Christian Society and again, in 1948, in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture. He will continually moderate his position that a culture, including its religion, should be the whole expression of a whole people, but it is a persistent view that is just beginning to be given an airing by Eliot here in the pages of “Thoughts after Lambeth.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY While the issue may seem to be one of papist Rome versus liberal Lambeth, Eliot’s position is ultimately not as parochial as it may seem to be on the surface, nor has it ever likely been. The poet of The Waste Land imagines in the pages of this essay in no less serious but far more sectarian terms a world on the march to an anemic hell of materialism and self-congratulatory thinking. That he finds the solution in an orthodox Christianity does not make him any more right than anyone else, but it does

400 “Three Voices of Poetry, The” not make him any more single-minded or wrongheaded either. He recognizes that there are divisions even within this relative bastion of faith and tradition. But these “differences are healthy differences within a living body.” What he is far more fearful of are those increasing divisions in the contemporary world between people of faith and social secularists. It is in those kinds of consideration that Eliot’s views in “Thoughts after Lambeth” reach their greatest scope of vision. “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality.” Surely he would have the fascist states just then emerging in Italy and in Germany in mind, as well as the communist state already in place in Russia, as much as the increasingly secularized systems of social welfare and management gaining credence among the Western democracies. There is as well, in humanism’s entrenchment as a field of thought and belief all its own, a similar movement toward an atheistic secularism afoot in academic and other intellectual settings as well. “The experiment will fail,” Eliot says of these efforts to reform human thought and organization in accordance with totally secular models and principles. While one may wish that he had then explained why he thought that would be the case, he concludes no less ominously and a bit prophetically: “[W]e must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.” (The specter of nuclear war was still some 15 years away.) There are those who feel that the awful failures of the 20th century were themselves the result of the failure of Europe to apply to its own actions those very Christian principles that it otherwise so forcefully exported, but clearly Eliot was not one of these. In “Thoughts after Lambeth” he gives voice and shape to a new and more coherent vision. The obligation to be Christian to be a people of faith is not a matter for the state but for individuals. That 1930 will also witness the publication of “Ash-Wednesday,” a new departure for the poet of wastelands peopled by hollow men, is surely no coincidence. In

that poem, belief comes to roost not in doctrine or polemic but in the pressures of lived experience. The tenets of one’s faith become for Eliot things to be exercised, not proselytized or pondered.

“Three Voices of Poetry, The” (1953) This essay was prepared from a 1953 address, the 11th Annual Lecture of the National Book League and then later collected, in 1956, in On Poetry and Poets.

SYNOPSIS Eliot does not get to the point until he is well into his address. The moment in question comes as he is speaking of “the minor Elizabethan dramatists” (although the example he winds up having in mind is none other than Christopher Marlowe and his Tamburlaine). In these plays, Eliot says, there are “passages of great poetry which are in both respects out of place,” for they are “fine enough to preserve the play for ever as literature,” yet they are so inappropriate otherwise “as to prevent the play from being a dramatic masterpiece.” This is an issue that Eliot had raised much earlier in his critical career. In “ ‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama” in 1919 and again in his 1927 essay “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” Eliot had tackled the causes of, and tried to justify, what he termed the “bombast” in Elizabethan drama. Here now, however, Eliot is still touching on the matter of bombast—dramatic speech in excess of the dramatic action—but only tangentially. His real concern, having by now been a poetic dramatist himself and a successful one at that, is how a dramatist may write a poetry that is not merely poetry (if one might offer so bold an expression), but is a language “in which characters may be said to live.” That, it would seem, would mean that they seem to be speaking “real speech,” even though the audience knows that it is all made up—which is especially the case when the dialogue is composed as verse. Eliot’s innocent enough opening paragraph in which he lays out very neatly these “three voices

“Three Voices of Poetry, The” of poetry,” while not entirely a ruse, is somewhat misleading nevertheless in giving every indication that he will take a cut-and-dried approach toward his topic. In that introduction he lays out the three voices of poetry as follows: the poet talking to himself, the poet talking to an audience, and the poet talking as an imaginary character to other imaginary characters. Simple enough, but as Eliot develops the idea of each of these three distinct voices throughout the remainder of his essay, it becomes more and more clear that the distinction between the second and the third voice is not as sharp or simple as it may seem at first glance to be. Speaking in the second voice as one’s own imaginary character, that is to say, is not the same as speaking in the third voice as an imaginary character to other imaginary characters. There, indeed, is the distinction, noted above with regard to the Elizabethans, between what might be effective as poetry but not as drama. Eliot qualifies the distinction between this second voice, the voice of poetry, and the third voice, the voice of verse drama, by using for an example his personal assessment of his accomplishment with the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral, his first completed original verse drama from 1935. The chorus is a chorus of the women of Canterbury. As Eliot explains the task of applying, in this instance, the third voice, he says: “I had to make some effort to identify myself with these women, instead of merely identifying them with myself.” There is all the difference in the world. The poet who takes the second tack—“identifying them with myself”—merely writes poetry. Depending on his talents, it may be great poetry, as in the case of Marlowe, but it is that and only that, and it is assuredly not great dramatic poetry. The gist of the matter is, then, that the poet writing in the third voice must “extract the poetry from the [particular] character, rather than impose the poetry” when the poet is pretending to be a character himself and, as a result, involving the second voice, by which the poet is speaking to an audience. Eliot uses the 19th-century English master of the dramatic monologue, Robert Browning, in this instance, but he could as easily have used himself, who, in earlier poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” had already extended the range of the dramatic monologue by giving it a

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modernist cast. In a dramatic monologue, although the objective is a character study, the poet in writing a poetry of the second voice is not required to find a voice unique to the characterization because there is no compelling need to give him or her a distinctive presence in the ensemble of characterizations that an actual drama may require. Eliot can fairly argue, then, with some confidence that the voice that readers hear in such poetry is the “voice of the poet, who has put on the costume and makeup either of some historical character, or of one out of fiction.” Eliot saves for last what most readers think of when they think of poetry, and that is lyric poetry, although Eliot claims not to like the term lyric. In any event, it is poetry of the first voice, poetry “which is not primarily an attempt to communicate with anyone at all.” Many readers of poetry are no doubt made quite happy by Eliot’s confirming what they have always suspected, and that is that poetry, “real” poetry, is often not very clear—that is to say, that it does not communicate well. Here Eliot explains why that must be the case. The poet of the first voice is “not concerned with other people at all: only with finding the right words or, anyhow, the least wrong words.” Eliot ends his essay by encouraging his listeners and readers to try to discern the various voices that the poet gives his characters the next time that they attend a play. However, he also asks them to be more tolerant of the effort the next time they read poetry by a poet of the first voice. “If you complain that a poet is obscure,” Eliot exhorts, “remember that what he may have been trying to do, was to put something into words which could not be said in any other way.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Readers would do well to keep these exhortations of Eliot’s in mind when reading much of Eliot’s own finest, certainly most celebrated, and very likely most enduring poems. His definition of the first voice, for example, must give anyone pause, inasmuch as it is, in and of itself, an interesting spin on the old and sacrosanct Aristotelian triad, wherein every act of communication involves three elements: the speaker, the subject, and the audience. It is not difficult to

402 “To Criticize the Critic” imagine someone speaking or writing about something to someone else, but Eliot proposes that poetry of the first voice is someone speaking or writing about something, and that is the end of it. On the other hand, it is not so difficult to imagine, either, someone musing for no one’s benefit or edification other than his or her own, and that is what Eliot likely means when he says that the first voice is “not primarily an attempt to communicate with anyone at all.” The “primarily” is a critical qualifier, no doubt, but Eliot’s real point is that the first-voice poet is engaged foremost with the struggle to put thoughts and feelings and experiences into words rather than with any effort at achieving what is normally called an act of communication. Eliot equally reveals his idea of the relationship between technique and theme when he discusses his dramatic verse, or the third voice. For it to be great dramatic poetry, the women of Canterbury, returning to Eliot’s example, must not sound like poets but like the women of Canterbury. This is a more telling insight than it may appear to be at first glance and is quite easily illustrated. There is a story that when Harrison Ford was first starting out in Hollywood, he met the famous producer Louis B. Mayer of MGM. Mayer wanted to impress on him what it took to be a great star. He told Ford how another young star, Tony Curtis, when he was just starting out, had a small walk-on part as a telegram delivery boy. “But,” Mayer extolled, “even in that small a role, you could tell what a great actor he was. He came on like a star.” Legend has it that the ever-cheeky Ford’s astute retort was: “I would have thought that if he were such a great actor, he would have come on like a telegram delivery boy.” There is the same insightful truth in that retort of Ford’s as in Eliot’s saying that his chorus of Canterbury women was written to sound like a chorus of Canterbury women, not like a crowd reciting poetry in unison.

“To Criticize the Critic” (1961) This essay is the title piece in Eliot’s last collection of prose, To Criticize the Critic, which was published

posthumously by Faber & Faber in 1965. “To Criticize the Critic” had been originally presented as the sixth Convocation Lecture at the University of Leeds in July 1961. A brief introductory note to the posthumous volume by Eliot’s widow, Valerie, informs readers that he never finished revising the essay for publication. Had he, she continues, he “would have incorporated further reflections into the former.” The observation permits readers to understand how much the essay is itself a looking back, a survey of a lifetime’s achievement in a field of endeavor to which he had contributed much and on which he had exerted great personal influence as well.

SYNOPSIS Eliot begins his reflections with a delightful quotation from F. H. BRADLEY, the English idealist philosopher who had been the topic of Eliot’s Harvard doctoral dissertation in 1916. Metaphysics, Bradley had once remarked, is “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.” The gist of Bradley’s witticism is that metaphysics, or speculative philosophy, often does not arrive at any satisfactory solutions to the questions that it addresses, but seeking those solutions is itself a part of the process of questioning. In the same way, Eliot strongly implies, his parallel endeavor, literary criticism, will never say anything satisfactory about the experience of literature, either from the point of view of producing it or from the point of view of consuming it, but such criticism is nevertheless more than a mere necessary evil. Rather, it is, like metaphysics, a part of an intricately interwoven process that enables the creation of the very texts that it then addresses. From that point on, Eliot continues in what seems to be a forgiving and generous mood. For example, certain critical intellects in the tradition of English literature—in particular, the 17th-century poet John Dryden, the 18th-century man of letters Samuel Johnson, and the 19th-century poet and critic Matthew Arnold—who had been given rather short shrift if not outrightly condemned in an earlier work, The Use of Poetry, now are enlisted under the banner of “masters of English criticism.”

“To Criticize the Critic” Eliot will, of course, have already been involved in much other revisionist thinking by this point in his life and career. In addition to his considerable accomplishments, by the late 1930s he already had become a literary celebrity and what might be called today a cultural icon, particularly in university classrooms, where thought is first winnowed and sorted, so that his every utterance, for good or ill, had more impact than he may have ever intended. Always a reasonably judicious and fair-minded intellect and individual, there can be little doubt that Eliot did not necessarily relish giving the world the appearance of a rabid partisanship in matters literary. In the mid-1940s and again in the early 1950s, for two outstanding examples, he reassessed his previous disparagement of such notable literary geniuses as the 17th-century English poet and polemicist John Milton and the late 18th- to early 19th-century German poet, novelist, naturalist, and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, finding himself somewhat wanting in his earlier negative judgments. As Eliot will himself say only a little later in this present essay, “When we are young we see issues sharply defined: as we age we tend to make more reservations, to qualify our positive assertions, to introduce more parentheses.” The same, then, may be said to hold true for the expansiveness with which he is now prepared to categorize what, and who, constitute the field of literary criticism proper. Eliot quickly breaks literary critics into four groups, the last of which will include practicing poet-critics such as himself. These categories of Eliot’s are not particularly surprising, although that does not make them any less worthy of consideration. First, then, he speaks of the professional critic. These would be persons whose main claim to literary fame, whether or not they also happened themselves to be failed creative writers, is their commenting on the quality of the literature of others. “Super-Reviewers,” Eliot calls them, without attempting to be in the least bit disparaging now. Often they are the “official critic for some magazine or newspaper,” whose work is occasionally collected in a book that may itself achieve respectable stature in the field. Then there is what Eliot calls the “Critic with Gusto.” Rather then a setter of trends and tastes,

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this individual is more interested in becoming “the advocate of the authors whose work he expounds, authors who are sometimes the forgotten or unduly despised.” Following them are members of that group who perhaps need no introduction at all, so much have they become associated in the popular mind with forming the first and last bastion of literary erudition. These are the academic and the theoretical critics. Among them he includes many of the most outstanding luminaries of modernist literary criticism, such as I. A. Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis. The last category is that “company [into which] I must shyly intrude,” Eliot tells his readers, and that comprises those “whose criticism may be said to be a by-product of [their] creative activity.” From the vantage point of “forty-odd years” later, as Eliot identifies the starting point for his own career as a critic, Eliot can be simultaneously accusatory and forgiving of himself. What he claims that he most regrets now is “the errors of tone: the occasional note of arrogance, of vehemence, of cocksureness or rudeness,” although he does not disown those past judgments and assessments and pronouncements. Indeed, what he claims to dislike most is to have “my words, perhaps written thirty or forty years ago, quoted as if I had uttered them yesterday.” He uses his famous “classicist, royalist, Catholic” statement from his preface to For Lancelot Andrewes as a particularly egregious example. For all the attention that that remark has garnered as a means of pigeonholing Eliot’s value system ever since that 1928 admission, he now reveals that it was made at the urging of an old Harvard mentor, Irving Babbitt, who, learning of Eliot’s conversion to High Anglicanism in 1927, suggested that he “come out into the open.” Of course, however, the gist of Eliot’s explanation of what the statement “really meant” is that it meant what everyone else thought that it meant. He then goes on to divide his own critical career into three phases, the first two of which were rather short-lived, the first while he was writing for and helping edit the Egoist, in which he published, in 1919, the essay that continues to be a landmark

404 “To Criticize the Critic” critical document in the history of English literature, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The second phase occurred after The Egoist folded in 1919. The third seems to be marked—since he does not otherwise really identify it as clearly as the other two—by the moment he turns from what he calls “essays of generalization” to “appreciations of individual authors,” which do seem to make up a great deal of his writing in the 1920s, although that trend did not necessarily continue unabated into the 1930s and 1940s when he turned his hand quite frequently to a literary criticism with pronounced social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. During this part of the essay, he comments on his present state of mind regarding his two most famous literary formulations: the “dissociation of sensibility” and the “objective correlative.” “[T]hey have been useful in their time,” he happily observes, as indeed they have been, although he now sees them more in terms of “conceptual symbols for [his own] emotional preferences.” In any event, he can see now in the formulation of each a way of concretizing a bias, on his part, toward the dramatic and lyric work of the 16th and early 17th centuries and against the poetry being written in the 19th and early 20th century—the literary period just preceding his own. He closes the essay by commenting, in the last several pages, on those authors who have influenced his own work the most, observing rather tellingly that “I am certain of one thing: that I have written best about writers who have influenced my own poetry.” The list would not stun any student of Eliot’s poetry and the history of its development. Among these writers he includes, for example, several philosophers and, intriguingly enough, not just their thought but their style. They are Bradley, Spinoza, and Plato. He eschews the commonplace encomium that he had started a vogue for the poetic style and passionate thought of the 17th-century English metaphysical poet, JOHN DONNE, although he admits that if he “wrote well about the metaphysical poets, it was because they were poets who had inspired me.” Yet he can confess, too, that he has never written anything about JULES LAFORGUE, “to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language.”

Other poets who influenced him in his “formative stage” and who continue to hold his unflagging admiration are, in addition to Donne and Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, George Herbert, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, of course, and DANTE ALIGHIERI. Of Dante, he writes, “There is one poet, however, who impressed me profoundly when I was twenty-two and . . . who remains the comfort and amazement of my age, although my knowledge of his language remains rudimentary.” Dante continued to shape and influence Eliot’s poetry writing well into the 1940s, obtaining a position of supreme honor when Eliot imitates the style of his Divine Comedy in the most moving passage of “Little Gidding,” the concluding sequence in the Four Quartets. The passage recounts the firebombing of London by Nazi warplanes during World War II. Eliot thus makes Dante’s terza rima, the three-line stanzas that he used throughout the Divine Comedy, an enduring part of both English literature and English history. Eliot concludes by reflecting on those authors whom he cannot fairly resurrect from his earlier negative criticism. The 20th-century English novelist D. H. LAWRENCE, a major modernist figure in his own right, stands out in this regard. In After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, published in 1934, Eliot had labeled Lawrence’s as a “spiritually sick” vision of the human condition. Now Eliot tones down this scathing criticism somewhat, saying mainly that he will “always waver between dislike, exasperation, boredom and admiration” in his estimation of both Lawrence’s work and his worth.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The remarks contained within “To Criticize the Critic” are essentially Eliot’s final thoughts on a topic that he had addressed frequently throughout his long career as a literary critic. Although not limited to the following instances, in essays beginning with “The Function of Criticism” in 1923 and continuing became through the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, delivered in 1932 and 1933, that became his The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, all the way up to the cloying stance that he took against the excesses of academic scholarship in “The Frontiers of Criticism”

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1956, Eliot had always had a vested interest in describing the parameters of what he took to be literary criticism’s benefits and obligations to both writers and readers alike. By the time of “To Criticize the Critic,” however, he no longer is interested in nor desires to make new judgments and formulate new principles. Rather, while he still has the opportunity, he is trying to secure his own place in the history of literary criticism in English by saying what he sees that position to have been. This is neither a vain nor an arrogant gesture on his part. His pronouncements have been the source of controversy, and he had long been a controversialist himself. Now he is ready to sum up not his positions but his contribution. He decides that, ultimately, his best work “falls within rather narrow limits,” being those essays “concerned with writers who had influenced me in my poetry.” There, he can safely say, without fear of censure or debate, that “in so far as literary criticism is purely literary, . . . the criticism of artists writing about their own art is of greater intensity, and carries more authority.” Who would deny Eliot’s premise, when it is stated in those terms? Still, one might wish that Eliot had chosen to revisit as well other areas of earlier controversy that, while they were not purely literary, were nevertheless subject to his singular authority to address and, if possible, redress and that continue to tarnish his otherwise untarnished reputation. What comes most immediately to mind is his unfortunate characterization of “free-thinking Jews” in After Strange Gods. Whatever Eliot may have meant by his insisting that such individuals can be disruptive to the cultural integrity of the American experience, such intellectual subtleties must of necessity be virtually instantly lost on any reader who is acutely sensitive to the bias and bigotry that such a characterization betrays. Eliot was not oblivious to the problem. Following its initial publication in 1934, Eliot never permitted After Strange Gods to be reprinted. Still, he fails to acknowledge even so much as a nodding acquaintanceship with this black mark on his literary and personal reputation in the very essay that places his own imprimatur on how he wishes his legacy to be regarded by future generations

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of readers. Perhaps this issue would have been included among his “further reflections,” those that his death cut off. In any case, here was an opportunity forever missed.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published as an anonymous piece in The Egoist, a London literary review, in September and December 1919 and subsequently included by Eliot in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, published in 1920. That it continues to exert a genuine influence on thought regarding the interrelationship among literary classics, individual artists, and the nature of the creative imagination, is a comment on its value. In any case, Eliot was able to let loose in this comparatively short essay—it runs to little more than 3,000 words—packing virtually every sentence with pronouncements that, in any other context of presentation, might have required far more elaboration and persuasive defense.

SYNOPSIS Despite these genuine virtues and the essay’s deserved renown, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is rather loosely, perhaps even haphazardly constructed and is worthy of consideration far more for the power of its suggestiveness than for the precision of its organization. In essence, the essay proposes a series of key concepts that would subsequently become germane, for one thing, to readings of Eliot’s own poetry and that would also eventually become the root if not the immediate source for major critical approaches with regard to modernism in general and the methodology of New Criticism in particular. In addition to exploring the question of the relationship between the tradition—that is, works already preexisting in a national or even multicultural body of literature—and any one poet in particular (that is, “the individual talent”), Eliot also delves into and, so, makes pronouncements on the relationship between the poet as a person and the poet as a creative intellect.

406 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” He comments as well, finally, on how much or how greatly a work of literature ought to be regarded as giving expression to the personality of the poet, giving birth to the impersonal theory of poetry. Coming relatively hard upon the poetry of the English romantics, the longest-lived of whom, William Wordsworth, had been dead nearly 70 years by 1919 and whose subjective, expressive approach toward the writing of poetry still wielded excessive sway over both the composition and the reading of poetry, Eliot’s efforts to found in principle in what would later become known as the impersonal school of poetry can hardly be scanted or overlooked. While his essay may not have initiated the powerful reaction to romanticism that is now thought of as literary modernism, the essay certainly gave that movement voice and a clear agenda. In keeping with an analytical approach, Eliot structures his central argument around various issues of separation. Specifically, and as will be examined in more detail shortly, there is the matter of the quality and degree of the separation that may or may not exist between the body of past literature, or the created tradition, and the individual living poet creating within the tradition’s most current or ongoing moment. Eliot also considers the degree and quality of separation necessary between that living poet as a fully rounded person (what he calls—perhaps a bit too colorfully—the “man who suffers”) and those aspects of that individual’s intellectual choices and other selective processes that result in the making of an actual work of literature (what he calls the “mind which creates”). Finally, Eliot takes into consideration the degree and quality of separation that is necessary between, on the one hand, the artist as an individual whose utterances may be thought to express a personality and, on the other hand, the semblance of personality that is, or can be, expressed in the work without any need for reference to the author’s own personality. As may be apparent, there is some considerable overlap and confusion of terms here, as well as some overlap between matters that involve the act of writing—actions that involve the creation of a text—and the act of reading, which, because it is a

process that involves the reception of a preexisting text, is a quite different approach. Nevertheless, the essay’s central premise, as well as its continuing critical value, is, in essence, Eliot’s argument that the creative process is an impersonal process, despite the tendencies of many readers to persist in identifying the speaker of a poem with the poet. Keeping this central premise in mind ought to demystify many of Eliot’s pronouncements on similar subjects. The Living Talent and the Tradition Eliot begins his presentation by directly addressing the essay’s ostensible topic, the relationship between tradition and the individual talent. What may seem to be the most obvious point in his opening argument is certainly the most salient, that the tradition is at any one time a completed whole that comprises all of the preceding creative endeavor out of which the individual author creates a new work. Tradition, then, is a continuum, and this point is one of the essay’s more daring stances. It may seem by now to stand to reason that the living practitioners of any one discipline add to and, so, shape and alter the accumulated store of their predecessors’ efforts—that, in other words, these past efforts live in a present that is continuously transforming itself into new efforts that then themselves become the efforts of the past, and so on. Though such a position may sound reasonable and justified, Eliot’s taking that position, as his feeling the need to defend it to his readers should readily attest, flew in the face of the conventional wisdom to that time and that had been in place virtually from the beginnings of the European Renaissance. According to that wisdom, the ancients, meaning the classical writers of Greece and of Rome—Homer, Sophocles, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, and others—were giants who towered over their puny modern descendants, who consequently characterized themselves as pygmies. In that older way of casting the debate, the moderns, although by no means capable of being better or wiser than their ancient forbears, still had the advantage of being able to build on and improve such models as those ancients had left behind. Indeed, the term classic, in addition to connoting

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” excellence in its field, implies a representative prototype within the particular genre or kind of work— epic, drama, lyric poem, and so forth. To complete the metaphor, if the ancients were giants and the moderns pygmies, those pygmies could nevertheless stand on the shoulders of the ancients and, in that way—but that way only—surpass them. Eliot comes out firmly against any notion of couching the tradition in terms of a conflict and competition between the old and the new, the past and the present. In sharp contrast to this older idea of a combative relationship among long dead and living traditions and long dead and living artists, Eliot, who shortly before writing the essay now being considered had visited the underground caverns in southern France where cave drawings that were tens of thousands of years old had recently been discovered, could talk of a mind of Europe that had discarded nothing of its virtually timeless creative traditions along the way, as if there were in fact neither any seam nor any conflict separating the present from the past, the ancients from the moderns, or one work of art from another. Rather, there was only that constant stream of statement and restatement, adjusting and altering and coming back upon itself as each new voice is added to, and adds to, the mix. So, then, Eliot asserts that poets cannot write after the age of 25 unless they have developed what he calls the historical sense, that being a sense not of the pastness of the past, as he puts it, but of its presence. It is at this point that Eliot’s argument takes a sudden, or at least unanticipated, turn by suggesting that the more perfect they are, the more artists express not their own personal lives and points of view so much as contribute to that living stream of creative endeavor. This abrupt turn makes much logical sense, however. Having just redefined the nature of tradition, one half of his title, Eliot is now obligated to define what he means by the individual talent, the other half. The Impersonality of Creation To explain his position on this score, Eliot introduces a simile drawn from chemistry, in which the mind of the individual artist is likened to a catalyst. As such, it allows disparate experiences to combine

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in new patterns that then form the work of art, like the chemical compound that results from the introduction of the necessary catalyst into the presence of the elements to be combined. While the catalyst initiates and enables the chemical reaction, or poetic process, to take place, resulting in the new compound or poetic composition, the catalyst itself is not otherwise affected and certainly, for all intents and purposes, is unchanged by the event. In other words, poetic composition is an impersonal process, engaging the poet’s creative and critical faculties but not necessarily any more of his or her personal life than, say, the chemical reactions that take place in the laboratory personally involve the chemist. A romantic notion persists to this day among readers that poets pour forth their souls in their poetry. Eliot says not that that is not the case, but that it ought not to be the case. As cold and dispassionate as this may sound as a description of the creative process, Eliot is responding to nearly a century of that same process’s having been regarded as something akin to Plato’s divine madness. The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is how William Wordsworth had defined the poetic impulse more than a century before in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (albeit with some further qualifications that Eliot later will cite). Wordsworth’s idea seems clear: Poetry is an expression of personal emotions that can no longer be contained by the poet unless he express them in his poetry. Eliot is trying to counter that claim by proposing that the creative act is as calculating and conscious an endeavor as any other constructive action and therefore is one that can be regarded wholly in terms of itself and of the traditions out of which it emerges, rather than in terms of the individual poet’s life and experiences. So, then, Eliot can further claim, legitimately for his purposes—which are to separate the poet from the poem and thus give primacy not to personality but to poetry—that poetry is not an expression of but an escape from personality, not a turning loose of but an escape from emotion (emphasizing a bit too coyly in his closing remark that only those who know what personality and emotions are would understand why one would want to escape from them).

408 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” As Hamlet says, however, that idea would be “scanned,” or scrutinized, for it must seem that, if the reader takes Eliot at his word, then Eliot is suggesting that the best poetry is escapist because personality and emotions are powerfully dangerous things whose expression ought to be avoided at all costs. In actuality, that is not Eliot’s point. Eliot is trying to propose an entirely different model of what poetry ought to concern itself with, as well as of how people ought to concern themselves with poetry. It is in his attack on the commonplace way of thinking of poetry as a personally expressive and emotive art that he is trying to propose, not that poetry is therefore escapist but that a poem is experience that has been objectified by structuring processes and the conscious selection of language and therefore is, as a statement, self-referential, nothing more and nothing less.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Debates over whether artists in any medium of expression produce out of and, so, comment only on their own personal experiences or whether they can instead express universal and thus objectified human situations are as old at least as Plato’s Republic and his dialogue “Ion” from the fifth century B.C. In the Republic, Plato, through his mouthpiece Socrates, famously banished virtually all the poets from the ideal community because, in his view, they do not speak universal truths openly and sincerely. Rather, they either conceal themselves behind masks, that is, their characters, or else speak only for themselves. In the “Ion,” Plato similarly argues that the poet is merely a medium for divine truths that have their origin elsewhere, so poetry is nothing more than a species of divine madness. Either way, Plato treated the poet, and poetry, as a special case, difficult either to categorize or to discuss. Whatever else he may have done as a result, Plato established a long-running tradition that the relationship between the poet and the poem is a knotty one. The fact is, however, that Eliot composed the essay in question while he was still relatively young—just turned 30—and not only was he at the time also a relative unknown himself, but the essay was published anonymously. It is more likely,

then, that it is the forcefulness, confidence, and clarity with which the central ideas of the essay are expressed that account for its enduring celebrity. It has been argued that the very anonymity that Eliot was able to maintain as he penned his thoughts and opinions on such a weighty and controversial literary question as the source of original poetic impulses might account for that tone of sublime authority in which Eliot conducts his presentation. One is inclined to share ideas more expansively and without fear of easy contradiction or challenge when the source of those ideas can be anyone and, so, becomes that powerfully impersonal force, the expert. This does not take away from Eliot’s ultimate achievement as a budding literary critic. To add, as Eliot does in his essay, even another sentence or paragraph, let alone another page, to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship among the poet, the culture, and the poem is quite an accomplishment, and Eliot might never have arrived at such an accomplishment on the basis of the considerable reputation as a man of letters that he had achieved by his early middle age. Rather, it is the strength of the idea itself that carries the day. Eliot makes the poetry the important thing. Another way to put it is to say that poetry is an abstract construct rather than any sort of personal statement and that its “meaning” then can be found in how it is put together rather than in what it is necessarily “saying.” If readers imagine that a poem is nothing more than personal expression, for instance, then poetry wins or loses its authority on the basis not of its own qualities but of matters entirely exterior and thus extraneous to the poem. The poet’s beliefs and attitudes and habits and foibles, not as readers know them but as they become known by the hearsay of gossip and rumor, scholarship and biographies, become more important than his or her poetry. That is a self-evidently absurdist posture. Lost in the process of adhering to the notion that a poem is nothing more or less than prettified self-expression is, of all things, the poem as a thing all its own, the way a flower or stone or bird is all its own thing and not what would be made of it by making it something other than itself.

“Ulysses, Order, and Myth” Such a way of perceiving Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry” will lead readers right back to the importance that he places on regarding tradition as a living cultural force in the opening pages of the essay. There Eliot argues that the intensity of poetry is dependent not on the intensity of the poetic process but on the “intensity of the artistic process.” The poet has not a personality to express but a “particular medium” to work with and through, whereby “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.” His points are well taken if they can be seen to be emphasizing artistic expression on its own terms, formed by and adding to generations of tradition, rather than as a mere extension of the personality and emotions of the particular poet. Then the artistic product can be viewed, regarded, appreciated, and even criticized not in terms of what it appears to tell readers of the peculiarly limited life and times of its author, as if literature were only second-rate or at least far less rigorous history or social science, but in terms of the universal abstractions it reveals in the concrete terms of language and what Eliot will later call art emotions. Those, he insists, are not the emotions of any single person, however interesting a personality he or she may have been, but of common human experience generalized into those poetic contexts and constructs that form the traditions out of which an endless stream of new individual talents continue to write. Eliot further insists that the individual talent writes best when it writes not for the sake of expressing itself as a personality, but for the sake of constantly shaping that tradition, whether that individual talent knows of it or not. (Naturally, Eliot would argue that anyone aspiring to practice an artistic endeavor should know its traditions through and through.) By virtue of the radical stance that he takes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot argues that the individual talent ought to know what his or her obligations to the tradition are and to know that one must have absorbed the tradition. It is, as it were, a never-ending circle in which personal issues have no place, although their rich variety, transmuted by the intensity of impersonal poetic processes, is indisputably the raw material of art, but only that.

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“Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) A key concept regarding the literary uses of the mythic past is formulated by Eliot in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” a November 1923 review of JAMES JOYCE’s Ulysses published in the Dial, the same New York review that, barely a year before, had first introduced American readers to The Waste Land. The tack that Eliot’s remarks take also reveals much regarding modernism’s early effects on shaping the literary imagination.

SYNOPSIS Eliot makes it clear from the outset of his review that he wishes primarily to call attention to a feature of Joyce’s considerable achievement that has until now not been given its due, and that is “the significance of the method employed.” Because Joyce employs such a wide range of both traditional and innovative narrative and stylistic techniques in the novel, one might imagine that Eliot is about to launch into one of his typically erudite treatises on how these various technical strategies combine to create some new species of art experience for the reader, but that turns out not to be Eliot’s point or focus. Eliot does indeed comment in passing on Joyce’s now-celebrated use of varying styles and symbols to distinguish among the novel’s various sections and characters, but even that noteworthy aspect of Joyce’s contribution to the modernist agenda to “make it new” is not the foremost feature of Joyce’s accomplishment to which Eliot wishes to call his reader’s attention. Rather, it turns out that by “the method employed” Eliot primarily means the most obvious aspect of that method, which is Joyce’s use of continuous parallels to Homer’s Odyssey. It should come as a surprise to many that Eliot feels called on to comment on this facet of the Joyce novel inasmuch as the novel’s parallels with the literature of the past, Homer especially, are hardly a concealed element of its structure. In fact, Eliot himself is the first to admit that one would think that those parallels above all ought to have drawn the attention of reviewers and critics alike.

410 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” Instead, compelling this observation now is Eliot’s estimation that the Joyce novel’s parallels to Europe’s classical, mythic past have been treated by reviewers much like an “artful dodge,” scaffolding used by Joyce merely to get the story told but then worthy only of dismissal. Indeed, using a particularly scathing review by Richard Aldington to further his case, a review in which Aldington calls Ulysses a “libel on humanity” and Joyce a great but undisciplined talent, Eliot proposes that critics until now have missed the forest for the trees when it comes to seeing the significance that Joyce assigns to these classical parallels as a means of his being able to accomplish a coherent aesthetic vision in the midst of the modern world. It is on this matter of Aldington’s charge regarding the undisciplined nature of Joyce’s abilities that the crux of the argument that Eliot will finally frame in Joyce’s favor turns. Eliot sees it as Aldington’s way of putting Joyce in the camp of “romanticism,” which at this time was not enjoying the vogue that it had a century earlier. Romanticism, with its emphasis on subjectivity and unbridled emotional and technical energies and enthusiasms, was by now regarded as the great enemy of its opposite, classicism, which placed all its emphasis on order and objectivity. For the sake of an illustrative parallel, if classicism was the rockhard foundation of all the inherited cultural traditions available to the literary artist at any time in history (the general idea advanced in Eliot’s own 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), then romanticism was that tempestuous sea whose perpetually erratic and unpredictable behavior could only ever eventually erode that foundation until there was nothing left but a boundless and misdirected creative energy. Joyce is a classicist in Eliot’s view, however, not because he adheres to the tradition in some predetermined manner, as if these distinctions can be likened to those describing political allegiances, but because Joyce does “the best one can with the material at hand.” For the writers of this present generation, that is the material that contemporary history permits, and if judged on that score, Eliot finds that Joyce’s parallel use of Homer’s epic poem has “the importance of a scientific discovery.” If

no one has ever before used a similar method to build the structure of a novel, it is because such a method “has never before been possible,” but now that Joyce has shown the way, he has pursued a method that “others must pursue after him.” Specifically, Eliot argues, that the novel as readers know it “was simply the expression of an age,” one that could be managed by formal narrative devices. That form, however, no longer is an adequate means for expressing the sorts of psychological and social realities that the novelist must deal with in the new age that has emerged with the 20th century, a period fraught with many challenging questions and few promising answers. Instead, after Joyce, rather than the narrative method, there will be what Eliot calls “the mythic method.” As he explains it, using myth to run “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” provides the modern writer with “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Others, such as the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. YEATS, had already seen as much, according to Eliot, and to the list, although modesty prevents it, can be added the poet of The Waste Land as well, since Eliot had pointedly used the myth of the Grail quest, among others, to give his work some semblance of narrative cohesion in its attempt to represent the experience of life in a modern urban environment.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY If there is another modernist work in English to rival any claim that The Waste Land may make to being the most notorious example of the celebrated stylistic eccentricities of that particularly peculiar literary movement, that work would undoubtedly be Joyce’s Ulysses. As an example of the literary imagination gone ballistic, the Joyce novel shares many affinities with the Eliot poem, perhaps the most notable being that they were both published in 1922. Readers familiar with both have, from the first, noticed far more suspicious affinities, however, including but not limited to a conspicuous use of cultural monuments from the mythic and literary past to comment on the contemporary moment, an equally conspicuous experimentation

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The with language and syntax to mirror psychological states, and a nearly pathological obsession with the physical decay and moral decadence of the modern urban landscape. These affinities became even more pronounced when Eliot’s widow, Valerie, published in 1971 a facsimile edition of the drafts of The Waste Land before they underwent extensive revision at the hands of Eliot’s poetic mentor, fellow American expatriate EZRA POUND. The poem as originally conceived by Eliot had even more similarities with the Joyce novel, including a long opening sequence that seemed to mimic Ulysses’s famous Nighttown sequence, a hallucinatory passage centered around drunken debaucheries on which the action of the Joyce novel climaxes. Coupled with the fact that Eliot, as editor of the Egoist, had published the early chapters of Ulysses in that so-called little review in 1919 and had read much of the rest of it in manuscript before its publication in book form in Paris by Shakespear & Company, it seemed to some that there was much borrowing, both conscious and unconscious, from Ulysses on Eliot’s part. However, it is much more likely that the two were influenced by the same wartime and postwar cultural anxieties as well as by the same reconfigurations that the poetic and narrative imagination of Europe was undergoing at the time. Eliot, after all, had been working up images and lines of verse that would eventually find their way into The Waste Land from as far back as 1915, predating his exposure to Ulysses. That he and Joyce should have come up with common images and symbols bespeaks their contemporaneity more than any other linkage or association. One of the major benefits that did come from Eliot’s admiration for Joyce and his no less considerable achievement was that it enabled Eliot to formulate a key concept regarding the unique nature of literary modernism, perhaps even enabling him to identify what will remain its most singular contribution to the ongoing traditions that constitute literature: That is its ability to account for the wide disparities among thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that typify the modern experience of culture. Ultimately, it is not a matter of ascertaining whether Eliot was correct in announcing the death of the

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conventional novel in order to appreciate the importance of his utterances on the topic. Certainly modernism remains renowned to this day because of its propensity for genre-bending experimentation in the face of a breakdown of conventional structures on virtually all fronts and in all fields of human endeavor. The liberating value of these cultural readjustments notwithstanding, poets like Eliot and Yeats and novelists like Joyce were concerned, as artists will always be, not with the broad, general effects of these chaotic fissures but with their impact on individuals and their capacity to cope with the persistent trials of moment-to-moment, day-to-day existence. To give “shape and significance” to the experience of a culture is one thing; to do it from and for the point of view of the individual affected by it but not otherwise profoundly connected to it is quite another. For the artist, then, Eliot is not at all off the mark when he commends Joyce for having achieved, with Ulysses, something on the order of a scientific discovery.

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The (1933) On September 17, 1932, Eliot set sail from England, where he had been in residence virtually nonstop since the late summer of 1915, to assume for the coming academic year the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at his alma mater, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He would also use the extended absence from his first wife, Vivien, required of him by this academic appointment to make final and legal what had become an emotional and physical separation from her, whose marriage to him in 1915 had by now become a disastrous failure in everyone’s eyes except, apparently, her own. The fruits of his labors at Harvard would include a substantial fee for his services, one that would better enable him to establish a separate household on his return to England the following year. In the meantime, free to travel elsewhere in the United States provided that he fulfill his primary

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obligation to Harvard, Eliot saw to it that this year abroad allowed him ample opportunity to tour and lecture extensively. Thus, in addition to the visiting professorship at Harvard, Eliot made appearances at various other academic venues, including at the University of California, Los Angeles, in December and at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, in February. In April, he was invited to give the PageBarbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and these addresses, in keeping with the terms of that lectureship, were later collected and, in February 1934, published by Faber & Faber under the intriguing title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. While that book may have achieved far more notoriety because of its apparent xenophobic slant and anti-Semitic overtones, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism should nevertheless be regarded as the foremost result of Eliot’s U.S. sojourn. Eliot seems to have agreed. Like the lectures that comprise After Strange Gods, Eliot was enjoined by the terms of the Norton professorship to publish the lectures that resulted from the series at Harvard, and they now make up The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. He would expressly forbid any future publication of After Strange Gods after its initial release; The Use of Poetry, on the other hand, would not only be rereleased in a new edition in 1964, toward the end of the poet’s life, but would be provided with a preface prepared for that new edition. In that preface, Eliot would make it clear that he would rather be remembered for these essays than for his most celebrated critical essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which, though he declined to repudiate it, he labeled “the product of immaturity.” Including the introductory and concluding lecture, between November 4, 1932, the date of the first, and March 31, 1933, the date of the last, Eliot delivered eight lectures, presenting an overview of English literature from the time of Shakespeare to the present. Throughout the lectures, Eliot’s aim would be twofold. As the title makes clear, he wished to establish some guiding principles regarding the uses both of poetry and of the criticism of poetry, primarily as they interacted with each other but also as each served a larger social purpose.

SYNOPSIS The Introductory Lecture As Eliot delivered his first, introductory lecture, it was the eve of a national election. America, already deep in the throes of the Great Depression, was just about to elect Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency for the first time. In a stunning victory over his Republican rival, President Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt would usher in a new regime for a nation desperate for economic rescue but not quite ready for the radical social and political changes that would constitute the New Deal. Europe, meanwhile, was moving into a period wherein the continuing economic and political turmoil resulting from World War I would, by decade’s end, catastrophically bring about new and increasing hostilities and the eventual outbreak of World War II. Such a state of affairs is mentioned because Eliot alludes to these pending changes in his opening remarks, thereby paying tribute to the lectureship’s namesake, the late Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, who, Eliot illustrates by citing from his letters, was also a man of letters who was generously in tune with the great public events of his time. Norton was a distant cousin of Eliot’s, as was the past Harvard president Charles William Eliot, for whom Harvard’s newly opened Eliot House where Eliot was being put up during his stay in Cambridge was named. Clearly, the guest professorship was, in very real terms, a family affair for Harvard alumnus Eliot, himself by now a world-renowned poet whose poem The Waste Land had come virtually single-handedly to describe the unique character of the modern moment as much in the popular imagination as for literary and academic audiences. Homage to Norton accomplished, Eliot sets about defining the business of the evening at hand: to “try to find out, in examining the relation of poetry and criticism, what the use of both of them is.” Poetry, Eliot admits, is the more difficult of the two to define otherwise; criticism, he insists, is not, being of two kinds—that which seeks to define poetry and assess its value and uses, and that which, by making assumptions regarding those matters, treats actual poetry. The first kind con-

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The siders what poetry is, he explains, while the other determines what is a good poem or good poetry. That distinction is the crux on which the remainder of his introductory lecture depends. Citing authorities as varied and disparate as Aristotle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and his own contemporary, the psychological critic I. A. Richards, whose Principles of Literary Criticism remains a classic in the field, Eliot points out that there are those who can, as it were, talk the talk but not necessarily walk the walk. They can, in other words, tell the reader what should constitute a good poem but not satisfactorily discern the difference, in practice, between a good and bad poem. Words and their limits are the problem at either end, and Eliot calls on Richards’s authority, as he does throughout the lectures, to clarify certain points (although it should be observed that Eliot does not defer to Richards’s judgment on all points, regarding the ethical relativism of his critical stance as a questionable moral posture). What a poem says, then, is not, either in Eliot’s or in Richards’s view, anywhere near as important as what that same poem is. This idea is not as thickheaded as it may seem. If the poem is judged merely on the basis of the quality of the statement that it makes, then it is little different from any other kind of expository, analytical, or persuasive writing. Whatever else a poem may be, the given for the critic as well as for the poet is that poetry is something altogether different from other species of writing, even if that difference cannot be, as Eliot continually stresses, easily defined. The experience of poetry that the critic brings to any one poem is the other end of the spectrum. The wider and more varied the experience, it stands to reason, the more the critic, as reader, is able both to identify the bogus and to distinguish it from the new that may appear to the less widely read person to be bogus as well. Eliot also labors to make it clear that by criticism he means that very intellectual process by which one endeavors to determine what poetry is, and by doing so, he tries to divorce himself from any association with that school of thought that sees the critical and creative impulses as processes at odds with each other. Thus, too, he rejects the notion

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that a highly critical age cannot produce great creative efforts, although he would never dispute that an age can produce great poetry without producing any written criticism. Still, he argues as well, “you cannot deplore criticism unless you deprecate philosophy,” for he sees the best criticism emerging from periods when poetry no longer expresses the whole of a culture—when, in other words, there is great and productive intellectual ferment. (While he does not say it at this juncture, his own age is most certainly experiencing just such a ferment.) At this point, Eliot makes a shift in his presentation, subtle but nevertheless discernible, from the general, what poetry and criticism is, to the particular, the last 300 years of the development of a more and more sophisticated critical apparatus in English letters. This shift to the particular allows him, in good expository fashion, to introduce an outline of the remainder of his lectures. He chooses to begin, he says, with the age of Edmund Spenser and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE because, over and above their own especial notoriety as literary masters, it was during this time, the late 16th century, that the so-called native tradition in English literature (i.e., Anglo-Saxon) came into open critical conflict with the influences of continental (i.e., Latinate) literary precepts and practices. He will then, he says, move on to the age of John Dryden, because this 17thcentury English poet was instrumental in winning the day critically for the nativists, thereby giving the shaping impetus to the succeeding two centuries of English poetry and criticism. Something more critical, for lack of a better word, is at stake at that juncture as well, however. The use of poetry, which to that time had been thought of as “at once delight and instruction, . . . an adornment of social life and an honour to the nation,” an attitude as old as the Roman poet Horace’s utile et dulce dictum (poetry is “useful and sweet”), begins to undergo a radical transformation that will become complete by the time of the English romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. “Wordsworth and Coleridge,” Eliot concludes, “are not merely demolishing a debased tradition, but revolting against a whole social order,” resulting in the confidence with which another English romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley, can proclaim that poets

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are the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” Eliot hopes to occupy the middle territory here between an age that agrees on the use of poetry and, so, looks for its most felicitous expression and an age that debates the use of poetry as an instrument for effecting moral and social change and, so, produces much criticism but is less scrupulous in separating the wheat from the chaff. While Eliot was obligated to publish the lectures as they were presented, he was also free to expatiate further in endnotes, as he does in the case of the first lecture, to which he appends a note on the development of taste in poetry. Here he concludes, using his own recollections of the development of his taste in poetry as a boy and young man, that the taste for poetry seems to diminish in most at about the time of the onset of puberty, and for those in whom it continues, it never really quite settles down until early adulthood, at which point it likely never develops much further. The mature taste, nevertheless, he defines as one in which the reader comes to recognize that both the poem and the poet have an existence “apart from us” readers. That is the point at which one is ready for a lifelong engagement with the great poets, and with identifying the sources of that greatness, neither of which are regarded by Eliot as topics easily taught in formal academic settings. “Apology for the Countess of Pembroke” The second lecture, delivered on November 25, is titled “Apology for the Countess of Pembroke.” In it Eliot will make good on the promise made in his first lecture to begin with an examination of the critical and poetical precepts that dominated the age of poets like Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. His thesis, as well as his means of approaching it, already having been established in his introductory lecture, Eliot gets right to business. In this second lecture, his aim will be to show that the critical mind and the creative mind were not as much at odds in the Elizabethan period as is generally thought, thus enabling him, he hopes, to advance eventually his central thesis that in later periods the creative and the critical mind enjoyed an increasingly intimate relationship.

The point of controversy that Eliot focuses on might best be described in terms of the old argument regarding the ancients and moderns, in which the classical poets and dramatists of ancient Greece and Rome were seen to have laid down principles of composition that the modern poet or dramatist could ignore or violate only at his or her own peril. Shakespeare’s total disregard for the three unities of time, place, and action, for example, and his apparent disregard as well for the unity of sentiment (that is, of not mixing the comic and the tragic) made him a lesser artist in the eyes of many of his most astute contemporaries, but it has made him a genius in the eyes of posterity. If those contemporaries of Shakespeare were so blinded by classical precepts that they could not otherwise recognize the brilliance of Shakespeare’s creative spark, then, Eliot argues, the criticism of the time, of which Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry provides an outstanding example, would have to be regarded as antagonistic to the creative spirit that was present. Eliot cites, too, the debate between Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel over whether English prosody should adhere to the artificial rules of rhyme and meter derived from classical Latin and other Latinate masters or should follow the inclinations, inherent in native Anglo-Saxon verse forms, of naturally stressed lines that often resulted in blank—that is, unrhymed—verse. Eliot concludes that the debate, as contentious as it might seem to have been, nevertheless legitimized the use of natural rhythms and unrhymed verse in English, paving the way for the genius of Shakespeare. Indeed, in Eliot’s view, “our greatest [English] poetry” was the direct result of “the struggle between native and foreign elements.” Nor should the reader forget how much of Eliot’s own poetry continued to be a rich mixture of native and foreign elements, (JULES LAFORGUE and DANTE ALIGHIERI prominent examples in the latter case), and of both comic and tragic touches, often on the same page, if not in fact in the same line. Sidney’s complaint that the drama of the day lacked unity of feeling or sentiment, meanwhile, is one with which Eliot tacitly agrees, because he imagines that at the time that Sidney lodged his complaint, 1580, the great plays of the Elizabethan

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The period had yet to be written. It takes a “much more highly developed audience,” Eliot proposes, to deal with pure comedy or pure tragedy, but again he concludes that that very unity of feeling did in fact eventually emerge, not, however, in slavish obedience to Sidney’s critical wishes that the two modes not be too freely mixed, but because Sidney touched on improvements that “a maturing civilization [such as Elizabethan England’s was] would make for itself.” Here, Eliot is able to single out Shakespeare as a poet who could turn the necessities forced on him by the tastes and fancies of his own time to his own advantage, so that the “comic relief” in a Shakespeare tragedy, rather than weakening the effect, makes for contrasts that empower the tragic moment. Eliot, nevertheless, is pleased to see the comic element disappear as Shakespeare matured. Eliot then enters into a long passage regarding the famous debate over the inviolability of the dramatic unities, particularly those of time and place, which are generally attributed to Aristotle but which Eliot argues were imported into England largely from Italy. Eliot appreciates the prejudice for the unities, he claims, since it is one that theater audiences share to this day, but he astutely observes that too rigid a respect for them can only lead inevitably to their violation, as indeed became the case. The countess of Pembroke to whom this lecture’s title alludes was the center of a literary circle that included such gentlemen of the court as Sidney and Sir Edmund Spenser. Theirs was a criticism that emerged during a period when popular literature was, as Eliot puts it, “mostly barbarous.” But the real effect of her circle was not to alter the course of popular literature—as Eliot had pointed out earlier, the advancing causes of civilization did that by creating the rich literary environment out of which a comedian of the genius of a Ben Jonson could emerge—but to engender valuable critical debate. Spenser’s verse contributed itself to the resolution of the other issue—the matter of verse technique—by influencing Christopher Marlowe’s blank verse, from which John Milton’s verse line would eventually spring. Eliot ends the lecture by observing that the common confusion between the poet as a maker or craftsperson and the poet as a philosopher makes it

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difficult to resolve the question of the use of poetry in any society. Still. the example of a Sidney, for whom Eliot expresses great disdain as a poet, demonstrates, in his view, that even in a time when it appeared that the critical and the creative faculties were in a state of major disconnect, there was in fact a certain measure of complementary mutuality to their common concerns. In other words, “you cannot dissociate one group . . . from another . . . and say here is backwater, here mainstream.” In the final analysis, the Elizabethan poets were never dull, having been “galvanised into animation by the necessity to amuse . . . or starve.” Somewhere behind that closing observation has to be the idea that those in the countess of Pembroke’s circle never had to trouble their literary concerns with such mundane matters as sheer survival. Maybe Eliot is implying that that is more of a difference than one should ever have to mention, since everyone ought to know it. “The Age of Dryden” The exigencies of the typical academic year with its holiday break between semesters aside, it should come as no surprise that while only one week— from December 2 to December 9, 1932—elapsed between the third lecture, “The Age of Dryden,” and the fourth, “Coleridge and Wordsworth,” more than two months would elapse before the fifth, “Shelley and Keats,” which was presented on February 17, 1933. Even less surprising should be the fact that Eliot would devote a single lecture to 150 years of English literary critical history, from the time of the early 16th century and Ben Jonson to the mid-17th-century man of letters Samuel Johnson, but two full lectures to the 20 years of developments covered by the critical writings of the four English romantic poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. As anyone as astute as Eliot, and certainly as the learned members of his audience, would be aware, the reason is that any critical tradition in English letters was more or less merely marking time between the richly contentious period of critical debate and creative activity that marked the Elizabethan period and the equally animated period identified with romanticism that came about nearly 200 years letter.

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Eliot’s lecture on Dryden and Johnson, as a result, devotes the first few pages to Ben Jonson, the Jacobean playwright whose Discoveries or Timbers, a so-called commonplace book or compendium of odds and ends, constitutes a critical record by virtue of its occasional insights into the tenor of Jonson’s literary times and his interests as a writer. Indeed, the attention that Eliot affords Dryden himself and then Johnson is rather scant, as if he cannot wait to get to a dicussion of Coleridge, whom he mentions virtually as frequently. Perhaps Eliot’s own regard for this age of Dryden is best summed up in the disparaging comment on the criticism of Joseph Addison, the 17th-century English essayist and pamphleteer, whom he calls “a conspicuous example of this embarrassing mediocrity, . . . a symptom of the age which he announced.” It is no doubt due to that mediocrity, nevertheless, that the romanticism that ushered in the next century was so abundantly luscious with new ideas and attitudes toward poetry and poetry writing that they are still being sorted out to this day. “Coleridge and Wordsworth” Within the 20 years or less separating Wordsworth’s publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, to which he appended his famous preface in 1801, and Coleridge’s publication, in 1817, of his Biographia Literaria, or Literary Biography, the sleeping giant of the English critical sensibility was awakened with a series of violent starts that continue to trouble poetry’s formerly dreamy waters into our own time. Everything old was new again, but, as a later poet would put it and as Eliot certainly seems to feel, it was a terrible beauty that was born. In the case of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the topics of his first lecture on romanticism, Eliot was wise to confine himself to Coleridge’s doctrine of fancy and imagination and to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s literary dialogue on the topic of poetic diction, the two most common areas of scholarly concern. Even so, Eliot is stepping into literary historical territory that was still undergoing reassessment and revision. The debate here, such as it was, involved Wordsworth’s claim to be writing in “a selection of language really used by men,” as opposed to the highly stylized and artifi-

cial-sounding language of poetry characterized as poetic diction that had been in vogue for the last century or more. In this regard, Coleridge, without detracting from the natural vigor and vividness of Wordsworth’s use of language, argued instead that the distinction was not one between the kinds and levels of language that particular poets wrote insomuch as one between levels of creative genius. These he distinguished as the imagination, whose products were fresh and original, and the fancy, whose results, however interesting, were merely repetitions of past performances. While not trying to take sides, Eliot commends Wordsworth’s contribution more than Coleridge’s, perhaps because Wordsworth’s applies more to poetic practice and Coleridge’s more to its evaluation by others. On the issue of diction, then, Eliot wonders “what all the fuss was about,” finally coming to rest on the astute observation that “it is not the business of the poet to talk like any class of society, but like himself.” Recognizing nevertheless that there was a conscious social agenda on Wordsworth’s part to give voice to the lives and concerns of the economically and socially excluded, Eliot recognizes, too, that Wordsworth’s is a poetry that is better understood in the context of “the purposes and social passions which animated its author,” inspiring him to use the selection of socalled real language. Coleridge fares less well, perhaps because Eliot saw the elder poet as a man who squandered his considerable talents. While he thus acknowledges “the great importance” of the distinction that Coleridge draws between the imagination and the fancy, in the final analysis Eliot sees it as amounting to little more than “the difference between good and bad poetry.” Providing such a critical tool is no small accomplishment, of course, and Eliot does not gainsay that fact. Still, when he commends Coleridge as a critical intellect from whom “there is a good deal to learn,” it is not for any particular precept or contribution but for the new dimensions of “a richness and depth, an awareness of complication” that Coleridge’s, and Wordsworth’s, deliberations bring to English critical discourse. In recognition of the fact, then, that it is his purpose in these lectures to show how attitudes

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The toward the uses both of poetry and of criticism have reached their present state of development in English literature, Eliot concludes the present lecture on that topic by handing the laurel to Coleridge, despite his reservations regarding the applicability of Coleridge’s actual conclusions. Thus, while Wordsworth in his own criticism “knew better what he was about,” it was Coleridge who “did much more” by having brought “attention to the profundity of the philosophic problems into which the study of poetry can take us.” “Shelley and Keats” One philosophic problem, and one that he had already touched on with a painstaking astuteness in his 1929 essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” is the problem of poetry and belief. In his next lecture, “Shelley and Keats,” which was delivered on February 17, 1933, Eliot traces that issue to a possible source, at least in English poetry, by laying its modern manifestation squarely at the doorstep of Shelley. Anyone familiar with Shelley’s poetry knows that he appears to be, in many of his poems, espousing a very particular social and political agenda, often couched in terms of human liberty and frequently cast in quasi-religious spiritual terms. This is very much in keeping with the revolutionary fervor and enthusiastic passion for liberation from artificial constraints that typified the times, of course. However, Eliot seizes on it as the bane of Shelley’s poetry and criticism and thus as a pernicious influence on the view of poetry and the poet that subsequently emerged in the popular imagination. The idea that the poet is both poet and philosopher, a purveyor of truths that have an extraliterary validity and impact, is, for Eliot, at the heart of the confusion that is often made between poetry and belief to the detriment of the poetry. As Eliot puts it, “Shelley both had views about poetry and made use of poetry for expressing views.” Furthermore, in Eliot’s view, Shelley’s views, his beliefs, have all of the unrealistic enthusiasm and none of the practical values of an adolescent mind, explaining, for Eliot, why one is drawn to Shelley in youth but abandons him in maturity. It is not for Eliot a matter of whether one agrees with the beliefs so much

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as whether or not they are of a sufficient depth and experience to deserve one’s attention, and on this score Eliot finds Shelley’s views lacking (as he will shortly do with the views or beliefs of a number of his prominent contemporaries in After Strange Gods, three lectures that he would deliver at the University of Virginia in April). As for Keats, if Eliot gives this youngest and shortest-lived of the romantics what appears to be the shortest shift, it is probably a sign of genuine approbation on Eliot’s part. He calls him a great poet, no small compliment to a man who died at 26, and concludes the few pages that he devotes to him by remarking that, unlike Wordsworth and Shelley, “Keats had no theory. . . . [H]e was merely about his business.” That that was the writing of poetry, and that Eliot had earlier commended Johnson for treating poetry as poetry “and not another thing” suggests how much, for Eliot, such an attention to the task of composing poetry was, too, no small matter. So, then, it is indeed a high compliment to the purity of Keats’s intellect, which was no less philosophic in Eliot’s view, to commend him primarily for his attention to craftsmanship. “Matthew Arnold” Eliot’s sixth lecture, on the 19th-century poet and literary and social critic Matthew Arnold, was delivered on March 3, 1933. Eliot was beginning to move into territory that was extremely close to home, and that perhaps accounts for the tone of complaint that he seems to adopt as he comments on all Arnold’s efforts to create an intellectual climate in which critical thinking and critical discourse in English letters could properly flourish. Indeed, considering that Eliot has been aiming all along to clarify the principles whereby both creative and critical literary endeavors might be given their due and have been rightly balanced, it seems odd that he should spend most of this lecture on Arnold severely disparaging Arnold’s own considerable accomplishments on behalf of the same goals. To those familiar with his work, Arnold remains a significant literary figure from the second half of the 19th century. Rather like the young writers of Eliot’s own generation, Arnold was a poet who felt that not just his own creative career but that

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of his times had come to a dead end, repeating themes that had already been belabored by several preceding generations. Determined at least to set a course for a future generation’s own success with a reinspired creativity, he turned his hand entirely to critical endeavors, hoping thereby to lay the groundwork for what he called a “current of fresh ideas” out of which a new poetry might emerge. He sounds, indeed, quite a bit like a younger Eliot, calling for a more objective and tradition-bound vision to guide poetic production, and for a new order of balance between the critical and the creative. It is possibly this genuine affinity between the aims of the two poet-critics that makes the competition between them, from Eliot’s end, seem more strident than objective. Arnold, who died the year that Eliot was born, comes too close to fulfilling a role that Eliot would like to claim for his own. In any case, Arnold is, for Eliot, “the poet and critic of a false stability,” one for whom writing about poets merely “provided a pretext for his sermon,” a man more likely to think about “the greatness of poetry rather than . . . its genuineness.” While he should not be neglected, he nevertheless also dealt in “departments of thought for which his mind was unsuited and ill-equipped.” These kinds of charges against Arnold from Eliot begin to sound more and more like the sort of criticisms that were lodged against Eliot himself as his own criticism ventured into areas that were not wholly literary in nature. To be sure, the level of that criticism against his own tendency to appear to be sermonizing and lecturing others in his own criticism would be ratcheted up after Eliot delivered the condemnations of the moral values exhibited in the works of many of his own outstanding contemporaries in After Strange Gods. It is reasonable to assume that Eliot could hardly have been unaware of the similarities between himself and Arnold and their critical methods, which was a more or less scorched-earth policy. If Eliot seems to minimize those similarities here by pretending that they do not exist, it may be for the purposes of thereby throwing the hounds off his own scent by giving them Arnold to excoriate in his stead. Be that as it may, Eliot does not deny that in his critical endeavors, Arnold added significantly

to the range of critical discourse of which English letters might be capable, observing that Arnold came to “an opinion of poetry different from that of any of his predecessors.” If Wordsworth and Shelley’s fault was that they too freely suggested a link between poetry and philosophy, one that remains an undercurrent of criticism and of reader response to this day, Arnold felt that “the best poetry supersedes religion and philosophy.” This is very much in keeping with premises crucial to Eliot’s own position on the matter; he had noted in his lecture on Shelley that he could not imagine how a poet could be a philosopher without being “virtually two men”—a clear indication from Eliot that the two are separate endeavors and ought to be kept and treated that way. However, if on this point Eliot gives Arnold his due, it is only to take it away at lecture’s end where he observes that Arnold was so engrossed in the question of “what . . . poetry was for, that he could not altogether see it for what it is.” To require of any critic that he or she do as much is, of course, a rather tall order, as Eliot himself had pointed out in his inaugural lecture in the series. Perhaps, nevertheless, Eliot reveals more of his antipathy to the validity of Arnold’s methods and conclusions when he cites him as well for a “conservatism which springs from lack of faith.” Arnold had sought to make a religion of poetry, as it were, one that he saw as a consoling cultural force and that would be “at bottom a criticism of life.” Earlier in the lecture, Eliot had lacerated Arnold for that kind of a conviction. “That is a great way down,” Eliot says of the bottom. “At the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, . . . and it is not a ‘criticism of life.’ ” For the benefit of Eliot’s achieving that kind of an observation, one worthy of the finest aspects of what Wordsworth and Coleridge would both call the philosophic mind, it is perhaps worth it as well to hear him flay a fellow conservative critic like Arnold in public. While Eliot does not hold others to his faith and convictions, he does hold them, Arnold included, to a very high standard of what faith and convictions ought to be if those are to be the terms of the argument. So, then, Arnold’s faith in poetry alone just does not cut it for Eliot.

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The “The Modern Mind” In the seventh lecture, delivered two weeks later, on March 17, 1933, Eliot finally gets into territory in which he is not so much expert as an original boarder: “The Modern Mind.” Eliot, after all, had had by this time a great deal to do with helping shape the literary manifestations of the modern mind in English letters, so it is safe to say that much of his spin on the matter is valuable for his own proximity to the phenomenon. Whether or not a new kind of mind had emerged on the cultural scene, enough critical ink had been spent on the fact that one apparently had emerged for Eliot to get right down to business. He turns back to Arnold once more, giving him credit for an insistence on a moral valuation in literature that suited his own time, but now, Eliot argues, a greater clarity and more exacting language are needed if criticism is to respond to the self-consciousness that typifies the modern mind. Out of those adjustments, being made by individuals such as I. A. Richards and, presumably, Eliot himself, should come a critical apparatus for learning “to distinguish the appreciation of poetry from theorising about poetry.” The danger is inherent in the times themselves, for modernism as a mindset “comprehends every extreme and degree of opinion.” The challenge of achieving clarity and exactness of thought and wording in such a liberal environment is not an easy one, nor one to be taken lightly. In fact, Eliot fears that when it comes to the topic of poetry, there is not much agreement beyond the notion that it is something of, or has some, importance. Furthermore, it puzzles Eliot that an age that has produced so much poetry should be debating questions about its nature, and he sees that problem as one going back to the entire matter of people’s having made poetry a substitute for religion, a problem that began with a poet and critic such as Shelley and culminated in Arnold’s critical stance. Now Eliot adamantly rejects the quasi-religious notion that “poetry is capable of saving us,” an utterance of Richards’s, who thanks the influence of Arnold for the insight. Indeed, because of what Eliot views as the “intense religious seriousness” of Richards’s attitude toward poetry, Rich-

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ards becomes the final focus of Eliot’s argument for keeping poetry poetry and belief belief. For himself, in the matter of poetry and religion, Eliot remains firmly of the mind that to confuse one for the other or to substitute one for the other does no good for either and even less good for the individual or culture that has been thus confused. Richards’s dismissive proposition that religion is constituted of “pseudo-statements” (ideas that sound good but are intellectually meaningless otherwise) that are no longer accepted as true is, for Eliot, itself a pseudostatement in its attempt to preserve the emotions of religion to the exclusion of the beliefs that have historically given them context. At the opposite extreme, meanwhile, is the idea that poetry is a handmaiden to the powers that be, a resurgence of sorts of Sidney’s notion that poetry was an adornment in which the nation could take pride. Eliot identifies this idea as one being put forward in his time by the Russian Communist ideologue Leon Trotsky. An ideology of a social materialism was just beginning to find fertile ground through the emergence of the global political policies of the Soviet Union, and with it was emerging a new aesthetics to support state policy. In Eliot’s view, the only difference from Richards’s ideas, although a major one, is that, according to the communist model, poetry should serve the larger purposes of state bureaucracies. Between the one extreme and the other—Richards’s substitute for religion and Trotsky’s service to the political community—Eliot sees little difference, since each requires poetry to be something other than what it is, even if, as Eliot frequently admits, that can never quite be resolved. Each model, nevertheless, attempts to make it something less. Finally, Eliot mentions yet another modality by which the so-called modern mind seeks to shape a view of poetry suitable to its own purposes and needs. This last one comes from a book titled Prayer and Poetry by Abbé Brémond, in which he seeks to identify poetry as a sort of inspired mysticism. Eliot will have none of that either, arguing that any theory of poetry, first off, only relates to what poetry the theorizer knows and enjoys and, furthermore, that any theory that tries to intimate a close relationship between poetry and a religious

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or social agenda thereby limits poetry, as if by some ersatz legislative process. “Conclusions” Eliot launches into his eighth and last lecture, appropriately titled “Conclusions” and delivered on March 31, by answering the question that must have been on everyone else’s mind by the close of the seventh lecture: What is Eliot’s theory of poetry? He does not mince his words: “I have no general theory of my own.” Nevertheless, he feels that it is an obligation to be on guard against theories that claim either too much or too little for poetry and to recognize that there may be nevertheless a variety of uses for poetry without insisting that poetry must be subservient to them. The reader may recall that that is virtually where Eliot’s survey of the uses of poetry and the uses of criticism began—with the contentious debate among the critics, and between critics and practicing poets, that marked the Elizabethan period. Theory, in other words, should serve the reader’s enjoyment of poetry, not overpower and master it for its own sake. So, then, Eliot also concludes that he is not necessarily even in conflict with Abbé Brémond’s point of view. For one thing, poetry writing can be akin to or even enhance what is typically called a mystical experience, but, Eliot insists for his own sake now, he would hesitate to suggest that that describes all poetry. Indeed, he observes that “the way in which poetry is written is not . . . any clue to its value.” After using his own poetry as an example of how a particular line of verse might find its way several times over into a poet’s work without any direct way of knowing how or why it does, Eliot asserts that there is much that is not and very likely cannot be known about the sources of poetic output except to say that every theory regarding same, up to his own time, has some particular defects, all of which inadvertently aim toward expecting “too much, rather than too little, of poetry.” One of the most important issues that Eliot tackles in his parting shots is the entire question of meaning in poetry and, ultimately, its relative importance as a constituent element. Whenever he had come to this issue in the past, Eliot had

invariably fallen on the side of the poem as a total experience, one not limited in a person’s ability to evaluate it only to the statement that it makes on a particular topic or theme. Anyone who had heard or read this series of lectures, especially beginning with the fifth lecture, “Shelley and Keats,” should now understand why Eliot takes such a stand. The tendency to search for a meaning in a poem lends itself to what Eliot sees to be the pernicious tendency, in recent times, to confuse poetry with philosophy and with religion, a confusion made by both poets and critics alike. The position that Eliot takes now is clearly stated, and it is that meaning is overrated. Indeed, Eliot likens it to be the bit of meat that the burglar puts out for the dog, distracting the reader’s more intuitive sensibilities while the poem does its “real work” on the reader. The burglar metaphor should not be carried too far, or one may well begin to wonder just what Eliot thinks that real work is. Otherwise, Eliot’s point is well taken. If all the poet wishes to do is render a particular meaning, then there are equally effective and perhaps even more effective ways to do it in prose. That brings Eliot to the next part of his conclusion: There are other valid means of expressing thoughts and feelings in words, so poetry must permit a particular and unique way of rendering those thoughts and feelings. This idea partakes a bit of Coleridge’s distinction between poetry and prose, which rested ultimately on the writer of each having a specific aim in mind to begin with. For the poet, it was to convey not meaning, or “matter of fact,” as Coleridge calls it, but pleasure. By that, Coleridge meant that poetry makes an appeal to all of the reader’s senses and faculties, not just the rational mind or moral intellect. While Eliot does not make a similar distinction himself, it is likely that it underlies his assertion that “anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose.” As might be expected, Eliot saves his most interesting observations for last. The entire purpose of this series of lectures has been not only to trace creative and critical developments in English letters from Shakespeare’s to contemporary time but to comment on the shifts in expectations that have

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The been made of each over those intervening centuries. Of criticism, Eliot asks that it be less restrictive in its definition of poetry while at the same time it restrict more severely the increasing demands that it has been making that poetry function as a tool for social order and spiritual well-being. Of poetry, he seems finally to believe that little more can be asked of it except that it continue to be written in an age that behaves as if it has little use for any species of discourse that serves no immediately recognizable social function. The poet, too, Eliot observes, is especially aware of this crisis. As the confused condition of the modern world calls for a more and more complex response from the poet, so does the most responsive poetry come to be characterized as obscure and difficult (Eliot’s own having perennially been a candidate for such charges). To that valid criticism Eliot offers an equally valid justification, that readers ought to be glad that poets nowadays express themselves at all. He adds the further observation that much of the difficulty and obscurity of modernist texts may be more a matter of reputation than of fact. Still, he is willing to offer a way of solving the entire problem of the tenuous relationship between the modern poet and the modern readership for poetry. The solution that he proposes is that “the most useful poetry” for his own time would be one that “could cut across all the present stratifications of public taste”—stratifications that may be themselves merely signs of social disintegration. This “most useful” poetry, he suggests, would be dramatic poetry, that is, verse written for the stage, and he further argues that not only the “ideal medium,” but also the “most direct means of social ‘usefulness’ ” for poetry is the theater because it permits levels of significance to persist simultaneously. Eliot does not deny that this may be too simplistic a solution, for the poet would then be forced to tailor not only his verse but his themes, such as they are, to the wide variety of individuals in a typical theatrical audience. The age of Shakespeare comes to mind, of course, during which many of the best poets wrere playwrights. But so does the fact that Eliot had already experimented with a stage play in verse, the abandoned “Sweeney Agonistes,” to

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which he makes passing reference in this closing lecture. Eliot would follow his own advice to a considerable degree for the remainder of his literary career. Within a year’s time, indeed, Eliot provided the poetic text for The Rock, a religious pageant play, and within another year he completed his first original verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral. By 1959, another four verse dramas will have flowed from his pen, all of them successful productions on the London stage and still part of the standard repertoire. For now, he brings his remarks to a close by observing, perhaps only slightly coyly, that for all the risks to a personal peace of mind that the poet runs “for the pains of turning blood into ink,” he may as well be willing to try to please a live audience exactly as if he were a music hall comedian, if the result would nevertheless be “a play which is real poetry.” In his concluding paragraph, Eliot reiterates that he has not, in his lectures, tried to define poetry and has rather insisted that there be a variety of poetry and that it not be defined by its uses. If, he says, poetry ultimately does little more than help others consider those very real features of day-to-day human existence that most of us spend most of our time evading, then, in his view, it has achieved some purpose, even if that purpose seems not to have any immediately assignable or recognizable social use.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY No doubt because the lectures of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism were presented to an appreciative and sympathetic audience at such a leisurely pace over a long period, but in keeping with the rigorous academic and scholarly standards required by the venue, Eliot achieves a neat and orderly survey of modern English literature. Much that he says is not new, although that does not mean that it is not necessarily original. Where a reader can benefit most from Eliot’s observations, however, is where he touches on the uses and benefits of poetry in the present time. There he speaks with a great deal of personal experience and reflection behind him, and with an authority that, while it may not be unassailable, is nevertheless inspired by an impeccable integrity

422 “Virgil and the Christian World” and constant practice. He has for his credentials the fact that he has been devoted to the cause that he takes up, the cause of poetry, perhaps the highest but unquestionably the most misunderstood of the arts, underrated where it ought most to be cherished, and overrated in arenas where it can do the least good. Eliot’s continuing and increasingly emphatic insistence that readers and critics alike avoid the pitfall of demanding of poetry that it be belief or philosophy forms no small part of his own critical agenda. Whatever human needs poetry may address, Eliot knows that it cannot address them successfully and, as a result, service those needs if succeeding generations of poets and of readers begin to demand a poetry that is nothing less than bad poetry and worse philosophy. That is exactly what he fears is beginning to happen on several fronts in the present-day culture. The pressures of psychology to make poetry and poets into case studies, of the state to confuse poetry and poets with public relations, and of scholarship to make all of it into elaborately high-stakes puzzles—these are forces doing more to shape the public perception of the uses of poetry than the poets themselves can ever hope to counteract. For Eliot, bad poetry is poetry that aims to prove or to make a point rather than to give verbal shape to the timeless human impulses that make us desire to prove and to make points. The distance between the one and the other is greater than any measurable distance in the universe, and no critical mind can ever successfully analyze or account for that distance. It is, nevertheless, a real distance, and Eliot’s point is that we recognize that.

“Virgil and the Christian World” (1951) This essay was first presented as a radio address over the BBC in 1951 and then published in that broadcaster’s magazine, The Listener. Eliot subsequently reprinted it in the 1956 collection On Poetry and Poets.

SYNOPSIS Eliot offers an innocent enough agenda for the work at hand: “What interests me here are those characteristics of Virgil which render him peculiarly sympathetic to the Christian mind.” Eliot begins his examination of those characteristics of Virgil by turning to the fourth eclogue, celebrated because, on the subsequent emergence of Christianity in the former territories of the Roman Empire (that phenomenon depended in large part, too, on the extent, influence, and common culture that that Empire entailed), many a learned Christian commentator saw in Virgil a prophet, albeit a pagan one, who had foretold the birth of Christ. Eliot is not convinced of that; as he sees it, if a prophet is one who has knowledge of what he is speaking, the first-century B.C. Roman poet Virgil, most renowned for his epic poem “foretelling” the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, was no prophet at all. However, as Eliot goes on to explain, “if the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand.” It is in that sense, then, that Eliot will accede that the poet “need not know what his poetry will come to mean to others,” any more than a prophet needs to understand his utterances’ full meaning either. Eliot, then, is more interested in the fact that, thanks to the sanctions that the fourth eclogue earned Virgil, his writings were deemed to be suitable reading for Christians, thus opening the way for his influence in the Christian world. Eliot starts the main body of his essay with a rather dry and clinical analysis of the Roman virtues that, thanks to Virgil’s influence, may have been carried over as hospitable to Christian values as well. Eliot focuses on three, using the original Latin in each case—labor, pietas, and fatum. The first is rather obvious, but it is more than just the idea that there is dignity in labor or work. Eliot points out that Virgil most bespeaks the dignity of labor in the Georgics, his poem on husbandry or farming. This devotion to working the soil or, if one be a landlord, maintaining one’s rural estate in good order, reflects for Eliot the principle that the life and health of the nation and the people are

“Virgil and the Christian World” tied to the land. In his own time, Eliot had become devoted to the Agrarian Movement that originated among a handful of American poets, Allen Tate prominent among them, in the 1930s. The idea that the wholesome industry of agricultural pursuits would keep vital the traditional values on which even a modern nation-state such as England or America is founded is based on Christian principles of simplicity and the common good, but Eliot finds a source for those values in Virgil. Pietas means duty in Latin. There, too, Eliot sees Virgil notching up the expected notion of the Roman’s sense of duty to his family and state. In the Aeneid, the hero Aeneas is defined by his dutifulness, being called “pius Aeneas,” or “the dutiful Aeneas.” Such a tactic on Virgil’s part, however, does not simply elevate a sense of devotion and duty as a son and citizen to level of that single characteristic which most defines heroic action. As Eliot points out, Aeneas’s sense of duty is most demonstrated by Virgil in his hero’s being pious toward the gods as well. “[I]n no way does his piety appear more clearly,” Eliot insists, “than when the gods afflict him.” If viewed as Christian humility rather than a pagan Roman virtue, Aeneas can be seen to evince again values and attitudes that have come to be regarded as typically Christian. Finally there is fatum, which Eliot would rather define as destiny than as fate. The older Greek heroes were the victims of fate, whereas Aeneas has a choice to accept or reject, through his acceptance or rejection of his duty to the gods, the destiny that the gods have prepared for him. It is not difficult for Eliot to sound convincing in seeing this attribute of Virgil’s hero, too, as one betokening the Christian concepts of free will and the acceptance of God’s will as a conscious choice engaging the whole person. Eliot would be the first to admit that the Rome for which Aeneas sacrificed himself is not the ruthlessly real Roman Empire of historical fame, but a purely literary construct. That, too, is Eliot’s point, however. The Aeneid’s Rome is, rather, “something which exists because Virgil imagined it.” Eliot continues: “It remains an ideal, but one which Virgil passed on to Christianity to develop and to cherish.”

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Thus, Eliot can happily conclude that “in the sense in which a poet is a philosopher . . . Virgil is the greatest philosopher of ancient Rome,” one “uniquely near to Christians” because of the virtues that he espouses. Virgil, Eliot claims, was alone among the poets of antiquity as a person “for whom the world made sense, for whom it had dignity and order, and for whom, as for no one before his time except the Hebrew prophets, history had meaning.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Those are words of high praise for Virgil, and Eliot shares the high esteem in which his own poetic master, the great 14th-century Florentine poet DANTE ALIGHIERI, held Virgil and his worldview. Eliot, however, may have extraliterary issues in mind as he praises Virgil’s accomplishments. For most of his adult life, in one form or another, Eliot had been fighting to maintain the coherence of Christian Europe in the face of 20th-century secularism. In fact it would be hard to imagine him saying anything less with regard to the singular significance of Virgil and his Roman classic in terms of what that poet represented to the cause that Eliot was constantly defending—the order and right thinking that he saw embodied in orthodoxy. This debate had come to center itself around the larger issue of the place and importance of tradition in the face of the constant, rapid, and dramatic change that, in turn, characterized the modern scene, with its secularist materialism and attendant consumerism. The old order was changing but, in Eliot’s view, not being replaced by anything equally as viable or meaningful. In prose works from as early as the 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism” to as late as his booklength diatribe, After Strange Gods, which was subtitled A Primer of Modern Heresy and published in 1934, Eliot had pretty much excoriated those whom he perceived to be representing the enemy camp, either in their professed thinking or their creative endeavors. His poetry turned more and more to the theme of preserving or, at least, respecting the past as well, notably in his choruses from The Rock, another effort of the early 1930s. By 1939, he had

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softened his views enough to present them in more reasonable, far less strident, but no less contentious terms, publishing his Idea of a Christian Society. By 1944, in an essay titled “What Is a Classic?,” Eliot had settled on Virgil’s as the exemplary literary classic, and he was at that time preparing the preliminary essays from which his Notes towards the Definition of Culture would eventually emerge in 1948. It would appear, then, that by 1952 all of these various but intricately related parts of a cause that had been occupying Eliot’s attention and energies as an essayist for much of his adult life should finally have settled on presenting Virgil as the archetypal Christian poet in the very process of proving, elegantly and astutely, that he is no such thing. None of this has been said to disparage Eliot’s project. Having seen Europe’s modern secular states succumb to an armed conflict, World War II, that had consumed 50 million lives and immeasurable treasure, Eliot could have done far worse, by the early 1950s, than recommend to his fellow citizens the model of the pagan Roman poet Virgil and his virtues of hard work; duty to family, community, and God; and the acceptance of immortal destiny as facts, not of history, but of life.

Waste Land, The (1922) Nothing could have prepared either the literary world in general or the curious reader who had been following Eliot’s career to date for the publication, in late 1922, of The Waste Land. Published in October of that year in Eliot’s own literary review, the Criterion, in London and in the Dial in New York, it was then released in book form in December of that year by the New York publishing house Boni & Liveright. Virtually overnight The Waste Land became a focal point and rallying cry for the culture wars of its time and brought Eliot a celebrity and iconic status that he would never live down and, within a short time, would be adamantly refusing to live up to.

BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS Eliot’s The Waste Land is undoubtedly the most renowned if not notorious literary achievement in

poetry in English of the 20th century, a poem so celebrated even in its own time that it generated a whole slew of legends, misinformation, and general myths about its origins, intentions, and impact on the contemporary scene of postwar Europe in the early 1920s, a scene of which the poem has by now come to be regarded as a perfect reflection. Surely, if nothing else, the notion that it is barely readable, let alone intelligible, is a part of The Waste Land’s reputation among readers. No one would dispute that The Waste Land stands among the handful of literary works from this time—other examples including most notably Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Eliot’s close friend, literary confidante, and erstwhile mentor, the expatriate American poet EZRA POUND, and Ulysses, the highly experimental, innovative, and epic novel by Irish novelist JAMES JOYCE—that typified modernism in English language literature, both from the point of view of its most energetic practitioners and its most ardent detractors. Modernists such as Eliot, Pound, and Joyce were obsessed with the idea that the literary artist could create a text in any medium, be it the novel, poetry, or a theatrical piece, that would freely and enthusiastically break all the rules and fly in the face of centuries of conventional wisdom and traditions, all for the sake of creating equally enduring works of literature that did more than just comment on human experience—that, instead, could effectively mirror its most obscure psychological and spiritual sources and dimensions. Other motives and issues compelled these younger artists as well, of course. The world had changed radically between 1800 and 1900, a century that was and continues to be regarded as an age of revolution in virtually all fields of human endeavor and on all fronts of human concerns. Efforts to revivify or revolutionize the arts coincided with these other efforts. What they themselves called modernism was the response of many of those involved with creative activities, particularly among the young, to these very real shifts, some of them quite cataclysmic, in what is called, for lack of a more inclusive term, the human condition. On the other side of what was then and possibly remains a great divide were those who saw nothing but anarchy and chaos, nihilism and irrev-

Waste Land, The erence, tastelessness and arrogance, in those who were practicing modernist techniques and utilizing modernist ways of thinking that eschewed authoritarianism and absolutes and advocated in their place relativistic ways of thinking and perceiving reality. From his debut on the literary stage in the mid1910s, Eliot was unmistakably one who had cast his lot with these newer ways of thinking and of defining the relationship among the writer, the work, and the reader. In his most famous early poems, among which “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” stand out to this day as exceptionally new and original works, Eliot showed that he was far more interested in expressing his time and place, its moral and social dilemmas and inner anxieties, than in carrying on business as usual. Rather than becoming an artist of the beautiful, it was clear as he attempted to translate the vision and attitudes of the French symbolists into contemporary American poetry, that his aim was to be an artist of the real, even if that often meant the sordid, the squalid, and the boring. Whether it was for these reasons or for other characteristics that Eliot’s poetry exhibited, his intentional efforts to “resuscitate the dead art of poetry,” words from Pound’s Mauberley, led Pound to proclaim Eliot, in a letter to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, a poet who had “made himself modern all on his own.” For a while, it seemed, however, as if Eliot might not be able to continue to live up to this reputation. The quatrain poems that, with their iconoclastic and sophisticated tone, succeeded these early efforts may not have been quite up to the same mark of originality and meaningful innovations as the poetry composed in 1910–11, primarily during Eliot’s Paris sojourn. In these later poems, Eliot’s efforts to surprise and puzzle his readers with a petulant cleverness and an excessive erudition, including the use of obscure, Greek-based medical terms and other multisyllabic words that were more likely to be found in use in the academy than in the literary salon, may all too often have overwhelmed the reasonably serious themes underlying the poetry of works such as “The Hippopotamus” and “Whispers on Immortality.” Still, Eliot remained something

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of trailblazer from whom a more somber and sober poetry would emerge with “Gerontion” in 1919, as if he had learned to bring the frivolous erudition of the quatrains to bear with the power of the same sort of tragic vision that had given “Prufrock” and “Rhapsody” their deserved but unassuming gravity. For those who despised the newfangled ways that modernism seemed to be espousing and to take a certain iconoclastic relish in embodying, The Waste Land was the last straw, the arch case in point for the argument that, with the modernist movement, serious literature, and poetry in particular, had reached a low point in its development, one from which it might never fully recover. The subsequent publication of the poem in book form with notes, of all things, appeared to them to clinch the argument for good. What kind of poet could imagine that his work needed notes in order for a reader to be able to understand it, some wondered, claiming that the notes only made any attempt toward comprehending The Waste Land worse, not better. Indeed, what with James Joyce having virtually simultaneously published in Ulysses what, from the point of view of even sophisticated readers, was an unreadable novel, many were inclined to begin to believe that the entire modernist movement was an elaborate hoax, a private joke executed by a few dozen overeducated and pretentiously self-absorbed literary snobs. But there were as many, if not more, who embraced the poem for what they took it to be saying about their times, times that had just witnessed the conclusion of a four-year war that had virtually brought European civilization to its knees. This was a civilization that had brought the world unheard of technological and commercial progress at the expense of their own populations and of the rights of other peoples around the globe to self-determination and self-government. The catastrophe of World War I, or the Great War, had compelled Pound to label Europe “an old bitch gone in the teeth.” What price glory, after all, if that quest for glory had come to this: a Europe in ruins, if not quite literally, as was the case in many areas, at least economically and in terms of the morale of its people? Oddly enough, both the Eliot poem and the Joyce novel won as much favor as recrimination

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for the uses that each author made of Europe’s classical past, although on reflection it is perhaps not odd at all. In Joyce’s case, he retold in modern terms the epic homeward journey of Homer’s hero, Odysseus. In Eliot’s case, allusions to sources as sundry as Sophocles and DANTE ALIGHIERI, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and Ovid, make up much of the poetry of The Waste Land. For those who were imagining that Europe had just gone to hell in a handbasket, the invidious comparisons that Eliot and Joyce seemed to be making between the great literary monuments of the past and the diminished scope for original creative vision in the present were seen as a fitting critique of a civilization that had fallen into a cultural and spiritual decline. On the other hand, those who still held out hope for the future lamented the fact that all that modernism appeared to be able to produce were works that looked back in sorrow, mimicking past triumphs but unable to equal them. The sides may not have been quite as neatly divided as this, but there were sides and the debate was furious, even if it was carried on mainly in the pages of little magazines, as the major reviews of those days were called, and in university classrooms. Within time, however, both works took their places as literary masterpieces that, like the great works of ages past, tell the future something significant of their own times, even if the times themselves did not necessarily realize or recognize as much to be the case. It did not take long for Dante to become the voice of the Renaissance, for Shakespeare to be seen as a literary genius of worldwide importance, or for Joyce to be widely read and highly respected. The Waste Land, however, remains a problem text. While no one would deny its importance as a literary document, the precise nature of its achievement as a work of literature, pure and simple, remains elusive for the very reason that the poetry remains difficult to read and is seldom rewarding for the novice reader. Some modest preparation, nevertheless, can make The Waste Land not only accessible but challengingly so. To understand the times that produced it, the place that it occupies in Eliot’s development to this point in his poetic career, the poetry’s sources, and Eliot’s methods

of composition can all contribute to finding in the finished poem one of the most incredibly conceived works of literature ever composed. In his effort to resist modeling his poem on any previous work while simultaneously paying an oblique homage to the accumulated accomplishments of past epochs, Eliot created a work that is a tribute neither to the past nor to the present and certainly not to European literature in particular or to culture in general, but to the human imagination and its capacity to make order out of the chaotic and random. That is the struggle of art in any age, but it seemed to be a more obvious and compelling struggle during the time that Eliot and his generation were both formulating and executing those masterworks of literary modernism among which The Waste Land shall remain a spectacularly shining example, albeit an occasionally blinding one as well. The War Sometimes scholarship does not have to uncover the obscure for fear of appearing to belabor the obvious. That is certainly the case with the profoundly devastating impact that World War I had on all aspects of European civilization. The war’s causes remain as transparent as its effects, and neither paint a pretty picture of human nature or of the sorry consequences of greed, pride, and blatant stupidity. One might question the notion that Europe had indeed produced a civilization in the first place, for it was the ferocity, destructiveness, and futility of the war that inevitably gave rise to the disillusionment that the catastrophe of the war ultimately engendered in the young, who also were those who fought and died in it. It was this same disillusionment that the literature of the 1920s, The Waste Land a notable example in this regard, would reflect, according to some. A brief overview of the causes and consequences of the war will expose the severely dissipating impact that it had on any and all notions of cultural and racial superiority that had been running rampant among Europeans up to that moment. The popular imagination would have it that the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 was the direct result of the assassination by a Serbian nationalist of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, heir

Waste Land, The to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophia, in Sarajevo, the capital of Serbia. An event of that order was a long time in both the coming and the making, however. As awful as such an act of political terrorism was, it was only the famous spark that ignited the tinderbox that Europe had become in the century since the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo in 1815. It had been a century during which the four great European powers—England, France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary—jockeyed for military dominance and colonial and commercial one-upsmanship in a game of constantly shifting alliances and treaties amid bureaucratic and palace intrigues. By the last third of the 19th century, those four powers had been joined by Italy and Germany, which only recently had unified into the modern nations that we know today. An already stiff competition for territorial and market expansion only became that much stiffer. To put it simply, the European powers started stepping on each other’s toes no matter where they turned and whenever they turned. Ultimatums and threats were made with an ever-increasing belligerency. Pledges of support and mutual defense were sworn to as freely. Sooner or later, someone or something was bound to slip up. The bullets that killed Franz-Ferdinand and his consort in 1914 had been fired nearly a century before when in 1820 the same great powers had carved up post-Napoleonic Europe among themselves at the Congress of Vienna. Along with the royal couple, the same assassin’s bullets struck down a century of posturing that had convinced Europe if not the world that theirs was the most successful and refined civilization that history had seen to that time. When hostilities finally broke out in August 1914 on a continent that had been legendarily teetering on the brink of war for more than a decade, no one was particularly surprised, although nearly everyone was convinced that the conflict would be over in a matter of months if not weeks. Germany and Austria-Hungary quickly found themselves allied against England, France, Russia, and Italy, and it was well nigh impossible for other, lesser European nations and powers to stay out of

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the way. A modern phenomenon came into being: world war. The catastrophic irony was that the very self-congratulatory pomposity that had led up to the outbreak of conflict now only underscored the war’s relentless brutality, and that irony was itself ironical. In earlier works such as HEART OF DARKNESS, such authors as the Polish-born English novelist JOSEPH CONRAD had already borne witness to the moral travesty of 19th-century European colonial and cultural imperialism, but so pervasive were its self-assured successes that the moral bankruptcy that it portended seemed nevertheless to defy easy analysis or even satire. The legal impunity and moral immunity with which the European ruling classes manipulated public opinion and the fate of nations worldwide gave rise to a new, cynical, and skeptical literature, like the French symbolist movement, a literature that was all the vogue among the avantgarde during Eliot’s youth and that would become the seedbed for the modernism that had then subsequently burst on the literary scene on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly in Europe, in the prewar years. If literary artists had found it difficult to grapple effectively with the contradictions of values and moral paradoxes that had led up to the war, however, they were to find it far more difficult to deal with the hypocrisy and fanatical nationalistic patriotism that the war itself produced. Indeed, so immune had prewar European self-aggrandizement become to the normal community channels of criticism and correction such as the arts, the church, and legitimate political dissidence, all of which as institutions had been either neutralized or radicalized into ineffectiveness, that it would finally take nothing less than a conflict on the scale of World War I to expose the essential corruption of vision at the heart of European cultural arrogance and put one abrupt stop to the whole awful show. In a manner of speaking, the war unraveled all the lies that a civilization had been telling itself and the rest of the world for decades, perhaps even centuries, and left in their place only emptiness. The rationales of a racial, managerial, and entrepreneurial superiority by which Europe had justified colonizing and otherwise exploiting to some degree or another most of the known world from the 16th

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century onward were now revealed to be nothing more than a justification for those old standbys, greed and territorial expansion, that simply could not, when the true trial came, pan out. Europe’s vaunted superiority had been forever blasted. Part of the value of The Waste Land, as its title suggests, is that its complexities are intended somewhat to mirror, portray, and embody this emptiness that the war left behind; but there was far more to the aftermath of the war than that. There was also the bitter irony that such a bloodbath had achieved, by demolishing the myth of European greatness, no other end than that. That it had left not opportunities for new beginnings but only emptiness and despair in the place of that previous self-confident arrogance. As much was an irony that not even art could successfully engage without seeming to distort itself as well. That is, great art, be it literary or musical or plastic, can portray great tragedy or great comedy, but it cannot easily portray smallmindedness, futility, and meaninglessness. A sense of that withering loss of all perspective and purpose is exactly what the war had engendered in those who survived it, particularly those of a more creative spirit like Eliot’s. A now-famous study published in 1973, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, makes an extremely convincing case that the cultural catastrophe that the war both was for and wreaked on Europe changed the very ways in which poets wrote about war and in which the public perceived its purpose and results. Battles were fought in which casualties in the tens of thousands were produced in a matter of days if not hours. The front in the West became stalemated and shifted sometimes only in terms of yards over months on end. Rats in the no-man’sland between the heavily fortified trenches became as large as cats and dogs from feasting on the dead and wounded who had to be left where they lay. There was chemical warfare, so horrible a means of waging war that it has been condemned and outlawed as battlefield ordinance among civilized nations ever since. All of these gruesome details, meanwhile, were communicated willy-nilly and nearly instantaneously by a popular press that had become a major competitive industry in the last part of the 19th century and, so, like the 24-hour

cable news channels of our own time, required reams of lurid copy and appropriately graphic photographs of the war in order to sell newspapers. In one final, capping irony, when the war finally ended after more than four years, on November 11, 1918, it was not in any emphatic victory for one side or the other, but in an armistice, a truce of sorts (although Germany would be penalized with reparations and other territorial and economic sanctions that eventually would lead to a renewal of hostilities a mere 20 years later in what history now knows as World War II). Fussell summarized all these results and their impact on ways of thinking in the remainder of the 20th century in this manner: “there seems to be one dominating force of modern understanding; . . . it is essentially ironic; and . . . it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.” From start to finish, the war had had as devastating an effect on literary artists and their hope and belief in the future as on any other members of the communities affected by it. In a letter composed shortly after Great Britain’s entry into the war in August 1914, the American novelist Henry James, who had been residing in England for most of his adult life, spoke for the dashed hopes of many when he wrote that “the plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness . . . gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be . . . gradually bettering.” Ultimately, he declared the prospects of the cultural and social disaster that the war was forecasting for Europe to be “too tragic for any words.” Though already in his 70s, James was so moved by the cataclysmic struggle that then ensued as the result of Britain and the rest of “civilized” Europe’s waging total war that, to signal his moral support for the British cause in the conflict, he became, and, in 1915, died, a British subject. Eliot, for his own part, was a man young enough for military service in a world where young men who were not supporting the war effort in some manner or another were becoming more and more scarce commodities on the so-called home front. He had been in London more or less permanently since the summer of 1914 as an Oxford student

Waste Land, The and later a figure on the London literary scene, part-time Latin teacher, and bank clerk, but he had remained a U.S. citizen, and the United States was a neutral power for most of the war years. (Late in 1918, Eliot would try to enlist for service with the U.S. armed forces but ran into so much red tape that he abandoned the effort.) Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that he was personally affected by an epic conflict that was laying waste his own generation. Lost to the future would be such brilliant and promising young thinkers, artists, and poets as T. E. Hulme, Henri GaudierBrzeska, and Wilfrid Owen. In December 1917, as the war stretched into its fourth year and the United States had by then been dragged into the European conflict as well, Eliot could comment in a letter to his father on how much the lives of everyone around him, himself included, had been “so swallowed up in the one great tragedy that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant.” Eliot concluded the thought by remarking nevertheless that he had “a lot of things to write about if the time ever comes when people will attend to them,” but that does not mean that wartime was not otherwise a time for poetry and for poetic renewal. If World War I was a war that depoeticized warfare by deromanticizing it, it was nonetheless not a war that did not produce poetry—but it was a changed poetry, one that was capable of rendering the paradoxes and ironies of a human and cultural tragedy of colossal proportions in terms of its impact on individuals rather than on nations. The most startling feature of the war, if that could be summarized in a single word, was in fact its waste—of time, of resources, of human energy, of life itself—young life, promising life, hopeful life. Every war exposes warfare as a terrible way to conduct human affairs. World War I, however, did this in a way that those who were left to survey the wreckage of a civilization that the war had left behind found to be intolerable and disgraceful. One of the most immediate and devastating results was that traditional sources of authority and stability, the state and the military, but particularly the remnants of the ancient European aristocracy, were totally discredited. Of the six great European

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powers that waged the war (seven if the Ottoman Turkish Empire is included), three suffered irreparable fissures in their traditional power structures. The longtime hereditary rulers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were sent packing. The old order had vividly, demonstrably, finally changed, even if it had nearly brought the whole precarious structure of civilized society down with it. In the aftermath of such a stunningly unanticipated changing of the guard, modernism, with its emphasis on making the arts new, was none too surprised to find that it had been waiting in the wings since the turn of the century if not earlier and was more than ready to tackle the task of chronicling this new moment in European, perhaps even human history. No one will deny that Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem based on the ancient myth of a wounded king and a blasted land that is seeking a questing hero who will heal its deadly illness, holds an honored and most telling place in that chronicle. The Immediate Sources The Waste Land is done a serious disservice, however, if it is treated as only or even primarily being a poem about or in response to the war that had just ended in Europe. Eliot was always careful to distinguish between the work and the biographical, social, and historical sources that produced it, not to obfuscate matters but for the sake of emphasizing that a poem is not second-rate or even secondtier autobiography or journalism or history but is itself a species of human record, human knowing of an entirely different order. Perhaps no other form of human communication, and there are many, is so difficult to understand and accept in terms of itself and itself alone. That is an attitude, a prejudice, that Eliot sought to ameliorate if not overturn in the best of his critical commentaries, yet he has often been the poet most associated with autobiographical or documentary readings, perhaps for the very reason that his poetry, as poetry, is a difficult nut to crack to this day. (The poetry of The Waste Land provides the best example of that very difficulty and complexity.) Another case in point is Eliot’s mental and emotional condition at the time of The Waste Land’s composition. While it would be foolhardy to deny

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that the horrors and fears generated by four years of unceasing warfare found their way into aspects of the tone and texture of the poetry of The Waste Land, those effects are as blended with the effects of other untold experiences, both conscious and unconscious, so that to try to disentangle or identify particular ones would be equally foolhardy. Nevertheless, legend has it that Eliot was either undergoing treatment for or actually having a mental breakdown at a psychiatric clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the fall of 1921, during the period that he was writing The Waste Land. The fact is that the poem was hardly composed at one sitting or even several. It combines as many if not more bits and pieces from earlier, often discarded poetic treatments by Eliot himself, written at scattered times in his life, as from other poets. A significant passage from early on in “The Burial of the Dead,” the first part of The Waste Land, for example, can be found virtually verbatim in “The Death of Saint Narcissus,” a poem that was set in galleys for the October 1915 issue of Poetry but was never published. Nearly the entire text of the fourth part, “Death by Water,” meanwhile, is taken from a poem of Eliot’s, “Dans le Restaurant,” that was published in the Little Review in October 1916. These lines cannot be said to be verbatim transcription, however, because the Eliot original is written in French. Furthermore, the nightmarish or hallucinatory and always fragmentary qualities of the poetry of The Waste Land, qualities that seem to support or at least suggest the view that they are either the results of or meant to mimic an unstable state of mind, can be found in Eliot’s finished poems from as early as the “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” written in 1911, all the way up to “Gerontion,” composed as late as 1919. Pound’s severe editing out of some of Eliot’s original sections of the poem also had the effect of making the finished text seem far more fragmentary than Eliot’s initial design would have indicated. There was much more detailed narrative description in the manuscript that Pound worked from, a draft that began with a long episode of youthful revelers enjoying a night on the town in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reminiscent of Joyce’s famous Nighttown

sequence in Ulysses. Another section, involving the typist and her erstwhile lover, was far longer, too, in keeping with the source after which it was modeled, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. There was, as a consequence, a more logical flow to the poetry and poem both than could ever be guessed at from the poem that was finally published. Perhaps equally as important are the biographical data, however. Eliot’s nerves were often if not always bad under the stress of his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood and her own ill health; he also suffered from the weakening effects of his own never sturdy physical constitution, which made him prone to chronic but never serious illnesses. In September 1921, a physician had recommended a period of rest and recuperation as treatment for headaches that Eliot was suffering (there had just been six months of drought in London). However, when Eliot applied to his employers, Lloyds Bank, for an extended vacation so that he might avail himself of such medical rest, the paperwork that his supervisors subsequently filed to justify his absence from work identified the reason for the three-month leave as a “nervous breakdown.” Finally, although Eliot, following a month on the Kent coast at Margate, initially planned to sojourn for the remaining two months of his leave in a country cottage belonging to Lady ROTHERMERE, who was underwriting the Criterion, at the last moment OTTOLINE MORRELL prevailed upon him to go instead to Lausanne and a clinic run there by a Dr. Vittoz, who had had some success with treating people who were emotionally run down, among them Lady Ottoline herself and Julian Huxley, brother of the novelist Aldous. While the foregoing depiction of how Eliot came to be in treatment at a psychiatric clinic in Lausanne while he was composing the better part of The Waste Land hardly constitutes a comedy of errors, neither does it suggest that Eliot had suffered anything even remotely resembling a mental breakdown. The hints with which The Waste Land opens of people visiting one of those European health resorts or spas frequented by members of the leisure class further underscore what his time in Lausanne must have seemed like for him. In resorting in this way to biographical information to clarify poetic

Waste Land, The detail, it is important to remember that the issue is not whether biography and current events can shape poetic output but whether they do anything more than that, thereby giving the poetry all its purpose and meaning. Where does the life and its attendant experiences leave off and the poetry, which is what must matter, begin? Eliot was acutely aware of this conundrum. At just about the same time that the aftermath of the war was sinking in on both public life and private mentalities, Eliot, in 1919, was penning the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he was forcefully arguing for the necessary separation between, as he put it, the person who suffers and the mind that creates. Eliot’s aim in proposing as much was not to deny that the poet writes out of personal experience—what more does anyone have?—but that creative processes transform that personal experience into something else altogether, much as digestive processes transform food into nutrients that then become muscle and blood cells. To that notion that there is not a direct relationship between poets’ personal experiences and the poetry that they write could be added a corollary requiring a like separation between the times and the literary works that emerge from them. For Eliot, however, there is a greater consideration at hand than the transformative powers of art, and that is its transcendent qualities. If art only comments on the times that produce it, then it cannot possibly continue to serve as commentary on enduring or permanent aspects of human experience, which it clearly does. Any reader who has ever confronted a work of literature from the past without any information other than the text itself knows this simple fact well. True, there may be a subsequent desire on a reader’s part to learn about the times or people or culture that produced the text as a result, and having that subsidiary information to begin with may make for an entirely different reading experience— but neither is a necessary condition or conclusion, and someone of Eliot’s way of thinking would argue that everyone’s reading experience, as well as every reading, is different in any case. It is this transcendent aspect of poetry that had apparently been of critical interest to Eliot himself

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from his earliest attempts at poetic composition. That a young descendent of Puritan American stock could find not only inspiration but a voice and poetic techniques in the French symbolists, not to mention a 13th-century Italian adherent of Roman CATHOLICISM, the poet Dante, as Eliot indeed did, speaks reams in favor of his having cultivated from the start an approach toward literature that stressed its timelessness, but not at the expense of its power as art. At the very least, his own wide literary interests would have been living proof to him that there was something in the poetic act that superseded cultures and even language systems, providing it with an essential capability to speak with fresh impact over great passages of both time and geographic distance and despite barriers of language and culture. It was as if for him and his methods of composition, literature formed a present and living whole in which all the works of all the ages were somehow contiguous with each other, shaped by and shaping one and the other. Nor is that a very far-fetched proposition. If people are capable of accepting that there are only six degrees of separation between any two human beings chosen at random from out of the billions who are alive at any one moment, how much more reasonable it is to accept the idea that all works of the imagination, of which there are so many less, affect and are affected by each other. In any event, that had become by the time of the publication of The Waste Land the hallmark of Eliot’s style. The easy commerce in his texts among original lines of verse and both open and veiled allusions to the works of others, virtually always without attribution and never with any sort of advanced warning, bespeaks this attitude toward the uses and the presence of both past and present voices in his work. Nor was he alone in this. For just one outstanding example, the poetry of Ezra Pound also depended for its challenging effectiveness on his sprinkling the words and phrases of other poets, often in their original, non-English form, liberally among his own. Indeed, while The Waste Land is not an easy text and does not even lie well on the page, what with its irregular stanzaic patterns and line lengths, not to mention frequent appearances of whole lines of

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verse, often consecutively, in languages other than English, no one who had been following Eliot’s poetry to this time would have been particularly struck by his methodology. (This time he even provided notes, when he published the work in book form.) Criticism has come to call this methodology intertextuality, referring to the processes of cultural and generic cross-pollination that have taken place among texts very likely from the beginnings of the use and easy dissemination of the written word. Virgil’s great epic the Aeneid is founded on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and anyone familiar with either text would know that, but someone who was not familiar with Homer would not hardly miss Virgil’s essential points. The author does not have to be conscious of his or her borrowings, however, any more than a reader does. The only difference that a poet like Eliot, and poetry like Eliot’s, makes is that, because Eliot exposes his allusions, the reader is made conscious from the outset that literature is the product of a continuous human dialogue whose terms can crop up in the unlikeliest of places and often without either recognition or attribution on the author’s or reader’s part. If the mind is like a mirror, it is important to remember that a mirror has no memory. There is no before and after, earlier and later. The whole of the past is a simultaneous experience for anyone who knows it by the bits and pieces by which each of us know it as it rises, quite frequently totally unbidden, to the surface of the reflective mind. Into the structure of The Waste Land, then, and onto its complicated surface detail, Eliot weaves centuries, millennia, of that mirror’s magic sights. His trick is that he lets his readers know that he is doing this, so that along with him, or at least along with the poem’s unnamed and unintroduced protagonist, Eliot’s readers share the quest that the poetry embodies, a quest, appropriately enough, for meaning on a stormy sea of signifiers (although, in keeping with The Waste Land’s ruling metaphor of cultural drought, it would be more like a desert sandstorm). Poetry’s aim is to quicken not the intellect, but the imagination, to make it make connections that cannot otherwise be easily spelled out, as it were. The device that Eliot has consistently

used to achieve that end is the literary allusion. The Waste Land is no exception. Throughout his critical career, Eliot maintained that nothing should be regarded as a substitute for engaging the poem, as poetry, in its own terms. The commentators and readers of poetry in general and of Eliot’s poetry in particular who seem adamant in insisting that his poetry is little more than veiled autobiography may not be missing the point, but they are most certainly missing the poetry. The danger is in imagining that identifying a source in The Waste Land constitutes an understanding of the verse or verses as they appear in that poem. It would be wise to recall Eliot’s own justification, from “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” for having an awareness of voices of the past. It is in the voices of the present that the past speaks most clearly, and that to the only audience that ever can matter, the living. Anything more is guesswork, and anything less is severely restricted by the endless possibilities for other interpretations that offer themselves even as one meaning or interpretation is emerging. The Epigraph Anyone familiar with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” knows that that poem’s unattributed epigraph, in the original Italian, from Dante’s Divine Comedy is far more than mere window dressing, a showing off of the poet’s erudition. Once identified, contextualized, and translated, Guido da Montefeltro’s words about his condition for speaking freely and truly set the tone for a poem in which another suffering soul, in this case, J. Alfred Prufrock, disburdens himself of the pains of a lifetime of being a wallflower. Other examples of the importance of the epigraph to the substance of an Eliot poem abound, but “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” with its unattributed epigraph in the original Greek, provides for present purposes one more telling illustration of the epigraph’s importance to an appreciation of the complexities of meaning that Eliot weaves into even a relatively minor work. How else to parallel the shallowness of Sweeney’s moral fiber than to remind readers, once they know that the source of that poem’s epigraph is Aeschylus’s ancient trag-

Waste Land, The edy, the Agamemnon, of how equally shallow were the self-serving motives of Agamemnon for killing his own flesh and blood, his daughter Iphigenia, so that the fleet that he commanded might set sail to lay waste the fabulous city of Troy, all to his own greater glory and wealth? How self-servingly shallow, too, were the motives of his wife, Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s first cousin, who then took revenge by killing the Greek leader virtually at his doorstep upon his triumphant return from that war some 10 long years later. And so his cry, “I am struck within by a mortal blow,” echoes across the centuries by virtue of Eliot’s giving the words a place and a meaning in a thoroughly modern context in the epigraph to his poem “Sweeney among the Nightingales.” If the epigraph matters as much in poems that are otherwise reasonably self-sustaining poetic compositions, how much more it must matter in a poem such as The Waste Land, whose poetry is largely composed quite openly of the poetry of others, with its epigraph in Greek and Latin. The passage, in Latin and Greek, contains a report of what the Cumaean Sibyl is reputed to have said to a group of boys who were taunting her. Translated, it reads: “For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a bottle, and when the boys said to her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’ ” The Sibyl was originally a single Greek oracle, an elderly woman who wrote her prophecies in ecstatic trances and then would toss to the seeker the leaves on which they were written. It would be up to the seeker, then, to make sense of the prophecy. The Cumaean Sibyl was a later but no less celebrated manifestation of this ancient Greek original. In one of the most famous stories about the Sibyl of Cumae, a Greek settlement near Naples in the south of Italy, she offered the last Roman king a series of nine books containing prophecies regarding Rome, destroying each succeeding one the longer he refused to meet her price, until only three were left. These remained in Rome, in the temple to Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, well into imperial times. A reader who goes on to discover that The Waste Land, too, deals with a seeker, the Grail quester, and has another famous Greek soothsayer, Tiresias,

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the blind seer of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, in its pages, has every right to feel that he or she is on to something. Oedipus, after all, is himself a seeker after the truth, even if he tragically misreads the significance of the Delphic oracle’s prediction that he will murder his father and have children by his own mother, and, like the seeker who must unravel the Sibyl’s tangled messages, he is a solver of riddles to boot, having solved the riddle of the Theban Sphinx. All this information in hand, any reader must feel quite justified in imagining that this epigraph sets just the right tone of a dire seriousness for the theme of the poem to come. The epigraph’s appropriateness in this regard is further underscored if the reader focuses immediately on the Sibyl’s withering reply to the boys’ taunts: “I want to die.” After all, if a quest is one of The Waste Land’s themes, so, apparently, is the poem’s equally heavy attention to the futility of action and to the range and depth of human desire as well, all of which themes the Sibyl’s reply seems to endorse. The only problem is that the epigraph that underscores such potential meanings can just as nimbly undercut them. The further information, for example, that the source text for the epigraph is a first-century A.D. Roman social satire, the Satyricon, may undermine a reader’s confidence in the profundity of the epigraph and faith in Eliot’s own intentions for it. Indeed, Eliot is as liable to weave, and is capable of weaving, as tangled a web of potential meanings as any the Sibyl ever has, as anyone who knew the comings and goings of seriousness and frivolity in his poetry would have been well aware by the time of The Waste Land’s publication. If the content of the epigraph sounds profound, the knowledge that the context is a work of satire, traditionally not regarded as serious literature, makes that profundity immediately suspect. Not only is the epigraph’s source a satire rather than a work of serious literature, but the satire’s title, Satyricon, with its reference to those notorious sexual libertines, the half-men, half-goat satyrs, does not bode well, either, for its being a sober commentary on seeking wisdom and overcoming desire in the midst of life’s vanity and futility. Indeed, the Roman source in question is attributed to Petronius, a wealthy Roman whose main claim

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to historical fame is that he was the director of revels for the notoriously decadent emperor, Nero, whose sexual and other outrageous exploits remain legendary. Petronius himself led a richly comfortable life as a favorite of the decadent emperor but died a suicide (having slit his wrists, he then went on to regale his friends with witty talk as he slowly bled to death) after he had been falsely accused of conspiring against Nero. About the only substantiated link, such as it is, between Petronius and the passage that Eliot uses as the epigraph to The Waste Land is that Petronius happened to have died at Cumae. Eliot’s readers, the more they come to know of this epigraph, have every right to wonder if they are not being put on, not just by its putative author, Petronius, but by Eliot as well. An Eliot reader’s head ought by now to be spinning, as is often the case of encounters with any Eliot poem written during the first decade and more of his poetic career. The story of this particular epigraph, however, does not end even on this note of compounded double meanings of insidious intent. Left for the curious reader is the task if not obligation of finally discovering that, in that allimportant textual area, context, the Sibyl’s withering words to those nasty boys are related in yet another person’s first-person account—confusing, but not unintentionally so. That latter person, Trimalchio, is being quoted by Encolpius, a man whose name in Latin pretty much means “encrotched” and who is himself the Satyricon’s fictitious narrator of a work by an author about whom little is otherwise known (since no one is certain that its author actually was Petronius, after all). It may seem by now as if Eliot’s epigraph is a sort of literary black hole, absorbing all meaning whatsoever into its darkening bowels, but there are yet further depths to plumb. Words are not spoken in isolation from events, after all, and that is the case with Trimalchio’s eyewitness report about the Cumaean Sibyl. A very wealthy man who some think may have been modeled somewhat on Nero himself, Trimalchio tells his tale as he regales his guests, Encolpius among them, at a fabulous dinner party. The party had begun with Trimalchio’s slaves carrying in a huge pig that was then disemboweled

right in front of the assembled guests, who were sent flying as the guts came bursting out. But the joke was all on them, for the “guts” turned out to be cooked sausages. Having fooled his guests to their own delight, it is then that Trimalchio tells them stories of his various other exploits, including the story about seeing the ancient Sibyl, so withered by age that she could fit inside a jug, telling the boys that she wished only for death. What else is anyone to think except that this Trimalchio, famously generous host though he may be, is nothing more than a practical joker and teller of tall tales, among whose repertoire is this tale of his having seen the Cumaean Sibyl “with my own eyes”? All is not lost, however, for the epigraph still, ironically enough, comes full circle, reminding the reader of the ancient wisdom that, in the midst of our revels, there is death. The story of the Sibyl hanging in a bottle and wishing only for death is not a happy one, after all, whether it is a true one or not. Furthermore, while Trimalchio’s report is in Latin, the words of the boys and of the Sibyl that he is reporting are in Greek. These words introduce a multilingual poem (seven distinct languages in a variety of dialects are cited directly within it) written some 2,000 years later for an audience that speaks English, itself a language partly derived from Latin and ancient Greek. In simple terms, by the time a reader has even begun to try to unravel the substance of the Sibyl’s “meaning” when she says, “I want to die,” and then further attempts to apply that substance to the substance of the text, that reader has already had linguistic instincts and capacities exploited and left unsettled, in very much the same manner in which poetry exploits a reader’s verbal equilibrium and assumptions long before that same reader happily, almost desperately, can attach a meaning to the experience. This is precisely the effect Eliot wishes to have the epigraph achieve: The illusion of meaty meaning in the Sibyl’s words distracts us from the immediate work of the epigraph as a play on the veracity of firsthand observation, particularly as the artist utilizes the device—and that understanding can itself be arrived at only by one’s having complete access not only to understanding the lan-

Waste Land, The guages of the epigraph in the first place but also to understanding the context of the words as well. These kinds of complexities, however, serve a purpose for Eliot and for the complexities of the poem. It is possible, in fact, to read the epigraph not for the specific detail of its content as much as for taking it as a model, a miniature exemplar, of how the text of the poem is to be read. This idea is borne out by the fact that Eliot originally intended to use for the poem’s epigraph a passage from Joseph Conrad’s short novel, Heart of Darkness. In that novel, an anonymous narrator (like Encolpius in the Satyricon) tells the reader what Marlow, a seaman, told him about Kurtz, a fabled ivory trader who apparently went mad in the depths of jungle along the Congo in Africa. So, then, the epigraph from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that Eliot had originally intended for the poem shares with the passage from the Satyricon nothing more than the fact that it too is a report (in this case thrice removed, once by Marlow, a sort of Trimalchio in this case, and then by the anonymous narrator of the Conrad story, and finally by Conrad) of Kurtz’s last words, which would be the equivalent of what Trimalchio reported the Sibyl to have said: “Did he [Kurtz] live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—‘The horror! the horror!’ ” The reader is left to imagine that those were Kurtz’s last words, for they seem to be very much in keeping with the guilt that the reader is also left to imagine that Kurtz must have been suffering as he lay dying. But the reader is only allowed to imagine what Marlow has made of it, and even Marlow’s recollection is filtered through a retelling by Conrad’s anonymous narrator. Furthermore, Kurtz’s cry is reported as being “no more than a breath.” Could Conrad, the fiction’s constructer, be asking us to imagine that it was Kurtz’s breath suspiring, not the words “the horror, the horror,” that Marlow heard, who heard, like all humans do, only generally what he expected to hear, not necessarily what was to be heard?

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No one can speak for Conrad’s intentions, of course, any more than anyone can speak for Trimalchio’s, let alone Encolpius’s, let alone Petronius’s, let alone Eliot’s. Still, it seems that, the similarities between the Conrad and Petronius epigraphs being as structural as they are thematic, the poet of The Waste Land wants his readers to think about the structure as much as about the substance of the statements in both cases. While the reader/listener’s instinct is to take any report at face value, the poet seems to be demonstrating with both choices for epigraph how it is impossible to know another person’s words firsthand, let alone in context, let alone as meaning. And yet in literary experiences, readers foremost derive some species of meaning from the words before they ever consider any other purpose for their particular arrangement. So much as a reader or listener can be tricked into assuming meaning where no clearly defined or intended meaning exists, Eliot would say, so much does this drive for meaning master the reader, who is then rendered liable to being tricked continuously, at least as he or she reads an Eliot poem, particularly The Waste Land. In his poetry, Eliot simply uses the neutral territory of language in action (and often other people’s language) to prove as much to the reader, should he or she care to take notice. The fact is that a reader is drawn toward the meaning toward which the artist wishes to draw the reader, but that is not necessarily the meaning the poet is himself aiming to achieve or exploit. Like all art forms, after all, poetry works on the reader before that person can determine whether the poem is enjoyable, let alone whether it is intelligible. Eliot the poet/critic would later say, in The Use of Poetry, that the poet puts meaning into his poetry in much the same way that the burglar puts out a bit of meat for the guard dog, and that is to distract the reader while the poem does its “real work” on him or her. It is no accident certainly that this analogy of Eliot’s equates meaning with meat, for it would be like Eliot to play with the popular notion that meaning is the muscle of poetry to which technique and structure are merely genetic code and circulatory system. Physiologically speaking, muscle is vital but not primary. So with meaning in poetry, in Eliot’s view, who goes on to say that there are

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still poets who do not even care that much for meaning and who become instead “impatient of this ‘meaning’ which seems superfluous, and perceive possibilities of intensity through its elimination.” One must wonder what that “real work” that Eliot speaks of might be, and it would not be too far amiss to suggest that it is poetry’s capacity to demonstrate vividly how meaning is arrived at, whatever the meaning might be, rather than to express a particular meaning to the exclusion of any other. As much is illustrated in the curious case of the poem’s original title. This information became widely known in 1971, when the poet’s widow, Valerie Eliot, published the original manuscript of The Waste Land, as it had been considerably edited and revised by the poet’s then-wife, Vivien, and his friend and literary confidante, the fellow expatriated American poet, Ezra Pound. After the poem’s publication, Eliot had sent the manuscript, in October 1922, as a gift to John Quinn, a New York businessman, in recognition of Quinn’s continuing patronage and support of Eliot on the New York publishing scene. On Quinn’s death in July 1924, this fascinating piece of 20th-century literary history passed into relative obscurity until October 1968 when the New York Public Library, which had acquired the manuscript from a grandniece of Quinn’s, made public its existence. Along with providing details such as, for example, Eliot’s initial plan to use the passage from Heart of Darkness for his epigraph (a plan that Pound talked him out of, leading Eliot to substitute the present epigraph from Petronius), Valerie Eliot’s later scholarly reproduction of the lost manuscript in book form was a genuine publishing event that provided scholars with a veritable treasure trove of new information, including the information that the poem was first titled He Do the Police in Different Voices. Fortunately, Valerie Eliot’s studious notes provided scholars with the precise source for such a quaint title, which, like so much else in a typical Eliot poem, turned out to be a literary allusion. The sentence comes from Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend and is spoken by one character, an impoverished widow, about a young boy whom she has adopted. In describing how much of a joy the boy, Sloppy, has become for her, she says:

“You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.” In essence, she is saying that Sloppy reads her the police report section of the newspaper, and when he does, he changes his voice to characterize each of the different individuals being quoted by the reporter in each news item. The idea, a fairly simple one, put Eliot scholars into high gear competing with each other in using this information as if it were a secret formula by which they could now unravel the complexities of one of the most enigmatic poems ever written. After all, and not surprisingly, there were connections among the line from Dickens, the novel itself, and the poem (and does not Eliot, in the poem, urge his readers not to be like his speaker who can “connect nothing with nothing”?). For one thing, then, The Waste Land, with its occasional emphasis on the forlorn and frustrated lives of the lower classes—Madam Sosostris and the young man carbuncular, Lil and Albert and the typist home at teatime—gives his readers a sort of police report world where people suffer from and with each other over their modest peccadilloes. (And in the earliest versions of the poem, before Pound severely edited the text back, there was much, much more of that kind of material.) Furthermore, for all that they are classical myths, the stories of rapes and mutilations and murders that fill the pages of Sophocles and Ovid are also the stuff of police reports, such as they are. Like Sloppy, then, The Waste Land as well does “the Police in different voices.” Furthermore, Our Mutual Friend has an ostensible theme that also resonates with the ostensible theme of The Waste Land, that is, finding riches in the debris of the past. For at the center of the conflict in Our Mutual Friend is the question of who will inherit mounds of ashes left behind by a man who has been a trash collector all his life— the thought being, no one knew what incredible treasures he or she might find by sifting through the rubbish. Once these connections between Our Mutual Friend and The Waste Land were made public in the flurry of reviews that had followed the publication of Valerie Eliot’s work, they seemed so obvious that it was hard for many to imagine that The

Waste Land, The Waste Land had not finally been deciphered. However, such euphoria did not last very long. If any scholarly career was eventually made by this particular critical escapade, it was made by the scholar who cried out, “Hold on, now!” To imagine that Eliot intended The Waste Land to do and to mean just this and just that because Our Mutual Friend included just this and just that was no less imagining, no less speculating, no less second-guessing. Thus ended the case of just what could be learned from the fact that Eliot had originally planned to call the poem He Do the Police in Different Voices. This is a good lesson for any reader of The Waste Land to keep in mind as he or she ventures into the poem: To discover a source is not to discover a meaning. It may help circumscribe the possibilities for how far a meaning may be extended, but even then, someone else, not armed with the same source material, is no less likely to discover meanings as well. Sources, in other words, may have meant a great deal to the author and may continue to be meaningful experiences for the scholar to explore and perhaps exploit, but the less a reader is mindful of them, the more the poem itself becomes the thing itself, as it should be. What, then, the frustrated student of Eliot’s first truly major work and one of the major literary achievements in English of the 20th century is liable to ask, is the purpose of all those source signposts that Eliot sprinkles liberally, to say the least, throughout his famously difficult text. Why make such a point of the poem’s being a combining of sources if to know the sources is not the point? But does Eliot in fact isolate each source, or does he assimilate them all into the far greater whole called The Waste Land, which is its own work with its own purposes? The fact of the matter is that Eliot is not hanging wallpaper. Eliot is a poet who has blended all these various sources and others never to be known so well into a unique creation of his own, its own, that scholars are, to this day, still finding new sources for those old lines. What else should that tell the frustrated Eliot scholar but that the sources are many things, the poem but one? When in doubt, stick to the poem and the poetry that it has made into its own self, whatever the original source may have been.

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That said, there is still one other item of front matter to be considered, and that is the dedication to Ezra Pound. It too has a story, and that story will lead the reader to still another source, in this case a major one for Eliot—Dante. The Dedication and Eliot’s Use of Dante The dedication to The Waste Land is made to Ezra Pound, the American poet who had befriended the younger Eliot almost from the time of the latter’s arrival in London in 1914 and who had taken it on himself to help foster Eliot’s burgeoning literary career. Pound’s editorial advice had a great deal to do with the final shape of The Waste Land as a completed poetic composition. It should not be too surprising, then, to discover that, in the dedication, Eliot praises his mentor Pound by calling him “the better maker.” No doubt, the finest compliment that one craftsman can pay another—and poets, like any other artists, are foremost craftsmen—is that the other is better at what they both do. As a poet and critic, not only was Pound an individual to whom Eliot turned constantly with early drafts of poems such as the quatrains, for example, and most assuredly with the original draft of The Waste Land, seeking his response and the benefit of his editorial judgment and acumen, but Pound’s was also a forceful and authoritative personality. His advice, no doubt, was neither given nor taken lightly. Not only that, but Eliot applied Pound’s advice with a liberal hand. Entire sections of The Waste Land as Eliot had initially conceived the poem were scrapped at Pound’s suggestion, and the history of the two poets’ editorial collaboration remains an interesting chapter in textual criticism. So, then, whatever other motives may have compelled Eliot to make the comparison, it seems fitting for Eliot to have praised his friend and to have acknowledged his contribution by not merely dedicating The Waste Land to Pound, but by declaring him to be the better poet, or at least craftsman, as well. The only problem is that the dedication, which is in Italian, il miglior fabbro, is itself a literary allusion, in this case to Dante’s Purgatorio, the second part of his great masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Dante is one of those poets whom Eliot himself has

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identified as being among his literary models from his undergraduate days, and, for just one outstanding example of Eliot’s admiration for Dante, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has for its unattributed epigraph a passage from Dante’s Inferno, the first part of the Comedy. Once more, then, it should come as no surprise that, in a poem in which Eliot alludes to almost every major literary tradition and/or master up to his day (the list is long but includes, in addition to Dante, Sophocles, Ovid, Shakespeare, and CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, to give some brief sense here of its breadth and scope), Eliot should use the words of a master such as Dante to compliment that living poet, Pound, whom he apparently regards as his own master. Another problem is, however, that Eliot’s use of Dante in The Waste Land does not stop there. Indeed, although disguised innocuously as nothing more than an erudite and appropriately accurate dedication to a fellow poet, the dedication, once it is put in the larger context of Eliot’s use of Dante in the total poem, serves a much broader thematic purpose. Maybe it is just the waste-not, want-not Yankee frugality of Eliot’s New England forebearers that made Eliot give his dedication a double purpose, but it is far more likely that it is merely another way for Eliot to illustrate, and to drive home, The Waste Land’s essential point: that there is nothing in a poem or on the page that does not contribute to what readers call, for lack of a better word, that elusive commodity known as “meaning.” To appreciate just how much even the dedication to The Waste Land, by virtue of its allusion to Dante, contributes to that poem’s meaning, it will first be necessary to locate the words of the dedication from Dante, “il miglior fabbro,” in the Dante poem. As already mentioned, the phrase comes from Dante’s Purgatorio and is spoken to Dante by Guido Guinizzelli, whom he encounters in canto 26 of the Purgatorio, where Guido is suffering in purgative or refining, as opposed to infernal or damning, fires to be cleansed of the sin of a bestial carnality. When Guido inquires why Dante is apparently an admirer of his, Dante tells Guido that he admires him for his “sweet verses” that will be treasured “as long as modern usage endures.” It is at that moment

that Guido declines the compliment, however, and points out to Dante another poet suffering in the same fires for sins of carnality, telling Dante that that one was “was a better craftsman [miglior fabbro] in the mother tongue.” The poet so honored by Dante through Guido’s compliment is none other than Arnaut Daniel, the greatest of the 13th-century Provençal troubadors, on whose work Dante had modeled his own love poetry. Furthermore, Arnaut Daniel was a poet whom Pound, in the earliest phases of his own career as both a language scholar and poet, had also studied and translated. Eliot puts himself in the dedication in the position of both Guido and, by extension, Dante, then, by not only praising Pound as the better modern poet but by comparing him favorably to Pound’s, and Dante’s, own poetic idol, Arnaut Daniel. If Eliot’s use of Dante in The Waste Land stopped there, the dedication would be a rich and multilayered enough literary tribute from one poet to another, but things do not stop there by any means. In fact, they instead come full circle. To understand and appreciate, however, exactly how they do that, it is necessary to map out, quite literally, the subsequent uses that Eliot makes of Dante in The Waste Land. The analogy to a map is a fitting one, inasmuch as both The Divine Comedy and The Waste Land are spatial in concept, each depending for its structural integrity in large part on its being designed as the representation of a journey or quest. In Dante’s case, it is a quest for spiritual enlightenment and eternal salvation within the rubrics of an orthodox, Western Christian theology. In Eliot’s, it is a quest for meaning within the disorienting chaos resulting from the counterclaims of tradition and modernity in the secular wasteland of post-Christian Europe. In either case, for the metaphor of the quest to be convincing, it must make its passage through the physical realities of a self-defined space, a geography, as it were, even if that space is fictional in its conceptualization, as much as through the lines of verse on the page. In Dante’s case, his protagonist, whom he portrays as himself at the midpoint in his life, actually traverses the environs of the pit that is hell and then mounts the physical mountain that is purga-

Waste Land, The tory. In Eliot’s case, his protagonist, who manifests himself largely as the speaker that comments from time to time on the flow of the action, must traverse a psychological wasteland, a desert of the mind and soul that is no less real a geographical space simply because it cannot be found on any map. Appropriately, then, the first allusion to Dante comes reasonably early in The Waste Land, near the close of the first part, “The Burial of the Dead,” and from a point in the Dante text relatively near, as well, to the beginning not only of that lengthy poem but of the first, critical steps of Dante’s journey of discovery, his descent into the Inferno. Though these first two allusions to Dante in Eliot’s text come back to back, lines 63 and 64 in the first section of The Waste Land, they are separated by nearly the length of a canto in Dante (approximately 150 lines). In The Waste Land, the immediate context is the moment at which, subsumed by the “brown fog of a winter dawn,” the speaker makes his way over London Bridge with a crowd of other early morning office workers and such. (Though this famous bridge has long since been replaced, its counterpart leads across the Thames into the City of London proper, not only the site of the original Roman settlement but the present-day commercial, financial, and administrative center of the metropolis. Not far from the bridge’s terminus in the city, for example, was the Exchange as well as the offices of Lloyds Bank, where Eliot was employed at the time.) To depict this crowd of the nameless, faceless bureaucratic and clerical types who have come to be the heirs of city directors, as Eliot will allude to them later in the poem, he draws on two images from Dante’s Inferno. The first occurs in Dante’s Inferno, canto III, lines 55–57, not long, that is, after Dante has passed through the infernal portal with the ominous injunction, “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The first sinners he sees are a swarm of faceless, nameless humanity. These are the Opportunists, those who in life had been neither hot nor cold so that in death heaven will not take them and hell does not want them. There are so many of them that Dante says “ch’io non avrei mai creduto / che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta” (“I would never have believed / that death would have undone so many of them”), a sentiment that Eliot

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echoes in line 63 of The Waste Land: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Line 64 echoes the moment shortly later in the Inferno, canto IV, lines 25–27, when Dante stands at the edge of the precipice overhanging the immense abyss that is hell. At that moment he says, “Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, / non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri, / che l’aura eternal facevan tremare” (“There, according to what could be heard, / there was not weeping but sighs / that made the eternal air tremble”). Eliot, according to his own notes, paraphrases the sentiments of that moment in the Inferno with his own observation that “sighs short and infrequent” were being exhaled by the crowd flowing over London Bridge. These lines from early on in beginning cantos of the Inferno are set as markers along the way and come near the beginning, too, of Eliot’s speaker’s own journey through his personal, modernist Inferno, The Waste Land. The next allusion to Dante comes from near the beginning of the Purgatorio, the middle section of Dante’s journey, at the end of canto V, in line 133. In Eliot, meanwhile, it falls at the end of the middle section of The Waste Land, “The Fire Sermon.” “The Fire Sermon,” of the five sections of The Waste Land, is the most explicit about the vagaries of human desire, especially and explicitly sexual desire. At the point in this section where the allusion to Dante occurs, the reader encounters quoted dialogue, apparently of a young woman, who is relating how she was born at Highbury but “undone”—that is, sexually compromised by a young man—in a canoe on the Thames between Richmond and Kew: “Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me.” According to Eliot’s notes, this line and a half of verse echoes a passage in the Purgatorio, where a woman, who identifies herself as “la Pia,” which may be her name or an attribute (in Italian, it would mean “the pious woman”), asks Dante to remember her when he returns to be among the living, telling him: Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia; Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma. . . . [Remember me, who is la Pia; Siena made me, Maremma unmade me. . . .]

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Sienese by birth, Pia goes on to tell Dante that the man who “did her in” in Maremma, as it were, was the same who had placed the ring on her finger, that is, her spouse. So, then, while Pia’s exact historical identity remains a matter of scholarly controversy, Eliot clearly makes her his marker at this point in The Waste Land because she represents another woman undone in one way or another in order to satisfy a man’s “needs.” The next allusion to Dante in the Eliot poem, and the next to last, comes very close to the end of The Waste Land but falls very near the conclusion of the Inferno, in this case the next-to-last canto of the Inferno, canto 33. At first glance, that may seem odd. If the speaker’s progress through The Waste Land is being marked by Dante’s parallel progress through the Inferno on into the Purgatorio, as witnessed thus far, it may seem to be backtracking for the speaker of The Waste Land to have fallen back into the Inferno again. However, such a vacillation between the one and the other—near the end of the Inferno, at the beginning of the Purgatorio—could be regarded as a more realistic rendering, by Eliot, of the stop-and-start, back-and-forth nature of spiritual or moral progress and growth, which is never a perfectly straight line. Whatever the case, this particular allusion to Dante’s Inferno is one of the most memorable from a particularly memorable poem. As he traverses the frozen lake, Cocytus, which lies at the very bottom of hell and comprises Circle Nine, where the sins of compound fraud or betrayal are punished, Dante comes on a man who is gnawing on the head of another man, both of whom are otherwise frozen up to their necks in the ice. The man doing the gnawing is Count Ugolino, his victim Archbishop Ruggieri, although in life their roles had been somewhat reversed. Ugolino stops chewing on Ruggieri’s head long enough to tell Dante the story of how the count and his young sons had been imprisoned in a tower by the archbishop’s trickery. In and of itself, however, that was not the cause of the hellish retribution that the count is now being permitted to mete out to the archbishop. Ugolino describes the day that, at the time when they would normally bring Ugolino and his sons their meager prison rations, he heard instead his

jailers turning the key to lock the single door to the tower—“io sentí chiavar l’uscio di sotto / a l’orribile torre” (XXXIII.45–46). Although his sons did not realize it at the moment, the count knew that they were now going to be left in the tower to starve to death, which they then did, one by one, the count dying last. Now both he and the archbishop are here in the very same circle of hell for their sins, and Ugolino is allowed to wreak such a perverse justice as Dante had just witnessed on the man who, in life, had made Ugolino and his sons suffer such a slow and horrible death by starvation. Eliot’s allusion to this poignant episode from the Inferno itself has a place of honor in The Waste Land. Eliot uses it to define by analogy the second of the third injunctions from the Upanishads that form the core of the fifth and last section of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said.” That second injunction, Damyadhvam, to sympathize, is symbolized by Eliot in the count’s having “heard the key / Turn in the door,” signaling for him how he and his sons are being cut off forever from the gifts of human compassion. Once more, fittingly, this allusion comes near the end of The Waste Land—lines 411 and 412 of a 433-line poem. If the first two allusions to Dante came from early in the Inferno and come early in The Waste Land, then, despite the momentary springing forward into the beginnings of the Purgatorio, this late allusion to Dante comes from near the end of the Inferno and at the very end of The Waste Land. But there is one more allusion to Dante before The Waste Land ends a mere 21 lines later. Line 427 is a direct quotation from Dante’s poem and one of those fragments that the speaker, with “the arid plain behind him,” now uses as “shor[ing] against my ruins.” The line from Dante in question reads, Poi s’sacose nel foco che gli affina (“Then he hid himself in the fire that is purging him”). Its exact placement in Dante is line 148, the last line, of canto 26 of the Purgatorio. That ought to give any reader pause. As The Waste Land ends, the symbolic markers of forward progress that allusions to Dante have provided suddenly take a quantum leap forward—from canto 33 of the Inferno to canto 26 of the Purgatorio—as if now that the speaker, having received the guid-

Waste Land, The ance of the rain-bringing thunder, has the wasteland behind him, there is no further vacillation and he is free to make his way past the modern hell in which the poetry of The Waste Land had had him embroiled till now. That is, one must admit, a wonderful symmetry, but Eliot is not done yet. If the foregoing has been something of a demonstration of how Eliot uses allusions not to show off his learning but to underscore his poem’s meaning, such as it is, it should mainly serve as a demonstration of the delightfully rewarding complexities of structure and insinuation those same allusions serve. The final allusion to Dante is spoken in regard to Arnaut Daniel, who has just greeted Dante after Guido Guinizzelli had called Daniel to Dante’s attention as the “miglior fabbro”—the better maker or craftsperson—the same words that Eliot used in the dedication to Ezra Pound. Indeed, the quotation from Dante in the dedication (one that Eliot, in his notes, does not attribute, by the way) comes a mere 31 lines—canto 26, line 117—before the line from Dante, canto 26, line 148, on which The Waste Land, lacking but six lines, virtually ends. What is Eliot up to, the reader might well ask. This is one of those many instances where Eliot’s renowned and often unduly annoying complexities become disarmingly simple. The separation between the poet and the identity of the speaker in The Waste Land is a murky one. Indeed, there are those who will argue that The Waste Land has no speaker or at least one who is consistent from part to part, stanza to stanza. Unlike Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” where the speaker is easily identified as Prufrock, or, for the sake of contrast, “Whispers of Immortality,” where the speaker is clearly the poet, The Waste Land is a poetry more in keeping with “Portrait of a Lady” or “La Figlia che Piange,” in which it is difficult to discern if the “I” is the poet or a fictive projection that he simply has not taken the trouble to introduce and identify by name and function. That said, with his dedication, Eliot is telling his readers, or at least those who recognize it as an allusion to Dante’s Purgatorio, that as The Waste Land opens and they are about to make their own descent into the hell that The Waste Land will depict in excruciatingly nightmarish detail, he, the

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poet and their guide, has already been there and made it out—has figuratively completed the Inferno as well as the better part of the Purgatorio, that is to say; otherwise, he would not be able to cite from it. If, then, by the end of The Waste Land, the speaker identifies the same passage from Dante as the poet had identified in his opening dedication, that is Eliot’s way of confirming for his readers that they, too, have now successfully made their way out of the hellishness that The Waste Land is intended to portray and, like him and his speaker, stand near the peak of Dante’s purgatorial mountain. The following analysis of the poem, section by section, demonstrates that The Waste Land takes its readers on a hellish journey for the sake of bringing them, like Dante, to some point of positive recognition that the hell of self can be mastered and left behind. The question is, How? A Note on the Notes No doubt, there are still those who hold up the six or seven pages of author’s notes that follow The Waste Land as proof positive that Eliot must have regarded the completed poem as unintelligible without them. Only the poem’s earliest readers, that is, those who had the opportunity to read it when it was first published, in October 1922, in two reviews, the Criterion and the Dial, will ever know what the experience of encountering The Waste Land’s decidedly complex text must have been like without the benefit of Eliot’s notes. On the other hand, it has long since been recognized that the notes, by calling attention to any one particular detail at the expense of another in a richly detailed tapestry of allusions and other poetic devices, may as often be a hindrance to understanding and clarity as a help. No one wants to approach The Waste Land unattended; still, it is unfortunate that that privilege has forever been denied readers once Eliot introduced his notes into the poem, with its publication in book form in December 1922. By now, the notes form as much of the experience of the poem as its lines of poetry, almost as if Eliot had always intended them to be a part of the poetic effect of The Waste Land from the first. Whatever other reputation for often intentionally obfuscating the obvious that Eliot may deservedly have earned by now, however, his notes came

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to be appended to the text of The Waste Land completely by happenstance and most assuredly without any subtle motivation on his part. The story goes, and there is no reason to doubt its veracity, that when Boni & Liveright was preparing The Waste Land for publication in book form in late 1922, they discovered that there would be a quantity of extra pages. That was because the text of the poem would fill only 48 pages. To this day, the typical trade book is printed in a format to produce the standard 6 × 9-inch size. This book size is achieved by printing 16 pages at a time on each side of a 24 inch × 36-inch sheet that is then folded four times, so that each finished page is one-16th of the original size of the sheet. These 32-page units, which are subsequently trimmed back at the top, bottom, and outside edges so that they can be opened properly after binding, are called signatures. Once the text of The Waste Land was set in type, it was discovered that it would fill only 48 finished pages, but it would have to be printed in two signatures nevertheless, leaving 16 pages blank. Eliot was prevailed on to provide some additional poetry to complete the volume. He opted, however, to provide the notes instead, hoping, as he says, that they might assist “any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.” That is not to say, nevertheless, that Eliot may not have eventually employed the notes as much to misdirect as to direct. The question remains whether he did so intentionally. Scholars have subsequently discovered many more possible sources and alternatives to sources for lines that Eliot himself identified than Eliot’s notes could have listed in the space allowed him. Still, one must question what mode of selection Eliot may have employed in determining what to omit, what only to point toward, and what to expatiate on in painstaking detail. Every choice, of course, shapes the response that the reader and the scholar formulate to the line or the source in question—a prejudicing of the evidence, as it were, that someone of Eliot’s astuteness and acute intelligence would have been highly aware. In the following discussion, to identify a source of Eliot’s, the notes will be relied on for the most part, and it will be only when there is a power-

ful suggestiveness to look elsewhere—for example, the reference to the Starnbergersee, which calls up King Ludwig of Bavaria, or the reference to Marie, that seems to be a reference to the tragic suicides at Mayerling—that sources not identified by Eliot will be introduced into the discussion. Incidentally, Eliot does not always identify an obvious source or provide an expected one. For example, the absence of an identification of a source for the epigraph is singularly conspicuous. For another example, Eliot does not let the reader in on the inside joke that the dedicatory words to Pound allude to the same passage from Dante alluded to elsewhere in the poem. That the title of the first part, “The Burial of the Dead,” is apparently taken from the Anglican burial service of the same name, is also not noted. Identifying the alleged allusion to Chaucer in the opening line, meanwhile, is left up to the agility of the reader’s imagination. Still, anyone doubting the story of how the notes came to be there in the first place—that they were provided by Eliot to fill what would otherwise have been blank space—need only compare the number of pages occupied by the notes with the number of pages occupied by the poem itself. The ratio should come out at just about one to three, accounting for the same proportionality that would have resulted if there indeed were those 16 blank pages to account for out of two 32-page signatures, leaving 48 pages of poetry.

SYNOPSIS The following is a section-by-section if not quite line-by-line reading of The Waste Land. This reading is designed to be consistent and coherent, but not exhaustive. To be exhaustive, a treatment of the poem would easily take a volume equal in size to this present one, and even then it could not possibly take into account in any genuinely satisfactory manner all the various other commentaries that the poem has generated virtually from the day of its first publication. Part I: “The Burial of the Dead” Thus far, the information being presented has had a single aim, and that has been to prepare a novice reader of The Waste Land for the experience of its poetry without unnecessarily daunting that reader

Waste Land, The before he or she even begins. With the achievement of that aim in mind, such a reader will find useful as well the following characterization of the approach to the text of The Waste Land that is about to ensue. That approach is to think of The Waste Land as a verbal space, literally—a wilderness of words and word-images, allusions and literary sound bytes, nonsense syllables and foreign words and phrases, and anything else that may come to mind or eye or ear. Just as the poem’s speaker will have to, the reader too must traverse that imaginary space with only one goal in mind—surviving the experience so that, by poem’s end, he or she may sit on the shore, like the speaker, with the arid plain behind them both. If a single principle can be isolated from all those foregoing presentations made thus far regarding The Waste Land, it would be that the richness and complexity of the poetry of The Waste Land should never be sacrificed for the sake of a facile reliance on stringing together the semblance of meaning by treating the wealth of background and source information as if it were the poem. It simply is not. However, a corollary principle has emerged, and that is that Eliot does rely on his readers’ having some sense of those general cultural reference points within the various texts and figures to which he calls attention by virtue of the poem’s many allusions. The danger would be to imagine that there might ever be a one-for-one connection between these allusions as they operate in their original sources and as they operate in Eliot. There is likely no better place to begin to demonstrate the validity of this corollary principle than with the opening line, which has traditionally been regarded as a direct allusion to the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century English treasure, The Canterbury Tales. So complicated has the issue of Eliot’s use of literary and other allusions in The Waste Land become, however, that even the title of the first part of the Eliot poem, “The Burial of the Dead,” needs first to be quickly considered and then as quickly dismissed as an allusion to the funeral service from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. That service is indeed called the Burial of the Dead and, like any item of great liturgical interest, pur-

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pose, and history, it no doubt has in it much powerful and beautiful language, not to mention powerful and moving sentiments as well. Raised in his ancestors’ Unitarian traditions, Eliot would, later in the 1920s, begin to attend Anglican services and eventually convert to the Anglican church in 1927. Finally, as the actively intelligent, engaged, and curious human being that he was, Eliot would have known something of the Book of Common Prayer, even if that were only for its literary, historical, and cultural importance to English-speaking peoples. Still, and all that said, it is pure speculation that Eliot had that source in mind at the moment that he selected the title for the first section of The Waste Land and, furthermore, even should it be proved conclusively that he did, the question remains whether it is necessary for a reader to have that information in order to feel the impact and import of the words, “the burial if the dead,” particularly in terms of the tone and the mood that they set for the poem that is to follow. “Of course not,” is the only fair answer that could be made to that speculative question, and that is the very point that Eliot makes by leaving so many putative allusions, including this present one, unattributed. The accidentals of reading and memory and writing surely play a part in anyone’s use of language. Words may come to mind in a particular order or echoing a particular source as much for their rhythms as for their initial meaning or source. In the case of Eliot, this particular horse—that every word must have its specific source, every source its specific implication for meaning—is one that cannot possibly be beaten to death too often inasmuch as it is the phoenix of dead horses and has a way of becoming an interpretative nightmare to boot. That said, it is fair to examine the poem’s celebrated opening clause, “April is the cruelest month,” with the same spirit of skeptical reservation when it comes to imagining that that opening image, such as it is, is an allusion to Chaucer. The General Prologue to his celebrated collection of tales, in Middle English, told to each other by a band of pilgrims on their fictitious journey to Canterbury to visit the shrine to the martyred 13thcentury saint Thomas à Becket, opens by setting the following springtime scene:

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Whan that aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; ..... Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, ..... The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. [When April with his showers sweet The drought of March had pierced to the root, And bathed every vine in such liquid Of which virtue engendered is the flower; ..... Then long folks to go on pilgrimages, ..... The holy blissful martyr for to seek, That them had helped when they were sick.]

Equally celebrated by now are the opening seven lines of The Waste Land, which describe April as the “cruelest month” because the spring rain breeds “lilacs out of the dead land” and stirs with a quickening liveliness “dull roots” that would otherwise apparently be content to remain sluggishly embedded in their wintry torpor. To this mix of the conflict between an awakening natural universe and what, in Chaucer’s time, would have been called acedia, a tragic slothfulness of the spirit resulting in a disengagement from the processes of life, Eliot also adds how April mixes “memory and desire,” the longing for a past contentment, perhaps, contending with that same promise of new life, new activities, springing into being. The point seems to be that, for the speaker or observer of the event, that promise is clearly not necessarily a welcome one, since its aim is to rouse the sleeper out of the cocoon of acedia. The idea being promoted with little fanfare or argument as the poem begins, then, is essentially one that the spirit, much like the body or mind, is reluctant to be wakened, so April is “cruel” by awakening all living things whether they wish it or not. This is not to say that there may not be good reason for imagining that Eliot wants his readers at the outset to be thinking of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, if only for the sake of contrasts. They,

after all, have a fixed goal and purpose in mind. The reader of The Waste Land will discover quickly that if there is a protagonist inhabiting the lines of The Waste Land, his or her most outstanding characteristic is aimlessness and confusion of purpose or direction. Even so, the ability to make even that sort of a connection with Chaucer would require some familiarity with Chaucer to begin with. That familiarity absent, the question would then be, Would that ignorant reader obtain a meaning of some sort from Eliot’s words about April and the spring rain, dull roots, and dried tubers? The answer to such a question could be nothing less than a resounding yes. For example, in the headnote that precedes the notes at the end of the poem, Eliot states that JESSE L. WESTON’s study, From Ritual to Romance, a work of fairly recent scholarship that had theorized that the origins of the Grail legend were to be found in ancient vegetation myths regarding the need for the earth to renew itself in new life after the death of winter, informs “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism” of The Waste Land. Also involved in the quest for the Grail is the legendary cup from Christ’s last supper, another story involving a journey or pilgrimage. So, then, there are several points of contact in general with the Chaucer poem, but beyond that, they do not seem to point toward any particular meaning or in any particular direction so much as onward. What that particular meaning and direction maybe should be the reader’s entire focus, of course, but Chaucer, having been brought up, must first be laid to rest. In other words, knowing Chaucer’s “meaning” will never clarify Eliot’s. To get past the first line, the reader must get past Chaucer—the reader must bury the dead. Throughout its pages, The Waste Land plays with and, to some degree, virtually milks humankind’s vastest and most common store of symbols and symbolical imagery and actions, those that have to do with life and death, birth and resurrection, sterility and fertility—in summary, the conflict between procreative sex and sexual recreation, as well as another conflict, that one between what has been sapped of all its vital energy and life and that sap that restores all vital energy and life.

Waste Land, The If The Waste Land is a wasteland, the reader comes to feel that it is one because there has been no life-giving rain, there is no water in it, nothing of that sweet liquid that can restore the dead land. That water is the life-giving water celebrated in countless myths from countless human cultures over countless ages, every one of which associates life with the supple and the quickened, and death with the dried out or desiccated and the dulled, the numbed. April is indeed the cruelest month, then, not because the ghost of Chaucer or of his particular sentiments on the same ageless topic haunt those opening lines of Eliot’s, but because it is that month in which the struggle between the forces of death and the forces of life are there for all to see as most obviously in conflict—provided that one has awakened to see it. Rather than the spirit being willing but the flesh is weak, in April the flesh is willing, but the spirit may be weak, or weakened. Certainly, it may be more willing to sleep than to awaken. It is this fear—that this spring there may be not that usual, age-old victory of spring over winter, but rather a defeat for the new life that is awakening, both literally and figuratively—that will permeate the entirety of the remainder of The Waste Land. That is how Eliot is able easily to slip between a poetry that at one moment seems to be a cultural critique of the shortcomings of his own time and, at others, seems to be merely yet another chapter in the enduring human tale of death versus life carried on in the terminology of a symbology as old, perhaps, as the human imagination itself. “Winter kept us warm,” the speaker, or a speaker, says, and it is perfectly understandable that the winter should have but only if it is the false warmth of the body dying into a paralyzing numbness, not the true warmth of the spirit reviving. No wonder, then, that the poetry moves now very quickly, but not unexpectedly for the reader who has been cued in to what the essential crisis is, to persons who are content to haunt “health” resorts, where they may partake of artificial cures in artificial settings while the real work of the natural universe progresses all about them. The reference to the Starnbergersee is particularly appropriate at this juncture. It is at that lake

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that the so-called crazy King Ludwig of Bavaria, the royal patron who underwrote much of Richard Wagner’s operatic efforts, including his Parsifal, which recounted the Grail legend for 19th-century Germans, not only built his renowned storybook castle that imitates the Grail castle but subsequently drowned himself, a suicide. The reference to Marie, meanwhile, is commonly thought to harken back to Baroness Marie Vestera, the mistress of the Archduke Rudolph of Habsburg, crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and first cousin to the same Archduke Franz-Ferdinand whose subsequent assassination would precipitate the outbreak of hostilities that became World War I). Rudolph and Marie, in one of the most famous scandals of the late 1880s, apparently committed suicide together on January 30, 1889, at his hunting lodge at Mayerling in Austria. Although the truth of the matter may never be known (some argue that he was brutally murdered), there is no doubt that Rudolph’s untimely death began the final series of crises and setbacks, involving matters of succession and alliances, that would bring Europe from the height of its glory as a human culture to the brink of a devastating war within a matter of decades. Inasmuch as Eliot’s intentions are concerned, however, all of the forgoing is purely speculative. What the reader does know is that in the midst of the polyglot activity of winter with which The Waste Land opens, what is missing is any sense of the ancient foreboding: What if the springtime does not come? If, for example, the Grail legend is centered around a wounded king whose wounds must be healed if the land is itself to be healed, a story whose origins are far, far older than Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, then it is none too puzzling that The Waste Land opens with these allusions to “wounded” royals, both of them connected to those two powers, Germany and Austria, that would become the initial aggressors in World War I. Do myth and reality live so near each other, The Waste Land asks, that one can be seen to blend easily into the other. The Waste Land can ask that question, however, only of the reader who is himself or herself conscious that he or she, too, is a living link in the ever-shifting present that resides between the past that is winter, memory, myth, and a future that

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could be possibly spring but may only be frustrated by confused signals and mixed desires. Logically, compellingly enough, into the next stanza in this poem of irregular stanzas and irregular lines, lines that rhyme and lines that end abruptly leading nowhere, suddenly appearing in a foreign tongue only to disappear instantly into another tongue or into an English that itself often seems to make as little sense, as if it too were a language from another land, the wasteland, comes the speaker, speaking clearly but hardly cheerily. This speaker calls the reader directly into the poem, confronting him with dire questions and more dire consequences. In so many words, he tells the reader that, although it may be spring, they are both lost in the wilderness, in a desert that is the wasteland of their mind and spirit and culture. Thus far in this commentary there have been passing references made to a speaker in and of The Waste Land, as if he is an easily identified entity, perhaps even a personage. Before proceeding, the reader might find it valuable to ponder briefly who that speaker may be. For he does now seem at this juncture to step suddenly out of the page and address The Waste Land’s readers directly: “you.” If this forthright voice, the speaker, is to be the reader’s friend or taskmaster, the reader’s Virgil as that Roman poet was Dante’s guide, then as the reader continues the trek across the pages of The Waste Land, it may not hurt to try to get this spectral speaker’s measure before venturing much further or farther. For as Joseph Conrad’s narrator Marlow says of the mysterious Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Eliot’s speaker is more a voice, a presence, than any flesh-and-blood persona such as J. Alfred Prufrock. Exactly when this voice speaks, for example, and what he has to tell the reader, are neither easy matters to discern, because a great part of the power, the realism, of the poetry of The Waste Land is its uncanny, albeit disconcerting ability to mimic the cacophony of contending sensory claims on the distracted and often disconnected reader’s attention span. When that voice speaks, however, it seems to have the power to make its presence known, almost as if it were someone or something that existed simultaneously within and outside the poetic line. A long-noted feature of

The Waste Land’s poetry is its ability to change tone and mood at the drop of a line, and that ability owes to the speaker’s uncanny power to master the poetic moment. With the opening of the first part’s second stanza, then, the whirlwind of voices and thoughts that both mar and mark the confusing energies and bewildering directions of the first stanza settle down. It is just as if that whirlwind has dropped the reader in a sandy, stony, burning waste in stanza two, and the voice of someone who seems to know what is happening but may otherwise be as lost and bewildered intones, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” That stony rubbish is the tumble of voices and images and allusions that have just assaulted the reader’s sensibilities; that stony rubbish is as well the figurative acres of wasteland imagery and poetry still before the reader. But here, for a moment, the anonymous, faceless, bodiless but hardly speechless speaker briefs his fellow trekker. “Son of man,” he remarks, “you cannot know / For you know only a heap of broken images.” If Pound in 1919 in his Hugh Selwyn Mauberley could witheringly summarize the accomplishments of all European culture as “a few gross of broken statues / a few thousand battered books,” Eliot distills the total by that much more to its barest figurative minimum—a heap of broken images—lost gods, lost myths, lost symbols, broken dreams, and shattered hopes. Lost in the desert that the past can quickly become when there are no reference points to guide the way, there is indeed no relief from the relentless heat of time’s burning passage. The image of “fear in a handful of dust” brings to mind the Sibyl who, knowing all things, seeks only death, hardly an endorsement for continuing any kind of human enterprise at all. If Christ has been invoked in the epithet “son of man,” the only title in the Gospels that Jesus of Nazareth claimed for himself, the relatively modern, post-Christian 19th-century New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, with his American philosophy of self-reliance and belief in the universal goodness of the oversoul, is also invoked, but all to no avail, in the image of the shadow that extends before and after all human

Waste Land, The endeavor. In “The Hollow Men,” near the middle of the 1920s, Eliot will use the image of the shadow to even greater advantage, but here in The Waste Land he uses it to call to mind his own direct reference to Emerson in “Sweeney Erect.” In that poem, one of the quatrains composed during 1917 and 1918, Eliot jokes that Emerson could not ever have envisioned the new man, embodied for Eliot in Sweeney, that the democratic masses of America could breed, nor could an idealist like Emerson have envisioned the catastrophe that modern history would become, either, in that shadow rising to meet us. Apparently, the only respite for the speaker of The Waste Land can be found in concealment from the blazing light of that kind of a searing truth, within whatever shade a red rock might provide, while what the body, what the soul, what the mind craves is the life-giving water, of which there is none, at least not here and not now. It is only ever “out there,” beyond the seeker’s reach but not his ken. Although The Waste Land is more a poetry of point of view, reflecting a state of mind rather than any actual character development or other elements typical of plot and motive, it is nevertheless by giving The Waste Land at least this species of a narrative structure, using the concept of the quest as the motivating factor and driving force, that the poem’s forward progress can be observed, measured, and made sense of. For there is a forward progress to both the poem and the poetry, though it may be difficult to imagine that that is the case as one reads on from one moment, or one line, to the next. Suddenly the reader, who has been asked to imagine a desert, is in a hyacinth garden, exactly as the scene might shift entirely by some odd quirk of association in a dream. Furthermore, the speaker, the reader’s friend, has fallen silent, although voices continue. Someone is telling someone else that he called her the hyacinth girl—or he may be telling that to a male, since the Hyacinthus of myth was a beautiful young man with whom the god Apollo fell in love. Here again, in a poem that will ultimately prove to be full of tales of and allusions to tragic or empty love relationships, is Apollo’s, which was another awful story of love gone fatally askew. Play-

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ing at discus with the young and handsome mortal, so the story goes, Apollo accidentally killed Hyacinthus, and the flower that now bears the young man’s name is traditionally regarded as a token of the god’s great grief. In a poem in which Tiresias’s bisexuality will, in the third part, “The Fire Sermon,” become a central metaphor, gender is developing more as an impediment to understanding than any metaphorical gateway. The reader might recall how, in the first stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” someone who is assumed to be a man (since the poem is written by one) suddenly morphs into Marie when words are spoken to him or her. So, too, these genderbending myths, and Eliot’s use of them, seem to be intended as a way of separating the theme of love, which must inherently transcend issues of gender, from sexual desire and human reproduction. In the next part, “A Game of Chess,” for a further example, the reader will encounter two frustrated couples whose problem seems to be that they have confused connubial love with sexual coupling and its attendant results. In “The Fire Sermon,” meanwhile, an allusion to that passage from The Confessions in which Augustine admits that he was “in love with being in love” plays a key role. Unavoidable is the further suggestion in this allusion to the tale of Apollo and Hyacinth as well that the relationship with the hyacinth girl did not end either happily or productively, a possibility encouraged by the verses that Eliot cites from Richard Wagner’s tragic opera Tristan und Isolde that come just before his reference to the hyacinth girl. Wagner has already appeared obliquely in stanza one of “The Burial of the Dead” by virtue of the allusion to his patron, King Ludwig, and now the tragic love affair of the Archduke Rudolph and the Baroness Marie Vestera of stanza one is echoed in Wagner’s tragedy of the lovers Tristan and Isolde, who also die as the result of a star-crossed love affair destined to end miserably. Their story had originated in the 12th century and by Wagner’s time had undergone many revisions and retellings, including being incorporated finally into the Arthurian literature, of which the Grail quest is a part. In every version, however, including Wagner’s, Tristan, the Cornwall knight, falls prey to the

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charms of the Irish beauty, Isolde, and as a result ends up betraying his master, King Mark, whose wife Isolde becomes. Without a doubt, this theme of love’s betrayal, like the spring’s, will permeate the entire Eliot poem, but the speaker, and the reader, will come to learn that it is a betrayal that is fomented by unreasonable expectations and desires as well as by self-deceptions and self-serving machinations. The speaker’s reluctance to accept the bidding of the spring is as much his undoing, for example, as the unwillingness of the material universe to set its clocks by an individual human’s needs. In the same way, love is all too often the name given the irresistible desire to scratch a bodily itch by abusing someone else’s trust and confidence. The verses that Eliot cites from Wagner contrast a sailor’s song, sung early in the opera in Isolde’s presence, with a report made much later in the opera, near its close. Quoted directly by Eliot in the original German, as was his wont, the first four lines portray a lover wondering where his beloved might be, because the winds that should be bringing her home to him over the sea from Ireland are favorable: “Frisch weht der Wind,” and so forth. The line with which the Eliot stanza closes—“Oed und leer das Meer”—relates to Isolde herself, who is coming by ship again, this time bringing a magic potion that can save Tristan’s life. Impatiently awaiting not only his beloved but a restorative (bringing to mind those restoring processes of spring with which the speaker of The Waste Land is obsessed), Tristan sends a servant to scan the horizon for sight of her vessel. While Isolde will eventually arrive, it is only to have her beloved die in her arms. However, at the moment in the opera when the words that end Eliot’s stanza are spoken—in English, “The sea is wide and empty”— the servant, a shepherd, has returned to tell Tristan that there are no sails, there is no ship in sight. The hoped-for restoration is derelict. The reader, who began this stanza in one wasteland, one of burning sand, will end it with the vision of another, a wide and empty expanse of dismal seascape. The impact of this second stanza is a heavy blow: Looking for some sign of a meaningfully renewed engagement with the external universe, one is instead left speechless as eyes look

only into the “heart of light, the silence”—a deafening and blinding emptiness. There is no hope, the poem seems to be saying, only loss. But another stanza awaits, for always, although even the individual life and hope may cease to be, poetry continues—a thought that forms no small part of The Waste Land’s primary intent. They say that a body ache should be treated by alternating applications of heat and cold. Eliot appears to be a poet who subscribes to this remedy for his reader’s spirits as well, for Eliot follows the bittersweet tragedy of stanza two, with its dire predictions of disaster, with a comically ominous visit to a fortune-teller, “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant.” Perhaps the speaker, as troubled by his own confusions as the reader may be, has dropped in on a lark on his return home that evening after work and maybe will stop at the club for a bit of wine and cheese to hold him till supper. After all, the news has not been good. There are wars and rumors of wars, even in the swanky resort where the speaker may have just spent his holiday hobknobbing with the rich and famous and powerful. Even they have been dropping like flies lately, suicides one and all, emblems of a culture set on a course for self-destruct. Although last night’s performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with its overwhelmingly tragic vision of love gone askew, was grand, tonight may be a night for something different, something not quite so depressing, so the speaker, suspended as he is between memory and desire, a past filled with regrets, a future vague and cloudy, visits a fortune-teller, and what does she tell him? Something depressing. The Waste Land is built upon a constantly shifting but always thematically consistent array of parallels, and even in this third stanza of the first part of the poem, with its turn to parody if not even nonsense, those parallels continue to manifest themselves. This “blind” fortune-teller (she concludes her spiel by telling the speaker that “one must be so careful these days,” making it clear that she does not know what the next minute will bring, let alone the future) harkens back to the Sibyl, of course, but also to the mythic Greek soothsayer Tiresias, the figure that Eliot, in his notes, makes central to the poem’s drama.

Waste Land, The Furthermore, Madame Sosostris reads the Tarot, the earliest form of the modern deck of playing cards, whose suits—the cup, the lance, the sword, and the dish—are derived from the Grail legend as well, according to Weston. As comical as the madame’s turn is, then, it ties together two of the major dynamics of the poem: The individual’s desire to seek the fulfillment that the future represents (that is, the quest) is matched only by his or her fear to know what that future may be. This attraction-repulsion relationship with the future, embodied in the alternating promise and nagging insistence of spring, will shortly be embodied in the fear of the resurrection of the wrong dead, that is, the infamous “sprouting” of the corpse that Stetson “planted last year in [his] garden.” But, like the future, that moment in The Waste Land is yet to come. For now and for the speaker, there is the “future” that Madame Sosostris, reading the cards, has to tell him. That it is nonsense is made clear by the fact that she tells the speaker, who is lost in a wasteland where there is not even the sound of water, to fear death by drowning. Inadvertently on Madame Sosostris’s part, here again, nevertheless, is another foreshadowing, in this case of Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician sailor of the fourth part of The Waste Land, “Death by Water.” Not that Madame Sosostris, charlatan that she is, deserves any credit for that. Eliot gives her a cold and punningly jokes about her “wicked pack of cards.” (An old saying reminds us that even a broken clock is right twice a day. The point is that nothing is ever meaningless, not even a charlatan’s predictions.) Apparently left depressed by the madame’s sorry vision, however, the speaker, in the last stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” heads the rest of the way home now, joining the crowd of other weary wayfarers wending their way across London Bridge. Here comes that moment in The Waste Land, already dealt with in the earlier comments on Eliot’s dedication of the poem to Ezra Pound, where the literary ghost of Dante and his vision of the human soul in Eternity is first invoked. The crowd making its way across the ancient bridge (not that the structure is itself ancient, of course, but the Thames has been bridged at this point since

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Roman times) calls up for the speaker an image of the damned making their way across the Acheron into the hellish pit of the Inferno. This area of the City of London that Eliot is describing is one with which he would have been personally very familiar. The Church of St. Mary Woolnoth, for example, is near where Eliot at that time worked, in the offices of Lloyds Bank. This locale in Eliot’s time would have been the financial and commercial center not just of London but as the seat of British imperial power, of the world, the equivalent in its time of the New York World Trade Center. To make it a fit landscape for hell is not any reference to its squalor or tawdriness, consequently (the squalid and the tawdry will come soon enough in The Waste Land) but to the transient service to the temples of materialism and of other temporal and empty pursuits that humans engage themselves in there. The reader is now very near the end of the section entitled “The Burial of the Dead,” after all. How many and how much is buried under this square mile of English earth, one must ponder. Not too far from St. Mary Woolnoth, for example, stands Christopher Wren’s monument to Charles II for his restoration of the city following the Great Fire of September 1666 that literally laid waste to four-fifths of the city itself, thereby giving Wren one of the greatest architectural opportunities in modern history. Caught up in this sensual music of birth, copulation, and death, destruction and restoration, loss and renewal that is all around him, the speaker feels not the lightness of the coming spring with whose promise the poem opened but the weight of the years and the toil and the sin. Rebirth spells responsibility, after all. The cry that the speaker thus calls out to Stetson, asking after that man’s particular guilty secret, sounds like the greetings that Dante makes to those among the damned that he recognizes on his own trek through hell itself. Here is the moment where the fear that is in a handful of dust finds its name, and it is indubitably fear for one’s sins—the corpse that was planted last year may resurrect to point a withering finger of accusation. Fear makes the spirit reluctant to awaken and instead, Sibyl-like, makes it desire

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death, like those doomed lovers Rudolph and Marie, or like Tristan and Isolde, whose last great aria, in Wagner, is the Liebestod, death-love. Now, too, the quester, the speaker, knows his charge: to seek life or to seek death, to awaken or to die. Let the dead bury the dead, the Gospels say, but what are the living to do in the midst of so much buried death? the poem clearly asks. But this message in The Waste Land, at the end of the first part at least, is not about religion; it is rather about dealing with the quiet, invisible terror—Kierkegaard not many decades earlier had called it fear and trembling—that is existence, and so in both the opening and the closing lines of final stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot invokes not one of the great religious poets of history such as Dante but one of literature’s most famous bad boys, Charles Baudelaire, a mid-19th-century atheist, French symbolist, and iconoclast. Though Eliot’s is a very free translation, the fragmentary line with which this final stanza begins—“Unreal city”—is from Baudelaire’s “Les sept vieillards,” or “The Seven Old Men,” a nightmarish vision of the modern city as a place inhabited by the walking dead, who may be vampires or even demons. The Baudelaire poem’s first image is of the city as an anthill, aswarm with subterranean dreams and ghosts and secrets, making the words “unreal city,” Eliot’s less vivid translation of Baudelaire’s original phrase, “fourmillante cité,” along with Eliot’s own subsequent use of images from straight out of Dante’s Inferno, all the more telling and appropriate. It is Baudelaire’s vision of what commentators have come to call the urban apocalypse that is again invoked at the end of the stanza and of “The Burial of the Dead” itself. In “To the Reader,” the opening poem in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, or Flowers of Evil, the French poet accuses his reader of being, like himself, a hypocrite, unwilling to admit that it is in each other that each human individual is compelled to recognize himself or herself among the living and the dead, “mon semblable— mon frère!”—“my reflection, my brother!” These two uses by Eliot of Baudelaire’s uniquely modern urban vision to clarify the inescapably deadening reality of the commonalities that life takes on in a teeming modern city drive home the point that The

The clock on the Church of Saint Mary Woolnoth would have been a familiar landmark to Eliot, who worked mere blocks away at Lloyds Bank in the City of London. Eliot memorializes the church and its clock, albeit rather darkly, in the closing stanza of “The Burial of the Dead” when he introduces Baudelaire’s “Unreal City” into The Waste Land. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

Waste has been making throughout this first of its five parts: The distinction between life and death, and between the living and the dead, has become a far less vividly dramatic one than poets of yore, with the possible exception of Dante, were capable of imagining, that in order to cope in a modern urban landscape, humans require not a new vision (that is why Eliot can call up as many of the voices of past poets as he has and will) but a new way of seeing how the old visions may still apply. The idea is not that the dead land whose imagery permeates the poetry of the poem’s opening section, “The Burial of the Dead,” will not yield something. The idea is that it is as likely to yield what has already died and been buried—the corpse interred in Stetson’s garden, for example—as to provide what is genuinely vital and inspiriting new growth. That is all the difference in the world, of course, a difference between repeating the past to no useful purpose or moving on into a future that may be uncertain but is nevertheless built on rather than mired in the past. The one course of action is redundant and stultifying, not to mention terrifying. The other is renewing and invigorating but perhaps, in its newness and strangeness, no less

Waste Land, The terrifying. And, so, the putative hero struggles with choices and mixed signals, neither of which are ever clear and both of which are always confused. In any event, that seems to be how the speaker of the poem, who is “suspended between memory and desire,” between a past that is dead and a future that is uncertain, views the matter; for if “The Burial of the Dead” has a consistent tone, it is one of confusion and doubt. Faced with an array of bewildering avenues of thought and action and meaning that, rather than proving to be liberating for him, seem instead to have paralyzed the speaker’s capacity for choice, the speaker, if he is indeed on a quest, a meaningful journey, seems to be getting nowhere fast, as the saying goes. Rather he wanders the streets of a great metropolis, London, feeling, apparently, more as if he has died and gone to hell than as if spring and its promise of renewal and rebirth are in the air. He has come to find himself stalemated, driven to a standstill by fear and doubt, both personal and cultural, and the second part of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” seals the speaker’s compact with the modern world’s only remaining sin, ennui—boredom. “The Burial of the Dead” ends with Baudelaire’s words to his readers, challenging them to deny the, for him, obvious truth that the greatest vice of all, and the most insidious, is boredom—insidious because it is a vice that everyone excuses and no one can resist. Eliot, indeed, may yet turn out to be the great poet of that elusive state of being in which more humans spend more time than any of us would ever care to calculate—boredom. The empty life of a Prufrock or the speaker of “Portrait of a Lady,” the insomniac world of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes,” even the pointless antics of the Sweeney poems or the frenetic wit of the more personal-seeming quatrains, and most assuredly “Gerontion” ’s exhausted and monotonous monologue all point in one direction, and that is into the bottomless pit of vacant self-absorption called boredom. Commenting on the 19th-century English poet and social critic MATTHEW ARNOLD’s observation that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life, Eliot astutely observed that one does not come away with criticism when one hits bottom. Rather, he

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asserted, one comes away with “a sense of the horror, the boredom, and the glory.” The issue is not whether it was Eliot or Arnold who was correct in this particular instance; the issue is that Eliot recognizes boredom as a major motivating factor in human life. Perhaps that view was a part of the influence on Eliot of the French symbolists with their jaded and irreverent sensibilities and tastes. The words of Baudelaire identify boredom as the one vice that is more ugly and foul than all the rest, though not as spectacularly interesting or inviting, and that other symbolist whose work influenced Eliot far more than any other, JULES LAFORGUE, carved his disillusioned and jaded doubled personae out of a word that had ceased, it seemed, to engage the young poet’s intellect or heart any longer. There are many kinds of death, but none is perhaps worse than the death of the will to engage life with an active passion. Eliot’s early poetry had consistently chronicled the more superficial aspects of this very kind of a death; The Waste Land explores it in depth. Part II: “A Game of Chess” Identifying boredom as humankind’s greatest bane may reflect a uniquely modernist attitude on the French symbolists and Eliot’s part, indicative of the increase in middle- and leisure-class activities that had come about as a result of the Industrial Revolution. After all, the sort of subsistence living that most humans had endured for virtually all of the previous eons of human history seldom left them with enough leisure time to give rise to either the bane or the vice of boredom. Whatever the social causes of the phenomenal attention suddenly paid to boredom by poets in the mid- to late 19th century, few if any other previous literatures deal with and detail boredom as a motivating factor in human psychology as much as early 20th-century literature did, and from their earliest manifestations, Eliot’s works are prominent among those that do. With the possible exception of “The Hollow Men,” no other poetry of Eliot’s captures the quality of the theme of boredom quite as well as does the second part of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess.” This should come as no surprise. It makes a certain kind of sense to settle on being bored as

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the one way to resolve the two conflicting choices with which “The Burial of the Dead” has presented the speaker—staying buried in a dead past or being restored to life in an uncertain present. Boredom offers at least the simulacrum of activity; to an outsider, indeed, the bored individual might very well appear to be quite comfortably at ease, even content, amid the luxuries of an upper middle-class apartment or sharing a pint or two with his or her chums at the local working-class pub. In any event, those are the two opposing settings, rather like the ying and yang of the black and the white pieces in a game of chess, for the action of “A Game of Chess.” By exploring these two extremes of the social order, Eliot dismisses the ages-old myth that each end of the spectrum of human culture has regarding the other, the rich believing that only the poor are truly happy, the poor that only the rich are truly happy. In the scheme of things that The Waste Land is developing wherein happiness is not a superficial emotional detail to be found in possessions or in the forgetfulness brought about by empty sexual encounters or by an alcoholic stupor, no matter what one’s bank account may be, there is no getting away from boredom, which the characters all carry with them like a virus that they inflict on one another. In the first half of “A Game of Chess,” then, is a middle-class couple who seem to be able to succeed at doing nothing better than getting on each other’s nerves. To set the scene, Eliot appeals to his reader’s acquaintance with an especially lush moment in act II of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra when Enobarbus, at the insistence of Agrippa, recounts the entrance that Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, made when she visited with, and succeeded in conquering the heart of, Marc Antony, the powerful Roman general and spiritual heir to the reputation of the assassinated Julius Caesar. Enobarbus waxes poetic as he describes how “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them. . . .” These are memorable lines that anyone that has ever encountered them is not likely to forget; Eliot’s calling them to his reader’s attention immediately as he begins his

own description of the room in which the bored 20th-century couple sits, playing a game of chess, does more than merely call to mind past splendors, however, be those splendors those of Shakespeare’s or the Caesars’ times. Indeed, one must always be careful when taking the measure of a classical allusion in Eliot. All too often it as likely to deconstruct the past as to honor it. With this particular allusion to Shakespeare, which as much brings to mind Cleopatra as an iconic historical figure as it does those so-called glories of the past, the reader should be mindful yet again that sexual attraction and amorous interest are being employed not to any ameliorative or constructive or even only merely recreative effects or purposes. Much to the contrary, Cleopatra remains notorious for having used her considerable sexual charms to ensnare and exploit to her own best political advantages two of the most powerful men in the Roman world, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. Shakespeare may make Antony and Cleopatra’s story a tragic love affair, but Antony’s love for and faith in her also brought about his defeat, ruin, and death. The larger lesson to be gained from all this is not one about sexual politics or gender issues, however, so much as one that reveals in dramatic terms how much self-centeredness and self-interest rule human behavior even in a context as ostensibly nurturing, sharing, and becoming intimate as the kind of human bonding that results in coupling and marriage. Of course, Cleopatra’s way to a man’s heart also serves in the scene to follow as an ironic counterpoint to the fact that the couple whom the reader is about to meet apparently have lost the knack for arousing any sort of sexual, let alone amorous, interest in each other. For the reader to see how this particular modern couple fail to relate or to connect with each other, however, the reader must meet another tragic couple from ancient times. In this case, the source is Greek rather than Roman, the story finding its basis in a myth rather than in history. Still, in most of its details, it rings no less true or likely for being myth rather than history. It is the story of Tereus, the king of Thrace, and his wife, Procne. Eliot introduces them into the poetry of The Waste Land at this point in the poem

Waste Land, The by calling to his reader’s attention a print that the London couple have hanging on the wall above the fireplace mantle. In this “sylvan scene,” the reader learns, is depicted “the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced,” a tale that not only reflects on the modern couple but on much of the rest of the direction that The Waste Land takes. Procne was the daughter of the king of Athens, and when Tereus won her hand in marriage, all Thrace rightly rejoiced. She soon gave Tereus an heir to the throne, their son, Itys, but after a while, Procne grew homesick and requested that her younger sister Philomela might come to visit them. Willingly, Tereus went to fetch her. The minute he laid eyes on her, however, he lusted after her, and, as Ovid, Eliot’s source for the horrible tale, tells it in the Metamorphoses, his collection of stories of mythic transformations, Tereus now burned only to have Philomela for himself. Instead of bringing her home to his palace and the waiting Procne, he took Philomela to a tower deep in a forest where he raped her, a virgin, and then, rather than killing her as she pleaded, cut out her tongue so that his horrible deed might never be known. There is the further suggestion that in that way, too, he could have his pleasure of her whenever he wished. Tereus managed easily to convince Procne that her sister had died on the homeward journey from Athens, but unbeknownst to him, Philomela contrived to weave a cloth in whose threads she told the tale of Tereus’s awful treachery. Philomela tricked an old maid servant into bringing the telltale tapestry to Procne as a gift, and when the dishonored wife and mother learned of the shame that Tereus’s lust had brought on her family and their marriage bed, not only did she free her mutilated sister from her confinement but, to avenge his crime, the two sisters mercilessly slaughtered Itys, roasted his dead body, and served it to Tereus. When he discovered what they had done, they fled, with Tereus hot in pursuit. The gods transformed the three into birds: Philomela into a swallow, because the swallow cannot sing but only cries out; Tereus into a hoopoe, a bird of prey; and Procne into a nightingale, whose plaintive song is taken to be inspired by the grief of a mother perpetually mourning her lost child.

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Anyone who would see in this story Eliot comparing a glorious past with a sordid present, as some contemporary readers of The Waste Land did, are certainly missing the point, which, again, in typical Eliot fashion, is multilayered. For one thing, in a poem whose overall theme is loss and waste, the tale of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus surely fill the bill whenever and wherever it may have occurred. In this particular instance, however, it is not just the adults who suffer, as in the case of Rudolph and Marie or Antony and Cleopatra, but the children, too. Itys is portrayed as a very small and innocent child, like Iphigenia in the Agamemnon, the tragedy that Eliot alludes to in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” or the infant Oedipus, whom the presence of Tiresias in the pages of The Waste Land will bring shortly to mind as well. The ancient idea is that a culture that slaughters its young does not have long to survive, and so a constant condition of the wasteland that The Waste Land portrays is its slaughter of innocence and of the innocent. That point will be much more fully developed shortly in the second part of “A Game of Chess,” the pub scene. For now, Philomela’s rape and the disgraced marriage bed appear more as a comment on the bored couple that the reader is about to hear as they engage in a fruitlessly one-sided conversation in their well-appointed apartment. The reader is now told that, along with the print depicting the rape of Philomela, “Other withered stumps of time / Were told” on the apartment’s walls. The clear implication rather is that these emblems of and lessons from the human family’s mythic past, containing its store of conventional wisdom and cautionary tales regarding destructive behavior patterns, have become mere wallpaper, as it were, nothing more than window dressing and decorative elements inasmuch as this modern couple, who are starving in the midst of plenty, are concerned. A vast panoramic history of ideas and images hovers just at the edge of their consciousness, if even there, but otherwise has no abiding effect on or benefit to their lives. Like the “roots that clutch” to no avail in “The Burial of the Dead,” the ancient tales have become “withered stumps,” an image recalling Philomela’s severed tongue, to be sure, but also echoing the image,

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again from “The Burial of the Dead,” questioning what branches—new growth, new ideas—might “grow out of this stony rubbish.” A withered stump bears no fruit. Cut off from the past, from its instructive powers over the living human spirit meant to inherit and be shaped by it, and bereft of any unifying principle of their own, the twosome sit there, bored out of their skulls with each other, their surroundings, and themselves. What then follows is, once more, the couple’s one-sided conversation in which she complains that her nerves are bad and that they never do anything, and he pulls a long-suffering silent act, never apparently responding to her complaints directly but thinking, nevertheless, about how bored he is, too, with the whole show, the whole lot of them. “What shall we ever do?” she asks, or is it him and of himself, as they sit there, drowning in a sea of human voices, hearing nothing, connecting nothing with nothing? Eliot almost gets his readers to wish that they might at least find the passion and the conviction that individuals like Procne and Philomela, even the brute Tereus, had. For all their destructiveness, they at least engaged life and the living of it as if such things were meaningful and important experiences in and of themselves, as if life mattered. This new, modern scene of marital tragedy, however, ends not with mad pursuit, but with someone “pressing lidless eyes”—there is no rest, no relief, and there apparently will be none. If this opening episode of “A Game of Chess” is one of the least difficult sections of The Waste Land to get a handle on because of its clarity as drama, as narrative, particularly after the challenges to order and coherence with which “The Burial of the Dead” has just presented the reader, then the pub scene that follows is a close competitor. The transition may be abrupt, but it should not be too difficult for the attentive reader to get his or her bearings because it is clear that, despite the lack of quotation marks, there is now someone being caught in the act of actually speaking, rather than the poet or the anonymous speaker speaking only to the reader. “When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—,” this someone begins, and it quickly becomes apparent from her turns of speech that she is a work-

ing-class person unabashedly gossiping about a good friend as she goes on about the marital advice that she tried to give to this other person, Lil. The monologue—although a one-sided conversation may again be, like the stressed wife’s of the first episode, a more apt description in this case, too— introduces us to yet another married couple, Lil and Albert. If The Waste Land drives its “story” forward on an endless stream of parallel stories drawn from different human epochs and locales, Lil and Albert’s, though they may be far more just “common” folk, is a story that is no less sad or tragic than the couple’s sharing a loveless and sexless marriage in the midst of their comfortable surroundings, or than Tereus and Procne’s. (Indeed, it may very well be Eliot’s intention to use Lil and Albert to dispel the old literary myth that only the highborn can know what genuine suffering is. Eliot was the child of a democratic culture; he would have known that tragedy is no respecter of classes.) Any reader can easily gather the details. Albert has just been released from military service after four years, having been in the war for the duration, no doubt, and the friend has been advising Lil to try to look her best if she wants to keep her man now that he has come home for good at last. Lil, however, has been having trouble with her teeth, and Albert would like to see her get them all pulled and replaced with false teeth. Lil’s excuse is that her bad teeth and her sorry looks are the result of her having taken drugs to abort her last pregnancy, having had five children by Albert already. Shades of the slaughtered Itys and Procne’s mournful tears aside, Lil’s friend makes it clear to her listeners that she has made it clear to Lil that if Lil does not give Albert the “good time” he wants, “there’s others will, I said.” “Then I’ll know who to thank,” Lil tells her. So the story goes. Interspersed with this particular mournful tale of love gone awry and adultery on the wing is the bartender’s crying out, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME”— the last call in a London pub. If it will help keep a dramatic focus, the reader might wish to imagine that the husband of the couple in the first part of “A Game of Chess,” no longer able to bear his spouse’s irritable nagging, has stepped downstairs into a pub that occupies the street level in their or an adjacent

Waste Land, The apartment building. Eliot and his wife Vivien did indeed live in a London apartment near a pub at this time in their married life. Although theirs was not a loveless match by all accounts, it was, because to Vivien’s difficult menstrual cycles, a great deal more sexless than is natural or normal. Imagining that the couple bored to distraction, the husband driven to a late-night drink, might be Tom and Viv will not make the significance of the moment in The Waste Land have any greater or lesser significance, however, since it could be a thousand other couples in a thousand other cities on a thousand other nights—which is Eliot’s point. By dragging Lil and Albert, Tereus and Procne, and Antony and Cleopatra (and, shortly, Tiresias) into the endless tale of human betrayal and disappointment in the name of love, he is not telling his own tale; he is telling everyone’s tale to one degree or another. For now, the poetry is mainly exposing the withering irony that there is no getting away from the agony that is human existence, its interminable boredom, and its seeking after quick and all too often violent pleasure in reaction. Seeking some surcease from his sorrow, such as it is, the speaker (for might not the husband driven from his apartment by his nerve-wracked wife not be the seekerspeaker of “The Burial of the Dead?”) has to sit and listen—at an adjoining table of his own, of course; he would hardly dare to mingle—to Lil’s friend go on and on as another dreary night draws to another dreary close. The patrons finally begin to depart, bidding each “goonight,” and another echo of that “Shakespeherian Rag” creeps over the water, bringing to mind one last pair of doomed lovers, Hamlet and Ophelia. In the midst of all those good nights is Ophelia’s—“Good night, ladies”—as she drowns, having been driven mad, first, by Hamlet’s abusive behavior toward her in his plot to feign madness and then when Hamlet’s kills her father, Polonius, mistaking him for yet another murderous king, Claudius. All stories are the same story, it has been said, and in “A Game of Chess,” Eliot’s aim is simply to prove this maxim in as few words and with as great an economy of stagecraft and fanfare as possible. If it were a stand-alone poem, “A Game of Chess” would still be an outstanding poetic achievement,

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combining the allusive, the dramatic, and the thematic in a way that both advances the immediate action—the quest is still on, after all, even if it seems that the text cannot get past square one, that being the City of London—and the universal dynamics of human relationships that compel that action. If The Waste Land is the dead land, it is not that it is incapable of springing to life; it is that the hero must desire life. Otherwise, all is lost inasmuch as the human element is concerned. Procne’s mourning cry is what survives—“the inviolable voice” that can fill all the desert with its song. That song, Eliot tells his reader, is the poetry—the enduring beauty, if you will—that is made out of all of this otherwise transient suffering. Shakespeare, in another of his plays, The Tempest, will say it best, perhaps, when he says that song is that magic that turns all our suffering into something “rich and strange”—a phrase that Eliot will resort to frequently in his criticism. Perhaps, then, it is appropriate that that very moment from The Tempest in which Shakespeare has the sprite Ariel utter those words underpins the opening movement (to shift to a musical analogy) of the next section of The Waste Land. Part III: “The Fire Sermon” The third part’s opening motifs of less-thanenticing scenes set by the River Thames as it wends it way through English literary history as well as past the sleeping modern metropolis of London is in keeping with the only somewhat convenient premise that The Waste Land, rather than a collage of mangled verse, is a narrative poem reflecting the thoughts and feelings of a single personage. Though he may be more a ruling intelligence than any easily isolated and identified agent or personality, the speaker whose presence periodically manifests itself clearly and distinctly among all those bit and pieces from sources as varied as past literary masterpieces, snatches of conversation caught as if in passing, and present-day popular songs does seem to take on more discernible characteristics and a personality as the poem proceeds, so that by the opening of “The Fire Sermon,” with its morning-after ambiance, this anonymous speaker’s trail follows logically upon the flow of the dramatic action that has just transpired in “A Game of Chess.”

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It is not too difficult to imagine, for example, that this ruling or guiding personage, whose interior monologue and exterior meanderings form the substance of The Waste Land, having left his apartment and nagging spouse at some point the evening before and then hung out till closing in the early morning hours in a pub in part two of The Waste Land, now finds himself, in part three, wandering the deserted streets of London in the early morning hours. As one half of that middleclass couple, unhappy not just with each other so much as with life itself, or at least with the lifestyle they have found themselves compelled to live in this contemporary urban environment, he may very well be reluctant to return home. He has had his fill of nagging women the night before. Whatever the case, he seems now to be retracing his steps from the closing passages of “The

Burial of the Dead.” Shortly, for example, he will invoke those images of the “unreal city” again, and from the landmarks that he cites, it will be made clear that he is once more near London Bridge. This is certainly Eliot’s vivid way of suggesting that the speaker, like the aimless opportunists in the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno, is going around in meaningless circles. The only problem is that he is supposed to be on a quest if the wasteland is ever to be delivered from its awful doldrums. That will come later, however. For now the speaker seems to be haunting the waterfront itself, the seedy banks of the river, and as he does so, he bears an uneasy witness to the sordid detritus of the previous night’s furtive activities along those ancient banks littered with “other testimonies of summer nights.” Such a conceit—that the speaker has lost his way as he walks off a hangover, perhaps—would

The Church of St. Magnus Martyr, whose high altar is pictured here, is praised in Eliot’s “The Fire Sermon” for its “[i]nexplicable splendour.” (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

Waste Land, The enable the reader to make sense and even order out of this third part’s tangle of allusions, fragments, and images. If the sensibilities of this ruling intelligence, the speaker, are suffering a disorientation from the marital stress and heavy drinking of the sleepless night before, then all these dulled and confused memories of past trysts that will dominate virtually the whole of “The Fire Sermon” are still very much in keeping with the speaker’s own current interests and predicament, even if that is not as clear to him at the moment as it ought to be to the keenly observant reader. Assaulted on all sides by a culture top-heavy with the totems and tokens of the past, and unsure of the direction that his life and marriage have taken, the distracted speaker has not lost sight of his quest so much as not yet come to realize that he is even on one—a quest not for the Grail itself but for the ability to make the kind of sense and order out of experience that the reader also craves as the poetry of The Waste Land continues on its inexorably chaotic way. Any pursuit that lacks direction or purpose must ultimately seem to be a vain one, and that is certainly the point that this section’s title, “The Fire Sermon,” makes. The title is a direct reference to a sermon, a teaching text from The Buddha, and as such The Buddha’s Fire Sermon emphasizes a spiritual lesson by means of the figure that all of the material universe is on fire—burning, that is, or changing—even as the soul witnesses it. The Buddha uses this figure to teach the lesson that the created world of time and space, which for the sensory, sensual self seems to be the only substantial reality that there is, is in fact nothing but an illusion. That as such, furthermore, it can only deceive the individual soul into imagining that what is “real” is this world, with its wealth, fame, power, and all its other attachments as well, including those to the flesh and its pleasures and to the flesh of others in the pleasures of sexual or connubial love. This world, however, is in fact illusory, according to The Buddha’s teachings, for the simple reason that it is always changing. Hence, nothing in it endures, whereas the soul does. So, then, the soul must seek the sources of its peace elsewhere. The idea that nothing here matters because nothing here endures is at the heart of much wis-

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dom literature from ancient times to the present, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (to which Eliot, in his notes, compares The Buddha’s Fire Sermon) included. With its exhortation to store one’s treasure in heaven, where it cannot rust, Christ’s guidance to his followers is based on the same principle as The Buddha’s: The world that the senses perceive to be the only world is instead a place of corruption, where nothing, not even thought or belief or love, lasts long—if, that is, it is built on nothing more than the shifting sands of human knowledge and human interaction. So, too, then, the shifting scene that the speaker discovers as he wanders the riverside at early morning is one that emphasizes that no human pleasure endures either, not even the lustful dalliances of the night before, as the remnant debris that he encounters bears witness. Like the nymphs, who were only ever imagined anyhow, and the city directors and their heirs, who come and go on fame and fortune’s changing winds, lovers, too, are all or soon will be departed or parted, just like the power-brokers—Lil as well as Cleopatra, Antony as well as Albert. To underscore that poignant truth, Eliot plays on a refrain from Sir Edmund Spenser’s 16th-century poem in honor of a wedding, The Prothalamion: “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.” Spenser’s love song for the young bride and groom ended long ago, as did that young couple, as will this echo of it, the poetry suggests. The river runs on, no matter, in good Hercleitean fashion. (Heracleitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, is famous for having observed that no one can step into the same river twice.) Echoes of Shakespeare’s The Tempest are heard here, too, another literary work that emphasizes loss. Ferdinand, a prince of Naples, fearing that his father, Alonso, the king, has been lost in a shipwreck, has his fears confirmed by “music that crept by me upon the waters,” so he weeps in grief while sitting on the bank. That this Alonso was not a very pleasant person is not factored in to Ferdinand’s grief, nor should it be. In any case, the report of Alonso’s death later turns out to be a lie, the basis for an illusion created by the magician Prospero, himself the former, usurped king of Naples exiled by Alonso to this lonely island with

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only his daughter Miranda for company. Who does not have a story of loss worthy of another’s tears? In a world of illusions, however, it makes no difference to the speaker what is true or what is false, for “son of man, / You cannot say or guess.” In the wasteland that the speaker inhabits, even the source of tears seems to have dried up (shades of Lil’s friend’s unsympathetic analysis of Lil’s “sorry” marriage). The speaker now ends up fishing along the bank. Whether that is literal or he is pruriently fishing for clues about what sorts of amorous activities may have transpired there last night under the concealing cover of darkness, it brings to mind the Fisher King, who though wounded monitors the hero’s access to the Grail that can cure him. Still, this is a moment of a forced, false resolution that will not take; much more travail and learning lay ahead for the speaker before, at poem’s end, he will have earned the right to sit finally at the shore, fishing, the arid plain behind him. For now, he is still lost in a wilderness of confusion, selfishness, and desire. That is why the dominant note struck in “The Fire Sermon” will be its almost obsessive emphasis upon sexual desire, lust. Dante was astute enough to consign the majority of the sinners confined to hell proper to Circle Two, where the lustful are punished, and Shakespeare never missed an opportunity to introduce a bit of bawd to liven up an otherwise weighty dramatic moment. Eliot, too, knows that, while the great mythic images of a lost or wounded king and blighted land longing to be rescued by a savior/hero/ Grail knight may tug at the heartstrings and appeal to the imagination of a certain kind of reader (Eliot himself included, no doubt), unadorned metaphors and images drawing on the raw energies of sexual desire and its related abuses will always strike a resounding clarion chord with most readers, since most humans know what it is to lose sight of goals, proper action, and even clear thinking when the heat of sexual passion clouds the intellect and moral judgment. Nor should this emphasis be thought of as either a pandering to his readers’ baser instincts or as moralizing or preaching to them on Eliot’s part, since that is not the point. Human sexuality is

merely and for the most part a convenient shorthand by which Eliot may define the essential problem of human existence, that being the individual’s attachment to the material universe, which, as The Buddha and the poets insist, is all only an illusion anyhow, changing ceaselessly even as it unfolds or undresses before the seeker’s eyes, hungry for the sight of something meaningful, maybe even just interesting. When in doubt, a comely naked torso will always do nicely to illustrate the point. The locale of a river, then, also itself becomes a suitable metaphorical reference point for the river of time, of course, which, like time and tide, waits for no one. Art may seek the changeless, but as the 17th-century English poet Andrew Marvell says, “at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.” Those awful sentiments, from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” a cleverly witty invitation to his beloved to surrender her chastity to his desires, are alluded to twice over within 12 lines of this same opening stanza to “The Fire Sermon,” so that the reader is not allowed to escape what the old scholars and religious used to call a memento mori—a reminder of death. (Eliot, in his notes, identifies the second allusion to Marvell as an allusion to an obscure poem called “Parliament of Bees,” but this may be the sort of red herring that Eliot delighted in tossing under the noses of scholarly source hunters. He was alluding to Marvell’s duly celebrated poem as early as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and his criticism had a great deal to do with making this poem of Marvell’s celebrated among modern readers.) By the end of the first stanza, nevertheless, the reader finds Eliot exercising his typical propensity for undercutting any earlier indications of a too serious intent for the poetry. The gloom and doom expressed in the poetry from The Tempest and from Marvell that has been alluded to, not to mention in the images of rats dragging “slimy” bellies or scurrying over bones cast into dry attics—shades of “Gerontion” or of “The Hollow Men” yet to come—suddenly take a turn toward the ludicrous but no less sexually seductive. Using the second allusion to Marvell to execute the segue—“But at my back from time to time I hear”—Eliot permits

Waste Land, The his caricature of the natural man, Sweeney, to swim into the picture. Followed by a ragged verse that comes from a relatively bawdy and contemporary song about a Mrs. Porter whose daughter “washes her feet in soda water,” reminiscent, perhaps, of the epileptic Doris from Mrs. Turner’s bawdy house in “Sweeney Erect,” Sweeney’s entrance into the pages of The Waste Land may lighten the moment but not the matter. Whatever else the reader may think of someone who uses soda water to clean her feet, the idea calls to mind a very famous poetic tag by George Gordon, Lord Byron, the early 19th-century Scottish libertine, poet, and bon vivant. If the speaker is indeed suffering a hangover as he muses on dead kings and deader desire, he may be recalling, too, another gibe at drunkenness and sermons and soda water as this first stanza of “The Fire Sermon” ends. Although this gibe is hardly as sobering as The Buddha’s injunction, it has as its target the same sort of frivolously vain human behavior: “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,” Byron’s couplet runs, “Sermons and soda water the morning after.” Soda water would have been a dyspeptic, the Alka Seltzer of its day for those who had indulged too heavily the night before. That said, Byron’s sentiments are clear, almost indeed the drunken libertine’s age-old battle cry: If I have to hear preaching, let it be after I have enjoyed the pleasures of sinning. It is a worldly man’s morality, naturally, and hardly what The Buddha would have had in mind, although Sweeney would no doubt subscribe to the idea. Whether or not the speaker of The Waste Land does as well will be answered in the next stanza. On balance, and despite this possible allusion to Byron through Sweeney and Mrs. Porter’s daughter, the first stanza of “The Fire Sermon” may seem to betoken on the part of a repentant speaker regret or at least some caution regarding sexual and other sorts of pleasure-seeking excess in the face of life’s brief candle—particularly when it is being burnt at both ends, as the saying goes. If there were any lessons to be learned, however, stanza two suggests strongly that they simply did not take. The speaker is back in the same locale of “unreal city” that he had already managed to find his way

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to in “The Burial of the Dead.” The morning has passed, and it is now a winter afternoon. Just as Madame Sosostris was a false start on Tiresias, who shall appear momentarily, Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, is a false start on the drowned Phoenician sailor that she read in the speaker’s future. That personage, too, will appear shortly in part four as Phlebas. For now, however, this scene, with its rather patent overtones of a homosexual pickup, appears to serve as a way for Eliot further to emphasize the speaker’s lack of any real forward progress, for here he is, still as suspended between memory and desire as he was within the first few lines of the entire poem. What now is about to ensue is an assignation between a young woman—a typist—and a rental agent—the “young man carbuncular,” that is, pimple-faced. (Eliot refers crudely to young male adolescents’ faces that have apparently broken out in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” as being “red and pustular”; he may, however, only be using that kind of an identifying characteristic as a sign of physical and, so, behavioral immaturity, rather than being insensitive.) Whether the speaker is a witness to this scene, a participant in it, or absent from it is difficult to determine. Since this scene is also famously witnessed by Tiresias, it is perhaps one of the most critical in the Eliot text, not simply for Tiresias’s mythic importance as a seer but for the special significance that Eliot assigns him in the notes to the poem. It is doubtful, nevertheless, that the speaker and Tiresias are the same person, as some commentators have suggested; rather, introducing Tiresias at this point gives Eliot the opportunity to take the typist’s part as well as the young man’s for reasons that will be explained shortly. That leaves two other options for where the speaker has gone. He has been until now present virtually without cease, after all, even if only as a sorry murmur from time to time since the second stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” so why should he suddenly disappear from the scene at just this juncture? To imagine that he has not disappeared leaves only one option: that the speaker may be the carbuncular young man who by late afternoon and after a near sexual encounter with another

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male relieves all his own pent-up sexual frustration, energy, and stress with the typist, an old flame perhaps or maybe even a present one, given the tenuous state of the speaker’s marriage. Ultimately, it is not that important a matter, of course. The typist and young man’s moment of sexual intimacy is merely another one of those universal moments repeated ceaselessly “on this same divan or bed,” as Tiresias so astutely observes. So, too, this scene in The Waste Land is that single one toward which all of the poetry to this juncture has been pointing, the poem’s dramatic climax (coming, as is appropriate, three-fifths of the way through). It is, at least, the easiest scene in the poem for a reader to follow. In a note, Eliot cites a longish passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses not only to give his own readers an introduction to Tiresias but also to tell them how that mythic personage is intended to function in this section of The Waste Land. Several issues arise immediately, however. For one thing, Eliot uses a Roman source for a mythic characterization that is Greek in origin. True, the source is a poet of no less stature than Ovid, but it is not as if the Greek sources for Tiresias are obscure or any less celebrated as poetic achievements. Indeed, few readers familiar with Greek literature, a category of individuals that would certainly include Eliot, would be likely to think first of Ovid when Tiresias comes to mind. Such a reader would think foremost, no doubt, of the Tiresias whom Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey, must visit in the Underworld in order to discover what perils still lie before him as he continues his homeward voyage to Ithaka. Failing that, such a reader would be as likely to recall Sophocles’ Oedipus the King or his Antigone, two tragic plays in which the same Tiresias, here portrayed as the blind seer, futilely informs others of the unassailable truths of their fate, truths that they cannot, or do not wish to, hear. To be sure, Eliot does make a point of reminding his own readers of those equally celebrated appearances of Tiresias in ancient Greek myths. His Tiresias speaks, for example, of his having sat outside the walls of Thebes, the locale of the two tragedies by Sophocles, and of his having walked among the lowest of the dead, that is, as he is seen to be doing in the Underworld of Homer.

A further connection between Sophocles’ use of Tiresias, incidentally, can be found in the fact that Oedipus the King deals with a city that has become a wasteland because it is unwittingly harboring the killer of the previous king. In other words, intentionally or not, Sophocles builds his Theban tragedy on the same primitive vegetation myths—with their sacrificed or wounded king and a blighted land awaiting its deliverance—a myth, Eliot tells his readers in his notes, that he has utilized as well to establish his own wasteland motifs in keeping with his reading of Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and SIR JAMES FRAZER’s The Golden Bough, which both contain “references to vegetation ceremonies.” But if Eliot does not think or wish his reader to be ignorant of Tiresias’s Greek pedigree, why, then, does Eliot call special attention neither to the Tiresias of Homer nor to the Tiresias of Sophocles, reasonably original Greek sources, but to Ovid’s tale of Tiresias, a tale based on those same original sources, no doubt, but otherwise composed in far distant Imperial Roman times? Fortunately, Eliot’s extended note dealing with Tiresias answers this question in rather precise but not necessarily perfectly clear terms. For one thing, Eliot tells his reader that the myth of Tiresias that Ovid relates (Eliot cites it virtually in full but leaves it in the original Latin) is “of great anthropological interest”—hardly a minor detail but, as phrased, not a particularly useful one either. That myth relates how Jove teased Juno by telling her that wives had the better part of it in lovemaking. Juno disagreed, and to settle the argument, they turned to Tiresias, who had spent seven years of his life as a woman (explaining why Eliot portrays him as an “old man with wrinkled breasts”) as the miraculous result of his having struck two snakes while they were copulating. Tiresias decided the argument in Jove’s favor (whether in deference to Jove’s might or to the truth as he, Tiresias, knew it is not clarified by Ovid). Juno had to live with the decision, of course, but to punish Tiresias for siding with Jove, she struck Tiresias blind (an action that commented on what she thought of Tiresias’s opinion). Jove could not undo the punishment—no god can—but was able to compensate Tiresias for the loss of his physical sight by making him able to see the future.

Waste Land, The Eliot does not miss the mark by much when he says that Ovid’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek rendering of the myth is of great interest, exposing as it does the far more ancient and epic battle of the sexes, which apparently goes on even among the immortal gods, and the drolly ironic subtext, which suggests that each gender thinks that the other side enjoys sexual activity more, thus implying that neither side does. Fortunately, too, Eliot’s note explains the significance of all this inasmuch as it affects The Waste Land, which, by this point in its unfolding progress as a poetic narrative, is as clearly obsessed with human sexuality as with anything. (A commentator once suggested that the poem ought to have been entitled The Waist Land.) In this same note, Eliot proposes that all the various male characters in The Waste Land are one male character, just as all the various women are one woman, and that the two sexes meet in Tiresias, “the most important personage in the poem.” Eliot goes on to explain that “What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” That sounds to be more than a hint as to the meaning of The Waste Land straight out of its poet’s own mouth, but the overzealous reader must be careful here, nevertheless. Eliot’s note, his words, are not necessarily a trap, but they require interpretation on the reader’s part as well. What Tiresias sees, for example, may seem obvious—a couple making rather perfunctory “love,” as it is often euphemistically put, almost as if the sex act were a duty or an obligation, like eating or sleeping or voting, rather than the intimate sharing of an abiding and pleasurable procreative energy with each other. However, what Tiresias also sees, as he comments—“I Tiresias have foresuffered all”—is that this is how humans most often have engaged, and do engage, in such a powerfully life-giving, lifehealing action, not with zest, but with reluctance and relief: “ ‘I’m glad it’s over.’ ” So, then, what Tiresias sees is not the human tragedy but the human comedy, thus, too, explaining why, for his Tiresias, Eliot turned to the less somber and sober Roman source, Ovid. Ovid’s Tiresias, the reader now should remember, speaks of the subject with an impressive authority, after all, one of which even the gods stand in

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awe, having known human sexual experience as both a male and a female. Indeed, Ovid’s Tiresias is one of the few, perhaps the only characterization, in all human literature, whose point of view can truly be called universal and so objective. On this basis it might be concluded that the substance of The Waste Land is its comment on the inability of the individual, be that person a man or a woman, to find peace and contentment and fulfillment in another human being on this side of the grave. The reader of The Waste Land has already seen a parade of lovers, like players in a French sexual farce, come sweeping past, much like the heterosexual lovers in Circle Two of Dante’s Inferno who are blown on a hot and stirring wind, the very emblem of their restless desire for rest in another’s embrace—Rudolph and Marie, Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Tereus and Procne and Philomela, the couple at their game of chess, Lil and Albert, the typist and the rental clerk, Tiresias. All have been left frustrated by that which ought to fulfill—love. And all are at a loss for what went wrong. Shortly the reader will be introduced to other examples of love, sex, attachments that went nowhere except into the sadness of what was wasted. The reader, continuing a journey down a river that is both the river of time, of history, and the real Thames, encounters Elizabeth and Leicester, whose legendary dalliance ended nowhere. Then the reader hears from each of the three young modern women whom Eliot, in another note, calls the Thames-daughters. Each one makes her confession of surrendering her virtue to a male companion who was all too willing to take it, and none of them found satisfaction or fulfillment in that awful daring of a moment’s surrender that is the complete submission of oneself, emotionally and physically, to another person in the throes of love, be it another name for sex or for passion. First, however, the speaker must stand one last time, as he has done twice before, on or near London Bridge (Wren’s church of St. Magnus the Martyr, a fishers’ parish, is close by). Once again he must survey the unreal, the swarming human city, filled with thousands of individuals seeking or already lost in the arms of a significant other, each

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one in the tangle of the ultimate human embrace imagining, like Ovid’s Jove and Juno, that it is the other one who is getting the better part of the bargain. Eliot’s point, if not the anonymous speaker’s, too, by now seems to be rather obvious: There must be something else. This sad and apparently timeless, ceaseless parade of human hope and folly cannot be all there is—cannot be what it is or was meant to be all about. That it is not, was not, is, of course, the thrust of both the entire poem and the seeker/speaker’s quest. That much is clear. But if the lives of most humans are lives lost in the errors of misplaced longings, as Eliot suggests by his use of so much past poetry as examples, the reader now has the right to demand of the poet something more than just the critique, something more in keeping with a possible solution to this universal human dilemma. What, then, is human happiness? Eliot had already introduced in the section’s title, “The Fire Sermon,” one possible solution, found in the asceticism promoted by The Buddha—happiness can come only through the complete renunciation of all the allure of the physical universe, since it is all only an illusion in any event. Now, as the third part of The Waste Land draws to a close, Eliot introduces words from another ancient text that also offers a solution to the question of, the quest for, human happiness. “To Carthage then I came,” are the words that open Book III of The Confessions of St. Augustine. In that work, a book that is regarded as the first autobiography and that was written in A.D. 397 when he was 43, Augustine, then the Catholic bishop of Hippo Begius in North Africa, recounts the history of his life not as the actions of a man but as the quest of a soul craving only one thing—to come to know, love, and serve its God. That Augustine, as a result of that quest, chose to know, love, and serve the Judeo-Christian God of the Old and New Testaments is not to Eliot’s point, so much as that in coming to do so, Augustine had to learn to put behind him his sinfulness, which, from his viewpoint, was his attachment to the things of this world. Among those attachments were the usual run-of-the-mill varieties—fame, fortune, glory—but the one that was particularly

troublesome and difficult for him to overcome from his own point of view was his inability, from the time that he entered puberty, to keep himself away from the sexual pleasures that he found in women. As Book III of The Confessions opens, it continues, “a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me. I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love.” More than anything else, Augustine found his carnality to be the foremost impediment to his finding peace with God and so peace with himself—in a word, happiness. And in those closing five truncated lines of poetry with which “The Fire Sermon” closes, there is, in essence, another appeal to the tradition of renunciation of the flesh and the things of this world that also forms the basis of The Buddha’s teaching. In Eliot’s view, Augustine’s Confessions is to the traditions of Western asceticism what The Buddha’s Fire Sermon is to the traditions of Eastern asceticism, an observation on which Eliot himself elaborates in his note to these closing verses of “The Fire Sermon” and their allusion to St. Augustine’s Confessions. The only difference, perhaps, is that if The Buddha calls for personal renunciation, Augustine calls for surrender to the will of a greater person, God: “O Lord Thou pluckest me out.” In either case, the solution is the same: self-denial, or in preparation for the next section of The Waste Land, “Death by Water,” the extinction of self. Suspended as he is between memory and desire, the speaker till now has been learning that desire is the danger and that all the sources of renewal, or at least a clue to them, are to be found in, are stored in, memory. Just as, in virtually real terms, spring is the vegetable world re-creating itself and, with it, the living Earth out of the cellular memory of past springs, past rebirths, and renewals, stored in a dormant natural universe, so, then, dormant within the speaker is the memory of hope. Lest he die to the animal appetite that drives him— desire—that memory will not be freed to awaken, however. Overcoming desire will be the focus of “What the Thunder Said,” the fifth and final section of The Waste Land. But first, like Phlebas, the speaker must experience a death—must recognize that physical death itself only symbolizes the death of the will to chart one’s own destiny.

Waste Land, The Part IV: “Death by Water” The fourth section of The Waste Land must, at first glance, come as a relief to any reader who has made it this far into the poem. Not only does “Death by Water” run a mere 10 lines, but there does not appear to be a single non sequitur among them. Indeed, the four sentences of which the single stanza is composed not only are all grammatically complete, but they present a consecutive and logical exposition from beginning to end, and the form of the stanza, divided by breaking lines three and seven into two half-lines apiece, make for a rather pleasant-looking pattern on the page, resembling somewhat the rolling waves of the sea in which Phlebas the Phoenician sailor-merchant must have drowned. Furthermore, the text is all in English, and there is only one literary allusion among the stanza’s 70 words. That allusion, such as it is, is to a poem by Eliot himself, “Dans le Restaurant,” or “In the Restaurant,” composed, as the title suggests, originally in French and first published in the Little Review in September 1918. Eliot had been a longtime student of recent French verse. Not only did he model many of his earliest poems after the style of Jules Laforgue, but he developed the latter quatrains in imitation of Théophile Gautier, particularly “The Hippopotamus,” which was adapted from one of Gautier’s own quatrain poems. During his student year in Paris (1910–11), Eliot would later confess in a Paris Review interview in 1959, he had toyed with the idea of settling down in Paris where he would “scrape along . . . and gradually write French.” That went the way of many another young person’s romantic dream of throwing all career and caution to the wind. Later still, after his early successes, Eliot admitted in the same interview that he thought that his poetic talent had “dried up completely.” He continued, “I hadn’t written anything for some time and was rather desperate. I started writing a few things in French and found I could.” Eliot admitted, too, to having had some help in editing these poems from Pound and another French-speaking friend, Edmund du Lac. “Dans le Restaurant” was one of the better products of that period and is to this day included among the minor poems in The Complete Poems and Plays. Otherwise, its main claim to fame is that

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“Death by Water” is virtually a direct translation of the closing stanza of “Dans le Restaurant.” The stanza on Phlebas does not seem to have a place in Eliot’s French-language original, which involves an elderly waiter recounting a curiously erotic episode that he had had with a young girl when he was just a boy. The only discernible connection seems to be that the patron requires change for a bathhouse, bringing to mind the possibility of a homosexual liaison, as well, perhaps, as the homosexual encounter that the speaker of The Waste Land has just had in “The Fire Sermon” with Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed Smyrna merchant, who invited him to a weekend at Brighton, a popular seaside resort (and whose own French, “demotic,” was not of the highest standards either, by the way). Any hints of the sea or water have implications of the notion of an imminent rescue from the oppressive dryness of The Waste Land, although in both of Eliot’s poetic treatments, water proves to be deadly for Phlebas. However, if death of self, in a spiritual sense, is the only salvation from the endless round of sexual desire, mayhem, and exploitation that the reader has thus far witnessed in The Waste Land, then “death by water” can easily connote a saving grace. Christian baptism, for example, utilizes the symbolic death of immersion in water to remind the initiate that he has died to sin and been reborn in Christ. So, then, the overall significance of the death of Phlebas, who is held up as a reminder, in the fourth part of The Waste Land, to both “Gentile or Jew” that Phlebas’s is the common human fate—each of us is mortal, dies—fits neatly into the overall movement of The Waste Land to this point. Thus far, that is to say, the reader has seen Eliot using the resources of myth, history, literature, and even current events—“He Do the Police in Different Voices”—to present a vision of humanity that has universal implications. The human individual is presented as a creature bearing the double burden of consciousness (“memory”) and an animal nature (“desire”), frequently unable to satisfy the rigorous demands of either, and afflicted on all sides with the need for constant interaction with other similarly burdened human creatures, leaving trails of loneliness, grief, regret, and violence in their wake.

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To that catastrophe sages like The Buddha and St. Augustine offer the antidote of self-denial and surrender to a greater will and, one must hope, purpose. Phlebas has certainly found a certain sort of peace; in death, he has “forgotten the profit and the loss”—the scorekeeping, as it were, that keeps the game going—but the benefit seems minimal. He is caught in the whirlpool, after all. Is death just another round of frustration and fruitless hope? the poetry seems to be asking, even if it asks the reader to recognize in Phlebas’s fate the fate that awaits every individual. The reader might wonder why here, at a juncture that is clearly a crossroads in the poem, Eliot did not choose to use a more publicly available and accessible reference point than an obscure passage and characterization from one of his own poems. If he had chosen a more commonly known mythic reference point, for example, there may have been a clearer signal as to whether Phlebas is intended as a model or an admonishment. The key to a suitable answer to that question may be found, however, in a detail from the original appearance of Phlebas in Eliot. In “Dans le Restaurant,” Eliot tells us an intriguing piece of information that is omitted from the same story as it is retold in The Waste Land. Eliot tells us exactly where Phlebas, the Phoenician sailor, drowned. It was off the coast of Cornwall, in the farthest southwestern reaches of England. That locale has its own historical legitimacy for playing host to such a significant event. Cornwall has been a source for tin from ancient into relatively recent times, and it is a well-known historical fact that the ancient Phoenicians, a seafaring and mercantile people who hailed from the area now occupied by modern Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean, carried on an active trade in Cornish tin perhaps from as far back as that tin was first being mined. Phoenician traders bartering with Celtic tribesman even happens to be the subject of a mural in the old Exchange Building in the City of London. Although a recent redevelopment of that impressive temple of trade and banking into an upscale dining and shopping mall now obscures the mural along with all the others depicting the economic

history of the British peoples, it is hard to imagine that Eliot, as he made his workday excursions week after week in those very same environs of the “unreal” city, where he was himself employed, did not see that mural frequently. There is, however, another, far more telling connection among the Cornish tin trade, Middle Eastern merchant adventurers, and The Waste Land. Not too far inland up the Cornish peninsula from Cornwall is Somerset, home to Glastonbury, which is famed in British legend both as the burial place of Arthur and Guinevere and as the site in Britain to which Joseph of Arimathea came, fleeing the persecution of the Christ’s followers in the Holy Land following the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. With him, in fact, Joseph, who is named in the Gospels for having provided both the burial garments and the tomb for Jesus’s interment, is reputed to have brought the chalice that Christ blessed and from which he and the Apostles drank the wine of the First Eucharist at the Last Supper— a chalice that came down into medieval times as the legendary Holy Grail whose quest would obsess certain among Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. Eliot’s allusion, by bringing Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician sailor, to the reader’s attention at this critical juncture in The Waste Land, to his own earlier poem also, by extension, brings the Grail quest back to the forefront once more as well, but in a manner at odds with Jesse L. Weston’s reading of the quest, which Eliot himself cites quite favorably in his headnote. By establishing in the old vegetation rituals that permeated ancient Indo-European cultures the likelihood of a pagan Welsh origin to the Grail legend, whereby the blood-sacrifice of the Fisher King in the autumn was a fertility act required to ensure the Earth’s rebirth in the spring, Weston builds her entire thesis to overthrow the longstanding notion that the Grail is connected with the chalice of the Last Supper through Joseph of Glastonbury and, so, connected as well not simply with the subsequent Arthurian sagas but with the origins and beliefs of Christianity. As in any scholarly argument, Weston does not disprove the possibility of a Christian origin and significance for the Grail legend but merely casts it into scholarly doubt, and Eliot soon seems

Waste Land, The to hedge his own bets by introducing Christ and elements of Christianity into the closing section of The Waste Land, which openly emphasizes elements from the Grail quest that have been only implied this far. There is one last significant detail regarding the Phlebas-Cornwall-Glastonbury-Joseph linkages that Eliot is establishing in “Death by Water.” Legend also has it that Joseph of Arimathea’s ultimately settling in Glastonbury, which would then have been the far reaches of the world for a man born and raised in ancient Israel, is the result of his having, as a wealthy merchant, visited Cornwall many times before in the company of Phoenician traders. Providing the inspiration for William Blake’s famous couplet—“And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?”—this legend claims that Joseph may have even on occasion brought his young nephew along with him—Joseph and Mary’s son, Jesus. Perhaps now the reader can better appreciate why Eliot, in a poem in which he unabashedly uses past myths and poetry with an abandon that is forgivable only because, on reflection, it serves The Waste Land’s larger purposes, not only fails to give his readers their usual mythic bearings in part IV but cribs some obscure poetry of his own for the sake of giving the moment clarity. That is to say, there is a direct line, for any reader willing to follow it, from part IV of The Waste Land back through “Dans le Restaurant” to the reference to Cornwall. Through this connection to Cornwall, Phlebas brings to mind not only Joseph of Arimathea and thereby Christ and the Grail but the entire Arthurian literature, as well as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for Tristan was a Cornish knight. Wagner, meanwhile, calls to mind Ludwig and Rudolph and Marie. Through Phlebas’s connection to Phonenicia, meanwhile, his presence in the poem also brings to mind Mr. Eugenides and Madame Sosostris’s drowned sailor, and through the fortune-telling Madame Sosostris the reader is made mindful of the Sibyl and Tiresias. Phlebas’s connection with the sea provides a further connection to the Fisher King, and so on. Combined in the characterization of Eliot’s own creation, Phlebas, in other words, is a veritable

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Everyman for The Waste Land, bearing the weight not only of all the lovers, comic and tragic, that people the poetry but also the rest of a doomed humanity as well. Thanks to Eliot’s providing a roadmap based on his own previous poetry, added to that critical role that Phlebas plays in The Waste Land are the further connections that his presence implies to Glastonbury and the Grail, baptism and redemption, mystery and wonder. To “consider Phlebas,” as the speaker enjoins the reader, requires considering all those relationships and significances. His epitaph is a reminder found on many a tombstone in many a graveyard: “As I am now, so shall you be.” That is not a threat but a truth; Eliot permits the truth of Phlebas’s fate to enlarge itself into each reader’s fate—Gentile or Jew, Buddhist or Hindu, for that matter—by suggestion rather than preaching. Any reader fearful that the foregoing suggests that Eliot may be waxing religious, nevertheless, is missing the point. The same holds true, however, for any reader who may think, either to Eliot’s credit or his shame, that he is simply trying to be ingenious or even precocious by planting these insidiously clever breadcrumbs leading back, through “Death by Water,” to “Dans le Restaurant,” and from that poem to a gushing wellspring of mythic, historical, and religious potential for meaning. Eliot is not purveying a mythic sampler, after all; rather, Eliot’s poetry is attempting to achieve a mythic understanding and to work out a mythic calculus of its own, in its own terms, and on its own terms. Otherwise, it is not poetry, not art; instead, it is polemic at best, a collation of “favorite hits of human culture” at worst. It stands to reason, then, that at this key juncture Eliot could do nothing more or less than turn to his own poetic powers of personal mythmaking, where his own talents are not inconsiderable, and bring to bear, from his own store of images and symbols, the most powerful totems that he could conjure up of human spiritual aspiration. He then presents those, likely enough, as they had already occurred in the context of a poem that he himself had previously written, “Dans le Restaurant.” By not referring to an external myth or literary work at this point in a poem that is notorious for doing

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as much (“Death by Water” does not have a single note, for example), Eliot is granting his readers and his speaker a moment of quiet in which to contemplate and regroup—“consider Phlebas”—in preparation for the assault on the senses and sensibilities that is about to come in The Waste Land’s lengthy closing section, part V, “What the Thunder Said.” The thunder will bring to the wasteland refreshing rain, after all, but water can also bring death by drowning (the old “too much of a good thing” problem). To survive the necessary immersion in the saving graces of wisdom, the reader and the speaker both must be prepared to overcome the other kind of surrender, not to life, but to death; that latter surrender, though far less attractive in hindsight, is the easier by far. For all his value as a key marker in the complex poetic and narrative structure that makes up The Waste Land, Phlebas stands as an emblem not of surrendering the self to a greater good and goal, as The Buddha and Augustine both suggest, but to letting go, to giving up, to drowning. The theme of The Waste Land can now be defined as seduction— life itself, enforced in the spring, seducing back to its own primal vitality the weary soul that would, if it could, remain numb and motionless otherwise. However, if all positive and affirmative things are deceptively mirrored in their own lesser, negating manifestation, then when the call to awaken to life comes, there will be the temptation to yield to the more appealing and opposing seduction of death, which can give the image, but not the substance, of a genuine release. In “The Hollow Men,” Eliot will shortly play with ideas of life-in-death and death-in-life; they do not constitute that difficult a distinction to discern. The first is the triumph of the spring over winter; the other is a surrender to that winter that keeps the individual warm with the illusion of warmth that is actually a gradual numbing of the senses into extinction. When that extinction is the actual physical death of an individual, as in Phlebas’s case, for example, who could fail to observe its cold finality. But the poem has focused all along thus far on those walking dead—those who have embraced death-in-life, who think that they are living but are in fact dead to all of nature’s life-giving powers and

forces. The thing is, as the speaker has been learning, unlike with a physical death, that it is impossible to know just when that other sort of a death, the death of the spirit, has occurred. If, however, the speaker chooses life, he must undergo a symbolic death of self. All things are mirrored in their own lesser manifestation, so it is easy for the individual to become misled and misdirected. The seductive power of life, for example, finds its own parody and grotesque debasement in the seductive power of sexuality for sexuality’s sake. Cleopatra’s encounter with Antony, Lil’s friend’s designs on Albert, Tereus’s betrayal of Philomela, the Thames-daughters’ three consecutive confessions of having been taken in and taken by listening to the empty promises of lustful males, the waiter’s boyhood encounter with a female friend—these examples of the powerful driving force of sexual energy gone askew are not introduced into the poetry for their prurient interest but rather as symbolic moments illustrative of life’s seductively all-consuming allure gone awry. In Eliot’s hands, the whole sordid history of sexual seduction that The Waste Land portrays is introduced primarily as a vivid and dramatic way of demonstrating and emphasizing how the seductive vitality of life itself, of the call to risk life, can be debased into its own brutal, brutish opposite in acts of violence, emotional or physical or both, one against another. If that is humanity’s common burden—to miss the forest for the trees, the rose for its odor— then Phlebas’s is humanity’s common fate. But the only choices are not death or death-in-life. One may also choose life itself, the promise of the spring, of renewal and rebirth. For that choice, it is never too late. For his part, then, the speaker, with Augustine, has cried to be plucked out of the whirlpool, the senselessly pointless cycles of birth, copulation, death, that is proclaimed by Sweeney to be the order of things in “Sweeney Agonistes,” an aborted work of Eliot’s that would come shortly after The Waste Land. But, Sweeney, like the waiter in “Dans le Restaurant,” is not the Grail knight, the hero. The speaker of The Waste Land is not, either—not yet at least. Before him now lies the burning plain, the arid vista of death-in-life. It had

Waste Land, The first confronted him back in the second stanza of “The Burial of the Dead.” By now, however, the speaker has taken the desert’s measure. Having trekked his confused way across it, he knows that the terror of the wasteland, like its emptiness, is an interior event, a space within himself. It exists because he—humankind immemorial—has, except for a precious few, The Buddha and Augustine among them, imagined that it exists. With the dead, who are embodied in Phlebas, behind him, the speaker forges on, hoping to hear what the thunder, the giver, the bringer, of rain, has to say. (Incidentally, the word restaurant is based itself on the notion of restoring, renewing, revitalizing. Dans le restaurant, indeed.) Part V: “What the Thunder Said” In the fifth section, a poem that has kept its focus primarily on life in a contemporary Western European city, London, and its environs now moves both eastward in space and backward in time, as if the speaker himself is aboard the ancient ship off the Cornwall coast with Phlebas, but unlike him who drowned there, has made the successful voyage home to Phoenicia just in time to be on hand in Jerusalem to witness the passion of the Christ. According to Eliot’s headnote to this last section of the poem, one of its themes is the journey to Emmaus when the risen Christ anonymously joined with several of his disciples, seeking to know, as if he were a stranger in these parts, why they were so low in spirit. They shared with him as best they could the horror and tragedy of the Crucifixion that had just transpired. It was only later, as he shared with them a repast of fish, that, in the breaking of the bread, he revealed himself to them as Christ. The hooded figure who inhabits this section of The Waste Land is that same mysterious figure, “the third who walks always beside you”—the presence that is both unreal and real, threatening and familiar, companionable and distant. Eliot takes that idea, he explains in another note, from the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s account of the arduous journey that he and another crewman took to reach a radio station and obtain help after their ship had foundered. Theirs was a remarkable story of survival in the face of incredible odds, as

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book jacket blurbs are wont to put it. Eliot seems to be implying that every human story is a remarkable story of survival in the face of incredible odds, as Christ’s Resurrection is meant to attest. Before there can be a Resurrection, however, let alone a road to Emmaus, there must first be the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and the Crucifixion on Golgotha. The first stanza takes the reader from the Agony in the Garden through Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. He is now dead, the speaker and poet, merged here, tells the reader, and the living are dying. In the emptiness left by that catastrophe, the speaker is thrust back into the desert that is all around him, ever threatening to overcome him, where there is only rock and sand and no water— not even the sound of water. The poetry makes clear that there is nothing, indeed, other than this vacant, lifeless, pitiless desert, a place of the phantasmagoric and apocalyptic, where “red sullen faces sneer and snarl” from behind the doors of mud houses and hooded hordes swarm “over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth.” Yet, in the midst of it all, there is the moment of revelation on the road to Emmaus, although even it is rendered as if it were a hallucination. In this dark and desperate delirium, the speaker now begins to suffer through a vision as dispiriting as anything witnessed by John on Patmos in the Book of the Apocalypse. The great cities of Western history—Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London—are named in quick succession, reminding the reader of all the doomed souls already encountered among them. These locales, however, no sooner are permitted to bring back to mind the stories of Rudolf and Marie (Vienna), Antony and Cleopatra (Alexandria), Elizabeth and Leicester and Lil and Albert (London) than each of those cities is dismissed as “unreal,” a human hive of ghostly frustrations. This is the fourth time that the poet has pulled out from under his readers any appeal to the fruits of civilization, that is, its great metropolises, for justification of so much human misery and misunderstanding, even if it is on those same fruitful results that the authority of The Waste Land’s poetry is based. The reader is being asked, simultaneously, to both abhor and exalt the cultures that have

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brought the poet the skills to question the achievements of those cultures. But there is a method to this madness: What if civilization’s own methods have been flawed all along? There is the recent memory and witness of the war to warrant such a suspicion and validate such a wild surmise on the speaker’s, and Eliot’s, part. In the same headnote in which he identified Emmaus as one of the themes of part V, Eliot also identifies the “present decay of eastern Europe” as another of its themes. Eliot’s note to this passage in the poetry gets more to the point. He cites, in the original German, novelist Hermann Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (Glance into Chaos), in which Hesse laments that same decline, calling up an image of the drunken laughter of Dmitri Karamazov from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, to do so. Whatever else Hesse might have in mind, Eliot surely would have in mind the chaos brought about by the socialist and communist revolutions that had brought down the Russian czar in 1917 and were still, in 1922, wreaking havoc on that nation’s suffering populace. No wonder sounds of “maternal lamentation” fill the air and call to mind, yet again, Procne’s mourning song for her lost son, Itys. In one last terrifying descent into sheer madness, then, it is as if the speaker has succumbed to despair himself and entered the all-consuming whirlpool of life-in-death and death-in-life that had engulfed Phlebas. The reader, too, is assaulted by a series of unsettlingly grotesque images that have neither meaning nor purpose, yet beg for clarity: A woman plays her stretched out hair with a fiddlestick, bats with baby faces crawl down a blackened wall, towers hang upside down in air, voices sing out of cisterns and exhausted wells. If these are merely more glimpses of the sorts of vistas one might expect to find in Dante’s Inferno, of which the reference to “unreal” cities ought to have reminded the reader, then it may be time to scream, “Enough!” And, to be honest, the poetry seems to anticipate that very frustration on the reader’s part. As Dante climbed down Satan’s body to exit the Inferno, having reached the absolute bottom of the pit of hell, at Satan’s waist Dante passed the midpoint of the Earth and looked down to see the rest of Satan pointing upward, like those towers of

Eliot’s hanging “upside down in air.” This disorienting display has been Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole as well, and in the next full stanza, it is now as if the speaker, having passed through and been thrown out of his own personal whirlpool, awakes to find himself in a “decayed hole” in the mountains, where reality seems, if not better, then at least a bit more stable and orderly, tame. There is faint moonlight, and in it the Chapel Perilous is in sight. Weston identifies the chapel as the locale in which the Grail knight faces a serious and mysterious peril, and she cites similar instances from a number of variant versions of the Grail quest. Since Eliot in his headnote to “What the Thunder Said” himself identifies as another of its themes the approach to the chapel as Weston presents it, the importance of the Chapel scene for the reader may be explicated in what Weston makes of the general meaning of these various episodes, since they appear in all the major Grail romances. The Grail quest, in all its variants, is the story of an initiation, Weston proposes. She writes that the Mystery ritual comprised a double initiation, the Lower, into the mysteries of generation, i.e., of physical Life; the higher into the Spiritual Divine Life, where man is made one with God. . . . the tradition of the Perilous Chapel, which survives in the Grail romances in confused and contaminated form, was a reminiscence of the test for this lower initiation.

Armed with that information, the reader might then well question why, when Eliot’s speaker reaches the Chapel, he does not face a terrifying test of his courage (in one of the Grail romances, for example, a black hand reaches out of a mirror to snuff a single taper lit on an otherwise bare altar), but instead finds the chapel “empty . . . only the wind’s home.” At first glance, that set of circumstances may seem to imply that the speaker has proved unworthy of the quest and, hence, this lower level of his initiation. A more likely reading, however, particularly in view of what ensues, is that he has already undergone the process of initiation, which, according to Weston, is “into the mysteries of generation.”

Waste Land, The In the course of the text thus far, after all, the speaker has borne his own often tedious witness to the pain and the boredom that can result from sex without love and misdirected emotion. He has transcended the need for initiation because he knows full well the common abuses that that natural, generative power undergoes as it becomes entangled with other motives on a day-to-day basis in the “unreal city,” where swarms of humanity take advantage of each other in myriad ways. Eliot’s myth, like most, nevertheless uses the amorous and the sexual to best dramatize the tangle of motives and their results. For this modern Grail hero, then, having witnessed the hopelessness that he has witnessed, not to mention the horrors and waste of war, what possible terror can any mystical chapel hold for him? “Dry bones can harm no one,” he observes, for the Grail quest and all its “mysteries,” like those “other withered stumps of time” that had become mere decoration in the lives of the couple in “A Game of Chess,” are all just dry bones by now, as are all those humans alive then who had created its romance to answer their own need for order and understanding. The need itself has not changed, however, only the individual’s way of satisfying it. The terms of the quest for a transcendent meaning may long since have altered, become “contaminated and confused,” as Weston puts it, but not the impulse to seek, to find, and not to yield as one pursues what meager clues are available at any one time in human history for making sense and purpose out of experience. The speaker is now ready to learn the lesson of The Waste Land: The goal to accomplish meaning can be achieved only individually, one person at a time, and not collectively. A culture cannot resolve its conflicts, but each individual who makes up that culture can resolve his or her own. That was the original meaning of the Grail quest—that it is to be undertaken by the lone individual, not by an army of lonely souls or a swarm of equally confused humanity. Knowing this—that he need save only himself, heal only himself—the speaker finds that revelation comes as there is a “flash of lightning” and then, to a parched land, a parched soul, “a damp gust / Bringing rain.”

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If the reader, like the speaker, has been traveling backward through time and through space to the sources of memory, the fonts of humanity’s first discoveries of mystery and wonder and wisdom, it is no doubt appropriate that the quester, having survived the Chapel Perilous quite handily, finds himself on the banks of the Ganges in distant India. The word that the thunder is about to speak is in Sanskrit, the mother tongue of all of the various other Indo-European languages—Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Provençal, and, of course, English—that have been employed thus far throughout the poem at one time or another, in one setting or another. Furthermore, the Asian subcontinent is also the primal breeding grounds for the various myths that the poem has also employed. Taking her cue from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the compendium of comparative mythology and ritual to which Eliot, in his notes, also refers his readers, Weston, for example, finds evidence for the earliest types of the Grail king, or Fisher King, of whom more will be now witnessed and heard as the poem draws to its close, in early Babylonian rituals. She concludes that he is “that strange mysterious figure whose presence hovers in the shadowy background of the history of our Aryan race,” by which she would have meant Caucasians. As such, this prototypical Fisher King is a “divine or semi-divine ruler, at once god and king, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his land and people directly depends.” In the Grail romances, this vitality has been impaired by an injury to the king that is most often depicted as or associated with a debilitated sexual potency (generally, for example, there has been a wound to the thigh that is impairing sexual function). The idea that the Grail quest introduces into the ancient mythos is that there must be a hero who can somehow recover or activate the talisman or talismans by which the Fisher King will be healed of his wound and thus restored to a lost vitality, and, with him, the land and people will be, too. Impelled by the vivid metaphorical implications of the wounded king and a blighted land, Eliot uses the Grail legend to describe a contemporary Europe debilitated by a failed cultural and political leadership, a land laid waste by war and the impotence of

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grief. However, he must replace the outer process of healing the king with an inner process, an act of healing one’s own sense of selfhood and purpose. One of the consequences of war is that it removes from individuals any sense of a capacity to change their own condition for the better, so much are they caught up in vast events beyond their control. The crowds flowing over London Bridge are no different, inside, than the hooded hordes sweeping over the arid plains. All are lost, all are aimless, because none of them sees, let alone believes, that he or she has still has access to the most potent of transformative powers—the power to change oneself. But how to activate it? That is the question that the thunder is now about to answer. At this moment in the Eliot poem, then, the speaker, having passed the initiation, is ready to fulfill his goal of healing the Fisher King. Eliot’s twist is that he will make the Grail knight and the Grail king the same person; by healing himself of the illnesses of the spirit to which his land, people, and culture have succumbed, he will heal himself and restore the land and its people, his culture, to its vitality, one person at a time, beginning with himself. It is a brilliant conception on Eliot’s part and even more brilliantly executed, particularly now, as he pulls out all the stops for this grand and mythic finale for which all of the preceding text has been, for all its complexities, only so much preparation. By being located in India, the speaker has, in obvious and direct terms, arrived at the source— “what roots clutch”—that he has been seeking all along. The entire figurative structure is unmistakable as well. Though the Ganga is sunken (that is, the water level is down), it has not yet dried up, and the help needed to restore it to its full flow— the healing rain—is on the way, announced by the thunder. Replacing the dry, sterile thunder that echoed earlier in the poem, this thunder not only brings rain but will speak primal truths. Eliot’s note tells us that the words the thunder speaks come from a fable in the Upanishads, a vast collection of Hindu wisdom literature intended to impart secret truths, through fables and parables, to its initiates. Eliot uses a fable from the fifth chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

The story, according to Eliot’s original source, is intended to teach the three principal virtues, hardly a small matter, and it goes like this: The three orders of beings—the gods, humans, and demons— having observed self-restraint, approached Brahma, the Creator, to seek instruction in how they ought to behave if they wished to be virtuous. To each, Brahma imparted a single word, more syllable than a word, more letter than a syllable: DA. Each group understood what Brahma said to them perfectly, although each heard the instruction differently. The gods or celestials, who live in paradise, never grow old, and know only pleasure, are bound to get carried away with enjoyment. They need to practice restraint, so when Brahma uttered “Da,” to them, they heard him saying, “Damyata,” which means to restrain or control. In other words, they need to practice subduing their senses if they wish to be virtuous. Humans, who are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy acquiring things—food, shelter, clothing—are liable to become too acquisitive and, as a result, greedy and selfish, hoarding everything for themselves at the expense of their neighbors. In Brahma’s “Da,” they heard him saying, “Datta”—give, be charitable, inasmuch as practicing the virtue of charity is the only check on greediness and selfishness. Finally, the demons, who can be very cruel and have no scruple against hurting others with insults and injury, heard Brahma say, “Dayadhvam,” which means to be merciful or compassionate. In each case, the instruction requires the recipient or initiate to overcome his or her own worst nature. In the case of the humans and the demons, that is to be done for the sake of being mindful of the needs of others. In essence, that is what virtue is—thinking of the other person before one thinks of oneself. Eliot adapts this fable, as he is wont to do with all his various source materials, to fit the needs of his own thematic and narrative aims. So, then, the thunder, with each clap, speaks the primal syllable, Da, three times to the Grail seeker, and in each case, the seeker hears the instruction that Brahma gave in the fable, although in the seeker’s case, they are slightly out of order (the instruction that Brahma gave to the gods came last instead of

Waste Land, The first), and they are regarded as personal in nature. In each case as well, Eliot illustrates the instruction with an episodic gloss, so that his reader need not be familiar with the source story or even with the meaning of the Sanskrit, for that matter. Datta, give, is the first instruction that Eliot’s speaker hears, and he reflects, quite bluntly, “What have we given?” Sometimes, the poetry makes clear, one gives too much or not wisely, into temptation, for example, “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” being uncharitable to himself. Other times, when the giving could have been to another and positive, the individual is, conversely, reluctant to let go; the poetry here suggests that one’s charity in his or her lifetime will not be measured by what there was left to leave to others in a will or in an obituary’s record of that individual’s “accomplishments.” In a poem that was originally intended to have a tag from a novel by Charles Dickens for its title, it is not too difficult at this juncture in The Waste Land’s closing lines to hear Marley’s response to Scrooge when, in A Christmas Carol, the latter insists that Marley should not be damned because he was always a good businessman. To that bit of wishful thinking and moral obfuscation on Scrooge’s part, Marley, whose ghostly remorsefulness is more than a bit redolent of those lost souls that Dante encounters in the Inferno, replies, “Mankind should have been my business,” as apt an illustration as any of what Eliot is driving at here. Then comes the next clap of thunder, giving the instruction, Dayadhvam—to sympathize. Here, by way of an illustrative definition, Eliot brings to bear the allusion to one of the episodes from Dante’s Inferno discussed earlier in this commentary, in conjunction with Eliot’s dedication of the poem to Ezra Pound. This is where Eliot’s speaker recalls Count Ugolino’s being locked in the tower to starve to death with his sons, but Eliot makes that event itself only a metaphor for how each human is locked within the prison of self, in terms of the physical limitations that the body imposes on the individual, but more in terms of the psychological limitations that experience itself also imposes. While it is hardly a unique idea that every human individual has a point of view that is wholly

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subjective and limited, Eliot, along with most of the world’s great religions and other ethical and philosophical systems, stresses that very few humans behave accordingly. Most of us, in the give and take of day-to-day relationships and reactions, imagine that the reality that we perceive is the reality that is in fact there. The conflict between appearance and reality and the confusions, ironies, ambiguities, and paradoxes that attend it is one of the mainstays of much of the modernist way of thinking. Eliot, however, whose field of graduate study at Harvard was not just philosophy but idealist philosophy, which deals with the ways in which mind and matter interact in processes of thought, was especially interested and expert in these kinds of inquiries. At its extreme, the individual can become genuinely self-imprisoned, behaving as if, but otherwise not realizing the error in thinking that, reality is what he or she makes it to be. That state of mind is called solipsistic (from the Latin solus ipse, oneself alone). It does not take much imagination to understand, by this point in The Waste Land, at which the idea of sympathizing is being emphasized, how much of the suffering that has been witnessed in the poem can be attributed to the destructive or abusive or exploitative behavior that can result when individuals think only of themselves. The question, the problem, of solipsism is, in other words, much more than an academic or philosophical one inasmuch as the dramatic necessities of The Waste Land are concerned. Its speaker/hero, for whom the Grail is not an object but wisdom, must learn to overcome self-centeredness and selfcentered interests, even though to be self-centered is itself a part of the nature of human intelligence and psychology. As F. H. BRADLEY, the contemporary English idealist philosopher whose examination of this question was the topic of Eliot’s Harvard doctoral dissertation, puts it—and Eliot himself cites in his note to this passage from The Waste Land:— Regarded as an existence that appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul. Caught within what Bradley calls their opaque spheres, nevertheless, individuals imagine that the external existence that they are witnessing

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is the same, and is being evaluated in the same way, as their neighbors’. As Eliot defines the resulting psychological and spiritual problem, locked in his or her prison, “each confirms a prison.” There is no getting out of that sort of a prison; it comes, quite literally, with the territory, in this case, human flesh and bone. But there is developing the understanding that one’s point of view may not be another’s, yet it is equally as valid. Thus, the second injunction, to sympathize. Such a point of view enables one to transcend the other, more selfish approach, which could lead a Coriolanus to betray an enemy and then betray Rome to them when, in his view, Rome betrayed him. That sort of vicious circle of selfishness can lead the hero only nowhere. By now, it should stand to reason why the third injunction should be Damyata, control, for it is the equilibrium and poise that are needed in order to engage and exercise the other two, which alone can free the quester from the endless cycle of selfishness and desire. Here Eliot, so capable a sailor from years of his family’s spending their summer vacations along Massachusetts’s North Shore that he wished to be known to his closest friends in his young adulthood by the nickname The Captain, uses the image of the pleasantly breathtaking experience that expert sailing can be when sea, man, boat, and wind become one single and harmoniously blended action. The lessons learned, and the wasteland watered by the restorative rain, the last stanza of The Waste Land, and the end of a trek that began with April’s cruel awakening and then the merciless desert vistas both of mind and soul, flesh and spirit, begins with the speaker sitting “upon the shore / Fishing . . . the arid plain behind me.” In one final transformation, the Grail hero has become the Fisher King, the physician the healed patient, the seeker the found. Weston, despite all the various symbolic significances that can be, and have been, assigned to the idea of a “fisher king” throughout history and cultures (including, of course, the Christian concept of the Apostles as Fishers of Men), reminds her readers that the Fisher King was called as much “because of his devotion to the pastime of fishing.” That is not a very earth-shattering conclusion to be

arrived at unless there is added to it, however, the ancient notion that both the fish and the fisher are “Life symbols of immemorial antiquity.” To be the Fisher King, then, is to be that one, whoever he or she may be, who is adept at tapping the life-source, exactly as our speaker is now doing as he sits on the shore fishing. Nor will he not “set [his] lands in order,” exactly as the Fisher King, once he has been restored to full health and vigor, is immemorially fabled to do, according, once more, to Weston. His is, of course, a figurative, a spiritual, a transcendent kingship, just as the land that will now be set in order is the interior landscape of the mind and spirit of each individual, in this case, the speaker/poet of The Waste Land. Similarly, if the individual psyche can figuratively constitute a land laid waste by doubt and confusion but that is now being delivered by the restored vigor and vitality of its personal Fisher King, who is the chastened and instructed ego that commands the individual being, so can it also be represented as a structure, a house or temple, for example, against whose ruins, and ruin, the same commanding ego, who has learned to give, to sympathize, and to control, has shored fragments like hewn posts to keep it from collapsing. There the metaphor is rather transparent. The fragments shored against the speaker’s ruin, his personal collapse into the madness of desire and misunderstanding that has been The Waste Land till now, are all those bits and pieces of other poems and of myth and of history scattered hither and yon throughout the poem, and drawn from hither and yon among the epochs of preceding human cultures, in which other humans, over time, like Tiresias, have suffered similar doubts and confusions and desires to no good purpose other than that they resulted in poetry. So, then, very much like a man who knows that one can never build sturdily enough, in the last few lines of the poem, the speaker adds still more of those fragment beams and piers and struts, lines recalled for no other purpose than that they sustain him with their supporting scaffolding. These last few follow no particular order, nor can they, emerging as they do helter skelter from the pools of memory: a children’s nursery rhyme

Waste Land, The about London Bridge, recalling the passages over it made earlier in the poem; the words spoken by Arnaut Daniel in Dante’s Purgatorio, recalling the poem’s opening dedication to Ezra Pound; a refrain translated from an ancient love poem, recalling Philomela raped and mutilated and then transformed by the gods; a verse from a sonnet by Gerard de Nerval, another near-contemporary French poet, this time recalling, through Aquitaine, Provence, the source of many of the elements in the Grail romances; a passage from an Elizabethan play, recalling that Shakespherian rag, perhaps; and then, not silence, but the next best thing. After the three injunctions from the Upanishads are repeated, the poetry all but comes to a stop as the word shantih is repeated three times. In his final note, Eliot says that the word essentially denotes “the peace that passeth understanding.” In other words, it is the word that is used when words are no longer available or, better yet, required. The speaker has learned simple truths: He cannot save the world from disorder and chaos. He cannot make perfect sense out of the ceaseless disparities of human experience and the bewildering assaults of otherness. But he can resolve his own inner conflicts. He can set his own house in order and then make a comfortable abode there, within himself, for himself. That kind of a separate peace, to borrow a phrase that Ernest Hemingway would coin relatively shortly in his World War I novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), may sound like a far more selfish choice on the speaker’s part than not, as if he is turning his back on everyone else’s distress, but the poem recommends this same resolution to and for everyone, not just its anonymous speaker. For no one would deny that the world would be a far better place if everyone sought inner peace and outer calm—in a word, contentment. In the 18th century, the French philosopher and wit Voltaire composed a bitingly clever satire to ridicule the notion that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Candide tells a tale of relentless human cruelty and stupidity in hilarious terms, but it ends on a positive note. After all their travails, the sundry protagonists find themselves at last leading relatively comfortable lives on the outskirts of Constantinople, and an equally contented farmer

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lives nearby. What, they ask him, is his secret. “Let each man cultivate his own garden,” this simple man says, imparting, of course, a great deal of unintended wisdom. In the same manner, The Waste Land ends by saying, “Let each one find his own inner peace.” But that can be done only if each person overcomes his or her own inner wasteland.

THE CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL RESPONSE One might think that, despite the worldwide celebrity that The Waste Land eventually has obtained, the initial response to the poem was a rather closeted literary event, limited to those reviewers and critics who were themselves among the vanguard of individuals devoted to the pursuing the latest trends in literature. Despite the high regard in which his pre–Waste Land poetry is now held, after all, Eliot had a reputation solely among fellow modernists poets and critics, as well as the handful of readers of the so-called little magazines. His name was hardly a household word, nor was it likely that the poem in question would be one that everyone would be anxious to have sitting on the coffee table at home. Nevertheless, the New York publication of The Waste Land in book form in December 1922, two months after its simultaneous publication in the Criterion and the Dial, hardly went unnoticed, nor was this attention by the reviewers limited only to those periodicals of interest to the specialized reading audience that typically follows such developments. Indeed, given the haste of the production methods whereby they could go to press with copy within a matter of days rather than weeks or months, the earliest public notice given The Waste Land can be found in major media outlets, which, in those days, were mainly the large-circulation metropolitan dailies. These reviews often appeared in these daily’s even more widely circulated Sunday editions and, in some cases, as if to underscore the significance of the event, were in response to the poem’s initial periodical publication rather than its appearance in book form. It must be emphasized as well that these early reviews were not the sort of brief notices that one might generally expect for a publication that

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is hardly aimed at a mass-market audience. The reviews were, rather, assigned apparently to the best staffers or literary stringers that these publications had available, and often these individuals were themselves, or soon would be, other poets and critics who had made a respected name for themselves in modernist circles. At the very least, their names are by now a veritable roll call of those who played significant roles in framing the critical tradition that emerged from literary modernism. As if in an intuitive recognition of the importance that The Waste Land would indeed achieve as a watershed icon in the cultural history of the 20th century, and perhaps in large part the cause of its achieving that reputation, the reviewers went out of their way to be circumspect, taking pains to place the poem in its contemporary cultural and social context. By treating the Eliot poem as something more than a publishing event, one that would do until the next “major” book came along, these reviewers and critics seemed to indicate that they were conscious that they were writing not simply book reviews but continuing chapters in a historical record that would be of equal interest to later generations of readers, scholars, and critics. This record of their response, then, should have something more than a passing value to any student not just of The Waste Land but of modernism in general. In fact, the interest that the poem then generated in both the little reviews and the popular press would last for the rest of the 1920s, itself a very literary decade. Nothing can garner that sort of attention without engaging a genuine interest and then satisfying that interest. Clearly, somehow, the Eliot poem struck a chord loudly and clearly among those who were alive at the time to hear it. Whether or not that was the case, it has certainly proved to be the net result. The Waste Land turned out to be, no doubt, what we would now call a phenomenon, and the extent of its contemporary response provides us with a very telling record of precisely what the poetry of The Waste Land said to readers then and of its time. Their response is, of course, ultimately no more valid than any other, but an irony is that this virtually unheard-of attention among its immediate contemporaries to an otherwise relatively iso-

lated publishing event continues to color responses to The Waste Land, certainly among the general reading public, and possibly to the detriment of the poem’s and the poet’s original intentions. In view of the richness of both cultural and personal experience that the poetry of The Waste Land can provide typical readers, it is surprising how polarized were the common notes struck in this initial public response to The Waste Land, and they quickly became a melody of like opinion that persisted for the better part of the 1920s and may, in the popular imagination, persist to this day. These likeminded responses, more than the poetry, set the tone for what The Waste Land “means,” that being that the poem was, by and large, a bitter and invective indictment of a contemporary culture that had failed. Such a measure of critical consistency can be attributed only to either a sort of critical bandwagon effect (once a few reviewers had set a “prevailing opinion,” few dared or cared to contradict it) or to an otherwise unspoken consensus as to the poem’s negative qualities. In that latter regard, and from the first, it would seem, The Waste Land is taken by its contemporaries to be a poem whose viewpoint is, in a word, despairing. Burton Rascoe, reviewing the theme of The Waste Land for the New York Tribune in November 1922, admired the poem primarily as an accurate assessment of this well-founded modern despair. Exhibiting what becomes a common bias toward reading and evaluating the poem as social criticism rather than literature or poetry, Rascoe found The Waste Land to be “analysis and realism, psychology and criticism, anguish, bitterness and disillusion.” If he could finally also see in the poem “a thing of bitterness and beauty,” even these are aspects “arising from the spiritual and economic consequences of the war, the cross purposes of modern civilization, the cul-de-sac into which both science and philosophy have got themselves and the breakdown of all great directive purposes which give zest and joy to the business of living. It is an erudite despair.” For another early critic of The Waste Land, Gilbert Seldes, who reviewed the poem for The Nation in December, the theme of the poem was equally as pessimistic, nor was it “a romantic pessimism of any kind”:

Waste Land, The . . . [O]ne feels simply that even in the cruelty and madness which have left their record in history and in art, there was an intensity of life, a germination and fruitfulness which are now gone, and that even the creative imagination, even hallucination and vision have atrophied, so that water shall never again be struck from a rock in the desert.

The font of inspiration has gone, and all hope is “buried deep.” Clearly, both these early reviewers saw The Waste Land as a valid assessment of the absolute decline of the modern Western world, an assessment free of the taint of any romantically subjective self-deception about the true state of things. Another early reviewer was Edmund Wilson, who reviewed the Eliot poem in conjunction with several other recent works, most notably James Joyce’s Ulysses, for the New York Evening Post Literary Review of November 25, 1922. Wilson, who went on to achieve an outstanding reputation of his own as a modernist critic, calls his article, “The Rag-Bag of the Soul”: “The characteristic literary form today . . . [presents] the whole world sunk in the subjective life of a single human soul—beyond whose vague and impassable walls there is nothing solid or clear, there is nothing which exists in itself as part of an objective order.” Though this tack on Wilson’s part may seem to oppose Seldes’s antiromanticizing effort, Wilson arrived at the same reading of The Waste Land—it is a subjectification of social realities—but, unlike Rascoe or Seldes who admired Eliot’s analysis, Wilson faulted Eliot’s vision on that basis, for such works as The Waste Land “involve no belief in any sort of order—either moral or aesthetic.” Summarizing Eliot’s approach, Wilson castigated its amoral, virtually clinical nonchalance: “Let us merely explore a single human consciousness and make a record of what we find there without venturing even the most rudimentary ideas as to what their significance may be or as to which of them may be considered the most valuable.” Playing off his thesis against the sort of The Waste Land/wasteland motif Eliot’s poem suggests, Wilson concluded that by virtue of such an aesthetic approach, “the

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human consciousness becomes a rag-bag, a rubbish heap—there is nothing more to be done with it.” Wilson reviewed The Waste Land again in December, this time for the Dial. Although he entitled his later remarks “The Poetry of Drouth,” he was now much kinder to Eliot. Since Wilson was now using the annotated Boni & Liveright edition of The Waste Land, his kindness may be attributable to the assistance that Eliot’s notes rendered to critics attempting to understand the poem for itself. Wilson seems to have become a convert and succumbed, like Rascoe and Seldes, to the validity of the poem as a statement of justifiable despair in the face of the vacuity of modern life: Mr. Eliot uses the Waste Land as the concrete image of a spiritual drouth. His poem takes place half in the real world—the world of contemporary London, and half in a haunted wilderness—the Waste Land of mediaeval legend; but the Waste Land is only the hero’s arid soul and the intolerable world about him. The water which he longs for in the twilit desert is to quench the thirst which torments him in the London dusk.—And he exists not only upon these two planes, but as if throughout the whole of human history.

Again like Rascoe and Seldes, Wilson eschews giving the poem a hearing on the basis of more universal truths for the sake of its contemporary applicability: [Eliot] is speaking not only for a personal distress, but for the starvation of a whole civilization—. . . It is the world in which the pursuit of grace and beauty is something which is felt to be obsolete—the reflections which reach us from the past cannot illumine so dingy a scene; that heroic prelude has ironic echoes among the streets and the drawing rooms where we live.

Louis Untermeyer, in a review of The Waste Land for The Freeman in January 1923, echoed both Wilson’s earlier reservations and his later admiration when Untermeyer called the poem “Mr. Eliot’s poetic variations on the theme of a super-refined futility.” It quickly becomes clear, however, that Untermeyer did not intend that remark as praise,

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even guardedly so. The Waste Land, in consequence, may be “a pompous parade of erudition,” Untermeyer observed, but “[a]s an echo of contemporary despair, as a picture of dissolution, of the breaking down of the very structures on which life has modeled itself, The Waste Land has definite authenticity.” Still, although “as an analyst of desiccated sensations, as a recorder of the nostalgia of this age,” Eliot has “created something whose value is, at least, documentary,” even at that archival rate, The Waste Land remains a “misleading” document. According to Untermeyer, The world distrusts the illusions which the last few years have destroyed. One grants this latterday truism. But it is groping among new ones: the power of the unconscious, an astringent skepticism, a mystical renaissance—these are some of the current illusions to which the Western World is turning for assurance of their, and its, reality. Man may be desperately insecure, but he has not yet lost the greatest of his emotional needs, the need to believe in something—even in his disbelief. For an ideal-demanding race, there is always one more God—and Mr. Eliot is not his prophet.

It is noteworthy that the preceding reviewers all agree on the cardinal point that the poem, as the aspiring poet Hart Crane would put it in a letter to his friend Gorham Munson, is “good, . . . but so damned dead.” (Crane in fact was so inspired by Untermeyer’s comments that the 24-year-old poet sent a copy of his just completed “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” to the elder reviewer as an example of the sort of positive, vital poetry Crane heard Untermeyer calling for.) Harold Monro’s review in the Chapbook for February 1923, for another example, was an openly facetious little piece that nevertheless touches what are rapidly becoming all the mandatory thematic bases. He observed that The Waste Land is at the same time a representation, a criticism, and the disgusted outcry of a heart turned cynical. It is calm, fierce, and horrible: the poetry of despair itself becomes desperate. Those poor little people who string their disjointed ejacu-

lations into prosaic semblances of verse—they pale as one reads The Waste Land. . . . Our epoch sprawls, a desert, between an unrealised past and an unimaginable future.

In the same month, however, Eliot’s friend from their Harvard undergraduate days, Conrad Aiken, for the New Republic, wrote just about the only published contemporary response that recognized the poem for its poetry (which even then becomes virtually coincidental with recognizing its technique): “The Waste Land is unquestionably important, unquestionably brilliant . . . partly because it embodies . . . the theory of the ‘allusive’ method in poetry. The Waste Land is, indeed, a poem of allusion all compact.” Aiken’s approach was structural. Taking issue with another reviewer who commended the artfulness of the poem’s structure, Aiken questioned whether the poem is “a perfect piece of construction.” He went on to ponder, “Has it the formal and intellectual complex unity of a microscopic Divine Comedy; or is its unity . . . of another sort?” Aiken then, by illustrating how misleading the allusions are for any attempt to consign them to the category of precise referents required for meaning to be elicited, argued that we must “conclude that the poem is not, in any formal sense, coherent”; “With or without the notes the poem belongs rather to symbolical order in which one may justly say that the ‘meaning’ is not explicitly, or exactly, worked out.” Rather, as Aiken saw it, the poem achieves a different order of unity, of coherence, by being “a brilliant and kaleidoscopic confusion; . . . a series of sharp discrete, slightly related perceptions and feelings . . . giv[ing] an impression of an intensely modern, intensely literary consciousness which perceives itself to be not a unit but a chance correlation or conglomerate of mutually discolorative fragments.” He continued: If we perceive the poem in this light, as a series of brilliant, brief, unrelated or dimly related pictures . . . [t]he “plan” of the poem would not greatly suffer . . . by the elimination of “April is the cruelest month” or Phlebas, or the Thames daughters. . . . These things are not important parts of an important or careful intellectual pat-

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tern; but they are important parts of an important emotional ensemble . . . a dim and tonal one, not exact.

or highwaymen, or [get] on intimate terms with Thomas A. Edison” (which would be our equivalent of navigating the Internet). Says Monroe:

For Aiken, the poem as meaningful statement “will not bear analysis.” Rather, “the poem succeeds . . . by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its explanations [including those provided by Eliot in his notes]. Its incoherence is a virtue.” For all its critical complexities, Aiken’s technical approach to the poetry and theme of The Waste Land allowed the poetry some much needed breathing space, and yet despite the widespread critical validity such structural readings would subsequently obtain, his remained for now a voice crying in the wilderness. The extremely influential editor Harriet Monroe, who did not review The Waste Land for Poetry until March, was back among the madding crowd, especially since the delay gave her a volume by Lew Sarett called The Box of God to hold up for comparison’s sake. Though the Sarett volume is now happily otherwise quite forgotten, the result, in Monroe’s hands, was what amounted to a commonplace book of these contemporary responses to The Waste Land. She saw the distinction between Sarett and Eliot as a distinction between “the man who affirms and the man who denies; the simple-hearted and the sophisticated man; the doer, the believer, and the observant and intellectual questioner . . . led by separating paths to opposite instincts and conclusions.” In this context, Eliot did not come out ahead; rather, Monroe told her readers, Eliot

We live in a period of swift and tremendous change: Mr. Eliot feels it as chaos and disintegration, and a kind of wild impudent dance-ofdeath joy, Mr. Sarett feels it as a new and larger summons to faith in life and art. . . . He could talk with Thomas A. Edison, or perhaps with a sequoia or skyscraper.

gives us the malaise of our time, its agony, its conviction of futility, its wild dance on an ashheap before a clouded and distorted mirror. . . . He shows us confusion and dismay and disintegration, the world crumbling to pieces before our eyes and patching itself with desperate gayety into new and strangely irregular forms.

For her, then, as well as for many of his other contemporaries, Eliot was the nay-sayer, one of those “poets of idle hands and legs and super-sensitized brains; varied by a bank clerk routine with second-rate minds” who cannot consort with “heroes

Sarett’s prodigious powers of communication aside, Monroe did give Eliot some due recognition for meeting squarely, “with an artist’s invocation of beauty,” the condition of the modern world as Eliot’s too “city-closeted” mind nevertheless misperceived that condition. Monroe’s view soon became a choral effort out to put Eliot in his place. In March 1923, N. P. Dawson’s review, “Enjoying Poor Literature,” scored The Waste Land for its instant celebrity. Dawson chalked up the whole distasteful phenomenon to the debilitated sensibilities of a reading public overly enamored of the “bad, obscure, ‘frank’ and especially ‘despairing.’ ” In all these particulars, Eliot’s Waste Land, of course, fitted the bill, and Dawson’s own despair was that, if the reading public was paying so much attention to “all the despair and all the dryness and the lamentation” best typified in the Eliot poem, “sane and intelligible and humorous” literature must languish as a result. Thus, Dawson concluded, if the reading public were to spend more time with good literature instead of indulging themselves in the faddish despair of such stuff as The Waste Land, they too would realize that “the world will be saved. The end of civilization will once more have been postponed.” By April, Herbert S. Gorman, apparently feeling called on to take up a renewed defense of The Waste Land for the Literary Digest, began by calling the poem “a battle-field.” But it is unclear whether he ultimately did Eliot or the poem any service, for Gorman merely reemphasized the ying/yang dynamics of the debate by retrenching behind the original critical lines. For Gorman, The Waste Land was great poetry because it more than sufficiently

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and accurately expressed a contemporary despair over the state of Western civilization: The laborious subterfuges that have carried Man forward into the arid stretches of modern civilization have failed. That is what Mr. Eliot states in “The Waste Land.” We have come to a dry desolation, and there is nothing here but hard rock and the faint mirages of a freshness that actually existed once, but which has now dwindled into the haunting fragments of broken memories.

An especially interesting exchange of views on The Waste Land occurred during the summer of 1923. John Crowe Ransom, then an English professor at Vanderbilt University, reviewed the poem for the New York Evening Post Literary Review in mid-July. During the first week of August, a reader sent a letter refuting Ransom’s position. The reader was Allen Tate, a former student of Ransom’s and future fellow “Fugitive.” Ransom had essentially assaulted Eliot for distorting both reality and aesthetic representations of reality. While “Mr. Eliot’s performance is the apotheosis of modernity,” Ransom did not think much of that “modernity” if such a poem was its apex, for The Waste Land finally “seems to bring to a head all the specifically modern errors, and to cry for critic’s ink of a volume quite disproportionate to its merits as a poem.” Those errors, Ransom would have it, are largely errors of modes of perception. Art, he insisted ought not to partake of the disunities of the sensibility that science has forced on the modern mind. But for him The Waste Land exhibited an aesthetics that did precisely that, “as if he [Eliot] were naming cosmos Chaos. His intention is evidently to present a wilderness in which both he and the reader are bewildered.” Ransom’s position was that the poet ought to be an imaginative synthesizer who counteracts rather than contributes to the disruptiveness of modern life, and it is that point that Tate’s letter took up: “Mr. Ransom . . . has offered only an abstract restatement of superannuated theories of consciousness . . . all to the end that a philosophy of discontinuity is not only lamentable but entirely wrong.” For his part, Tate insisted that there is form

in The Waste Land’s apparent formlessness and that the form is found in Eliot’s use of literary allusions. Ransom had relegated them to nothing more than parody; Tate argued that they are effective irony and that the very “form” of the poem is “this ironic attitude.” Unfortunately, given the context of the remarks, Tate did not elaborate on this insight, nor did he more fully explain his closing remark: “it is likely that the value of The Waste Land as art is historical rather than intrinsic.” If we can see here the beginnings of a criticism that did more recondite justice to the thematic complexities of allusion in The Waste Land, it was not until 1939 that Cleanth Brooks brought such a critical approach to full bloom in his essay “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth.” The rest of 1923 would see further treatments of The Waste Land remain within the narrow critical confines already established. Regarding the theme of the poem, there seemed to be no in-between. Whether the reviewers praised The Waste Land or lambasted it, nothing that passes for a thematic consideration seemed capable of removing it from the boon-orbane of its being social commentary and, in that context, an unequivocating, unequivocal statement of absolute despair. Helen McAfee touched on the poem briefly in an Atlantic article, assessing what she called “the literature of disillusion” of the postwar era. Speaking of the disastrous psychic scars that the war had left on the creative sensibilities of an entire generation of young writers, she noted that: the most striking example of this depth of confusion and bitterness is Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As if by lightning it reveals the wreck of the storm. For this effect it is clear that the author has consciously striven—indeed he refers to his works as ‘my ruins.’ . . . It is mood more than idea that gives the poem its unity. And that mood is black. It is as bitter as gall; not only with a personal bitterness, but also with the bitterness of a man facing a world devastated but for a war by a peace without ideals. The humor—for it has humor—is sordid and grotesque.

It should come as no surprise that by September 1923, readers would find the reviewer for the Times

Waste Land, The Literary Supplement repeating the usual cant: “From the opening part of The Waste Land to the final one we seem to see a world, or a mind, in disaster and mocking its despair. We are aware of the toppling of aspirations, the swift disintegration of accepted stability, the crash of an ideal.” F. L. Lucas, reviewing the poem for The New Statesman a month later, wrapped the poem up in largely the same manner: “The gist of the poem is apparently a wild revolt from the abomination of desolation which is human life, combined with a belief in salvation by the usual catchwords of renunciation.” The year of The Waste Land’s initial celebrity past, there now followed a hiatus in significant commentary on The Waste Land. But the occasional comment in the succeeding years did not bring any new point of view to bear. Edmund Wilson, for example, reviewing Stravinsky’s music for the New Republic in 1926, had finally grown tired, it seems, of Eliot’s despair (“The Hollow Men” had just been published in a new collection of Eliot’s poetry), yet he never considered whether the Eliot whose despair he was growing tired of might simply be a fictive element in his own intellectual and emotional growth. Like his friend Hart Crane, Wilson had apparently had an experience of Eliot that was now becoming rather tedious, without wondering if Eliot’s “faults” might not lie in the commonplaces of critical misconceptions of that poet, the very sort of misreadings to which Eliot has never ceased to fall prey. In any case, Wilson observes that no artist has felt more keenly than Mr. Eliot the desperate condition of Europe since the War nor written about it more poignantly. Yet, as we find this mood of hopelessness and impotence eating into his poetry so deeply, we begin to wonder whether it is really the problems of European civilization which are keeping him awake nights.

Harriet Monroe resurfaced, too, on the question of Eliot and his terrible poem when she was quoted extensively in an anonymous review in The Literary Digest for November 26, 1927. Echoing her EliotSarett review of four years earlier, Monroe told of an offer made by “a designer of power-plants” to award a prize for a poem “ ‘touching adequately,

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whether in praise or dispraise, modern science or industry.’ The poets have not risen to the offer”: Indeed, the poets . . . have been more preoccupied with the negative than the positive side. I have spoken of Eliot’s “Waste Land,” which gives a vivid suggestion of the whole vast modern fabric crashing down in ruinous chaos; and there are many other poems which present or imply or prophesy failure or spiritual disaster in the modern scheme. In other words, the poets have preferred weakness to strength.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of an entire critical generation’s paradoxical love/hate affair with a figment of their own imaginations, and of their own emotional longings for a time before despair became a character called “Mr. T. S. Eliot,” can be found in “Waste of Time or, T. S. Eliot of Boston: A Yawn by Jack Lindsey,” published in London Aphrodite for December, 1928. Having read “en bloc” all of Eliot’s works, Lindsey wondered where Eliot’s reputation ever came from: Has Eliot given us anything positive at all? Has he stated anything beyond a fear of death? A feebly corrective intellectualistic viewpoint (borrowed from Valéry) dwindling more and more to a kind of Calvinistic Roman Catholicism (!) and a few formal experiments that are exemplified far better in the at least gargantuan hurly-burly of Ulysses or the technical modulations of Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell. Always nothing but a thin terror, and from fear of death come all rottenness and abstractions ghosting life.

Lindsey concluded, “[Eliot] is the last remnant of the pre-war generation, disillusioned further by the war, frightened of life, desperately but unconsciously expressing this fear in an effort to castrate life of its dangers by the blade of intellectualism.” Edmund Wilson weighed in one last time during the first decade of criticism inspired by The Waste Land, and it would be appropriate to regard his as the last word of that initial critical response before forming our own conclusions about the wide disparity between The Waste Land as poetry and the poem’s reception among its contemporaries. In his landmark critical survey of modernism, Axel’s

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Castle (1931), Wilson took his text from an earlier observation of his own. In 1926, he had written, “one suspects that [Eliot’s] real significance is less that of a prophet of European disintegration than of a poet of the American Puritan temperament.” Wilson now developed this idea into what appears to be a new view of Eliot and his poetic vision: The present is more timid than the past: the bourgeois are afraid to let themselves go. The French had been preoccupied with this idea ever since the first days of romanticism; but Eliot was to deal with the theme from a somewhat different point of view, a point of view characteristically American. . . . One of the principal subjects of Eliot’s poetry is really that regret at situations unexplored, that dark rankling of passions inhibited, which has figured so conspicuously in the work of the American writers of New England and New York from Hawthorne to Edith Wharton. T. S. Eliot, in this respect, has much in common with Henry James.

As such, “Eliot’s most complete expression of this theme of emotional starvation,” Wilson continued, “is to be found in . . . ‘The Waste Land’ ” whose expression of “sterility we soon identify as the sterility of the Puritan temperament” (104–105). We recognize throughout “The Waste Land” the peculiar conflicts of the Puritan turned artist: the horror of vulgarity and the shy sympathy with the common life, the ascetic shrinking from sexual experience and the distress at the drying up of the springs of sexual emotion, with the straining after a religious emotion which may be made to take its place.

Although on the surface this appears to be a refreshingly radical approach to The Waste Land (which is, after all, set in London), Wilson has really only brought Eliot’s despairing corpus home to native shores, so that the bane of despair and negativism still hangs over the poet and what was then his most ambitious work to date. Other readings of, and ways of reading, The Waste Land aside, readers must wonder why Eliot’s

own generation was so apparently thick-headedly single-minded in its reading of the poem and if there is anything that can be learned from their shortsightedness, if not their out and out wrongheadedness and narrow-mindedness. There is an interesting parallel in that the poem is itself about the dangers of shortsightedness and wrongheadedness and narrow-mindedness. Another is that Eliot himself did all he could to derail the prevailing critical insistence on seeing the poem as an expression of disillusionment (although to this day many see that disclaimer as Eliot’s way of trying to sidetrack certain potentially explosive personal issues). He did not deny that the poem had its negative quality; a bit of rhythmical grousing against the world, he once called it. But even at that rate, it is a grouse that serves the purpose of transcending rather than wallowing in bitterness and despair. Everything must begin from somewhere, but it does not then automatically end there as well. Such a thought sounds very much like the sort of observation that T. S. Eliot, student of F. H. Bradley and connoisseur of delicious epistemological dilemmas, may have made himself. It certainly sounds like the Eliot who found himself 20 years later in Four Quartets ending where he began but now knowing the place for the first time. In comparison with him, then, his contemporaries, at least those who took the time to comment publicly on what The Waste Land was all about, were chasing a tail that did not even have the good grace to be their own. Perhaps that is the rub, however. To appreciate The Waste Land as a contemporary event, one must become its contemporary. Then the interested individual would read the poem not as universal meaning versus post–World War I angst and despair but as the indictment, as likely intended as not, of a reading culture lost not in its own myths but, like any other, in its own smug assumptions. Such an individual would have to be among a lot of other well-educated, well-read, well-fed, and well-placed young men and women who think that the world is literally what these scions of the ruling class and inheritors of Western civilization make it, knowing, meanwhile, that they and their fathers and grandfathers had just gone and made it something awful and confusing and despairing because of a war. Yet

Waste Land, The that in itself, whether it is good or is bad, only has added to their certain belief that it is they, for good or for ill, who are calling the shots. Such a smugness, compounded by denial, cannot be awakened to any universal truths, not because these people are dead or asleep but because they have fallen into the insomnia of individuals and of a culture that is wrapped up in itself without any due regard for the past or the future or each other, “read[ing] much of the night,” “pressing lidless eyes.” It is in this context that The Waste Land must continue to be regarded, for whether or not the poem has a speaker or protagonist, let alone a hero, it certainly at least has a point of view, and that point of view exposes boredom and complacency and self-satisfied certainties far more than it expresses despair or an embittered nostalgia for the past. The hero of The Waste Land—and for the sake of this argument it must be said that there is one— is typical of those same well-educated, well-read, well-fed, well-placed young people of the time, all of them up and comers, but with one glaring difference: The hero of The Waste Land knows that the world is what he makes of it only in figurative terms. His problem is not that he knows nothing, but that he knows too much, so that there is no center or purpose or direction to his knowing. His despair is not that there has been an awful war (he hardly mentions it) but that all of his learning and training and seeking has come up spades, particularly when he finally resorts to fortune-tellers. His lesson is that all of that despair is typical, however, not just for anyone else of his own time, but for anyone who has ever lived, real or imagined, be it The Buddha or Augustine, Tiresias or Lil, even Jesus Christ, and certainly Phlebas the Phoenician. And yet our hero, perhaps unlike anyone who has ever lived before, has been brought up to believe that he and his age are anything but typical, are in fact the inheritors of the ages, the modern world fulfilled at last in system, thought, and institution, gramophone and taxi cab. That realization—that he is, after all is said and all is done, only human—is the source of his disillusion. But a liberating disillusionment it is, for his solution is now to learn how to be human, not

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smug and European and upper middle class, but holistically human. Then, through sympathy and self-discipline and service, he finds the beginning of the springs of an inner peace that will culminate in a genuine self-acceptance, a story, at least Sophocles’ Tiresias would agree, as old as Oedipus of Thebes. The Waste Land is a critique of neither the myth nor the urban apocalypse. The Waste Land is the first work of Western secular literature to recognize and, more important, to illustrate, that no human value system is central to the needs of the entire human race, and yet “regarded as an experience which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.” That is Eliot’s citation from F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, which the poet of The Waste Land quotes in his note to line 412. As much as it is also an expression of the theme of the poem, the myopia of the poem’s contemporary responses confirms that theme’s validity.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The Waste Land may have meaning only as a commentary on the severe limitations on our ability to arrive at universally acceptable meanings, and it achieves that “meaning” of its own by disassociating itself from the techniques of meaningful literature, a goal it further achieves by bringing to bear, for examination and consideration, fragments of that very kind of literature as it has developed, in the West, through several millennia. It is not, however, the thematic substance of the poetry’s literary fragments, or their sources, for that matter, that constitute the poem’s meaning, which is instead arrived at as its readers undergo the same processes of self-discovery as the speaker undergoes. We are The Waste Land while The Waste Land lasts, and then it is gone. Rather like Bertrand Russell’s teacher’s paradox of the two sides of the sheet of paper that perpetually refute each other—the statement on the opposite side of this sheet is true, reads one side; the statement on the opposite side of this sheet is false, reads the other—so Eliot continually confirms meaning by as continually denying its possibility by just as constantly echoing its myriad formulations

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in the past. The reader who studies each particular fragment fails to realize that it is a whole, not a partial vision, that matters. Thus this “theme” of The Waste Land, though it is assuredly the heart of the poem’s poetic experience, is developed by example, never stated, for the simple reason that to even hint at it as a theme would be to undermine its validity. The poet is a liar trying to tell his reader the truth, but for the reader to hear what truth the poet is speaking, he must know when the poet is lying. To approximate something as cataclysmically profound as each human individual’s longing to hear a truth by which he or she may live a meaningful life with some mere token from the poetry of the past—the quest for the Holy Grail, for example, or the romantic tragedy of Tristan and Isolde—or with the mechanical lovemaking of the typist and the clerk, or with the bisexuality of Tiresias, or even with the ennui of the middleclass couple playing chess or of the working-class locals gabbing at their pub, all of which is what the poetry of The Waste Land will do, is to lie, but it is the human bane never to know for certain that the truth one hears is indeed the truth, let alone a truth that can be applied to one’s own circumstances. That is the point of art—that it can only ever approximate things that are indefinite to begin with. That, too, is the point of Eliot’s epigraph, both the one from Petronius as well as the discarded one from Conrad. That, finally, is why the poem extends beyond all those accumulated images and those various kinds of circumstantial moments into a approximated image of its own, the wasteland, but will end at the seashore with—an incredible irony here for a poetry that uses seven languages—a pointing toward the ineffable: Shantih shantih shantih. If the Sanskrit word is generally translated to mean the peace that surpasses understanding, then that is itself another way of identifying that point at which words fail but life goes, happily, on. Such an ending to such a word-intensive poem is a self-evident mockery of the efficacy of words to do anything more than confuse readers out of the very peace they seek to find through and in them. That is one reason that it is fair to see The Waste Land, for all its bookish erudition, as a cautionary against trusting anything too much, particularly

literature. If the poem can be summed up in the words, “Physician, heal thyself,” then the poem would be giving itself the lie to end by implying that it is the answer. It presents itself only as a way to finding an answer. But what, then, is left? One could safely conclude that it is the spirit of the quest itself. The hope, blind though it may be (what hope is not?), that one can find one’s own way through the wasteland of The Waste Land is, after all, the same hope that enables each one of us to find his or her way through the far more real wasteland that is experience itself, particularly when that experience does not offer the wayfarer specific and objective moral and ethical guidance. The journey through the wasteland that Eliot depicts in his poem is finally nothing more than a metaphor, perhaps among the most apt ever devised, of each individual’s journey through the confusing maelstrom that is life itself. The poet might very well caution the reader to sort through the chaos of data to find one’s own satisfactory meaning, guidance, and path.

FURTHER READING Bedient, Calvin. He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Bolgan, Anne C. What the Thunder Really Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Making of The Waste Land. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1973. Brooker, Jewel Spears. “ ‘The Second Coming” and The Waste Land: Capstones in the Western Civilization Course.” College Literature 13 (1986): 240–253. Brooker, Jewel Spears, and Joseph Bentley. Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Brooks, Cleanth. “The Waste Land: The Critique of Myth.” In Modern Poetry and the Tradition. 1939. Reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967, 136–172. Childs, Donald J. “Stetson in The Waste Land.” Essays in Criticism 38 (1988): 131–148. Chinitz, David. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Cox, C. B., and A. P. Hinchcliffe, eds. The Waste Land: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1968.

“What Dante Means to Me” Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Works of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Scribner’s, 1949. Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts. London: Faber and Faber, 1971. Freedman, Morris. “Jazz Rhythms and T. S. Eliot.” South Atlantic Quarterly 51 (1952): 419–453. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. New York: Dutton, 1950. Greene, Gayle. “Shakespeare’s Tempest and Eliot’s Waste Land: ‘What the Thunder Said.’ ” Orbis Litterarum 34 (1979): 287–300. Gunter, Bradley, ed. The Merrill Studies in The Waste Land. Colombus, Ohio: Merrill, 1971. Hargrove, Nancy. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978. Hinchliffe, Arnold P. The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday: An Introduction to the Variety of Criticism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959. Knoll, Robert E., ed. Storm over the Waste Land. Chicago: Scott, 1964. Leon, Juan. “ ‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides”: T. S. Eliot and Eugenic Anxiety.” Yeats Eliot Review 9, no. 4 (Summer/Fall 1988): 169–177. Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973. Lockerd, Benjamin G., Jr. Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998. Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante. London: Macmillan, 1989. Martin, Jay, ed. A Collection of Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968. Matthiessen, F. O., and C. L. Barber. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. Miller, Milton. “What the Thunder Meant.” ELH 36 (1969): 440–454.

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Schwarz, Robert L. Broken Images: A Study of The Waste Land. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1988. Smith, Grover. The Waste Land. London: Allen and Unwin, 1983. Unger, Leonard. T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966.

“What Dante Means to Me” (1950) On July 4, 1950, Eliot gave a lecture at the Italian Institute in London titled “What Dante Means to Me,” which was subsequently collected in the posthumous volume To Criticize the Critic in 1965. As Eliot’s title suggests, the address on Dante was intended more as an anecdotal piece rather than as a scholarly or critical presentation. At the very least, the resulting essay does not come anywhere near achieving the same level of authoritative pronouncements as Eliot’s 1929 exercise on the same topic, titled simply “Dante.” Still, a poet and critic of Eliot’s stature can seldom if ever touch on the subject of another great poet without offering insights into his own work as well as into the nature of poetry and of the poet in general, and this present instance proves to be no exception.

SYNOPSIS In keeping with the informal nature of the setting (his audience was no doubt mixed and probably as interested in hearing Eliot for his status by then of an international celebrity and cultural icon as for his interest in Dante), Eliot begins by protesting that he is not in possession of any special expertise when it comes to Dante and even declines the opportunity of citing from Dante in the original Italian, perhaps for fear of botching the accent among linguists and any native speakers who may have been present. As he had done those more than 20 years earlier in his first appreciation of Dante, Eliot instead confesses that he never read Dante without having a prose translation at hand. It is a confession that makes particularly impressive his further claim that he would nevertheless

484 “What Dante Means to Me” commit especially pleasing whole cantos to memory from time to time (a typical canto in Dante’s La divina commedia, or the Divine Comedy, would run anywhere from 130 to 150 lines). Even in establishing a genuine modesty, in other words, Eliot easily makes it clear that he is hardly a novice when it comes to Dante, a fact that would not come as any surprise to most readers of Eliot’s own poetry, filled as it was with epigraphs from and allusions to Dante from its earliest days. Having made it equally clear from the outset that the only area of Dante studies in which he can claim expertise is in Dante’s influence on his own poetry writing, Eliot convincingly admits that, after 40 years, or dating back to the time of the initial composition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” he continues to regard Dante’s poetry “as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse.” Before he goes into that influence in more detail, however, Eliot digresses momentarily into the nature of influences in general, identifying other ones in his own case, specifically the French symbolist poets JULES LAFORGUE and CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. In the case of Laforgue, Eliot makes the valid and gracious observation that the young French poet, whose life was cut tragically short by tuberculosis, was precisely the sort of influence that Eliot could have used and may have needed at that point in both his own life and his poetic career. Simply put, in a case like that, one turns not to a great master like Dante, Eliot suggests, but to a kindred spirit, one more like oneself and closer, too, in time. At least, he confesses that he did and that it was much to his advantage. Baudelaire offers a similar contrast, being admittedly a lesser poet than Dante yet one who enjoyed a far wider reputation than Laforgue. Certainly by the time that Eliot would have turned to him, Baudelaire had developed a reputation as a daring innovator in both form and theme. Eliot had dealt with him already in a much earlier essay, composed during the same period as his first essay on Dante, in 1930. Then, in fact, Eliot had commented on the tendency to identify Baudelaire as a “fragmentary” Dante, observing that “many people who enjoy Dante enjoy Baudelaire.” Although for his own part Eliot makes it clear that he would prefer

to think of Baudelaire as a “more limited” version of the equally great and far more recent German poet, Goethe, he is given his due by Eliot ultimately for his having a unique sense of his age and an engagement with “the real problem of good and evil,” particularly as it was manifested in the “ennui of modern life.” Now, these 20 years later, however, Eliot singles Baudelaire out as an example of another kind of influence from that on him of Laforgue or Dante, a poet from whom one can learn “some one thing.” With that for an introduction, Eliot tells his audience that from Baudelaire he learned that “the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis . . . the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience . . . in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry.” The example both of Laforgue and Baudelaire, however, are presented for the sake of emphasizing what a far more lasting and beneficial influence Dante has been on Eliot’s work. Though his tribute to Baudelaire is as expansive as one poet can make to another, Eliot acknowledges that he may seem to have gone seriously afield from his main aim, which is to propose the influence that Dante has had on him, but then he astutely observes that its extent cannot be appreciated without comparison to the influence of other poets on him as well. As he begins to discuss Dante in particular, he reiterates a central point that he had made regarding the kind of poet that Dante is, among whom he would also include Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare, and that is that “the appreciation of their poetry is a lifetime’s task.” He then recounts the various ways in which he has borrowed from and alluded to and even imitated Dante over the years, ranging from the series of direct echoes that form much of the thematic underpinnings of The Waste Land in 1922 to the passage composed in 1942 in “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets, in which he attempted what he describes in quite technical terms as the “nearest equivalent” to a canto of Dante’s as he, Eliot, could achieve.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY While Eliot hands the laurel for the poet in English most powerfully influenced by Dante to Percy Bysshe Shelley, from whose Triumph of Life he cites

“What Is a Classic?” extensively, Eliot ultimately disclaims the idea that influence, however, can be measured mainly in terms of actual borrowings and echoings. In the 1929 essay, Eliot had, in the final analysis, praised Dante mainly for the clarity, simplicity, economy, and vividness of his language, and that is the essential note that he strikes here again, when all is said and done. Influence, in other words, may be more a matter of showing how a thing can be done, rather than providing a format for its doing. Put another way, a poet need not “sound” like Dante or favor Dantean themes and images in order to have been influenced by him. Eliot singles out Dante’s as a verse that seems to demand a literal translation because one is convinced that “the word he has used is the word he wanted, and that no other will do.” Eliot by now would have been quite mindful of how a poet’s mastery of words, of word choices—the best words in the best order—often takes a backseat to considerations of theme and social context and even extraliterary matters such as belief and biography, politics and historical events. And yet the poet is the person most responsible in any human culture for extending the possibilities of the language as a resource for expressing the ranges of human experience. For his part, Dante succeeds on both counts, in Eliot’s view. By having “pass[ed] on to posterity one’s own language, more highly developed,” and by having as well “express[ed] everything in the way of emotion . . . that man is capable of experiencing,” from the most depraved despair to the most exalted blessedness, Dante fulfills the “task of the poet.” That task is to “mak[e] people comprehend the incomprehensible” by perfecting the linguistic resources that are their sole means for doing so, both individually and collectively. As Eliot sees it, it is in “these lessons of craft, of speech and of exploration of sensibility” that Dante excels, thereby setting both a standard and a model for others to follow. To take Eliot at his word when he says that he personally followed Dante’s lead throughout his own poetic career will provide any reader of Eliot’s poetry with primary insight into the essential tasks that his poems aim to accomplish.

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“What Is a Classic?” (1944) This essay was presented in 1944 as the Presidential Address to the Virgil Society, then published by Faber & Faber in 1945, and finally collected in On Poetry and Poets in 1956. Eliot begins his remarks by moving straight to the point.

SYNOPSIS By classic, Eliot means a work that reflects the maturity of a culture. Indeed, he argues that “[a] classic can occur only when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind.” Eliot had at this same time been preparing the preliminary essays from which his Notes towards the Definition of Culture would eventually emerge in 1948, and he had also discussed in the 1943 essay “The Social Function of Poetry” the integral relationship that exists between a people and their national language. It is no doubt that it is these same considerations that are now making him identify what is called a classic with the maturation of a people and of their language as they are realized in a single work, itself the product of a mind capable of wholly embracing that same measure of cultural maturity. Given the context of his remarks—an address to the members of the Virgil Society—it makes further sense that, along with the obligatory passing reference to WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Eliot should use as his model the first-century B.C. Roman poet Virgil, whose epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, is one of the great masterpieces of the Classical Age. That, however, is not what makes Virgil’s epic poem a classic. Using the Aeneid as his running example, Eliot requires that a classic foremost cannot be manufactured with that aim in mind: “it is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such.” By the same token, there has to be a history behind it; that is to say, the literature of a people and their culture must have arrived at a point that the writer of genius has already in place the tools and traditions by which a classic can be achieved. Furthermore, with Virgil’s Rome still as his model,

486 “What Is a Classic?” Eliot observes that a common literary style must also have emerged because the “society has achieved a moment of order and stability, of equilibrium and harmony.” Out of that kind of a culture can come that final ingredient: maturity of mind. That sort of maturity, Eliot feels, requires both “history, and the consciousness of history.” In other words, a Virgil must find all these conditions available to him but must also be able to avail himself of them. Thereby, the characters and situations that Virgil manipulates are not in any manner provincial but ready, as it were, to step onto the world stage. That these conditions obtained for Virgil is shown in the expansive way that he operates his material, one that “never appears to be according to some purely local or tribal code of manners: it is in its time, both Roman and European.” The result is not just great poetry by a great poet but a classic. The great poet, such as a Shakespeare or a Milton, may exhaust a form as it has come to be developed in that culture and for that language. When, by contrast, the poet in question is, like Virgil, a great classic poet, “he exhausts, not a form only, but the language of his time; and the language of his time, as used by him, will be the language in its perfection.” It follows, then, that the great classic poet will ultimately “express the maximum possible of the whole range of feeling which represents the character of the people who speak that language.” If, however, the resulting work is truly to achieve the status of a classic, it must not only have seized the right historical moment and exhausted the possibilities of the language but transcended even purely literary values. “If Virgil is thus the consciousness of Rome and the supreme voice of her language, he must have a significance for us which cannot be expressed wholly in terms of literary appreciation and criticism.” What such a poet leaves behind, rather than a critical legacy, is itself a criterion by which other works in its category may be judged. That would indeed be the very definition of a classic—that it is so much a product of its time, place, and cultural, linguistic, and historical conditions that it does not so much exhaust its form as set a new standard for what that form might achieve, should all the other conditions be propitious. In Virgil’s case, however,

Eliot does not stop there. Because Virgil’s language happened to have been Latin, which, thanks to the influence of the Roman Imperium that Virgil himself celebrated, “came to be the universal means of communication between peoples of all tongues and cultures,” Virgil writes in a language to which no modern language can ever hope to aspire in terms of that very universality. As a result, no modern language, Eliot asserts, can achieve a classic on the order of Virgil’s. Indeed, on the basis of his preceding argument, he can say with some confidence that “[o]ur classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil.” Eliot concludes by strongly implying that in celebrating Rome and by placing Roman culture and values and language at the center of human history, Virgil unconsciously paved the way for a new epoch in history. His vision of a common order, an ideal harmony, for humanity “led Europe towards the Christian culture which he [Virgil] could never know.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot’s rationale for such broad claims is explained in detail in a subsequent essay, “Virgil and the Christian World,” which Eliot presented as a radio address on the BBC in 1951. There he makes a convincing case that Virgil’s Roman virtues found a hospitable soil in the ethics that the teachings of Christ inspired. It may seem that Eliot, who had started out “What Is a Classic” by making rather modest claims for his intentions, ends with extravagant ones instead. In fact, however, he goes from arguing that a classic must, in effect, summarize a whole people to establishing that classics are, in and of themselves, a summarization of even greater cultural and historical developments. Eliot also was likely aware that any reference on his part to “classic” might call up memories of the romanticism versus classicism debate that engaged much English literary thinking during the 1910s and the 1920s and in which Eliot himself had been a passionate partisan on the side of the Classicist agenda. This debate, in which Eliot most famously took issue with J. MIDDLETON MURRY, whom he characterized as marching under the banner of “Muddle Through,” centered primarily around the

“What Is Minor Poetry?” larger issue of the place and importance of tradition in the face of the constant, rapid, and dramatic social change that, in turn, characterized the modern scene at that time. In prose works as early as the 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism” and as late as his book-length diatribe, After Strange Gods, which was subtitled A Primer of Modern Heresy and published in 1934, Eliot had pretty much excoriated those whom he perceived to be representing the enemy camp, either in their professed thinking or their creative endeavors. Even from this vantage point, the matter would not necessarily strike any informed person as one to be taken lightly. Whether a society founds itself on long-established values or on self-corrective evaluations of contemporary needs remains a source for intellectual conflict. In the case of Eliot, then, who had in 1928 declared himself a Catholic, a classicist, and a royalist—that is to say, a traditionalist or conservative on all counts—his defense of valued traditions and traditional values was not petulance but a moral imperative. By 1944, however, the time of these present remarks, England along with most of the rest of Europe and virtually the entire globe as well had been engaged for five years in that armed conflict known to history as World War II. It would be hard to imagine anyone still harboring old intellectual animosities in any life-and-death struggle such as global warfare portends. At the very least, the far more pressing requirements of that conflict seem to have had an ameliorative effect on Eliot’s intellectual and moral largesse when it came to principled conflicts. If his definition of a classic as a summary work holds true, then it would be equally true that, for European history and culture, no classic can ever equal Virgil’s Aeneid for the simple reason that Europe would never again realize such cultural and linguistic cohesion as it did during the time of Caesar Augustus, whose reign Virgil celebrates. Eliot, who had been fighting a holding action to maintain the coherence of Christian Europe in the face of 20th-century secularism and who was writing in the midst of a European conflict that would, by its conclusion in May 1945, leave 50 million dead, knew whereof he was speaking.

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“What Is Minor Poetry?” (1944) In 1956, Eliot published On Poetry and Poets, his first major compilation of previously published essays since Selected Essays in 1932. Among the essays collected in the later volume is “What Is Minor Poetry?,” which Eliot had first delivered as an address before the Association of Bookmen of Swansea and West Wales in September 1944 and then published in The Sewanee Review.

SYNOPSIS Eliot quickly makes his aim clear: To dispel any “derogatory association” that the term minor poet might inspire. In keeping with that aim, he also hopes to establish what kinds of minor poetry there may be, and, more important perhaps, “why [we] should . . . read it.” Eliot begins by identifying minor poetry as anthology poetry, by which he means collections of work by new, young poets. After a lengthy digression concerning the craze for anthologies themselves, a craze that he likens to an addiction among a certain cast of readership, Eliot leads to a definition not of minor poetry, but of minor poets. Eliot had already taken care to protest that he did not want to get into a debate over who are the minor and who are the major poets. To say that a minor poet is, then, a poet who wrote only short poems or whose reputation rests on a single, very long poem, begs the question, and requires exceptions—John Donne, for one—but does not debate who is minor and who is major. By this point in Eliot’s presentation, he has already identified such indisputably major poets as Edmund Spenser and William Wordsworth, and Donne and William Blake, as well as such indisputably minor ones as Robert Southey and Thomas Moore. The reader begins to recognize that, even should there be no clear way to distinguish between the one and the other, be it as poetry or poets, literary cultures certainly do as much. To know how or why, then, does become a valid course of inquiry. A poem’s length cannot be the determining factor, since there are minor long poems and major

488 “Whispers of Immortality” short ones. Even determining relative quality cannot help the sorting process, since that would require subjective criteria and impressonistic judgments. Eliot does take the risk of concluding, nevertheless, that what makes a poem major is that its whole winds up being greater than the sum of its parts. This seems to come down to meaning that the poem is so much of its time and place that it reflects those coordinates without necessitating the reader’s personal knowledge of them. Thus, George Herbert, the 17th-century religious poet, holds one’s attention because his view of things is so thoroughly Elizabethan as to need no other introduction. Herbert’s near contemporary Robert Herrick, meanwhile, Eliot can dismiss as a lessthan-major poet who wrote short poems because the short poems that Herrick wrote show “no such continuous conscious purpose.” Now Eliot seems to be getting somewhere: The major poem or poet expresses a unique view of experience—has, in a word, vision.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Throughout the essay, Eliot continues to stress the importance of what he calls vision or “a unity of underlying pattern” in a poet’s work in order to help determine whether that poet is minor or major. Although he plays this determining factor in a variety of ways, he always seems to come back to the idea that, the quality being uniform otherwise, there is something distinctive and identifiable in each poem that enables one to know that particular poet and his or her work. One need not know the whole of a major poet’s work, then, to come to know the unique view and voice that the works express, although knowing the whole corpus of a particular poet, should that poet be of a major status, enhances the appreciation of each work in the canon. The idea, then, is clearly one of continuity from one work to another, as much as an underlying unity of point of view or vision. It might be noted as well, nevertheless, that Eliot has moved away from defining minor poetry. By his definition, it would appear, for example, that a major poet cannot write a minor poem. Yet Eliot himself, who is more certainly a major poet by his own definition, included in Collected Poems, 1909–

1935 a section of his own poems called “Minor Poems,” among which, by his own claim, are poems that are all distinctively Eliot. In his own defense, however, some of the poems that he had included in this manner—“Five Finger Exercises” and “Landscapes,” for example—are manifestly Eliot only after the fact. “Five Finger Exercises,” for example, can be seen to be characteristic of Eliot’s poetry after he published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats in 1939, while “Landscapes” bespeaks his style more, once its technique is viewed in terms of Four Quartets, completed in 1943, a work whose four component sections are each inspired by the features, associations, and significances of a particular place. It would be fair to say, then, that that whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, but that yet is identifiable in each part, and that then goes on further to form the corpus of a poet who is major, can only be known and recognized once the whole is complete. As Eliot will himself say in terms of judging the relative merits of living poets in these terms, “we ought to stick to the question: ‘Are they genuine?’ and leave the question whether they are great to the only tribunal which can decide: time.” As to what constitutes being genuine, Eliot had already defined it as whether “this poet [has] something to say [that is] a little different from what anyone has said before, and . . . found not only a different way of saying it, but the different way of saying it which expresses the difference in what he is saying.” This is not circular reason. Rather it is hallmark of any great artist in any medium: uniqueness.

“Whispers of Immortality” (1918) “Whispers of Immortality” is one of the quatrain poems, a mode that Eliot had adapted from the mid-19th-century French poet Théophile Gautier. Written sometime between 1915 and 1918, it was published originally in the September 1918 issue of the Little Review and first collected in June 1919 by Leonard and VIRGINIA WOOLF’s Hogarth Press in a volume titled simply Poems.

“Whispers of Immortality”

SYNOPSIS In the opening four stanzas of “Whispers of Immortality,” the first half of the poem, the reader encounters little more than a compendium of disease-ridden imagery. Such a compendium seems to be intended to reflect a morbid consciousness of our fatality that is ameliorated only somewhat by its being presented as if this catalog of mortal horror were an exercise in the history of literary tastes, with references to John Webster and JOHN DONNE. In the second half of the poem, the atmosphere has the hothouse headiness of an excursion to, and exercise in, a sort of sexual farce, reminiscent of the two quatrain poems featuring Sweeney—“Sweeney Erect” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales.” There is no missing the fact that sex, love, and death are related and certainly associated ideas and experiences, but Eliot has elected to jerk them so violently apart that “Whispers of Immortality” seems to be two separate poems made haphazardly into one. It is possible that Eliot was experimenting with the techniques of the French symbolist JULES LAFORGUE, freely interspersing the serious with the light, the elegant with the vulgar, the ironic with the sentimental. If so, then in “Whispers of Immortality,” instead of intermingling the two contrasting tonal modulations, as is the more typical practice, he is sifting those two rhetorical extremes out into the two separated halves of the poem that are then left quite literally facing each other on the page. Each side of the coin as much negates as mirrors, mirrors as negates, the other, so that the reader must maintain the contrasts that each half of the equation portrays, such as they are, suspended in mind. By this reading, the structural irony of the section break acts like a fulcrum, all the better to focus on the contending biases as if they formed a simultaneous whole. To achieve balance, after all, is the aim of art; at least, it is one of the first principles of composition. (Interestingly enough, the first half of the poem focuses on decomposition.) In any case, if it can be demonstrated that each half of the poem presents the opposing but reconcilable side of a binomial equation, then the theme of the poem should be found in the sum that the two sides are intended to

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represent as otherwise imperfect but balanced parts of that unnamed whole. The title may help in resolving this sort of a problem (a delightful one, by the way, as long as a focus is kept on the fact that it is poetry, not algebra). The phrase whispers of immortality suggests hints of our mortality, and those hints as surely suggest reminders of death. The death head with which the poem opens, that skull beneath the flesh that the English playwright John Webster, “much possessed by death,” sees, has been treated universally as a memento mori (reminder of death) since time immemorial, after all. So, then, if a theme for this poem seems to be quite clearly stated in the title, unlike with many another Eliot poem from this same period and beyond, as the reader reads on, he or she will not be too sorely disappointed by imagining that that theme—the corruption of death embodied in its necessary opposite, the promise of immortality or, more precisely, death’s constant and defining presence in the very fatality of mortal life—is exactly what the poetry goes on to develop, until at least the section break, that is. From “the skull beneath the skin” and dead limbs of the opening stanzas to the references to marrow, ague, skeleton, fever, and bone of the fourth, the first section of the poem speaks of nothing but deathliness, humankind’s fatality that acts as the perpetual goad to thoughts of immortality, and the poetry speaks of this promised theme in a language redolent of the two English writers whom the poem openly identifies, Webster (1580–1625) and his contemporary, the metaphysical poet John Donne (1572–1631). Both were poets who emerged from an age obsessed with death, albeit that is a comment that can be made of any age from any human culture. In the case of Webster and Donne, however, that thin and invisible line between vitality and fatality and their paradoxical dependence on each other were never far from mind, so that theirs was an age that came to see the most life-provoking and life-promoting of human actions, the sex act, as a “little death” because of the window that its spent passions seemed to open, even if only for a brief and fleeting moment, into eternity. The observant reader may have noticed early on that “Whispers of Immortality,” out of keeping with

490 “Whispers of Immortality” virtually any other poem of Eliot’s from this period and with much of his subsequent poetry as well, has no Eliotic epigraph, thankfully perhaps, inasmuch as they typically lend themselves more to mystifying as not. Nevertheless, it might be that these opening four stanzas, with their meticulous duplication of a 17th-century vision of the uncomfortably close relationship between the totems of life and the icons of death—the lustful spirit of vitality and the rapacious power of corruption, the flesh in its beauty and heat and the corpse that derides them both—provide the poem with that missing epigraph, thus making the remaining four stanzas, with their sudden turn to the more typical Laforguean poetry that Eliot was writing at this time, a perfectly logical conclusion and counterbalance. Indeed, Grishkin and the so-called love that she represents are themselves presented as something that may mimic but is nevertheless removed from any real measure of animal vitality or mortal fatality. For all the playfulness of its descriptive power, calling her breasts “pneumatic” suggests that they give the appearance but not the substance of the lifebreeding, life-bearing emblems that these physical attributes of the human female embody, implying, in this case, that there is nothing but air beneath their superficial allure (hints there too, perhaps, of “The Hollow Men” yet to come). In summary, she is all only so much clever surface detail, exactly as the poetry being used to describe her is itself.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Like “The Hippopotamus,” “Whispers of Immortality” is another of the quatrains that Eliot is later reported to have identified as a poem that is not to be taken seriously. Unlike “The Hippopotamus,” however, the intensely morbid sobriety of the opening verses is not going to impress a reader with notions of levity, and in view of the fact that that intensity continues through the remainder of the first four stanzas, at which point a line of periods is introduced to suggest a section break, the reader would have to conclude that, while the poem may not be serious, it is at least grave. And perhaps that is the whole point because the remaining and concluding four stanzas are, in contrast, light if not frivolous or at least seem that way.

In “Whispers of Immortality,” then, Eliot may be beginning to exercise his soon-to-be regular habit of essaying historical contrasts between one world and its set of values—that is, the Renaissance world typified for Eliot by the sort of imaginative conjoinings of disparate elements that poets such as Webster and Donne were capable of executing—with another world—this one of witty but enfeebled and overly refined subtleties of social observation for their own sake. That would be the world obsessing the modern imagination, embodied in the poetry of Laforgue and, to a great degree, of Eliot as well. Such contrasts as these, within a matter of a mere few more years, would form the crux of Eliot’s early masterpiece, The Waste Land, but for now they were operating in an embryonic state in these spare and otherwise enigmatically disjointed stanzas composing the two halves of “Whispers of Immortality.” To illustrate this assault of an older and more coherent sensibility on what he perceives to be a fragmenting modern one, Eliot has taken great care in choosing Donne and Webster to lead the charge, after all. Along with Dante and Laforgue, no other literary figures or periods have as much importance in defining Eliot’s view of the poet and of poetry. In his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets” on the subject of metaphysical poetry, of which Donne is by now the most celebrated practitioner, Eliot makes it clear that he sees the poets of that period as being among the last to have what he calls a unified sensibility. By that, Eliot means that they were capable of balancing and treating equably and equivalently matters of the heart and of the mind, of the flesh and of the spirit, neither giving one primacy over the other nor confusing the impulses of one for the other. In sharp contrast to their capacity for maintaining a healthy respect for life and for death, for mortality and for immortality, as the necessary halves of the individual’s experience, Eliot saw the modern world, which he would date from the time of the two most prominent English poets of the mid-19th century, Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson, as one whose poets “think, but . . . do not feel their thoughts.” Eliot further concludes that this state of affairs was the result of a long historical process of a declining poetic imagination whereby “the language became more refined, [but] the feeling became more

“William Blake” crude.” He called this gradual separation between thought and feeling in poetry (or, more to the point, the poet’s capacity to express thought and feeling with an equal skill and respect for the propensities of both) a “dissociation of sensibility.” Donne, then, continues to be renowned for his ability, in his earlier poetry, to write of his beloved and of his passions for her as if he were writing religious verse. In his later years, he would indeed write a religious poetry that sounded very much like amorous and passionate love poetry. Clearly, there was for Donne no separation between thought and feeling or between language and expression. Everything aimed toward achieving a single end—a true representation of the complex interrelationships of both thought and feeling as they each contribute to an experience of any sort. Webster, although he was a playwright, was from the same time period as Donne, both of them writing before thought and feeling became, in Eliot’s view, separated. Like Donne, for whom Eliot says a thought was an experience that “modified his sensibility,” Webster, too—in plays like The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, tragedies involving individuals caught up in the maelstroms of such powerful and overpowering emotions as love, jealousy, greed, and vengeance—maintained the necessary balance between thought and feeling, physical and emotional experience, without separating either out of the equation as unrelated to motives and events. If Webster was indeed “possessed by death,” as Eliot puts it, it was because Webster could see that death lives in the flesh and so could make it live as well in the lives of his characters. If Donne and if Webster could keep the two halves, death and life, thought and feeling, inseparably together, however, the poem “Whispers of Immortality” does not. Now perhaps it is possible to understand the otherwise totally inexplicable shift from the deadly serious to the coy and the tawdry in the Eliot poem’s second half. Eliot is, through the apparent discontinuity between the two parts of the poem, demonstrating the very dissociation of sensibility that he would later comment on critically in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets.” The Laforguean cleverness of the description of Grishkin’s sexual endowments, her animal vitality

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being expressed through open allusions to the musk of a large cat, the sleek, exotic, and predatory Brazilian jaguar, come through as only that—cleverness. It is devoid of passion or even erotic arousal, that kissing cousin of death that poets like Donne and Webster knew firsthand and recorded in their poetry. To borrow a phrase from W. B. YEATS, caught in the sensual music of such superficial standards of beauty as Grishkin represents, the contemporary man of letters, unlike his 17th-century forbears, among them Webster and Donne, who could see death lurking beneath life’s otherwise pleasing but illusory surfaces, is not anywhere near as up to the task of accomplishing the same totality of vision, one that spans both life and death. For the contemporary poet, “our lot crawls between dry ribs,” hungry worms for whom only the desiccated bones of the forming experiences are left and all memory and traces of the corruptible human flesh that housed those bones in its mortal comeliness are gone, at least from the poetry of our age. Eliot writes a poetry in “Whispers of Immortality” that becomes a virtual casebook for his critical position at this time. If the first four stanzas are aimed at imitating the intensity of language, thought, and feeling that he associates with the English metaphysical poets, then the remaining four stanzas of the poem are a parody of the exploitative modernist verse that he is himself practicing, a wry and witty use of language that masks nothing but crude and empty feelings. It is exceedingly difficult to think of “Whispers of Immortality” as light or at least “not serious” verse, though Eliot is reported to have said later that it was. The poem is both an exercise in a probing self-criticism and a treatise in miniature on the turn that Eliot’s own poetry would take shortly, in 1920, with the publication of “Gerontion.”

“William Blake” (1920) The late 18th-century English visionary, poet, and lithographer William Blake is one of the most eccentric and, therefore, problematic poets in English literary history. As a result, Eliot’s treatment of him in this brief essay published in the Times

492 “Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock, The” Literary Supplement in 1920 highlights those characteristics that account for great poetry, as well as for renegade art.

SYNOPSIS First, Eliot puts Blake in the party of history’s greatest poets, those who have a special kind of honesty “in a world too frightened to be honest.” Such an honesty is unpleasant for most, Eliot says, and therefore he commends Blake’s as a poetry that “has the unpleasantness of great poetry.” No one can doubt that in the poems found in his Songs of Experience Blake did not pull any punches, and it is this kind of honesty to which Eliot refers. In consequence, Blake the poet “was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal,” and yet it is the intensely personal version of Blake’s honesty that also compels Eliot to view it as flawed. Blake’s philosophy was, like everything else about his unique view of things—his visions, his insights, his technique—all of his own making, according to Eliot, and it is on that very point of an intensely personal creativity that Blake, in Eliot’s view, ultimately fails. “You cannot create a very large poem,” Eliot insists, “without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into personalities.” Intriguingly enough, Eliot would have at this time just begun work on his own long poem, The Waste Land, with its multiplicity of points of view and wide variety of poetic voices (and no less unpleasant honesty). Eliot concludes with a comically apt trope. Blake’s philosophy, he says, is like an “ingenious piece of home-made furniture.” Eliot continues: “We admire the man who has put it together . . . but we [English] are not really so remote from the Continent, or from our own past, as to be deprived of the advantages of culture if we wish them.” Eliot sees in Blake a man with many gifts but none of them controlled or disciplined by any external constraints such as reason, common sense, or a scientific objectivity. “What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own.” Had he not done so, Eliot contends, Blake would have been, like Dante, a classic, rather than “only a poet of genius.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY Eliot’s simultaneous approbation of certain aspects of Blake’s poetry and disapproval of others enable one to discern even at this early a stage in Eliot’s career as a critic the subsequent direction of his own development. In the 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism,” Eliot inveighs against those of his contemporaries who imagine that they will be able to execute poems of great vision merely by listening to what he calls an “Inner Voice” rather than by paying heed to long-established and inherited traditions. By the 1930s, this will have become a cause for Eliot, culminating in 1934 in the virulent polemics of After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. He expects great poets to have vision, what he will call in 1944 in “What Is Minor Poetry?,” “a unity of underlying pattern.” This vision, however, will be subjected to a more and more severe test as time passes, and that is whether it finds its own source in the bedrock of longstanding cultural traditions or blooms unimpeded by anything other than personal embarrassment full-blown from the poet’s own mind. The seeds of this culturally conservative bent of Eliot’s can already be seen in his condemnation of Blake’s too personally derived philosophy. Yet there is much to be said for Eliot’s contention that only that poetry that builds on the past has a rightful claim to a stake in the future.

“Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock, The” (1924) See MINOR POEMS.

“Yeats” (1940) Following the passing of the renowned Anglo-Irish poet WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1867–1939) on January 29, 1939, Eliot was invited by the Friends of the Irish Academy to deliver, in 1940, the first annual Yeats Lecture at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, whose

“Yeats” company Yeats had himself helped found. The resulting appreciation was subsequently published in the periodical Purpose and then included by Eliot in his prose collection On Poetry and Poets in 1956.

SYNOPSIS As he ought to, given the circumstances, Eliot has much to say that is positive regarding the elder poet whose passing he is here to memorialize, but he still manages to damn Yeats with faint praise, very much as Eliot had done a mere seven years earlier in the Page-Barbour Lectures given at the University of Virginia and would subsequently publish in After Strange Gods. Eliot begins by noting that Yeats was already a “considerable figure” on the world poetry scene when he, Eliot, first began to write poetry himself and that, while Yeats’s influence on the younger poets of Eliot’s generation may have been minimized by the uniqueness of Yeats’s idiom, it was nevertheless a benefit for them to have “the spectacle of a great living poet” available as a constant inspiration. Despite this, Eliot takes inordinate pain to emphasize repeatedly that the source of that inspiration was not Yeats’s poetry but the figure of the poet that Yeats cut—“the integrity of his passion for art”—one who “cared more for poetry than for his own reputation as a poet.” Furthermore, he can say that he sees in Yeats a poet who achieved a particular sort of impersonality—always, for Eliot, a critical aim for the artist to achieve—one whereby he was able, “out of intense and personal experience, . . . to express a general truth . . . [and] make of it a general symbol.” So far, so good—unless, that is, one recalls Eliot’s earlier condemnation of the early Yeats as a poet who had dealt with matters that were “trifling and eccentric.” Eliot continues to point toward Yeats’s middle and later years when singling him out as a singularly significant voice, finally going as far as to label him “pre-eminently the poet of middle age.” It is, to say the least, a somewhat puzzling categorization, smacking as it does of holding up Yeats as a measure for outstanding mediocrity. Eliot is fair enough not to deny that “there are aspects of Yeats’s thought and feeling which to myself are unsympathetic,” though, thankfully and tactfully,

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given the context again, Eliot does not now elaborate. Nevertheless, it is an unwarranted honesty. Rather, he commends Yeats for having successfully translated himself from a poet of one era and mindset into that of another, his career having spanned the late Victorian period and early modernism. Yeats’s ability to survive if not transcend literary trends culminated in his carving out a place for his own distinct vision and voice. “[O]nly those who have toiled with language know the labour and the constancy required to free oneself from such influences,” Eliot observes, mindful, perhaps, as he is now himself composing the poetry that will become the masterpiece of his own maturity, the Four Quartets, what he had to sacrifice along the way to achieve the freedom to speak as and for himself. Yeats had been born into a world in which “Art for Art’s Sake” was generally accepted, Eliot notes, and then lived on into one in which “art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes.” Although Eliot’s road has not been entirely parallel, he, too, can appreciate the difficulty of not allowing poetry to become either something else or something less. Eliot concludes by commending Yeats for holding “firmly to the right view which is between these.” Yeats, he says in closing, is “one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.” That, at the last, is very high praise.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The modernist period during which Eliot produced the bulk of his work as a poet saw an abundance of noteworthy poets and impressive achievements, and Eliot was frequently at the forefront of these accomplishments. If any one of these other poets, however, had as widespread a reputation as Eliot’s among readers and scholars as the most outstanding living English-language poet of his day, it would not have been his close friend EZRA POUND or even the famously homespun Robert Frost. Rather, it would have been the Anglo-Irish poet Yeats. Indeed, Yeats had, even as a very young man, made a significant enough mark as a poet that ARTHUR SYMONS, in 1890, dedicated his influential study,

494 “Yeats” The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, to the 23-year-old Yeats. As to how influential Symons’s study may have been, one need only know that it was Eliot’s reading of Symons’s work as a Harvard undergraduate in 1908 that, while it may not have been the impetus for Eliot’s lifelong career as a poet, certainly gave his earliest poetry, particularly “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” much of its unique tone and focus. Eliot was drawn primarily to what Symons had to say about the French symbolist poets, especially JULES LAFORGUE, and did not seem ever to find a sympathetic voice or source of inspiration in the elder English-language poet, Yeats. That may be due to Yeats’s own poetic interests, which were at first parochially entrenched in old Irish myth and occult lore and then became so idiosyncratically the works of his own genius as to defy imitation or even literary homage. There are even stronger indications, however, that Eliot had more specific antipathies to the work of a poet like Yeats. Eliot held a view not only of literature but of sociocultural developments in general that had come to rely more and more heavily on the individual talent’s subordinating its interests to the preservation of tradition. As such, he may simply have had a philosophical dislike for the work of poets like Yeats, who seemed intent on devising personal mythologies and their attendant value systems out of the chaos of the modern world, with its rapid change and catastrophic tendency toward self-destruction. In the Page-Barbour Lectures, which Eliot delivered at the University of Virginia in April 1933 and

subsequently published under the ominous title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy in February 1934, Eliot lambasted a litany of his fellow contemporary authors, Yeats among them, for their failure to provide the modern world with the sort of spiritually sound vision that only something as doctrine-neutral as literature can normally do for an otherwise healthy culture. In addition to the British novelist D. H. Lawrence and Pound, Eliot chastises Yeats for having created in his visionary poetry, with its emphases on pagan myth and the occult, a world that is not one of “real Good and Evil, of holiness or sin.” Eliot can only conclude that Yeats is a poet who, in his maturity, although he has not achieved a genuine philosophy, has “at least discarded . . . the trifling and eccentric.” For his own part, Yeats would, in 1937, send a shot across Eliot’s bow by declaring that he had always taken Eliot to be nothing but a satirist, a level of literary achievement and esteem several notches below that of a serious and major poetic voice. It would be wise not to take this sort of literary feuding all too seriously itself since it is more often made up by outside observers rather than actively engaged in by the participants themselves. Nevertheless, it is a shame that two such great literary figures who had much in common otherwise—an affinity for symbolist poetry, an abiding friendship with Ezra Pound, an interest in reviving verse drama in English, a profound devotion to the causes of poetry and of culture—should have had such a professional animosity toward each other’s work, however superficial that animosity may have been.

PART III

Related People, Places, and Topics

A Aiken, Conrad (Potter) (1889–1973) The American poet, short-story writer, novelist, and critic Conrad Aiken was born on August 5, 1889, in Savannah, Georgia, but was raised in Massachusetts after the 11-year-old Aiken was orphaned by his parents’ murder-suicide as a result of financial problems. Educated at private schools in the greater Boston area, Aiken enrolled as an undergraduate at Harvard College in 1908. Like any undergraduate, Aiken was quite active in various social clubs that then constituted the core of the undergraduate experience, forming many a lifelong friendship in the process. Most notable among them was with the fellow future poet and critic T. S. Eliot, whom he joined in 1909 on the board of Harvard’s undergraduate literary magazine, the Advocate. Several years behind Eliot in school, Aiken would not graduate until 1912, although he did manage to visit with Eliot in Paris in the summer of 1911 toward the end of Eliot’s year abroad. There he encountered a homesick Eliot, who expressed a determination to return to Harvard and continue with graduate studies in philosophy. As was Eliot’s, Aiken’s poetry writing was heavily influenced by the French symbolists, to whom he, too, would have been introduced by ARTHUR SYMONS’s landmark 1899 study, The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE. Most significantly, through Aiken’s kind offices, Eliot first met another fellow American poet, EZRA POUND, later in London on September 22, 1914, thus beginning one of American and English letters’s most

celebrated and productive literary and personal friendships. For years, Eliot and Aiken would continue to carry on a correspondence, in which Eliot shared with his old college friend the notoriously scurrilous King Bolo verses. Perhaps because of his close personal and professional association with Eliot, Aiken, a particularly perceptive critic, was an astutely sensitive reader of Eliot’s work, especially his most problematic poem, The Waste Land. In February 1923, within months of the first publication of The Waste Land the previous October, Aiken reviewed the poem for the New Republic. It is the only published contemporary response that recognizes the Eliot poem for its poetry as opposed to its social commentary. Aiken writes that “The Waste Land is unquestionably important, unquestionably brilliant . . . partly because it embodies . . . the theory of the ‘allusive’ method in poetry.” Aiken’s approach to Eliot’s achievement ultimately is structural, putting his reading well ahead of the times. Aiken illustrates how misleading the allusions can be if one attempts to consign any to the category of precise referents in order for meaning to be elicited, so he argues that we must “conclude that the poem is not, in any formal sense, coherent.” He continues: With or without the notes the poem belongs rather to symbolical order in which one may justly say that the “meaning” is not explicitly, or exactly, worked out.

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498 Anglicanism As Aiken sees it, the poem achieves a different order of unity, of coherence, from anything that has come before it, by virtue of its being “a brilliant and kaleidoscopic confusion; . . . a series of sharp discrete, slightly related perceptions and feelings.” And so, for Aiken, an approach to the poem as meaningful statement will not hold up under scrutiny. Rather, “the poem succeeds . . . by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its explanations. Its incoherence is a virtue.” Aiken became a significant contemporary poet in his own right. In 1930, his Selected Poems was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In addition to Selected Poems, his volumes of verse include Earth Triumphant (1914), The Charnel Rose (1918), And in the Hanging Gardens (1933), Brownstone Eclogues (1942), Collected Poems (1953), A Letter from Li Po (1956), A Seizure of Limericks (1964), and The Clerk’s Journal (1971). Aiken also single-handedly introduced the reclusive 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson’s works to the reading public when, in 1924, he edited her Selected Poems, thereby essentially establishing her literary reputation. He was also the author of two novels, Blue Voyage (1927) and Great Circle (1933). Two of his short stories—“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Mr. Arcularis”—have been frequently included in undergraduate anthologies. Like Eliot, the significance of musical patterns attracted Aiken’s attentions as a poet, and his poem “Music I Heard” has often been set to music by composers, Leonard Bernstein most notable among them. Among his other honors, Aiken held the poetry chair at the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1957 and in 1969 was awarded the National Medal for Literature. In his later years, Aiken returned to his native Savannah, where he passed away on August 17, 1973. Anglicanism See CATHOLICISM, FORMS OF. Anglo-Catholicism See CATHOLICISM, FORMS OF. anti-Semitism In February 1951, according to biographer Peter Ackroyd, Eliot attended a poetry reading at which, unbeknownst in advance to Eliot,

fellow poet Emmanuel Litvinoff read a poem attacking Eliot’s attitude toward Jews. Ackroyd gives no further details regarding the attack itself, except to say that Eliot was heard to remark favorably on the poem at the reading’s end. The entire incident was reported in the British press, and Eliot’s secretary was quoted as saying, “Many Jewish people have written to him accusing him of anti-semitism [sic]. It is not true.” To be Semitic is to be any person of Jewish or Arabic descent, for Jews and Arabs are traditionally regarded as the children of Shem, one of Noah’s sons, from whose name the word semite is derived. However, anti-Semitism as either a conscious or an unconscious attitude and mode of behavior refers specifically to a veiled or open hostility toward or prejudice against Jews. One cannot understand the awful dimensions of anti-Semitism without fully appreciating its precise meaning and its historical foundations. The popular explanation, and all too often excuse, for the terrifying and shameful persistence of Christian Europe’s long tradition of anti-Semitism is that it originated in the mistaken belief that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians worship as the Christ, the Son of God and third person of the Holy Trinity. “Blame it on the Jews” became a subspecies of public policy in most European nations, and the Holocaust, the name given to the systematic extermination of some 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II, was, for anyone familiar with how deeply rooted anti-Semitism has been in the European consciousness, nothing more than the horrifically tragic but all too natural conclusion to centuries of a sanctioned tolerance for intolerance. No wonder, then, that anti-Semitism should be regarded as something more than a mere prejudice and should be treated instead as the virulence that it is and has been for centuries. However, how much art is required to reflect a culture with all its warts and blemishes intact without running afoul of the more profound moral and ethical dilemma that occurs when such reflections perpetuate rather than expose those self-same warts and blemishes, anti-Semitism among them, can often be a basis for confusion and controversy.

anti-Semitism Eliot’s attitude toward Jews, as that attitude is expressed in his poetry and prose, is most certainly a source for confusion and controversy among both devotees and critics of the poet alike. There are definitely elements of anti-Semitism in Eliot’s poetry and prose. The earliest and most problematic instance comes from one of the quatrain poems composed between 1917 and 1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales.” In that text, in the midst of other shenanigans, a woman introduced as Rachel née Rabinovitch “[t]ears at the grapes with murderous paws.” If the far more inventive presence in that same poem of the brutish Sweeney may be taken, among other things, as a demeaning attack on the moral caliber of Irish-Americans and, by extension, Roman CATHOLICISM (and Sweeney’s presence may be taken in that manner without much loss of credibility), then Rachel Rabinovitch’s appearance in the same text does constitute antiSemitism, although it may put more knowledgeable readers in mind of Central Europe, a popular setting, at the time, for equally popular Broadway operettas with nonsensical plots. The next documentable instances come in another of the quatrain poems, in this case “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar.” Writing the same sort of energetic nonsense as in all the quatrains, Eliot disparages everything that has to do with tourists and tourist sites, in the latter case, Venice. But Eliot feels free to go one step further with Bleistein by portraying him in another, harsher light than one that is distinctive merely of an acquisitive crassness suggested by the cigar, a long-time symbol for those who engage in conspicuous consumption. Eliot makes it clear that Bleistein is Jewish: “Chicago Semite Viennese.” Virtually as a racist caricaturist might, Eliot then further portrays Bleistein with “lusterless protrusive” eyes and describes him further in terms of “protozoic slime.” Nor does Eliot stop even there. Lower indeed than the rats that lurk under the pilings that hold the Venetian Rialto up is in the speaker’s view the “jew [who] is underneath the lot”—an image that may mean that the Jew is beneath everyone else or is behind every shady business deal in the auction houses where Canalettos and other masterpieces of Venetian art may occasionally be sold, as Venice

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goes on bartering its heritage. Whatever else Eliot may be getting at, it is difficult to account for the insensitivity and savagery with which he identifies and then depicts Bleistein’s ethnicity. As with the Sweeney poem, however, it is not as if other characters in the poem fares any better, whatever their ethnicity. When last seen, Burbank is meditating on time’s ruins and the seven Noahid laws—the Jewish laws from God’s covenant with Noah, to which even non-Jews are expected to adhere. For a poem, then, that carries preponderantly the theme of a present that is squandering the riches of the past, among those riches Eliot has clearly placed Judaism, and among the squanderers he has put Bleistein. That is stereotyping, to be sure, but it is not necessarily anti-Semitism. So, then, a similar motive can be seen to underlie the Eliot text when in the next instance, in “Gerontion,” 1919, the speaker is seen to “stiffen in a rented house.” As the description continues, it is “. . . a decayed house, / And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner.” Here, while the anti-Semitism appears quite blatant, it reflects nevertheless the notion that, like the Venetians and like Bleistein himself, the speaker of “Gerontion” has mortgaged his inheritance, bringing up a further point. Since the poem is clearly a dramatic monologue, then here, too, the reader is at least required to imagine that it is the speaker’s values and attitudes that are being expressed, not necessarily the poet’s. The same concept—that Europe had in effect whored itself—later is reflected in “Gerontion” in the image of someone named Hakagawa, another “non-European” person apparently of Japanese heritage, bowing among the Titians. The cumulative implication seems clear: Europe is no longer a vibrant culture. Rather, she is a vacated house that has become an attraction for foreign tourists without any vital connection to the local culture or its preservation, key concerns of Eliot’s throughout his poetic and critical career. If these three examples were the only three cases of overt anti-Semitism to be found in Eliot’s work, one would have to admit that, at the worst, Eliot was a poet who, for the sake of an over-the-top line or image, would not go out of his way to avoid

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offending any number of ethnicities, all of them— Irish, Italian, Jewish—fair game from the point of view of Eliot’s white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant upbringing. However, in April 1933, in the course of introducing the Page-Barbour Lectures that he was then presenting on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Eliot outdid himself so boldly that the strain of anti-Semitism in his intellectual and moral makeup becomes obvious. The lectures were later published, in 1934, as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. In his introductory comments, Eliot takes a moment to assert that “a native culture,” apparently meaning by that a white and Protestant one, has more hope of being reestablished in Virginia than in New York because Virginia has been “less invaded by foreign races.” One is forced to imagine that, by “foreign races,” Eliot means all those recent immigrants from southern and central Europe, who were likely to be Jewish or Roman Catholic. Nor does he stop there. Expanding on the earlier statement, he further argues that tradition must represent “the blood kinship” of a people, an exclusionary view of a national experience such as America’s, which is made up of so many different peoples as to be the entirety of the human race. Yet he goes on in this kind of exclusionary manner by stressing the importance of maintaining the homogeneity of the American population, particularly with regard to preventing it from “becom[ing] adulterate.” Finally, and most deplorably, he emphasizes the need for that unity of tradition to be particularly backgrounded by a common religion. Presumably, that religion, in Eliot’s view, ought to be Christian, for he pointedly remarks that, with that end in mind, “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” on the American intellectual and cultural scene. Many have tried to characterize these remarks in such a way as to imply that the excluded group is not Jews in general, but “free-thinking” Jews, and that furthermore the emphasis should be placed on “free-thinking,” not “Jews.” Such explanations—for there are not many who would approach a defense of Eliot’s remark in any way that may appear to be endorsing or justifying it—still leave intact the no less onerous problem that this exclusion is to be

done for “reasons of race and religion”; nor can any explanation resist the fact that Eliot’s remark sounds blatantly anti-Semitic, if that term has any meaning whatsoever. In Eliot’s defense, he subsequently forbid any reissuing of After Strange Gods, yet he never retracted the statement, not even in the 1961 essay “To Criticize the Critic,” whose whole intent and purpose was to make peace with and amends for past editorial and critical transgressions. The best that anyone can do is to argue that Eliot was, like most of the rest of us, a victim of the prejudices and ethical shortcomings of his time and place. The first 20 years of Eliot’s life coincided with an incredible influx of European immigrants; at the time of his birth, for example, a quarter of the nearly half-million residents of his native city, ST. LOUIS, were foreign born. Members of Eliot’s class and ethnicity in the America of the times—upper-middle-class individuals of English or Dutch descent, and descendants as well of the nation’s original colonial settlers—were wont to look askance at “foreigners” of any ilk, but those of a Southern European and Catholic background or of a Central European and Jewish background were generally the most despised, degraded, and, when possible, rejected. That may explain why, during his sojourn in Paris in 1910–11, the youthful Eliot was drawn to the ideology of Charles Maurras’s Action Française, which, despite its ostensibly Roman Catholic leanings, was actually a nationalist movement that was profoundly anticlerical and anti-Semitic in its principles and practice. At the very least, the remarks in After Strange Gods some 20 years later were an insensitive and inappropriate way of expressing what Eliot may have seen to be a legitimate intellectual gripe, although how it was even only that is itself impossible to explain or to justify. At the worst, the remarks regarding “free-thinking Jews” were irresponsible and reprehensible, because it was cultural critics like Eliot who insisted that we have a right to expect more from our artists and thinkers when it comes to matters of common sense, common decency, and simple justice. An attitude is not an iceberg, however. With an iceberg, the tip is merely a tip-off that there is

Arnold, Matthew something larger at hand. With an attitude, the tip is the top, the bottom, and all four sides. What, then, is the precise dimension of Eliot’s anti-Semitism as can be determined from these remarks? It is not enough to say that he just was not thinking. All the more the shame, then, both for him and for his audience. His overall attitude toward the Jews in his poetry—that, as caricatures, they are good for a comic turn every now and then—mimics a similar attitude toward Irish Catholics, as they were embodied, say, in the serving girls of a poem such as “Morning at the Window,” but especially in his characterization of Sweeney, whose predilection for prostitutes and, it is to be assumed, strong drink and unsavory company makes him a “stage Irishman” par excellence. But we must now return to the question of the special prerogatives of art and of the artist. Is Eliot exhibiting these social and cultural failings or exposing them? His poetic style is generally intended more as a means for representing rather than stating, and it is frequently masked. So, then, is he exploring states of mind and feeling, or exploiting them, or unwittingly revealing them as being present in himself? Of course, the more subtle becomes an analysis, let alone any approach toward a defense of Eliot’s apparent bigotries, the more likely it is to miss the point. The point is that there clearly are elements of anti-Semitism and of other forms of prejudice in Eliot’s poetry and his thinking and that that state of affairs cannot now ever be rectified. The topic reached critical mass in 1988, Eliot’s centennial year, during which conferences and other events in his honor were being organized throughout the English-speaking world. Responding to this outpouring of affection and respect for Eliot, the following year the American novelist Cynthia Ozick felt compelled to weigh in, in a long article published in the popular New Yorker magazine, with a scathing indictment of him as a self-made and therefore phony Englishman whose poetry is no longer read and who was an anti-Semite. Since then there have been numerous articles, books, and reviews attempting to set the record in order, none succeeding, perhaps, as well as the English critic Anthony Julius’s.

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In his 1995 study, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, Julius argues that Eliot’s poetry does not merely “reflect the anti-Semitism of the times; . . . Eliot’s work contributed to the antiSemitism of the times.” Considering that Nazi Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, whose bestial regime would be the architect of the Holocaust, was just coming to power in Germany at the same time that After Strange Gods was being published, Julius’s is a powerfully stinging indictment, and one that cannot be dismissed out of hand or, very likely, even refuted. One’s words do affect others, and the words of a great poet affect others by that much more. Whether or not he would in any way, manner, or form condone anti-Semitism in others, expressions that can be construed as anti-Semitic in Eliot’s poetry and in his prose certainly legitimize anti-Semitism, exactly as Julius argues. Eliot would, if he could, say that contributing to the anti-Semitism of the times did not form any part of his intention, and it is likely that he would be telling the truth. That may not excuse him, but it would permit forgiveness. There are lessons to be learned here. A great mind must be possessed of a great heart, and a great heart cannot but condemn hatred. On the score, there can be neither compromise nor subtlety. Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888) The son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby who is celebrated to this day in Thomas Hughes’s immensely popular 1852 English novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the English poet and literary and cultural critic Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, Middlesex, on Christmas Eve 1822 and educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, at which he became a fellow in 1845. In 1851, however, through the influence of Lord Lansdowne, to whom Arnold was private secretary, Arnold was appointed inspector of schools, a position that he held for most of the rest of his life. He would nevertheless also be appointed professor of poetry at Oxford and in 1883 would be pensioned off at a sum then equaling $1,000.00 per year, a very generous amount. While Arnold made his living as a minor bureaucrat, he made his reputation as a poet and critic of considerable power and conviction. In poems such

502 Arnold, Matthew as “Dover Beach” (1851), “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” (1852), and “The Scholar Gypsy” (1853), Arnold sketched a postromantic response to a world that was becoming increasingly secularized and “modernized,” but without any great advantage for the individual that he could see or happily identify. Rather, the splintering effects of political, intellectual, and religious factionalism encouraged him to describe the current cultural landscape as one in which “ignorant armies clash[ed] by night.” In response to this moral chaos, the best minds of his generation had lost their way as well, finding their beliefs and ideas “[w]andering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” Those two worlds of his represented the old, medieval world order that had crumbled in the face of the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation and the humanist, empiricist revolution in thought and in knowing and a truly modern world, comfortable with itself, that might, at some point in the future, emerge from the castastrophe of readjustment required by such widespread cultural transformation. As if in response to his own poetic despair, Arnold slowly but surely turned his hand more and more to writing trenchant essays that critically analyzed the set of circumstances that had led to the impasse that he was envisioning and that might, as a consequence, begin to repair the serious breach in the life of the intellect that had caused it. In summary, he felt that a major part of the problem and, so, a potential solution for it was that the creative impulse had itself become stultified—that the poets, and poetry, were in essence spinning their wheels in vain efforts at expressing the despair that such a breach had engendered. Instead they should inspire the general community to recognize the dilemma of a lack faith in both human and divine agency to ameliorate the situation and address that dilemma, rather than the tumultuous feelings that it aroused, directly. Beginning with essays on the order of “The Function of Criticism at Present Time” in 1864, Arnold began to propose that now was not the time for poetry, that, rather, now was the time to take unflinching critical stock of the culture as a whole entity in order to identify its conflicts and deficiencies with an eye toward

inspiring a more positive creative response to those conflicts and deficiencies. One could argue that the modernist movement in the arts that would begin some 40 to 50 years later was the very sort of new literature that Arnold was envisioning. For his own part, Arnold encouraged others to follow his lead in what he called a “disinterested” critical endeavor “to learn and to propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,” without any regard for what set of ideals or party may thereby benefit from those conclusions. His major work in that regard remains the book-length essay Culture and Anarchy (1869), whose title pretty much sums up what he took to be the terms of engagement. Eliot had difficulty throughout the better part of his own career as a cultural and literary critic abiding with Arnold’s positions. In the essay “Arnold and Pater” (1930) and then in On the Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1934), Eliot took issue with Arnold for attempting to make poetry a substitute for religion, a position that, in Eliot’s view, had given rise eventually to the secular humanism advocated by his former Harvard mentor, Professor IRVING BABBITT. If Arnold could say that poetry was “at bottom, a criticism of life,” Eliot could retort that when one hit bottom, one did not encounter the ability to criticize better, but rather “the horror, the boredom, and the glory”—planes of experience, that is to say, that are neither easily rendered nor easily identified. By now we can see, as Eliot did later in his life, that Arnold was waging his own cultural wars on the same field and for many of the same reasons that Eliot would be later waging his—in the hopes that something of the old, the tried, and the true might survive an increasingly mechanized and secularized public realm. Matthew Arnold died on April 15, 1888, a man who had devoted himself to serving the public good with all the skills and talents that he had had at his disposal and to encouraging his fellows to do likewise. For Eliot, finally, one must imagine that Arnold was more of a model than an impediment, offering him a way in which to make genuine literary criticism a part of the general discourse by which cultures and societies can identify their shortcomings and seek to rectify them before it is too late.

B Babbitt, Irving (1865–1953) Born in Dayton, Ohio, on August 2, 1865, the American academic and literary critic Irving Babbitt was a shaping force in the development of what became known as the New Humanism, which in turn shaped much of the American intellectual agenda from 1910 to 1930. Babbitt was educated at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1889. After taking a teaching position for several years in Montana, he continued his education at the Sorbonne in Paris and then took a master’s degree in Sanskrit at Harvard. After a second teaching stint at Williams College in Massachusetts, Babbitt was offered a position as an instructor, in French, at Harvard, where he remained the rest of his academic career, eventually rising to the rank of full professor. Thanks to the wide variety of his training and interests in cultures and languages, he is credited with introducing the study of comparative literature at Harvard and may have had a hand in influencing his undergraduate student, the young T. S. Eliot, in developing his own famously eclectic tastes in world literatures and languages. These would be honed to their highest degree by Eliot in 1922 in his celebrated multicultural extravaganza, The Waste Land. In keeping with the parallel thinking of his Harvard colleague Paul Elmer More, Babbitt’s humanism made an effort to chart a course between the sentimental sloppiness of that early 19th-century phenomenon romanticism, with its emphasis on the self and on intense feeling, and the increasingly

mechanistic secularism that had begun to dominate public life, policy, and discourse throughout the balance of the 19th century. Out of the New Humanist movement, for example, would emerge the Great Book movement that guided the teaching of literature in American academia for the better part of the 20th century. The idea was that literature served the purposes of both the aesthetic and the religious imagination, training the mind while molding the spirit. In that regard, Babbitt might be regarded as a disciple of the mid-19th-century English poet and social and cultural critic MATTHEW ARNOLD. Like Arnold, Babbitt proposed a place for aesthetic experience, including literature, that would give those kinds of human activity a transcendent validity formerly reserved only for religion. While this tack is to be commended for its insistence on a less materialistic and more spiritual approach toward determining and benefiting from the dynamics of culture, it also tended to make poetry a substitute for religion. It is on those grounds that Eliot, in a 1927 review of Babbitt’s book Democracy and Leadership titled “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” would attack his former Harvard mentor’s essential position. In Eliot’s view, where Babbitt’s arguments failed was in their proposing too extensive a social purpose for poetry, one that it could simply not possibly deliver. Eliot would revisit his criticism of Babbitt’s humanist posture in a 1928 essay, “Second Thoughts on Humanism,” in which he felt called on to clarify 503

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his earlier condemnation of certain aspects of Babbitt’s thought that, if carried to their logical conclusion, would, in Eliot’s view, diminish the cultural effectiveness of both poetry and religion. Despite this professional and ideological rivalry, Eliot and Babbitt remained good friends personally, and they maintained an amicable master-pupil correspondence with each other. Babbitt passed away on July 15, 1933. In 1960, Harvard established and endowed the Irving Babbitt Professorship of Comparative Literature in his honor. Baudelaire, Charles (1821–1867) Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 9, 1821, the son of a former priest and a mother who had been orphaned in her childhood. A notorious womanizer and drug addict who lived a life of the same sort of decadence that his poetry would celebrate and his criticism would justify, he would die at the relatively young age of 46 on August 31, 1867, the victim of syphilis, which he had become infected with as a young man. For all of that, Baudelaire managed to fashion out of his archetypal “life on the wild side” a model for the kind of sensibility that was required in order to respond to the vista of moral and spiritual degradation and despair that were, in his lifetime, rapidly becoming the hallmarks of urban experience in the mid-19th century. Modernism as a way of thinking was only just then coming into its own; modernism as a way of feeling, believing, and behaving would be shaped by the likes of Baudelaire and the other, young French urban poets of his day. In his single volume of poetry, Les fleurs du mal, or The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire was among the first to identify squalor as a source of beauty, the conventionally beautiful as a mark of corruption, and ennui or boredom as the only authentic human vice. When it was first published in 1857, all involved in its writing and publication were prosecuted and found guilty of obscenity and blasphemy. A second edition in 1861 managed to pass the censor’s bar. Baudelaire’s poetry remains problematic because he eschewed the provincial, middle-class idea that art is meant to be an adornment. For him, the artist was the conscience of the human community and

was bound, therefore, only by the single restriction that he tell no lies. The poem should leave readers feeling uncomfortably agitated, not benumbed and satiated. Indeed, much of T. S. Eliot’s brand of modernism takes its cue from these aspects of Baudelaire’s poetics, with its painfully abrupt honesty intermingled among typically “poetic” touches. In Baudelaire’s famous image of the human city as an anthill teeming with the desperately bored, he challenged his “hypocrite readers” to see themselves in their brother poet, bringing to them his bouquet of unpretty flowers. Although he studied for the law, Baudelaire had set his sights on a literary career from a very early age. His writing skills were honed largely in his years of translating the American poet Edgar Allan Poe, whose similarly skewed vision and excesses of imagery fascinated Baudelaire as much as they did his fellow French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842– 98). Along with poets like Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine (1844–96), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), and JULES LAFORGUE (1860–87), Baudelaire effectively led the way in dramatically revivifying not only French poetry writing but, by virtue of his influence on such modernist poets as Eliot and European and American poetry writing as well. For all that they seemed at times to wallow in the sordid details of ordinary life, these symbolists, as they came to be called, sought to create through their poetry a window into human experience unadorned by romantic sentimentalities but no less richly beautiful and strangely meaningful. A young Eliot first came to know many of the most original French symbolist poets by reading ARTHUR SYMONS’s landmark study The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE in December 1908. Although Baudelaire would not have been included in that earlier edition of Symons’s book, Baudelaire’s vision of the so-called urban apocalypse had had enough of an impact on Eliot for it to be reflected in the “[u]nreal city” that provides the locale for most of the goings-on in the first three sections of Eliot’s The Waste Land, first published in October 1922. From his readings in Baudelaire, Eliot appears to have overcome the taboo that precluded the mechanics of human sexuality from serious artistic endeavors, poetry among them.

Bergson, Henri Baudelaire’s poetry may be filled with images of lust and of decay, but those are no less genuine aspects of the human condition and of the factors motivating a wide range of human behavior. By making what had previously been held to be the obscene and the blasphemous the subjects of serious literary endeavors, Baudelaire made them as well the objects of legitimate concern not just for the beleaguered individual but for the entire community. Furthermore, Baudelaire’s success in bringing these issues to the table of “important human concerns” made them become the topic of intellectual discourse in the academy and of political and social discourse in the popular press and in the halls of government. That this constitutes a cultural revolution of the first order is beyond dispute, and Baudelaire deserves credit for nearly single-handedly initiating it. In his youth, Baudelaire had been a political activist, taking to the barricades during the Paris uprising of 1848 that ushered in the so-called Second Republic in France. A democrat at heart, Baudelaire did not seek to use human sexuality as a means to titillate or otherwise exploit his readers. Rather, he found a way to write “for the masses” that included all of us at the most basic levels of existence, which included more typical emotions like frustration, despair, and boredom. His poetry reinvigorated the ancient idea that the poet spoke not merely to and for the kindred aesthetes but to one’s fellow, whoever he or she may be, and to the entire community, stripping away illusions and shame and self-deception for the sake of approaching a true beauty and a purer truth. Beacon Hill See BOSTON. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941) Although he was born French, on October 18, 1859, in Paris, the philosopher Henri Bergson was created by all of Europe. His father was of Polish Jewish descent, his mother of Irish and English Jewish descent, and the family lived in London for nearly a decade following Henri’s birth. Eventually, however, they returned to France, and Henri became a naturalized French citizen. As befitting a thinker and academic, Bergson led a relatively quiet and uneventful life. He began his

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career as a scientist and mathematician but eventually made a name for himself in the humanities with an essay on the Roman philosopher Lucretius. By 1889, he had earned a doctorate in humane letters from the University of Paris on the strength of a thesis on Aristotle and the manuscript of what would be his first published philosophical work, Time and Free Will. With the publication of Matter and Memory in 1896, Bergson established himself as one of the leading thinkers of his day. His work was founded on years of real scientific investigation into the functioning of the brain and the body, although his most significant conclusion—that the experience of change is, for the individual, a matter of perception that is not confirmed by anything in the physical universe, or objective experience—seems at its heart to be largely within the realms of speculative philosophy, or metaphysics, in keeping with the work of the English idealist philosopher F. H. BRADLEY, a contemporary thinker. Supposedly independently, Bergson, for example, argued for a view of experience in keeping with the 19th-century American pragmatist William James’s concept of a “stream of consciousness” that the ordinary mind distorts through categorical concepts. Similarly, in keeping with Bradley’s notions of the necessary conflicts and confusions between appearance and reality, Bergson’s work focused primarily on matters of perception and memory, those means of processing not merely information but the very essence of experience, means that were then just coming into vogue as areas of scholarly and philosophical investigation. In 1900, he was appointed to a professorship at the Collège de France, first to the chair of Greek philosophy, but eventually succeeding, in 1904, to the chair of modern philosophy. In 1907, Bergson published his third principal work, Creative Evolution, in which he developed most fully his theories regarding the purposes of the arts in furthering human social development. It was partly to attend his lectures that the young T. S. Eliot, just graduated with an M.A. in English literature from Harvard University, traveled to Paris in the fall of 1910, remaining there until the summer of 1911. Eliot’s poetry writing at the time, confined to works as significant as his

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early masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” reflects the influence of Bergsonian thinking, with its emphasis on a reality that is totally intuited and therefore of the perceiver’s making and that is furthermore shaped as much by preconceptions as by received experience. Individuals are, as it were, prisoners of their own “mind-forg’d manacles,” as the late 18th-century English poet William Blake no less accurately portrayed the psychological phenomenon that is consciousness. A much-honored individual who was invited to lecture at major universities in both England and the United States and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, Bergson nevertheless saw his influence fall into a decline in the final decades of his life. Bergson’s last major work was his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, published in 1935, in which he extended the ramifications of his thought into the areas of art, religion, and morality. Although he desired to convert to Roman Catholicism toward the end of his life, as a sign of solidarity with his fellow Jews, Bergson registered as a Jew in keeping with the requirements of the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi-backed Vichy government then managing so-called unoccupied France during World War II. Bergson passed away on January 4, 1941. In keeping with his wishes, a Roman Catholic priest said the prayers at his funeral. Boston The community that now is Boston, Massachusetts, was first settled in June 1630 within 10 years of the famous landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, making the city of Boston one of the oldest places of continuing habitation settled by Englishspeaking colonists in the continental United States. Boston, however, has many another claim to fame, not the least among them being that its citizens were the first to fan the sparks of rebellion against the British crown with the Boston Tea Party in 1765, and Boston and its surrounding communities, most notably Concord and Lexington, are still fabled for their key roles in the Revolutionary War that subsequently ensued following the colonists’ Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Among all the various Anglo-American families who have achieved prominence because of their long and continuing ties to the development of the

Massachusetts Bay Colony and subsequent Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as the state is called, are most certainly the Eliots. Not only was the family founder Andrew Eliot, who had emigrated from East Coker in England, a juror with the Salem witch trials in the 1670s, but an Eliot was later a president of HARVARD University. In any roll call of these founding families, then, which would include names as enduringly embedded in American history as the Cabots and the Lodges, the Lowells and the Adamses, the Peabodys and the Winthrops, would be the Eliots. Eliot’s own branch of the family, however, was founded in ST. LOUIS in 1834, when the family patriarch, WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT, then a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, set out for that frontier town to establish the first church devoted to UNITARIANISM west of the Mississippi. Even as a child of the great Midwest and the Mississippi Valley, however, the young Eliot came to know his New England roots as well. His family summered every year in GLOUCESTER, north of Boston on Cape Ann, and his father built an immense summer home on Eastern Point, Gloucester, in 1896. Furthermore, in 1905 the teenage Eliot was sent east to attend Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, just south of Boston, in preparation for his enrolling, in 1906, in Harvard College, located just across the Charles River from Boston in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By this time in U.S. history, waves of early immigrants from Western Europe, particularly the British Isles, had been followed by immigrants from Southern and Central European nations, so that by the end of the 19th century, the Boston area had a populace that was as likely to be of Irish or Italian descent and was composed of tradespeople and craftspeople whose task it was to service the needs of the old, established families of Anglo-Saxon descent who still controlled the community’s political, commercial, and educational bases. Such a melting-pot culture has become a commonplace experience by now, typifying urban life in the United States throughout most of the 20th century. A young Eliot was on hand to witness the mixed fruits of this national transformation, so that Cambridge and other upper-middle-class and working-class locales

Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert] are prominently featured in much of Eliot’s early poetry, either providing readers with glimpses into the values of a bygone era or introducing them to the comparative squalor of the new. Beacon Hill, for example, which continues to contain the most valuable residential properties in the United States, would have been the home to Boston’s social elites, the so-called Brahmins who set the tone and tastes for a city that still regarded itself as the Hub of the Universe, with some justification. Located on prime real estate just across the Charles River from Cambridge, the south slope of the hill overlooks the famous Boston Common. Beacon Street, the area’s main thoroughfare, is home to the Boston Athenæum, an independent library and museum founded in 1807 on the model of similar private galleries in England. A few doors down is the headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the modern organization representing the religious denomination that dominated the spiritual life of southern New England for most of the colonial period and to which the Eliot family belonged. The hill’s narrow, gaslit streets, with their sidewalks and row after row of Federal-style houses, should come to mind as one reads “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or “Portrait of a Lady,” from 1911, and this exclusive area for proper Bostonians no doubt figures as well in such later Eliot poems as “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” “Cousin Nancy,” and “Morning at the Window,” all composed in about 1915. As an undergraduate, Eliot was not above “slumming it” either, so Boston’s working-class locales were sources of inspiration for his early poems as well. Inspired by JULES LAFORGUE and, very likely, CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, the two French symbolist poets who most influenced his early urban and social poetry, Eliot experimented with poems whose interests and topicality were involved with the seamier side of life in a vast metropolis such as Boston. This early experimentation would lead eventually to the “Preludes.” Eliot was penning poems with titles such as “First Caprice in North Cambridge” and “Second Caprice in North Cambridge” as early November 1909. Their subjects were cityscapes that focused, in a handful of spare lines confined largely to description, on the under-

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belly of inner-city living. These first inklings of yellow evenings, gutters, streaked window panes, piles of refuse, tinny pianos, and even cheaper music were “minor considerations,” as the poet called them, yet they seemed to occupy a great deal of his time and attention. As a result of Eliot’s 1910– 11 study sojourn in Paris, he would pen “Fourth Caprice in North Cambridge.” As originally cast, the “Preludes,” too, had much a more place-specific emphasis in their individual titles, being first called, in order, “Prelude in Dorchester,” composed in October 1910; “Prelude in Roxbury,” also composed in October 1910; “(Morgendämmerung [German for ‘morning twilight’]): Prelude in Roxbury,” composed in July 1911; and “Abenddämmerung [‘evening twilight’],” which was composed after Eliot had returned to the United States, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1911. The prominence of Dorchester and Roxbury as locales is easily explained: They are to this day other working-class towns located near Cambridge, the sort of places a young man of means might haunt when he was out for a “night on the town.” Such locales find their way into the opening of “Prufrock” as well, with its images of “sawdust restaurants with oyster shells” and men in shirtsleeves leaning out of windows. Eliot’s most significant use of Boston and its environs, however, comes in He Do the Police in Different Voices, the original version of The Waste Land. Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert] (1846–1927) Influences are all too often chicken-and-egg propositions. How can it be determined to any degree of satisfaction whether a writer’s way of thinking is influenced by another or that writer merely finds that other writer’s or thinker’s ideas and beliefs congenial to ideas and beliefs that he already holds? Sometimes, too, a person may give expression to someone else’s way of thinking that, until then, had not been articulated in any systematic or clear way by that person. The point is that when the connection is made, there is no way of determining what wiring there was in place already that made the connection possible. It is this very indeterminate nature of the relationship between an event and a person’s knowledge of the event that is at the heart

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of the philosophy of the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley. Along with the 19th-century French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE and DANTE ALIGHIERI, it is doubtful that anyone exerted as much influence on Eliot’s thought and writing as Bradley did, yet the extent and exact nature of that influence, like any other, is purely speculative. That one may never acknowledge an experience until it has already occurred, so that the acknowledgment is itself colored by the experience that has inspired it, is not a philosophical postulate but practical reality— although it may take a great deal of philosophical postulating to prove as much. That is where a philosopher such as Bradley comes in. How does one illustrate, let alone postulate, let alone verify those unverifiable aspects of experience that one nevertheless believes constitute its true nature? The obvious answer is that one does not without entering the realms of what is called speculative philosophy, or metaphysics. For Bradley, the true nature of experience or, as the philosophers say, reality is not constituted of our interaction with objects existing and operating independent of each other; rather, reality is an integrated whole that exists ultimately as ideas rather than objects. Any summary of Bradley of this order is likely to do serious damage to the subtle complexities of Bradleyan idealism. Nevertheless, the lines of engagement that his philosophy draws reveal an unmistakable affinity with the challenges facing the artist, particularly a literary artist such as Eliot, for whom one’s perception of any experienced event is invariably colored by one’s ideas and words are always an inadequate means of expressing that complex of event, thought, and emotion. Whether Eliot’s poetics, with its unconventional treatment of meaning as a thing that the reader must struggle to make all on his or her own with little or no assistance from the poem’s speaker, was inspired in part or in whole by Bradley’s idealism or whether Bradley’s thinking was hospitable to ways in which Eliot had already been thinking and composing is, then, itself impossible to determine, although it is more likely that the latter is the case. Eliot had, after all, already attended, in Paris in 1910 and 1911, the lectures of the French ideal-

ist HENRI BERGSON, whose philosophical premises resembled Bradley’s, inasmuch as Bergson, too, stressed the essential and yet unknowable stability of objective reality, which could be known only by degrees of perceptual coloration. It was not until June 1913, meanwhile, that Eliot’s interest in Bradley can be documented. Still, he was drawn enough to Bradleyan thinking to make a critique of the philosopher’s thought the subject of his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” which he completed in April 1916. The dissertation would be published by Eliot in 1964 under the title Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Suffice it to say in the final analysis that Bradley’s philosophy, like Eliot’s poetry, seeks to close the gap between knowledge and experience by regarding the ways in which the individual objectifies that experience. In that sense, it is absolutely true that objects exist only as ideas. By the time that Eliot arrived at Merton College, Oxford, to study under one of Bradley’s disciples, Harold Joachim, Bradley’s seminal work had already been accomplished, although he continued to be a presence at Oxford. Born on January 30, 1846, in Clapham, now a suburb of London, Bradley was the son of an Evangelical minister and his second wife. His brother, A. C. Bradley, would become a distinguished Shakespearean scholar. F. H. Bradley was first educated near home but eventually attended University College, Oxford, obtaining his position at Merton College in 1870. Widely regarded as the most brilliant English philosopher of his day, Bradley’s reputation did not hold up well after his death in the late summer of 1927. Interest in scientific positivism and mathematics had begun to rule the roost among younger English philosophers, BERTRAND RUSSELL among them, and Bradley’s idealism became more and more dismissed for its necessary speculative biases, while Bradley himself was labeled a metaphysician, as certain a kiss of death as any among the emerging analytical philosophers. His most significant works are Ethical Studies, published in 1876, which Eliot particularly commends in his essay on Bradley; The Principles of Logic, much of which is regarded

Browne, E[dward] Martin 509 now as polemical rather than analytical, published in 1883; and Appearance and Reality, published in 1893. That last work most encapsulates the principles of Bradleyan philosophy, and Eliot cites it in one of the most significant notes in The Waste Land, in this case to line 412, regarding the confession of Count Ugolino. Browne, E[dward] Martin (1900–1980) In 1930, the Most Reverend George Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chichester, hired a young man named E. Martin Browne to reinstitute the longstanding relationship between drama and religion in the English church, appointing Browne the diocesan director of religious drama. An actor by training, in this new capacity Browne turned his abilities at directing toward re-creating a manageable production from the 14,000 lines of the York Mystery Cycle, a 14th-century pageant play depicting the Bible from the Creation to the Last Judgment. His resulting script for a pageant play is used in performances in England to this day. Browne first met Eliot at Bishop Bell’s episcopal palace in December 1930 during a weekend visit when Eliot read from his then just-published sequence “Ash-Wednesday,” with its prominently religious overtones. When Browne subsequently agreed to write the scenario for a pageant play to aid the Anglican Diocese of London with a churchbuilding fund, although he would be working from a story line that was based on episodes suggested by the Reverend R. Webb-Odell, Browne asked Eliot to write the choruses and the dialogue. The poet happily obliged. The resulting play, The Rock, was, then, the product of several hands, perhaps explaining why Eliot would later include only the choruses in his Collected Poems, 1909–1935. When the play was finally performed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London from May 28 to June 9, 1934, nonetheless, it drew a total audience of 1,500, an impressive outcome for Eliot’s first entry into writing for what amounted to the popular stage. (An earlier effort begun in 1923, “Sweeney Agonistes,” had been abandoned by the poet in 1925.) With Browne and Eliot’s successful collaboration on The Rock behind them, Bell now suggested that Eliot prepare an original work for next

year’s Canterbury Festival. For his theme, Eliot settled on a drama dealing with the martyrdom, at Canterbury of the 12th-century English archbishop Thomas à Becket and turned to Browne for his expertise with staging and directing the new play. Alternately called Fear in the Way and The Archbishop’s Murder Case, the verse play that ultimately emerged as Murder in the Cathedral was first performed in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral the evening of June 19, 1935, before an opening night audience of 700 as a part of the festival. Browne and Eliot’s collaboration continued with The Family Reunion, Eliot’s first completed verse drama with a contemporary setting. At Browne’s urging, that play went through several rewrites before opening to a disappointing five-week run at London’s Westminster Theatre on March 21, 1939. Nevertheless, the two had by now forged a lasting professional collaboration. A successful revival of The Family Reunion following the war encouraged Eliot to try his hand at a new verse drama. By July 1948, he had sent a draft of the first three acts of the new play, which he had originally intended to title “One-Eyed Reilly,” to his theatrical collaborator Browne. The Cocktail Party, as the new played was finally called, was mounted at the Edinburgh Festival during the last week of August 1949 and was a popular success there. Unable to secure a theatre in London’s West End for its commercial premier, producer Henry Sherek premiered it on New York’s Broadway instead, where it opened on January 21, 1950, to a long and successful run in the Henry Miller Theatre. It would be Eliot’s greatest theatrical triumph, a moneymaker, as they say on Broadway, that enjoyed an equally successful run later in London. Browne and Eliot would collaborate on two more verse dramas aimed at a popular audience. Eliot had the first two scenes of The Confidential Clerk drafted as early as May 1951 after The Cocktail Party had closed for London audiences. His plans were to premier the new play at the Edinburgh Festival the summer of 1952, but he would not complete the play until February 1953, thus delaying its Edinburgh Festival debut until the following August. There, it was very well received. The play

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opened at London’s Lyric Theatre on September 16, 1953, where it continued to experience great popular success. By the end of 1957, Eliot had a completed draft of yet another new play, which he had originally intended to call The Rest Cure. When he learned that that title had already been used, he elected to call his verse drama The Elder Statesmen instead. The London production of the play, again under Browne, opened in the Cambridge Theatre in late

September 1958. Eliot’s reputation as a dramatist and his ability to gauge public tastes, had peaked with The Cocktail Party, however, and this last collaboration of theirs did not enjoy anywhere near the same level of critical and commercial success. Browne would write his own reminiscence of his nearly three decades of working with Eliot in the book The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1969, four years after Eliot’s death in January 1965.

C Catholicism, forms of Americans think of the terms Catholicism and Catholic as pertaining to the rituals and doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, so called because its leadership is located at the Vatican in Rome. Eliot, however, uses the terms differently. When Eliot, for example, speaks of Catholicism as if it is a coordinate ideology with classicism in his 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism,” or when he is variously quoted as having proclaimed himself a classicist, a royalist, and a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic in his preface to For Lancelot Andrews in 1928, or when he writes of “Catholicism and International Order” in the 1949 essay of that name—in all those instances, it is not a religious denomination per se so much as a theological concept that he has in mind. In all three of these contexts, and with the possible exception of Eliot’s discussion regarding the schism between Roman Catholic and Anglican belief in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot is never speaking about a denominational issue regarding the faithful’s practice of their religious beliefs when he refers to or uses the word catholicism or any of its variants. Rather, he is addressing the central concept of that body of belief derived from the Gospels detailing the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the individual recognized by Christian faithful, whatever their particular denomination, as the Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and Son of God. (Curiously enough, an exception among nominal Christians to this generalization is UNITARIANISM, the faith of Eliot’s family and, so, of his childhood and young manhood.)

Among the central tenets of Christian faith is one that asserts that the church that Christ founded is not a sect but the universal church, although as a tenet it was one that by Eliot’s time was not being as aggressively proposed and pursued as it once had been. In summary, the Christian believes that there is no other church than Christ’s. Hence, inasmuch as the word catholic denotes something that is “universal; general; all-inclusive,” Christianity is synonymous with a church that is catholic. That the American experience has encouraged a large portion of the Christian community to hear the word catholic as denoting a specific denomination, Roman Catholicism, is an understandable cultural phenomenon and one to which Eliot himself would have been exposed, being an American by birth, upbringing, and education himself. Nevertheless, when Catholic is used to identify a Roman Catholic, it is really something more in the way of a familiar shorthand than anything approaching a theological or doctrinal correctness. Indeed, Eliot would himself, and does, draw a distinction among Roman Catholicism, AngloCatholicism, and Anglicanism, but this distinction would be in regard to belief, ritual, and practice. That is to say, the differences are not quite denominational only but are significant nonetheless. The original breach between Rome and London, as it were, occurred during the reign of Henry VIII, who severed all ties with the papacy in Rome in 1533 as the result, largely, of a dispute over whether or not he could divorce his present wife, Catherine of 511

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Aragon, in order to marry Anne Boleyn, the future mother of Elizabeth I. There is no denying that there were issues purely doctrinal in nature as well behind the so-called English Reformation that thus resulted, but Henry’s own motives were by and large what we would call to this day geopolitical. Subsequently, however, there was a serious doctrinal breach regarding the nature of the Eucharistic Host, the most significant of Christian sacraments. For adherents of Roman Catholicism to this day, the Host that is taken by the faithful at Communion represents the real presence; while it retains the appearance of mere bread, it has become in fact, and not symbolically, the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In that regard, the sacrament is an act of what is called transubstantiation. This, again, is a central—perhaps the most central—belief of a Roman Catholic Christian. Lutheran doctrine, however, introduced a serious modification into this belief; for these Protestants (i.e., those who “protested” the authority of Rome as having the final say in matters of faith), the Eucharistic Host is representative of the sacramental process but does not fully embody it. Instead of transubstantiation, the process is one of a consubstantiation, whereby the Host is either/or (or, from another point of view, neither/nor). To individuals not especially devoted to the sacrament of the Eucharist, such a distinction may seem to be a trivial one, perhaps even a silly one. To persons of faith in the doctrines and rituals that have just been described, the distinction is all the difference in the world. The point is that while the breach between the Roman and the English church may not have originally been based on a doctrinal dispute, as was the case with Martin Luther’s original opposition to Rome, as years passed, Anglicanism accepted the doctrine of consubstantiation at the expense of a belief in transubstantiation. To the uninitiated, the difference between a Roman and an Anglican service, or Mass, may seem to be absolutely none at all, particularly since the reforms in the Roman church as a result of Vatican II in 1962. For the faithful on either side of the divide just described, however, those similarities are all show ultimately without any authentic substance whatsoever. Eliot, in choosing to identify himself as an AngloCatholic instead of as an Anglican following his

conversion to the Church of England in June 1927, was letting it be known that, while not granting any semblance of authority to Rome in terms of his personal faith, he was so-called High Church Anglican and still capable of adhering not only to the idea that the Eucharist is transubstantial but also to a devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, which many Protestants see as idolatrous. Anyone who knows both the acts of faith of Roman Catholicism and Eliot’s 1930 poem “Ash-Wednesday” may be liable to think of Eliot as a Catholic—meaning now, in the common parlance, a Roman Catholic—instead of an Anglican. Indeed, it is safe to say that someone well versed in the belief systems of each would be far more likely to think him a Roman, as the English say, rather than an Anglican. Eliot stopped at the very threshold of becoming a Roman Catholic largely because, as he explains it himself in great detail in his 1948 book-length essay, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, he feels that religion should be the expression of a people and their own unique culture, and not because he was not himself, in the final analysis, a Catholic. Conrad, Joseph (1821–1924) Born in Poland on December 3, 1857, the son of wealthy Polish landowners and christened Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, the late 19th-century English novelist and prose stylist Joseph Conrad learned English by first pursuing a career in the British merchant marine. Fiercely patriotic, both of Conrad’s parents died by the time he was 11 as a result of their being exiled to Siberia by Russian authorities, who then were governing territories that had formerly belonged to Poland. In order to evade conscription into Russian military service, young Jozef escaped to the West, first France and later England, and he achieved both his Master Mariner’s certificate and British citizenship by age 21. Despite these successes in translating himself into Joseph Conrad, he left the sea in 1894 to devote his attention full time to novel writing. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published in 1895. Conrad utilized the experiences of his own youthful adventures as a seaman in the South Seas in much of his early fiction. An Outcast of the Islands (1896) and Typhoon (1902) are early examples. But Con-

Criterion rad, whose father had been a writer as well, had the artist’s knack for combining the extremely entertaining with the profoundly philosophical, and his sea yarns and tales of political intrigues in Western and Central Europe became more and more the stuff of high art and the early inklings of modernism as well. With other fiction writers of the period, most notably the English novelist Ford Madox Ford and the young American novelist and short-story writer Stephen Crane, Conrad developed a school of fiction writing called impressionism. It was founded on the principle that the literary realism that was all the vogue at the moment, with its emphasis on an almost journalistic approach toward recounting narrative experience, failed to account for the complexities of experience as a lived event. The impressionists wrote tales that unfolded from the point of view of a single character who was often not the narrator but whose perspective nevertheless colored the moral dimensions and therefore the meanings and the themes of the unfolding fiction. Rather than the novel being a conventional narrative that told a story from beginning to end and more or less merely chronicled the life of the times, it became a tool for awakening readers to the shortcomings of human knowledge, especially when it came to experiences as near at hand as one’s own and those of one’s neighbor. Conrad experimented as well, in such novels as Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900), with framed first-person narratives, wherein one character related what another had said, and with novels told from a multiplicity of points of view, such as 1915’s Victory. In keeping with naturalism—another literary movement of the time that emphasized the random nature of experience— trivial actions, or actions construed as trivial, take on great significance in his fictions, so that lives are ruined and empires fall as a result not of great calamities but of what may appear to have been meaningless gestures. In the meantime, in novels such as Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), Conrad used these techniques for creating ambiguous narratives whose moral underpinnings were equally as ambiguous in stories that dealt with the ironies of self-decep-

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tion and duplicitous political maneuverings in a world of colonial exploitation and power-jockeying among the major Western powers. For Conrad, the real basis of human behavior and aspirations was all a flickering light in an immense darkness, a mystery; in the meantime, the great world of power and politics went its merry way, enslaving the poor, vanquishing the conscientious, and celebrating the hypocritical, in the name of hollow principles and hollower causes. Were Conrad’s an isolated vision of the social and political and economic realities of his time, his would still have been a viewpoint with which to be reckoned. Rather, he seemed to be at the vanguard of a radically changing attitude toward the efficacy of art and the limits of individual choice and power. Clearly Eliot, for whom Conrad would have one of the leading “serious” writers of his own youth, was drawn toward Conrad’s drolly dark depiction of modern humanity. Heart of Darkness holds an honored place in the Eliot canon by being one of the few works of contemporary literature to which the poet has frequent recourse, alluding to it at significant junctures in both The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men.” Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924. Criterion Nearly from the time of Eliot’s arrival in London in July 1914 to commence a year of graduate studies at Merton College, Oxford, he was networking into the exciting developments in review publishing that were accompanying the burgeoning movement in the arts known as modernism. Eliot would not have known at the time that the outbreak of war in early August, coupled with his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood the following June, would wind up making him a de facto resident of England who would never again return to live in the United States for any extended period. Even if he had every intention of returning to the United States, however, after his year of study abroad on a traveling fellowship from Harvard, it would have been foolish of him as an aspiring poet, literary critic, and essayist not to take advantage of the opportunities for a career in literary journalism then available in London; the war only aggravated these circumstances for the better.

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In addition to reviewing for the New Statesman in London, Eliot was getting his poetry published in so-called “little magazines” such as the American poet and critic Alfred Kreymborg’s Others and Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, outlets that were leading the way in introducing the day’s exciting young writers to a wider and sympathetic reading audience. These connections were made thanks in large part to the efforts of his fellow American poet and expatriate EZRA POUND and were located in New York and Chicago, respectively. As early as June 1917, however, thanks again to Pound, Eliot landed work as the assistant poetry editor for Harriet Weaver’s EGOIST. That journal no sooner ceased publication in late 1919 (but not before publishing Eliot’s landmark essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) than he landed a post as contributing editor to the Times Literary Supplement through the good offices of the English poet and novelist Richard Aldington. Eliot had other publishing “gigs,” not the least among them a regular “Letter from London,” which he contributed to the New York review the DIAL, edited by Scofield Thayer, his friend from their schooldays at Milton Academy and then Harvard. Nonetheless, Eliot was starting to chew at the bit to have editorial control of a review all his own. Several factors contributed to this desire. For one thing, the Eliots were themselves no slouches when it came to managing enterprises of great note all on their own. His grandfather WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT had founded a Unitarian church in his adopted hometown, ST. LOUIS and not only had been instrumental in founding that city’s WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY but acted as its president for several decades. The poet’s father, meanwhile, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr., was a highly successful businessman who managed a brickyard in St. Louis. A distant cousin, Charles W. Eliot, was president of Harvard University at the time that a young T. S. Eliot attended that university. Those considerations aside, however, a more compelling reason was that Eliot did not appreciate the fact that the little magazines were not thriving and that the movement it both fostered and reflected was likely to be preempted by more and more commercial publishing endeavors. Thayer and Eliot began to develop a publishing venture.

They hoped to secure financial backing to launch a London edition of the Dial that Eliot would edit and that might thereby give it a highly competitive and unique publishing presence as an international journal of the arts. Sidney Schiff, who wrote novels under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson and was himself a wealthy art patron, introduced Eliot to Lady Lilian Rothermere in the summer of 1921. Although by that time she was already estranged from Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, the newspaper magnate and one of the wealthiest men in England, Lady ROTHERMERE was herself extremely prominent in London’s social and artistic circles and quite capable of throwing her considerable wealth and influence behind the very sort of publication that Eliot and Thayer were proposing. These credentials made her the perfect contact for Eliot’s own somewhat avant-garde issues and interests. For her part, Lady Rothermere wanted to endow a new publication that would cut a swath through the so-called smart set by featuring cutting-edge fiction and essays, whereas Eliot wanted to manage something that would publish only the best writers and writing of the day, in keeping with the most exacting literary standards. There would be no illustrations in the proposed journal. Despite these philosophical differences, they were all in agreement that it should aim toward an exclusive audience that might never exceed a circulation of 1,000. As two of the leading lights of the modernist movement then sweeping literary England and America, Eliot and Thayer were easily able to convince Lady Rothermere that they could fulfill their part of the bargain. When Lady Rothermere finally struck a publishing deal, however, it was with Eliot, to the exclusion of Thayer. Rather than a transatlantic journal, she would underwrite the publication of a review housed in London and edited by Eliot. The result was the Criterion, and its first issue would be a publishing landmark. Coming out October 16, 1922, it contained Eliot’s new poem, The Waste Land, which the Dial published simultaneously in New York. Lady Rothermere thought the first issue, of which 600 copies were printed, rather “dull,” and it would subsequently remain Eliot’s constant aim to try to please the taste of his

Criterion wealthy patroness while maintaing his own rather conservative editorial standards and beliefs. In July 1925, Lady Rothermere’s three-year contract with the journal’s publisher moved toward its expiration, and Eliot began to fear that she might simply close the review down. Instead, Lady Rothermere made an agreement with Faber & Gwyer, the new publishing house with which Eliot had just taken a position as poetry editor and a board member, to take over publication of the Criterion, now launched as the New Criterion, in January 1926. By May 1927, Faber & Gwyer began to publish the Criterion, until then a quarterly publication, as a monthly, however, increasing the production costs. By now the journal had a circulation approaching 800. The result was that Lady Rothermere finally felt forced, in December 1927, to summon Eliot and inform him that she was withdrawing her financial support. The financial blow that her actions precipitated nearly caused the Criterion to cease publication, but Geoffrey Faber decided that in view of the writers that it attracted and would help publicize for other publishing projects, the Criterion served a useful purpose for Faber & Gwyer as an ongoing concern. He thus used his own considerable influence among the London establishment to obtain enough financial support to keep the Criterion going, albeit returned to a quarterly publication schedule. Throughout the 17 years that the Criterion published, it provided a significant publishing outlet not only for numerous American and British writers, but for writers from the European continent as well—and, of course, Eliot himself, who, in addition to The Waste Land, published parts of “The Hollow Men” and “Ash-Wednesday” in its pages. The roll call of authors published in the Criterion is impressive—Aldous Huxley, the SITWELLS, VIR-

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GINIA WOOLF, E. M. Forster, Hart Crane, Hermann Hesse, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, Noel Coward, and Eliot’s wife, Vivien, are among them. Throughout, Eliot’s aim was to present a selection of writings that reflected the most interesting intellectual and aesthetic trends in contemporary European culture. In October 1938, as the war clouds began to gather again over Europe following the appeasement with Nazi Germany’s expansionist aims by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in his infamous Munich Pact, Eliot and Faber decided finally to suspend publication of the Criterion. The first number the Criterion for 1939 would also be the last, and by September 1 of that year, Europe was at war again following the German invasion of Poland. By then the Criterion’s circulation, never large by design, had been reduced to 600, but it would be shortsighted to conclude that Eliot’s decision was motivated solely by financial considerations. Eliot, in a 1946 radio address to the German people, would comment on the topic of the unity of European culture. Germany had just been defeated after a long and destructive war that had challenged the viability of a European culture of any order, and Eliot’s remarks would later be included as an appendix to his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, published in 1948. Among his various points, he noted that the Criterion had aimed always to be an outlet for and conduit among the various cultures that constituted European culture. That “gradual closing of the mental frontiers of Europe” that began with the more and more aggressive stance that fascism took in Germany and Italy in the early 1930s, however, led to a closing of those avenues of communication, so that by 1939, a publishing venture of the scope and aspirations of the Criterion could no longer succeed—not for economic but for intellectual and cultural reasons.

D Dante Alighieri (Alighieri, Durante degli) (1265– 1321) Durante degli Alighieri, who has come down to us through literary history as the great Italian poet Dante, is one of the most influential early figures in that European cultural and intellectual phenomenon now known as the Renaissance and was perhaps one of its founding impulses. Born in Florence, Italy, sometime in the late spring of 1265, Dante was descended from the Alighieri, a family long prominent in Florentine affairs and, consequently, thickly embroiled in the political factionalism of the day. Indeed, Dante’s own time would hardly have seemed as enlightened to him or his contemporaries as it now does to posterity, but that fact no doubt may account for the continuing power and allure of his poetic vision, and in particular of his masterwork, La commedia divina, or The Divine Comedy. Rather than as the beginning of anything, that is to say, Dante would have seen his era and work as the continuation, though perhaps a bit more refined, of a Christian Europe that had fragmented socially and politically as a result of the slow diminishment of Roman power beginning in the fifth century but that had nevertheless achieved to a remarkable degree the spiritual coalescence to be found in a common Christian faith, Roman Catholicism. By Dante’s time especially, Italy, which had never been anything more than an extremely loose confederation of tribes and localities even in the heyday of the Roman Empire, had been reduced to warring districts, each with its own distinct system of government and even language. The Tuscan city

Florence, ancient home of the Etruscans who had once ruled much of Italy in pre-Roman times, was hardly an exception. The Guelfs, to which faction Dante’s family belonged, supported the papacy, while the Ghibellines supported the Holy Roman Emperor, the Roman Catholic pope’s archrival for military authority on the Italian peninsula. Once the Ghibellines were effectively subdued and removed from power, the Guelfs themselves divided into two factions, the Whites, to whom Dante belonged, and the Blacks. The Blacks continued their devotion to the papacy, while the Whites were suspicious of papal motives now that the Ghibellines had been declawed. This new configuration of violent civic rivalries resulted, in November 1301, in the slaughter of the Whites, a fate that Dante, in Rome at the time, fortunately escaped. However, Dante now was tried in absentia, exiled for two years, and ordered to pay a heavy fine. When he was unable to do so, his sentence was commuted to perpetual exile, and he was condemned never to return to Florence, under pain of death. From exile he carried on a public relations assault against his Black enemies, but this strategy backfired. When the Whites were eventually pardoned, Dante was not among those receiving such clemency, and he later refused, in 1315, a general pardon on principle. He died in September 1321 in exile in Ravenna. Although Florence later repented of its harsh treatment of its native son, the city did not make amends for another 500 years when, in 516

Dante Alighieri 517 1829, an ornate tomb was constructed there in his honor. Repeating the greeting with which the poets in Limbo welcomed Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, the legend carved on the stone commands the visitor to “honor the most high poet”—but Dante’s body remains buried in Ravenna to this day. A well-born man of his time, Dante pursued no regular profession, although he did excel at diplomacy in his later years. He was also a warrior and a political leader during the Whites’ brief period governing Florence in 1301. It is, however, as a poet that he made his mark and his name even in his own day. While Italy was divided along many different cultural, linguistic, and social lines, it shared a common system of belief in Roman Catholicism and, so, a spiritual identity that, in Dante’s time, both in Provence in the south of France and on the island of Sicily, to the west of the tip of the socalled Italian boot, had found secular expression in a new kind of love poetry, the courtly love tradition. Originating in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the late 13th century, poets working in this tradition celebrated the female beloved as an unattainable object, very much in keeping with the notion that divine love can touch men and elevate them above their bestial needs and desires. While still a young man, Dante had fallen in with a group of Florentine poets who practiced writing in this entirely new school of poetic thought and feeling, which they called the Dolce Stil Nuovo (“sweet new style”). Among others, these fellow poets included Dante’s close friend Guido Cavalcanti and a former teacher, Brunetto Latini. Two works of Dante’s stand out as fulfilling the requirements for turning the poet’s most intensely personal sentiments, emotions, and experiences into the most highly stylized kinds of poetic expression. The first was his La vita nuova, or The New Life, which Dante is thought to have composed in 1292 or 1293. In it he both recounts and celebrates through a series of vignettes—now prose, now poetry; now critical, now fanciful—his encounters, beginning at age nine, with Beatrice Portinari, a fellow Florentine who was at the time 18 and with whom Dante, according to his own report, carried on a years-long love affair from a distance, in keep-

ing with the requirements of the courtly lover. She became, that is to say, Dante’s lady, the embodiment of all that is pure and beautiful and, in order to keep it so, unattainable. The poet’s love for her thus made him a lifelong servant of Amore, or Love, which is itself, manifested here in this world, nothing more than a pale image of the divine love that, for Dante as a profound Christian believer, rules the universe and guides all creation back to itself. It is in Dante’s second and far more significant achievement as a poet, The Divine Comedy, that Dante combines that great theme with his more parochial political and social themes, as well as with the whole panoply of human knowledge, wisdom, and experience, virtually from the beginning of recorded history to the present day. While the poet’s eye is never off his native Florence or his pain and anger over his exile from that city (the poem is set during Easter 1300, one of Dante’s last to be spent in Florence), Dante controls this vast array of material and interest with a single, central metaphor: He has lost his way spiritually, and to regain it, he must take a guided tour through the afterlife. This tour commences with a journey through hell in the Inferno, continues through purgatory in the Purgatorio, and culminates in a vision of heaven in the Paradiso. Everything in the work is carefully crafted. As a reflection of the divine Trinity, for example, Dante used a three-line, rhyming stanza, called terza rima. Then, too, each of the three sections named above comprises, as poetry, 33 songs or, in Dante’s parlance, cantos. Canto I, meanwhile, in which Dante first awakens to the fact that he has fallen into error and lost his way to salvation, makes for 100 cantos altogether, 100 being the perfect number. Dante is scrupulously orthodox as well. For example, it is the pagan Roman poet Virgil, who in Dante’s time would have been thought of as the greatest mind of the ancient world (Dante himself bestows on him the title “Prince of Poets”), who initially acts as Dante’s guide. Dante is quickly taught even by this pagan poet, however, that it is through the grace and love of Mary, the Blessed Mother, as well as with the permission of God the Father, that the entire process of his salvation has been set in motion to begin with. Furthermore, for the last

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part of his journey, Dante will be guided by none other than his lady, Beatrice, who had passed away in 1290 and whom, in Dante’s fictive invention, the Virgin Mary now dispatches to fulfill Dante’s rescue from sin and error. Thus, by manipulating the creative potentialities of a poetic vision that is unitive in the truest sense of the word, Dante manages to bring the great theme of love, in all of its human and its divine manifestations, together in this single, great work. Scholars generally assume that Dante began The Divine Comedy, which he had titled, simply enough, La commedia, in 1301, shortly after his exile from Florence and that he did not complete it until shortly before his death nearly 20 years later. The temptation to see his Comedy as a work in which Dante “gets even” with his foes and honors his benefactors is an easy one to fall prey to. Who would not welcome the opportunity to consign one’s detractors to hell and one’s patrons to heaven? Dante does as much himself. Farinata degli Uberti, for example, one of the Ghibellines’ great military leaders, is to be found in the Sixth Circle of hell among the heretics (Inferno X), and Boniface VIII, the seated pope at the time that Dante’s exile is imposed, will find himself assigned to the Eighth Circle, where he is to be punished for having used his religious offices for personal financial gain (Inferno XIX). Cangrande I della Scala, on the other hand, who permitted Dante to live in comfort in Verona for a period of time, finds himself rewarded with a place in heaven (Paradiso XVII). But Dante is as unsparing of friends and influences. His beloved teacher and fellow poet, Brunetto Latini, is encountered in the Inferno among the sodomites (XVI). The great Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, whose work had inspired Dante’s circle, is found suffering in the Purgatorio with the Carnal (XXVI). More than these isolated examples, however, there is the testimony of the scope and power of the work itself to commend it to our attention as an achievement that transcends both its time and its poet’s intentions for it, whatever they may have been. It would be wrongheaded to imagine that Dante would have devoted so much of his life to

a work enbued with so much of his experience as a scholar, a thinker, and person merely to extract his pound of flesh from those who had done him injury. Surely it was Dante’s capacity for vision—his ability to conceive of a monumental poem that brought together all the values and beliefs that his time and his culture cherished—that drew Eliot to Dante and his great poem over and over again, commencing with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1911 and ending with the most poignant passages in “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets, in 1943. Eliot’s profound debt to Dante is self-acknowledged and widely recognized. In 1930, he would identify Dante and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE as the two greatest poets of all time, bar none, and late in his life, he singled Dante as the one enduring influence throughout his poetic career. Dial Among the so-called little magazines that provided the necessary publishing outlets for the new, young artists and writers who began to emerge as modernism took deeper and deeper root during the first few decades of the 20th century, Scofield Thayer’s Dial was one of the most prominent, influential, and stylish. This New York–based review had originally been founded in 1840 as a forum for the transcendentalist thinking of such individuals as its first editor, Margaret Fuller, and was later edited by one of the time’s leading transcendentalists, the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reestablished in 1880 as a source for commentary on the more liberal thinking of its day, the Dial began to catch the tide of the changing times under the editorship of Martyn Johnston, beginning in 1916. This new and more ideologically daring approach, however, brought the publication to near financial ruin until Thayer bought it and transformed it from a contentious liberal rag into one of the premier journals for art and culture then being published in America. The wealthy Thayer had been an undergraduate with Eliot at Harvard and later attended Magdalen College, Oxford. Thanks to his connections with other poets, critics, and artists like Eliot, Thayer had access to the finest writers and artists then working in both America and Europe. Within its

Donne, John first years of publication under Thayer’s editorship the Dial would publish Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Charles Demuth, Kahlil Gibran, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Odilon Redon, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, Van Wyck Brooks, and W. B. YEATS—a veritable roll call of the leading poets, composers, and artists of the day. Thayer also provided readers with letters from contributing editors reporting on the cultural life of European capitals. Eliot, for example, contributed a letter from London, while EZRA POUND wrote one from Paris, and the novelist Thomas Mann reported on similar trends in the literary and cultural life of Germany. The Dial’s greatest claim to enduring literary fame, however, came in October 1922 when, simultaneously with the Criterion that Eliot was just then beginning to publish in London, it published The Waste Land. Thayer had, in June 1921, established the Dial Award, an instantly prestigious and generous literary award that would enable one of the magazine’s contributors the financial wherewithal to find the leisure to continue to compose. The first recipient, in 1921, was the novelist and short-story writer Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio. In 1922, the recipient of the $2,000 award, a feat engineered by Pound and underwritten by the New York lawyer and art patron JOHN QUINN, was Eliot. The Dial continued to flourish throughout the better part of the 1920s under the guidance of Thayer’s tastes and funds. In 1926 the critic Gilbert Seldes joined Thayer as managing editor, but as the years passed, Thayer took a less and less active role in the review’s preparation, eventually leaving New York to take up more or less permanent residence in Europe. The poet Marianne Moore edited the Dial for two years when Thayer fell ill in 1927, but by July 1929, in the absence of any further financial support from Thayer, the magazine was finally forced to cease publication. Donne, John (1572–1631) By now, the continuing celebrity of the 17th-century English divine and metaphysical poet may be easily attributed to the incredible vigor of both intellect and imagination that his work displays. It may be difficult, then, to

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realize that in the first few decades of the 20th century, interest in his poetry had to undergo a revival that was led chiefly by T. S. Eliot. Whether it is a typical early Donne love poem such as “The Flea,” in which he asks his lady to buy the argument that they should abandon all sexual restraints because their “bloods commingl’d be” already inasmuch as the same flea had bitten both him and her, or one of his later, far more somber and sober “Holy Sonnets,” in which he conceives of God as a blacksmith (“Batter my heart, three-person’d God”) or a rapist (“I be not chaste except thou ravish me”), Donne’s wit, as this rich talent for making far-fetched connections or “conceits” was called then, would have seemed to be insurance enough for an enduring literary reputation. Donne proves, however, that kindred spirits, and a kindred age, may be as necessary as well. For Donne’s wit amazes not with its brilliance, which might seem so to any age, so much as with its aptness, which requires a wit as ready to receive it for it to be appreciated. Later metaphysical poets— Donne’s was among the first poetry written in this style in English—may reach for the more and more extravagant conceit. Donne does not reach at all; he merely tries to put into words, with a compelling consecutive logic, the twists and turns and stops of starts of human thought and passion and feeling as they each contend for supremacy in the struggle to comprehend what fools these mortals be. Donne’s parents were a wealthy London ironmonger and the daughter of the playwright John Heywood (and a relative of Sir Thomas Moore, the martyred legal advisor to Henry VIII). Donne was born into tumultuously exciting times with a notable pedigree but one outstanding strike against him. England was not only caught up in the throes of the Renaissance in thought and in learning then taking place on the continent but in the spiritual, social, and political turmoil of intrigues and conflicts that had resulted from the Protestant Reformation which began in the late 15th century. In England, Henry VIII had broken with the Church of Rome in 1537. Although the Church of England might have then been only administratively estranged from Rome, it still was not wise to be openly Roman Catholic, as the Donne family was.

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Educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, from neither of which he took any degree, the well-born Donne nevertheless managed to wangle for himself a successful career in law that put him close to the sources of power, although his brother Henry’s death in prison for hiding a suspect Roman Catholic priest came near to shattering Donne’s faith. Whether for that reason or for the heat of his youthful blood, these were the days of “Jack” Donne, who also became a notorious womanizer and hard drinker. This lifestyle also produced some of his earliest poetry, whose bawd was concealed and forgiven by virtue of its technical virtuosities and powerfully direct expression of sentiment and thought. Then, in 1601, Donne came close to ruining everything for good by secretly marrying the 17-year-old daughter of a well-placed courtier. Although the marriage was not annulled, Donne and those who assisted him in the deception spent some time in prison for their cheek—and Donne lost all chances for the advancement that had seemed inevitable. The young couple had to struggle, particularly as their family grew. Eventually they became reconciled with their in-laws, and in and around 1610 Donne made it clear in several published polemics that he was no longer Roman Catholic. One of the polemics, “PseudoMartyr,” which argued that one could swear spiritual allegiance to the crown without jeopardizing one’s faith, won him favor with James I, but James withheld his patronage until Donne took orders as a priest in the Anglican faith in 1615. Those youthful passions and indiscretions tamed by age and responsibility, and especially by the tragic loss of his wife in childbirth in 1617, Donne now turned from the needs of the flesh and devoted his attention to the life of his soul in the Holy Sonnets, published in 1618, bringing to that theme the same powers of expression and invention. Donne

became more and more obsessed with death and with his own mortality. His Meditations upon Emergent Occasions, published in 1624, includes his famous Meditation 17: “No man is an island.” In a portrait completed a few weeks before his death, he posed in his own shroud, and he even went as far as to preach “Death’s Duel,” his funeral sermon, two weeks before he died on March 31, 1631. As Eliot observes in “The Metaphysical Poets,” itself a 1921 review of Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, the English metaphysical poets were the losers in their own particular brand of culture wars. While their poetry had not fallen into total obscurity, their capacity to wed thought and feeling seamlessly together in a direct and often abrupt English while nevertheless conveying richly suggestive analogies did not continue as the prevailing mode of English poetic style. Instead, by Eliot’s time, in his view, English poets talked about what they thought and what they felt, rather than trying to find ways to convey their thoughts and feelings. The result, as Eliot identified it then, was a “dissociation of sensibility” that had been continuing unchecked since the time of the late 17th-century English poet John Dryden. It became Eliot’s hope and his aim that modernist technique might restore a measure of intellect to English poetry without distorting its capacity to render the parameters of an emotion as well. Surely Eliot the novice poet, who, in 1911 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” fashioned such a perfect metaphysical conceit as that poem’s opening comparison between the evening sky and “a patient etherized upon a table,” had already learned from the English Metaphysical poets—although it may have been in the guise of their 19th-century French descendants, the symbolists, JULES LAFORGUE chief among them.

E Egoist One of the truly little of the so-called little magazines that featured the new, young writers emerging in England at the beginning of the 20th century, the Egoist was published in London only from 1914 to 1919; yet during that time it published work by some of the most outstanding modernist literary figures of the day, including JAMES JOYCE and T. S. Eliot. Founded by Dora Marsden as a successor to her feminist journal The New Freewoman, the Egoist was appropriately enough subtitled An Individualist Review. Published biweekly for the first half-year of its existence, when the Egoist went monthly under the editorship of Harriet Shaw Weaver in the second half of 1914, it became a more and more significant outlet for poets and critics alike. Assistant editors included Richard Aldington and H. D., or Hilda Doolittle, a companion of the American poet EZRA POUND, at approximately the same time that CONRAD AIKEN, the future poet and recent Harvard graduate, would arrange for Pound to meet a young American who had only recently arrived in England—T. S. Eliot. That meeting would occur in September 1914. By 1917, the Egoist Limited Press would publish Eliot’s first volume of poetry, the groundbreaking collection Prufrock and Other Observations. In 1917, when Aldington left for service in the army, Eliot would take his place as assistant poetry editor. The Egoist, which had come into its own with the outbreak of the World War I in the summer of 1914, did not survive long after that conflict

came to an end in the fall of 1918. The review would cease publication in 1919, but not before, in its last two numbers published in November and December, it published in two installments one of the most significant critical documents produced by the modernist movement, Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot, William Greenleaf (1811–1887) As the social and cultural status that the Eliots enjoyed suggests, other members of the poet’s family were adept at succeeding in their chosen fields and in service to the greater community, in keeping with the spirit of UNITARIANISM that Eliot’s branch of the family had been devoted to at least since the time of his paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf. Henry Ware, Sr. (1843–1919), for example, the poet’s father, was an astute businessman and eventual president of the Hydraulic-Brick Company in ST. LOUIS, while the poet’s mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot, not only raised seven children but was an accomplished poet who instilled a lifelong love of learning in her precocious and youngest child. Their claim to fame, nevertheless, is contingent upon their having parented a literary figure who had obtained worldwide celebrity by his early 30s and was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature in 1948. Eliot’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, on the other hand, has earned his own place in American social history for his efforts on behalf of American Unitarianism and his service to his 521

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adopted hometown, St. Louis. William was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on August 5, 1811. It was in that New England state, primarily in the BOSTON area, that the Eliot family had made their home since the family founder, Andrew Eliot, emigrated there from the village of East Coker in Somerset, England, at the end of the 17th century. After his graduation from college in 1831, William attended HARVARD Divinity School and was ordained a Unitarian minister on the completion of his course of study there on August 17, 1834. In 1854, the school would award him an honorary doctorate for the ministerial work that he subsequently accomplished. No sooner had young William acquired the necessary religious training than he followed the course of what would be his and several succeeding generations of American’s manifest destiny by “going West.” In his case, he settled later in 1834 in the Mississippi River frontier town of St. Louis, known to this day as the Gateway to the West. Founded by French settlers, St. Louis was still largely Roman Catholic in tone and culture, but it was there that William, with a missionary’s zeal, founded the Church of the Messiah, the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. He would remain its minister from 1834 to 1870, and the congregation remains active to this day as the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis. William, in keeping with the Unitarian ideal of civic duty, helped found many other institutions that enhanced the quality of life in the burgeoning metropolis, among them the St. Louis Public Schools and the St. Louis Art Museum. In 1861, he was among those who managed to keep Missouri in the Union following the outbreak of the Civil War in April of that year. Among his most significant

achievements and legacies, however, is St. Louis’s WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, which was originally organized in 1853 as an educational institute associated with Eliot’s church. It was over his strong protest that the school was the initially called the Eliot Seminary. In 1857, it was organized into Washington University, largely with the support of Eliot’s congregation, and Eliot would serve as its president from 1870 to his death in January 1887, contributing funds as well to its continued construction and maintenance. It was to the campus of Washington University that its founder’s grandson, by then a worldrenowned poet, critic, and playwright, would venture on June 9, 1953, to deliver an address titled “American Literature and the American Language,” his only one on that topic. Commenting in his opening remarks on the grandfather whom he never knew, Eliot noted that “I was brought up to be very much aware of him . . . as still the head of the family.” William Greenleaf had, from beyond the grave, instilled in his grandson a devotion to moral responsibility and a consciousness of “our decisions between duty and self-indulgence,” so much so that any deviation from the rules of conduct that William had brought down, like Moses, as tables of the Law “would be sinful.” Eliot continues: “Not the least of these laws, which included injunctions still more than prohibitions, was the law of Public Service.” That service extended into three areas: the church, the city, and the university, Eliot notes, and he makes it clear that, for his family, all three of those institutions were to be found for them there in St. Louis, the city to which his grandfather William had come more than a century earlier as a young man just turned 23, determined to serve God and his community on the American frontier.

F Frazer, Sir James (1854–1941) There is very likely no work of scholarship more exciting, for those who care to hazard its formidable length, than The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, who virtually invented modern cultural anthropology. The original 12-volume study of the relationship among magic, religion, and science in the ancient world, limiting itself to no single human culture, begins with an anecdotal image worthy of the most compelling mystery novel. It is set in ancient Italy, in the woodlands of the Alban hills near a lake alternately called the lake of Nemi or the lake of Aricia, the two villages located nearby. Frazer goes on to say,

popular tastes but a work of impeccable scholarship by a Cambridge University fellow, replete with notes identifying all the various sources that constitute the wealth of knowledge, analysis, and interpretation that the work entails. Born on January 1, 1854, in Glasgow, Frazer was educated there and later at Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1874. Aside from a year teaching anthropology at Liverpool, Frazer remained at Trinity for his entire academic career. Even more intriguing, however, is Frazer’s own tale of how he came to write The Golden Bough in the first place. He would relay this tale some 32 years later in the abridged edition of his work, published in 1922, that he prepared for the less dauntless but no less ambitious reader. (This abridged version runs a mere 864 pages, index included.) In his preface to that edition, he explains that the primary aim of The Golden Bough was to “explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession of the priesthood of Diana at Aricia,” for that was who that figure in the sacred woods had been—the priest of Diana, herself the hunter-goddess and protector of wildlife. Frazer continues: “When I first set myself to solve the problem more than thirty years ago, I thought that the solution could be propounded very briefly, but I soon found that to render it probable or even intelligible it was necessary to discuss certain more general questions, some of which had hardly been broached before.” What Frazer had come to discover was a relationship between the function of king and of priest

In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.

The pace, power, and intrigue of the narrative does not let up from that moment on, and yet, of course, this is not a work of fiction aimed at pleasuring 523

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that transcended cultural traditions to such a degree that it had to have as its source a foundational relationship to the organization of human societies. In her own way, and on a related topic, the literary scholar JESSE L. WESTON in her FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE, published in 1920, would find that much of the earliest lore traceable to the origins of the legend of the Holy Grail that would sweep Western Europe in the late 12th century has to do with wounded or sacrificial kings. Eliot confessed to having recourse to the work of both Frazer and Weston as he was developing the archetypal superstructure for his poem The Waste Land, published in the fall of 1922. In the headnote to his celebrated notes to The Waste Land that he appended to the poem when it was published in book form in December 1922, Eliot admits to being “so deeply indebted” to Weston’s book that he recommends it to any reader of his who might wish to have The Waste Land elucidated. He saves the greater praise for Frazer, however. The Golden Bough, Eliot says, “has influenced our generation profoundly,” and he then singles out two of Frazer’s 12 volumes, on the topics Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. While Weston may have given Eliot a useful view of the Grail with which to work, there can be no doubt that the vegetation rituals that underlie The Waste Land’s primary metaphor of a dead land that the hero must, by seeking selfsacrifice, restore to life come from Frazer’s compendious work. Knighted in 1914, Sir James died on May 7, 1941, in Cambridge. His Golden Bough, subtitled A Study in Magic and Religion, not only remains a classic in the field of comparative religion but by now has achieved the status of a classic work of literature as well. From Ritual to Romance JESSIE L. WESTON begins her landmark 1920 study regarding the true origin of the Grail legend with the observation that “the theory of Christian origin breaks down when faced with the awkward fact that there is no Christian legend concerning Joseph of Arimathea and the Grail.” Indeed, Weston asserts, the story of Joseph and the Grail occurs only in the Grail literature itself.

This plain-spoken conviction of Weston’s, despite the unabashed confidence with which she states what is otherwise an obvious fact, flies in the face of the then-prevailing scholarship concerning the origins of the Holy Grail. Until then, scholars had asserted with the same plain-spoken conviction that the Grail was the cup of the Last Supper, miraculously bequeathed to Joseph of Arimathea by Christ himself after the Crucifixion and Resurrection. As Robert de Boron, a 12th-century Frankish knight, told that tale, Joseph, famed in the Gospels as the wealthy man who provided the tomb and burial cloths in which Jesus was buried, was in prison at the time. He was permitted by the cup’s powers to free himself, and he then fled the Holy Lands, taking the sacred vessel with him to what would then have been the farthest reaches of the Roman world, Glastonbury in the southwest of what would then have been Celtic Briton, near Cornwall. Robert’s tale apparently inspired others to tell not so much similar stories as stories that took up the Grail at further and further removes from the origins that Robert had claimed for it. In the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, the story has been moved up to the time of Arthur, the Celtic king of the Britons. In it the cloddish Perceval comes near to discovering the Grail and thereby saving the wounded Fisher King and restoring vitality to the Wasteland, but Perceval fails in his unwitting quest because he does not ask the proper questions of the strange sights that he sees in the king’s palace. While Chrétien’s account does not in any way connect the Grail with the Last Supper or with Christ in any other way, he does introduce the notion that the fabled Quest of the Holy Grail is an elaborate stand-in for the notion that the hero must, quite literally, “question.” Another source is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which retells Chretien’s story but incorporates into it the Joseph elements found in Robert’s, so that the Christic element is restored by Wolfram to the now-burgeoning legend. From that point on, in the late 12th century, the story had so much power to capture the imagination that countless versions and variants sprang up all over Western Europe, primarily in the Provence region

From Ritual to Romance of France, flowering at last, for English speakers at least, in the 14th-century Arthurian narrative, the Morte D’Arthur, or The Death of Arthur, by Thomas Malory. This brief summary provides insight into both Eliot’s use of the Grail legend as a structuring motif for his 1922 poem The Waste Land and the daring of Weston’s claim. It also provides hints why Eliot does not rely on the older scholarship that had limited the legend to a Christian morality play viewed through the lens of an elaborately extravagant symbolism but rather defers to Weston’s recently published From Ritual to Romance as a text that might “elucidate” his poem. What she proposes is not only daring but more reasonable and, therefore, much more interesting. Taking her lead from Sir JAMES FRAZER, whose The Golden Bough had encouraged a more anthropologically astute approach to the folklore and legends of the human past, Weston had found in the Grail legend the traces of a root story or master narrative that transcended what must otherwise appear to be the comparatively parochial concerns of late medieval Christian knights. Without doing her thesis in that famous study too much injustice, it is fair to say that her entire aim was to prove in From Ritual to Romance that the Grail legend was in its origins based on the pagan story of the Welsh dish of plenty, itself a derivative of many old vegetation myths and rituals

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engaged with ensuring not just a bountiful harvest but the restoration of the Earth to its fecundity in the spring. To establish the validity of this otherwise unorthodox assertion, Weston, taking her lead from Frazer’s methodology, surveys many related ancient traditions in Indo-European culture, crossreferencing them with Robert de Boron’s Joseph of Arimathea, the progenitor of all the Grail literature that flourished in Western Europe from the end of the 12th until well into the 14th century. In essence, her argument is that in his Joseph, Robert, rather than relating any actual Christian legend regarding the Holy Grail as most previous scholars took for granted, had done nothing more than retell an ancient story in the relatively modern garb of the Christian mythos—her point being that there is no such legend before Robert. What Eliot made of this, in The Waste Land, was that he could use the Grail as a marker to universalize a myth that was already, in its most primal origins, universalized: the myth that the hero must sacrifice himself if the land is to be saved. Put relatively simply, one must not be self-centered but, rather, like the mysterious speaker of The Waste Land, learn to give, to sympathize, and to control, virtues that the Sanskrit extols as if itself to give credence to Weston’s assertion that behind the quest for the Grail is a universal myth of profound human significance.

G Gloucester, Massachusetts Originally settled by English colonists in 1623, this major and still active fishing port located on Cape Ann northeast of Boston was the first settlement in what eventually became the Massachusetts Bay Colony, predating the founding of Salem in 1626 and of Boston itself

in 1630. As a further claim to fame, Gloucester has been associated with the fishing industry and shipbuilding for nearly as long. The first schooner was constructed there in 1713, and people of Gloucester have been fishing the Georges Banks off Nova Scotia since the 17th century. The famous

The summer home that Henry Ware Eliot, Sr., built for his family on Gloucester’s Eastern Point in 1896, as it looks today (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

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Golden Bough, The image of the Gloucesterman in his “nor’wester” manning the wheel of a fishing schooner as he bravely faces a stormy sea is both the logo of the Gorton Seafood Company, founded in 1829, and a civic emblem commemorating all those fishers of Gloucester who “have gone down to the sea in ships.” Gloucester’s long relationship with the sea, in particular the perilous North Atlantic, has been celebrated in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 classic novel, Captains Courageous, made into an equally classic film in 1937, and in the recent film, The Perfect Storm (2000). In addition to the income derived from fishing, Gloucester began to derive a good part of its income from tourism beginning in the 19th century as Bostonians made its coastal beaches and rugged, rocky points locations where they might sunbathe and, over time, build immense summer homes. The Eliot family summered in Gloucester, first in rented accommodations and eventually in a large house that Henry Ware Eliot, the poet’s father, had constructed on Goucester’s Eastern Point, which remains prime seaside real estate. (The house still stands.) Thanks to these summers spent at the

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shore, Eliot became an able sailor, taking solo voyages up the coast as far as Canada. In later life but while still a young man, he used “The Captain” as a nickname among close friends. It was during his sailing days off Cape Ann that he came to know the nautical marker off Rockport, the community located at the tip of the cape. These were three rocks barely visible above the surface of the sea and called the Dry Salvages. Years later, he would honor them by titling the third poem in the sequence Four Quartets after them. In that poem, he would speak of the Lady whose “shrine stands on a promontory.” Some believe that the allusion is to Gloucester’s Our Lady of Good Voyage Catholic Church on Pleasant Street, the parish for the local population of Portuguese fishermen and their families who settled there in the late 19th century. The church stands prominently on a hilltop overlooking the harbor. Eliot’s nurse as a boy was a young Irishwoman, Annie Dunne, who was said to have taken the child to Mass with her when the family was vacationing in Gloucester. Golden Bough, The

See FRAZER, SIR JAMES.

H Harvard The institution of higher learning known to this day as Harvard College, which would itself later be incorporated into Harvard University, was founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when one of the early English colonial settlers, John Harvard, bequeathed in his will his library to the community so that they might found an academy there for the training of young men of intellect. As such, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and most assuredly in the English-speaking areas of the Western Hemisphere, a claim to fame and to distinction that Harvard has scrupulously guarded virtually from the first. Indeed, so given were its founders to creating a learning environment of the first order on what was for them the alien soil of a New World—recall that the earliest of these settlers had arrived on the Mayflower a mere 16 years before in 1620 in what they regarded as a veritable wilderness—that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was invited to be the fledgling college’s first president. As might be expected, the Eliot family, itself among the first to arrive in what became known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had had generations of connections with Harvard, and it was not so much expected as an automatic given that the young T. S. Eliot, like his elder brother, Henry Ware, Jr., would matriculate there when the time came, which was for young Thomas the fall of 1906. He completed his undergraduate degree in three rather than the traditional four years and then took a master’s in English literature before

leaving for a student year abroad in Paris from 1910 to 1911. Then he would reenroll in a graduate program at the university, this time to pursue a course of studies toward a Ph.D. in philosophy, completing everything but the oral defense, or viva, of his dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” thus effectively accomplishing but never actually earning or being awarded the degree. Those are only the bare facts, however, of the influences that that esteemed institution must have had on one of the most famous and accomplished American poets of his generation. Indeed, that influence must have been inestimable. Not only did he encounter such mentors as IRVING BABBITT and JOSIAH ROYCE during the course of both his graduate and undergraduate studies there, but it was in one of its student libraries that he first would encounter, late in December 1908, ARTHUR SYMONS’s The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, a book that would change his life and, so, in its own significant way, the course of American literature in the 20th century. There, too, he made friendships that would stand him well, both as a person and throughout the early years of his development as a poet and critic. CONRAD AIKEN, another future poet, and Scofield Thayer, later the influential editor of the DIAL, are noteworthy among them. More, his early poetry reflected his Harvard days, not as student experiences but as they reflected the tenor and tone of the times of this time in his life. Much of this has to do with the 528

Harvard locale as well, for example, Cambridge and BOSTON with its common and the stately mansions of Beacon Hill where Eliot’s kind lived, as reflected in “Aunt Helen,” for example. The fact remains, nevertheless, that just as one never forgets his or her college years as a particularly free time in one’s life, between the coddling parental discipline of childhood and the rigorous demands of adulthood, it was Eliot’s being an undergraduate at Harvard that gave his earliest poems—“Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and especially “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—their peculiarly insider/outsider sensibility, the likeness of a dreamy nightmare that is being lived more for the hell of it than out of despair. As late as 1921, when he was first writing the poetry that became The Waste Land, the poet first off harkens back to a drunken evening on the town in Cambridge, not to his Oxford days or to his years of working as a young banker in the City of London, as if to relive the reckless nonchalance of an undergraduate bender, in the subsequently discarded opening sequence. Finally, and in the long run, Harvard gave Eliot DANTE ALIGHIERI as well, the poet whom he would later identify as the “most persistent influence” on his own poetry. From 1382, when Geoffrey Chaucer first began to incorporate his own translations of some 100 lines of Dante in and among his various works, until 1761, when the first translation of the Inferno, in prose, appeared in English, Dante was a cultural footnote for English speakers. Indeed, there was not a complete translation of Dante in a credible English poetry until the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of the Commedia, in blank verse, was published between 1865 and 1867. That present-day readers of English might not, without some research, be aware of those preceding five centuries of a comparative neglect of Dante among English speakers is due in part to the extensive use that Eliot would make of Dante a little less than a half-century later in his own poetry. How this deplorable gap in cross-cultural history was filled in such a comparatively short period of time is a commentary, however, not on Eliot but on how forwardthinking and academically progressive an institution of higher learning Harvard University was.

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The initiating figure was a young American scholar, one George Ticknor, but it required an institution with the commitment to education that Harvard has always embodied to inspire Ticknor’s accomplishment. In 1816, the 25-year-old Ticknor was invited to become Smith professor of the French and Spanish languages and literatures at Harvard College. Ticknor was a lawyer by profession, but his interest had always been in humane letters. On his appointment to the Harvard professorship, he meant to do right by the incredible opportunity that he now saw. Aware of advances in the teaching of philosophy and literature then occurring in Europe, Ticknor spent 20 months at the University of Göttingen in Germany, so that when he returned to his new post at Harvard, he was ready to apply these new European methods there, including lecturing in the prescribed languages. The end result was a revolutionary program in modern languages at Harvard that introduced young American scholars, for the first time, to the literature of those languages, Dante and Italian among them. Among the most illustrious beneficiaries of Ticknor’s methodologies would be another young American, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Influenced no doubt by the reforms that Ticknor had implemented at Harvard, Longfellow’s alma mater Bowdoin College in Maine, established a chair of modern languages and asked Longfellow, a recent graduate, to become the first professor. He was allowed time to travel and study in Europe to prepare himself for his new post, and for the next several years he visited Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and England, returning to America in 1829 to take up a career as a college professor of modern languages. In 1834, Longfellow was appointed to a professorship at Harvard where, in 1835, he succeeded Ticknor as that institution’s professor of modern languages and literature. Longfellow would not only publish the first complete English translation of Dante’s Commedia to do poetic and artistic justice to the scope and breadth of Dante’s masterpiece, but in 1881 he helped found, along with the poet James Russell Lowell and Harvard art history professor (and a distant cousin

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Heart of Darkness

of Eliot’s) Charles Eliot Norton, the Dante Society of America, the second-oldest such organization in the world. Norton himself would be a later American translator of the Divine Comedy. Under Ticknor’s guidance, the major American institution of higher learning of its day, Harvard, had transformed American academia by introducing a program in Romance languages, including Italian, into its curriculum. One especially fruitful result of this transformation is that Eliot, as a Harvard undergraduate, would have been thoroughly exposed, some 25 years later, to Dante through Harvard’s advanced comparative literature program. Beginning with Eliot’s famous epigraph to his youthful masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” taken from canto XXVII of the Inferno, Dante’s Italianate, papist vision of eternity (a viewpoint that would have been regarded as entirely anathema by the white, Protestant American ruling class little more than a century earlier) became a crucial thematic element in Eliot’s poetry. That vision, once so neglected among English speakers, has thus become a permanent part of 20th-century American popular culture. It is a significant achievement, not on Eliot’s part, but on Harvard’s in its effort to educate young men, and women, as well as was humanly possible. Thanks to this significant turnaround in education sponsored by the idea of a university that Harvard has continuously aimed toward engendering, an American poet like T. S. Eliot was able to honor Dante’s accomplishment as an achievement not simply of Italian culture, but of world culture. Heart of Darkness (1899) Elements from JOSEPH CONRAD’s celebrated novella, Heart of Darkness, figure prominently in several Eliot poems, particularly The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” if not in their final versions, then as details from the working drafts. The Conrad novella was first published in 1899 in serial form in Blackwood’s Magazine and was subsequently collected in a hardcover volume titled Youth in 1902, along with the title novella and The End of the Tether. Early reviewers and, it must be imagined, readers of the time as well found Heart of Darkness to be the least accessible and enjoyable of

the three. Renowned as much for the high adventure of his sea yarns and tales of the South Seas, Polish-born Conrad, who had in fact had a successful career as an officer in the British merchant marine, possessed a unique talent for writing gripping narratives that entertained as much as they instructed. With Heart of Darkness, however, there emerged, as the title might suggest, a no less gripping but far more philosophical text, full of mystery and profundities that never quite connect, thereby making readers ill at ease in the indifferent but still threatening universe that Conrad painted. This shadowy, twilight reality of his, where nothing is either what it seems or what it is capable of being, would become more and more the hallmark of Conrad’s fiction, making him one of the first serious practitioners of fiction in the modernist mode. Heart of Darkness stands as a masterpiece for that reason alone. More important, with Heart of Darkness Conrad touched on a handful of themes that became more and more the central issues not just in 20th-century literature but in social, political, and ethical fields as well. The exploitation of native peoples for the purposes of financial gain stands out most egregiously, as do matters of cultural and moral imperialism, whereby one people imposes their notions of right and wrong, good and bad, proper and improper, on another.

SYNOPSIS Based very loosely on experiences that Conrad himself had had as the captain of a river steamer plying the Congo River in what was then a Belgian colonial territory maintained primarily for obtaining ivory and any other riches to be had in that part of Africa, Heart of Darkness tells the story of a young seaman, known only as Marlow. Bored with being between berths, he hires on as a riverboat captain for a trading company plying an unnamed river that leads into the so-called Dark Continent, Africa. There he is appalled by the stunning ineptitude, greed, and racist cruelty that he encounters on arriving at his new post, although he hears positive things about a man named Kurtz, a legendarily successful agent who has penetrated deep into the interior in his zeal for improving rather than raping the land and its people.

Heart of Darkness 531 Marlow welcomes the opportunity to take a boat far upstream when it is learned that Kurtz has apparently fallen seriously ill and needs to be “brought out.” Once the journey upstream finally gets under way, the sailing is anything but smooth. The most awful part of this less and less romantic adventure, however, awaits Marlow at journey’s end, when they at last reach Kurtz’s encampment deep in the jungle. Surrounded by the adoring and obedient native population (the walls of his compound are festooned with the skulls of the victims of Kurtz’s “enlightened” justice), Kurtz has become a maniacal tyrant, still spouting pious nonsense about improving the lot of the native population while in fact exerting a deadly power over them to obtain his ivory. “Exterminate the brutes,” the last entry in a “learned” essay that Kurtz had been writing, prefigures the horrific madness of the Nazi’s extermination policy, their so-called Final Solution yet to come, looming a mere four decades ahead in the future, suggesting, too, how well Conrad knew his material. Kurtz is at least somewhat forgivable, for the reader is allowed to imagine that too much unbridled power mixed with a fervent idealism has driven him mad, whereas the other officers of the company are conscious of the hypocrisies of their cause as they steal a continent and a people’s treasure under the guise of bringing them progress.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY The story line may also sound vaguely familiar to anyone who has seen Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, which freely adapted the Conrad story to reflect the travesty and tragedy, as Coppola viewed it, of America’s similarly wrongheaded involvement in Vietnam, wherein good intentions turned into bad policy, bad policy into atrocities. (In the film, incidentally, the character Kurtz, played appropriately enigmatically by the late Marlon Brando, is shown to be reading not Conrad but T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”) It is fairly easy for the reader to see in Conrad’s characterization of Kurtz the learned idealist turned moral monster, a vivid embodiment and thus scathing indictment of the tragic ironies of 19th-century

European imperialist expansionism, with its rapacious greed masked behind racial theories of white supremacy and misguided altruistic goals. Conrad’s indictment, while still widely read in high school and college curricula, has itself become more and more controversial in recent years. Some have made valid arguments that it is sexist and racist, setting Marlow up as a spokesman for the very sorts of misguided idealism and ideas of white male superiority that the narrative is ostensibly condemning. Without gainsaying these reassessments, criticism has long recognized that Conrad was experimenting as much with point of view as with any fascinatingly complex tale of greed, madness, and hypocrisy, and it may be in that confluence of craft with theme that Eliot found his own fascination with Conrad’s now classic text. What is known for a fact about Eliot’s interest in the Conrad text is scant but provocative. For one thing, it had been Eliot’s original intention to use as the epigraph for The Waste Land (1922), then in draft form and tentatively titled He Do the Police in Different Voices, the most famous passage from the Conrad tale—the moment when the dying Kurtz, in an apparent delirium, cries out, “The horror! The horror!” Eliot’s friend and sometime mentor, the American expatriate poet EZRA POUND, prevailed on him to scuttle that plan (Conrad, Pound said, was not “weighty enough”), and Eliot discarded the passage from Heart of Darkness, replacing it for his epigraph with a passage from the Satyricon of Petronius regarding the boys taunting the Cumaean Sibyl. Still, Eliot’s first choice remains a faint echo near the end of the opening section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” when the Eliot poem’s anonymous but equally cryptic speaker comments on staring into the “heart of light.” What all this may mean is more easily elucidated if another, later poem of Eliot’s, “The Hollow Men” (1925), is examined for its uses of the Conrad text. There is in that poem an overt allusion to Heart of Darkness in the epigraph, the first line of which reads, “Mister Kurtz, he dead.” These words come in Conrad’s text within less than a page of the passage in Conrad that Pound had convinced Eliot to discard as the epigraph to The Waste Land, almost as if Eliot could not ultimately let go of his desire

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to allude to that passage from the Conrad novella. Indeed, the words from the epigraph to “The Hollow Men” are spoken to Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, within moments of the time that Kurtz has had his final say about the horror. They are spoken by a native retainer bringing Marlow the news that Kurtz has at last succumbed to the jungle fever that had, along with his moral blindness, driven him mad. There is, however, a covert allusion to Conrad’s tale in the poem’s title, “The Hollow Men.” In the text of the poem, the collective “we” repeatedly talk of themselves as the hollow men, the stuffed men, empty men, whose heads are filled with straw. Among the various images, or, in Eliot’s phrase, objective correlatives, that such a conceptual description deploys in the reader’s mind are, no doubt, the corporate nonentities who inhabit the modern world’s bureaucracies, from boardroom and committee room to classroom and church. Conrad, in Heart of Darkness, was among the first European authors to identify this new breed of humanity, the Organization Man, who is all surface but nothing of any substance or fiber beneath or within—hollow men, in other words, who are described exactly so by Conrad. In Heart of Darkness, when Marlow first encounters the manager of the Central Station, a company man whose only managerial skill seems to be that “he inspired uneasiness,” Marlow is forced to conclude that “[p]erhaps there was nothing within him.” Shortly thereafter, among the various lackeys vying for position and advantage, Marlow meets a company agent “with a forked little beard and a hooked nose,” a man who is so transparently oily that Marlow sees right through him instantly. Marlow describes this unctuous agent as a “papier-mâché Mephistopheles.” He is another “hollow” man, a farcical devil whose values and character run no deeper than the slick façade that one encounters to begin with. Eliot may claim later, in a January 1935 letter, that the title for his poem “The Hollow Men” came from his combining the title of a romance by William Morris, The Hollow Land, with the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The Broken Men,” but Eliot was also notorious for intentionally tossing red herrings into the path of source-hunting literary scholars. This textual evidence suggests

nevertheless that there is more than a little of Conrad’s paper-thin and empty company clerks present in Eliot’s conceptualization of his own “hollow men,” particularly when one last likely connection between “The Hollow Men” and Heart of Darkness is considered. “The Hollow Men” ends on an ominous note that also may have been drawn from Conrad’s story. Marlow is Conrad’s narrator, but Conrad’s narrative technique is actually a bit more complicated and ambiguous than that. The narration is actually framed: Readers first meet an anonymous narrator who sets the scene (he and a group of friends, among them Marlow, are on a cruising yawl at dusk in the lower reaches of the Thames, waiting for the tide to go out). This anonymous narrator then tells how, in the twilight stillness, Marlow starts to speak and winds up telling the story of his harrowing journey up river to “rescue” Kurtz. It is a clever narrative device on Conrad’s part, and a total deception, for no one could possibly recall verbatim every word that Marlow spoke that night. The trick works well enough, however, for the reader also to fall under the spell of Marlow’s “voice” and of the dark, nightmarish adventure that he relates. Marlow begins by imagining what the mouth of the Thames must have appeared like to those ancient Romans who first encountered it some two thousand years earlier, when Britain was inhabited solely by Celts who would have seemed, to the invading Romans, barbarians at best, savages at worst. “And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth,” Marlow suddenly says, breaking the anonymous narrator’s own private reverie, which had been, according to him, focused on all the light of civilization that had flowed down the Thames and out into the rest of the world over the centuries. The reader will learn, as Marlow’s story then develops, that he had been drawing for himself a parallel between Britain in Roman times and the African Congo in his, and Kurtz’s, own. Civilization and all its restraints and constraints are but a thin veneer in his view, for Marlow has seen, as the reader soon will, what a so-called civilized man can become when he is left strictly to his own devices, as Kurtz was. “We live in the flicker,” Mar-

Holy Grail low says as he starts to tell the tale of Kurtz’s fate in the jungle. What Conrad is saying here through his philosophical seaman/spokesman is the same point that the reader hears in the closing litany of Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” when, amid echoes of the Lord’s Prayer, the hollow men continue to remind the reader/listener that between all human impulses and their fulfillment, all human aspirations and their achievements, “falls the Shadow.” In terms of the physics of light, there may be quite a distinction between Conrad’s “flicker” and Eliot’s “Shadow.” In terms of the metaphors by which the poet can awaken the imagination to those realities that shape the human individual but that otherwise cannot be seen or even measured or weighed, the distinction between a flicker and a shadow is less than nothing. The sensitive and attentive reader comes away from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the same way as he or she comes away from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase, “a sad-

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der and a wiser” person, but not a more comfortable one. Not just the surface details of the Conrad novella but its profound critique of the limits of human endeavor are there as well in Eliot’s own vision of misguided desire and ambition, limitations found not only in the ideas that both authors express but in the matter of point of view as well. Both Heart of Darkness and “The Hollow Men” confine the information that is given to the reader to a speaker or speakers, the veracity and accuracy of whose reports must naturally be called into question by the reader/listener. The use of a so-called “unreliable narrator,” a term coined by the critic Wayne Booth, is hardly original with either Conrad or Eliot, but it typifies both their work and the literary age that they and their work helped to define. Hogarth Press Holy Grail

See WOOLF, VIRGINIA.

See FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE.

J Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius) (1882–1941) Among those modernists writing in English at the time that Eliot was himself first making his mark, none was perhaps more celebrated in literary circles than the Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce. Born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, Joyce, the eldest of 10 children in a Roman Catholic family, exhibited a literary precociousness from a very early age. When he was nine, he wrote—and his proud father had published—a poem, “Et Tu Healy,” dealing with the scandal that ruined the political career of the Irish home-rule advocate Charles Stewart Parnell and that apparently led to his early death. Although young Joyce’s middle-class family’s gradual decline into poverty impeded the quality of his formal education somewhat, he was nevertheless trained from his childhood by Jesuits, a rigorous order of Catholic priests, first at Clongowes Wood College and later at Belvedere College. Joyce himself entertained a vocation for the priesthood until he was 16 and also flirted for a time with a career as an operatic tenor. Learning and literature ultimately won out as his two primary interests. In 1898, Joyce enrolled in University College Dublin, where he studied modern languages, including English, French, and Italian. By 1904, he was able to travel to the continent with his wife Nora to take up a post teaching English with Berlitz Language Schools, first in Zurich, Switzerland; later in Trieste, Italy; and finally in Rome. Thus began Joyce’s famous self-imposed

exile from his native Ireland. Ireland’s religious, intellectual, and political turmoil under the bane of a centuries-long British colonial occupation apparently had caused him nothing but exasperation and pain throughout most of his youth, and, with the exception of a brief visit during the summer of 1912, he would never again return there. Partly through the good graces of his brother Stanislaus, he never lost touch with his Irish roots, however, both as the locale and inspiration for his literary compositions and as the outlet for his work. A series of short stories, providing realistic glimpses into urban Irish life at the turn of the century, was published in book form under the collective title Dubliners in 1914. Most noteworthy among these baldly unsentimental tales are “Araby,” detailing a young boy’s frustrating encounter with romantic high hopes and dashed expectations, and “The Dead,” a novella that exposes the unconscious hypocrisies underlying much of an ethnic Irish society split between its buried native impulses and a shallow devotion to contemporary fashions in thought and behavior. An early (1904) essay on aesthetics, meanwhile, “A Portrait of the Artist,” eventually became the abortive autobiographical novel Stephen Hero. It finally emerged, after a virtual rewriting, as his first major novel and modernist masterpiece, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This work details the developmental years of its overly sensitive protagonist, and Joycean alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, as he struggles with the normal problems of growing up, 534

Joyce, James problems that are compounded in a culture where individual sensibilities are devoured by the ceaseless conflicts of confused allegiances to church, state, and nation. Like Joyce himself, his young hero discovers that, in order to survive and create “the uncreated conscience of [his] race,” he must leave Ireland altogether. This would be achieved, by Joyce himself, in the transformation that another early project took. It started out to be a short story, intended originally for inclusion in Dubliners, following the progress of an outsider to Irish culture, in this case a Jewish ad canvasser. Like Portrait, the work in question took on a life of its own, eventually emerging, in 1922, as the renowned modernist novel Ulysses, a present-day recasting of the ancient Homeric epic The Odyssey, which recounts the difficulties that its hero, Odysseus, met and overcame in order to return home from the war at Troy. A soberly comic achievement of the first order, Joyce’s multifaceted novel is also a brilliant tour de force that offers challenging reading experiences from one page to the next, let alone from chapter to chapter and episode to episode. The novel explores a single day—June 16, 1904 (which also happens to be the day that Joyce and Nora met)—in the life of the city of Dublin as experienced primarily by Joyce’s Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, and by Joyce’s earlier protagonist/alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, who now functions for Joyce as Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. The role of Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife, meanwhile, is played by Bloom’s own wayward wife, Molly, and their home at No. 7 Eccles Street becomes Ithaka, Odysseus’s home island and the goal at the end of all his wanderings. In Bloom’s case, it will be

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enough just to have made it through the day with all its grind and misgivings. With its complex mixture of narrative styles, including stream-of-consciousness techniques, and of Joyce’s own extensive learning in both literature and history, Ulysses stands as one of the greatest literary achievements, in any language, of the 20th century. Beyond a doubt, it rivals Eliot’s The Waste Land, published during that same year, as a work that embodies the spirit and nature of the modernist revolution in the arts. Indeed, in a review, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” Eliot focuses approvingly on Joyce’s accomplishment in using the scaffolding of classical myth to give order to the apparent chaos of modern experience, saying that that approach to the past has the same significance as a scientific discovery. In any case, Eliot employed a similar method in The Waste Land, and, even as he later became more and more conservative in his literary and moral judgments, Eliot would continue to exempt Joyce, with his emphases on longstanding European cultural and religious traditions, from among those contemporary authors who fostered what Eliot termed, in 1933, “modern heresies.” It would take Joyce another 15 years and the remainder of his life to complete his final masterpiece, the novel Finnegans Wake, which Eliot’s own house, Faber & Faber, published in 1939, just two years before Joyce’s death in Zurich on January 13, 1941. Finnegans Wake is a massive modernist text so filled with multilingual puns and elaborate crossreferencing of literary and historical allusions as to be nearly unreadable, yet scholars and critics, not to mention the occasional dauntless reader, continue to pore over its pages in an effort to decipher its many interconnected meanings.

L Laforgue, Jules (1860–1887) The influence that the tragically short poetic career of the French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue had on T. S. Eliot is very likely incalculable but nevertheless cannot be exaggerated since it is quite well documented by the younger poet’s own subsequent and extensive testimony. Eliot was first introduced to Laforgue through ARTHUR SYMON’s The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, a book that Eliot encountered while still an undergraduate at HARVARD in December 1908. By the spring of the following year he had acquired a three-volume set of Laforgue’s complete works, and as early as in an August 1917 letter to an admirer of Prufrock and Other Observations, he would admit to feeling “more grateful” to Laforgue than to any other poetic influence that he could think of to that time. In the same letter, Eliot confessed as well that he could at first barely translate Laforgue’s verse because so few of his words were to be found in a dictionary. While Eliot presumably would have been using the sort of French-English dictionary an undergraduate might have access to, his observation still provides a revealing detail about Laforgue’s use of language, which tended to be very idiosyncratic. That it would take Eliot, again according to his own 1917 account, several more years after that initial 1909 encounter before he would meet someone who had also read Laforgue suggests that the poet might have been a mutual interest that Eliot came to share with the young French medical student Jean Verdenal, whom Eliot would meet during his 1911–12 postbaccalaureate sojourn in Paris.

Verdenal, for example, would allude to an anecdote from Laforgue’s life in a February 1912 letter to Eliot, suggesting that he had reason to believe that Eliot was familiar enough with Laforgue as well to appreciate the allusion.

INFLUENCE ON ELIOT Whatever the case may be, Eliot would recall his profound indebtedness to the influence of Laforgue well into his own later life. In the 1950 essay “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot again expresses his indebtedness to Laforgue from the time when he was himself just beginning as a poet, saying that Laforgue was the first to show him the “poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech.” In the same passage, Eliot further singles Laforgue out for having a temperament akin to his own. After noting that a young poet is not likely to be influenced by a great master such as DANTE ALIGHIERI, Eliot characterizes Laforgue as an influence who was to him more like “an admired elder brother.” Eliot echoed these sentiments three years later in the essay “American Literature and Language” when, although he is speaking in broad generalities, Eliot seems to have the influence of Laforgue, and of Dante, too, in mind when he observes that a young talent need not be shaped or even influenced by poets of his own nation or language group (as Eliot surely was not). Rather, that forming talent, Eliot proposes, may find most attractive a poet writing in another language or another, more distant time, of whom the younger might wonder 536

Laforgue, Jules 537 what similar things he can do in his own language and in his time and place. Surely, then, an interest in and attraction to Laforgue constituted no mere passing fancy for the still youthful Eliot, nor was Laforgue’s influence on Eliot limited to just this or that particular angle of vision or way with a phrase. As frequently as he was wont to comment on the benefits that he as a young, aspiring poet might gain from studying and emulating the French symbolists, Eliot would comment later on the dearth of worthwhile poetic influences to be found among English-language poets of the time. From as early as 1924, as far as the written record is concerned, Eliot would complain to Virginia Woolf of the absence of poets of any particular accomplishment from the immediately preceding generation, a charge that he would reiterate well into the 1950s. He spoke frequently of the poetic scene in English in those early years in terms of it being a blank for him, aside from such poets as the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. YEATS and Symons himself, whose primary value at the time, according to Eliot, was that they assured him that there was “something to be learned from the French poets of the Symbolist Movement.” Among those French poets, as has been already established, Laforgue stands out. Indeed, from the range and tenor of Eliot’s remarks, it seems fairly clear that Eliot found not just a style of writing poetry but a shared vision and kindred spirit in his French precursor. To Laforgue, in another of Eliot’s seminal critical essays, “The Metaphysical Poets,” first published in 1921, Eliot pays the profound tribute of placing him in technique and style closer than any modern poets writing in English to the much admired, by Eliot, 17th-century English clergyman and poet John Donne in their shared capacity for turning ideas into sensations and observations into states of mind. In a 1928 introduction to a collection of Ezra Pound’s work, Eliot calls Laforgue “not quite the greatest French poet after [CHARLES] BAUDELAIRE,” a compliment whose very guardedness makes it that much more noteworthy. In addition to his freeing up the nature of what should properly constitute the language of poetry and introducing a more relaxed approach toward

poetic form, a mode that came to be known as VERS LIBRE, or free verse, Laforgue also extended the idea of the metaphor by making the most outrageous parallels between one sensation and another for the sake, apparently, of nothing more than to open his readers’ minds to the possibilities of experience. While such farfetched conceits, or comparisons, in their extravagance can all too often stretch the reader’s credulity and patience as much as his or her imagination, they are, as well, nothing particularly new in the traditions of English poetry, having been exploited to the fullest by those metaphysical poets of the 17th century, including Donne. Eliot nevertheless clearly was first and foremost influenced by Laforgue in this regard, coming upon his admiration for Donne’s work only later. For just one outstanding example, Eliot’s startling comparison, in the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” of the evening sky to a patient lying etherized on an operating table is totally, and, it would seem, intentionally as well, in the manner of Laforgue. A closer examination of what Symons had to say about Laforgue, then, should clarify those aspects of character and career that drew Eliot so powerfully to Laforgue that the former would still be acknowledging both his indebtedness to and his fascination with Laforgue nearly a half-century later, by which time Eliot’s own worldwide renown as a poet had far eclipsed whatever recognition his mentor might ever have achieved.

LAFORGUE IN SYMONS Even the briefest introduction to Jules Laforgue will single him out as an innovator in that style of poetry called vers libre, or free verse. Such a loose term, despite its French origins, can be extremely deceptive, however. The typical reader might automatically associate it with the wildly irregular patterns of lines and stanzas of poets in English such as Eliot and his own contemporaries, most notably Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Meanwhile, there were English-language poets actively engaging in and openly experimenting with freeverse forms well before the modernist era and earlier even than French symbolists like Laforgue. Two mid-19th century American poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, come almost immediately to

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mind in this case, as does the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins from during the same period. In Laforgue’s case, and where Eliot may be seen later to mimic him the most, his use of vers libre is best defined as a mode of poetry writing that liberated both language and meter from the rigid constraints of convention and traditions, rather than one that set out deliberately to break all the rules or obstinately to create new ones. The difference here is between doing something radically new for the sake of doing something radically new as opposed to doing something radically new for the sake of saying what one has to. In Symons, whose chapter on Laforgue is the briefest in the study, Laforgue is singled out as well for his free play of language and unpredictably assorted levels of speech, whereby he makes “subtle use of colloquialisms, slang, neologisms, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously.” As a result of manipulating the poetical with the colloquial and the technical, Laforgue thus creates, in Symons’s view, a verse that, though “always elegant, is broken up into a kind of mockery of prose.” Symons continues: “The old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all banished. . . . Here, if ever, is modern verse verse which dispenses with so many of the privileges of poetry, for an ideal quite its own . . . a very self-conscious ideal, becoming artificial through its extreme naturalness.” Lest it be misconstrued, the focus in Laforgue, however, is never on sounding clever or cute so much as on exposing the moral and social conditions of a new sort of human type, the world-weary urbanite, a bit jaded and bored but a gentleman nevertheless. This different type is one whose life had never before been the stuff of which all the great poetry of the past had been made. For Symons, Laforgue’s view of things is new particularly because it “is terribly conscious of daily life, cannot omit . . . a single hour of the day; . . . he sees . . . the possibilities for art which come from the sickly modern being, with his clothes, his nerves.” According to Symons, “There is in it all the restlessness of modern life, the haste to escape too willingly from whatever weighs too heavily on

the liberty of the moment . . . distressingly conscious of the unhappiness of mortality, . . . it plays, somewhat uneasily, at a disdainful indifference.” In his poetry, then, as in his life, Laforgue’s persona “has invented a new manner of being,” Symons declares. This thoroughly modern poetic persona of Laforgue exhibits “an inflexible politeness towards man, woman, and destiny . . . composes love-poems hat in hand, . . . is very conscious of death, but . . . is, above all, gentlemanly. He will not permit himself, at any moment, the luxury of dropping the mask: not at any moment.” It is difficult to read Symons’s analyses of Laforgue and not see the future J. Alfred Prufrock peeking out from behind every other phrase, almost as if Eliot’s own famed characterization were an intentional amalgam of Laforgue the man and the style. A closer examination of the details of Laforgue’s life will reveal parallels to Eliot himself as well, although those parallels may not be readily apparent.

LAFORGUE’S LIFE AND WORKS Born to Breton parents in Montevideo, Uruguay, on August 16, 1860, Jules Laforgue was six when his family returned to France after his father’s school failed. Though the family would eventually number 12 children, Laforgue’s mother would die when he was 16, his father when Laforgue was 20, and he seemed to have adopted the habits of the lonely, reticent, but always proper and correct scholar and thinker almost from the onset of adolescence. Cursed with both fragile health and a morosely skeptical mind, and influenced by the scathingly fashionable irreverence of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, Laforgue gave up his family’s Roman CATHOLICISM as his own faith in his late teens, and in his earliest poetry he, too, contemplated, like Baudelaire, the futilities of human existence, albeit in what Laforgue would later regard as an overly emotional and oratorical verse. In 1881, Laforgue obtained a position as reader to the Empress Augustus of Germany, and for the next, and last, five years of his life he traveled amid the luxurious and pampered boredom attached to a royal court as it made its annual rounds from Berlin to Baden-Baden to Coblentz and back around again. He has been described during this period as a

Laforgue, Jules 539 rigidly masked person, uncertain and slow if not in fact unable to connect easily with others, although he did fall in love with and eventually married a young Englishwoman, Leah Lee. The experiencing of a lifestyle as jaded and sheltered as that of an imperial court also, and perhaps as important, gave him enough distance from his earlier philosophical pessimism, which he now turned into an ironic selfdetachment and self-effacement in some 50 mocking, clever, but tragic Complaints, as he called them, wherein his alter ego, the clownishly aloof Pierrot, deals with the bitter sorrows of love in a playful language that forbids serious emotion to take root, let alone grow, and that chides all human endeavor, but particularly love. Within days of his 27th birthday, in August 1887, Laforgue succumbed to the tuberculosis that had itself mocked the vivacity of his youth and young manhood and no doubt gave his poetry its peculiar bent. A year and one month later, Eliot would be born in ST. LOUIS, Missouri. He was a lonely and intelligent child born late to a well-bred and well-heeled couple, raised among older women relatives, exposed all his life to the rarefied environment of high learning and culture and privilege, relatively sickly and therefore perhaps pampered and a bit spoiled, shy but extremely clever and articulate, with a bent for both poetry and philosophy—a genuine prize, as it were, very much like the young Laforgue. It is not hard to imagine, then, how Eliot in his own early 20s might be drawn to the personality and poetic vision of the young French poet with whom he shared so many characteristics and whom he would later claim to have seen as an elder brother and mentor.

ELIOT’S DEBT TO LAFORGUE “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” alone owes to Laforgue the vivid and unexpected use of a new poetic language, free to say whatever needs to be said as long as it adds to the dramatic weight not of the theme but of the presentation, of the social mask that Laforgue himself could wear so well, having virtually invented it. Eliot’s poetry’s morbid preoccupation with decay, deceit, and madness, with his scenes of madmen shaking dead geraniums and gentlemen noticing the hair on a woman’s arm, can-

not so much be traced to Laforgue as be regarded as indebted to him for helping Eliot find the proper tone and rhetorical distance in and from which such otherwise potentially sentimental or vulgar attitudes and observations could be expressed. For his part, Symons concluded that Laforgue could conceal as much of life’s suffering and despair, and even resignation, beneath and behind the mask of a studied nonchalance and moral detachment because, dead of a life-altering, sapping disease before reaching 30, Laforgue had been, in literal terms, a dying man all his life. As a result, Symons concludes, this tragic poet was able to think “intensely about life, seeing what is automatic, pathetically ludicrous in it, almost as one might who has no part in the comedy.” In his poetry, with its coy verve and wit, Laforgue could elegantly eschew dispensing an overbearing sense of life as tragedy for the very reason that his life was one. It is there that any putative resemblances between Laforgue and Eliot break down, however. When he encountered Laforgue, Eliot was a 20year-old undergraduate who had his life before him and everything to live for, including now the prospect that Laforgue’s poetry offered him. It had taught Eliot how a man of his own intellectual and social accomplishments might write a poetry that would be both original and powerful without expending emotional capital or personal integrity. Like the tragic clown Pagliacci of Italian operatic fame, according to Symons’s reading of the relationship between the young Laforgue’s life and his work, Laforgue could laugh through his tears and make both seem to be hollow mockeries of the real thing. But not even the wit of his ironies could alter the physical realities of Laforgue’s rapidly wasting body. Able to engage the style as Laforgue’s legacy without having to live and die the life that had engendered the Laforguean manner in the first place (if Symons’s thesis is correct), Eliot did his mentor Laforgue one better, stealing the mask but placing it on the face of poetic personae who were invented solely for the sake of fitting the mask. Nor should his arriving at that tactic ultimately come as any wonder for as socially and constitutionally highly refined a sensibility as Eliot’s. Raised in a tradition whereby poetry was most frequently regarded as an intensely

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personal and emotional mode of communication charged with a romantic high seriousness, Eliot no doubt must have found in Laforgue’s studied and detached elegance, with its capacity for striking just the right balance between restraint and insouciance, craft and recklessness, not only the method but a sanction for writing a poetry that could properly reflect the world that Eliot alone knew while still commenting on the human condition in general. Lawrence, D[avid] H[erbert] (1885–1930) The English novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and critic D. H. Lawrence was one of the major figures from the period of literary modernism and also no doubt one of that rich epoch’s most controversial if not notorious authors. If one feature of Lawrence’s writing sets him apart from his equally daring contemporaries, it was not his writing style, which tended to be brilliantly commonplace and even at times a bit florid, so much as his unabashed take on society’s ills, which he consigned for the most part to an excess of sexual repression coupled with ceaseless battles for dominance among individuals. To such a negative view of human nature in the modern world, Lawrence offered as an antidote a harmony between men and women, as well as between people of the same sex, founded on an unrestrained freedom to express oneself sexually and a mutual respect for the will and desire of the other. In novel after novel, beginning with such early ventures as Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920), and then in his more mature fictions, most notable among them Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lawrence wrote provocatively engaging, if somewhat long-winded narratives that dramatized through equally engaging characterizations drawn from all walks of British life the human comedy. As Lawrence saw it, that comedy unfolded not so much between the sheets as within and among the unspoken power struggles whereby parents sought to dominate children, lovers sought to dominate each other, and wealth sought to dominate everything. The characters who survived, or seemed to offer the possibility that they might, often learned from each other and through love, often expressed in erotic passions, to share rather than squander the pleasure of each other’s company.

As might be expected, Lawrence suffered personally, critically, and legally for his free-spirited approach toward reforming not only the world but human nature through literature. His works were often condemned and virtually always censured, and he spent the better part of his adulthood in selfimposed exile from England, although he was partly seeking warmer climes in such places as Italy, Ceylon, Australia, and, eventually, Taos, New Mexico, because of persistently frail health that affected his weakening lungs. In those warmer climes as well, Lawrence, who was as much an accomplished poet and painter as he was a novelist and essayist, found the mirror of the passionate exoticism that his spirit seemed always to crave. In his personal life, from childhood on, he had known what was the price one paid to think and to feel differently from mainstream values and patterns of behavior. Born the son of a coal miner in Nottinghamshire, England, on September 11, 1885, Lawrence was the sensitive, artistic child of a brutish father who could not understand his gifted son’s yearnings and aspirations. That Lawrence would eventually be condemned by most as nothing more than a pornographer is understandable since it was his conscious choice to outrage the middle-class sensibilities of the day with their typically conventional view of what constitutes moral choices. His career would enjoy a critical rebirth in the licentious 1960s, which regarded him as a prophet of the unbridled sexuality and uninhibited experimentation with drugs and alternative lifestyles that had shocked Lawrence’s own time. Back in 1934, however, T. S. Eliot would, perhaps, summarize the attitudes of a generation of Lawrence’s detractors by confessing, in After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, that while he, Eliot, did not doubt that Lawrence as a writer was spiritual, he was nevertheless “spiritually sick.” Eliot was, of course, pursuing his own social, moral, and aesthetic agenda in that assessment of Lawrence’s worth. However, as late as 1961, in the retrospective essay “To Criticize the Critic,” although Eliot would take the time therein to apologize for many of his own youthful critical indiscretions, he still could not bring himself to say anything positive regarding Lawrence.

London Lawrence had eloped with a married woman, Frieda Weekley, in 1912, but they would not marry until July 1914, after she had obtained a divorce. She would remain by his side through the turmoil of his personal life and persecutions, his restless travels, and his continuing and growing ill health. In 1925, in Taos, he nearly succumbed to a bout of malaria and tuberculosis and, so, had to be aware that he did not have very long to live. Very much a child of his times, the well-read Lawrence had familiarized himself with the leading thought of the day, including Einstein’s theories of relativity and Freud and Jung’s theories of the workings of the unconscious. A man with a mission—to save his fellow creatures from the empty, distracted, and often meaningless lives that he witnessed continuing all around him, especially in the awful destructiveness of World War I from 1914 to 1918—Lawrence was, oddly enough, as committed to the causes of

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individual freedom and liberation as Eliot was. The simple truth is that Eliot found his liberation in submitting his will to the power of tradition and the dictates of the spirit as promulgated in orthodox Christian belief, whereas Lawrence sought his liberation within, as if his animal nature and spiritual being were an inseparable whole. Tragically enough, it was Lawrence’s weakening animal self, bereft of that vitality and energy that his fiction, at its very best, unerringly celebrated, that cut his vision off just as it was maturing. Lawrence was committed to a sanatorium in southern France, dying there on March 2, 1930, shortly after his release from the facility. Frieda eventually had his ashes brought to their ranch in Taos, where they are now enshrined in a small chapel. London The London that T. S. Eliot knew when he first arrived there in July 1914 to take up what

The grand entrance to the British Museum in London. This world-famous institution stands just around the corner from Russell Square, where Eliot worked for many years. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

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would turn out to be a virtually lifelong residence in England no longer exists. This is not to say that it has merely undergone the wide array of transformation that any city of virtually any size would undergo within the space of nearly a century as a result of the simple processes of renewal and catastrophe, flux and change and retrenchment. From that perspective, every place has changed radically within that same time frame. London, however, which has otherwise most certainly undergone all those other, more typical transformations, including major destruction as a result of the persistent bombing of the city by the Nazi Luftwaffe during World War II, has seen a more dramatic, radical, and very likely irreversible change. The London that Eliot came to know intimately and is by now forever associated with thanks to poems of his such as The Waste Land and “Little Gidding” was the capital of the British Empire, then very much in its prime. With overseas holdings that extended from Canada through Australia and into the vast Asian subcontinent that now comprises India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; continuing across the Middle East into Egypt and westward toward Gibraltar, the veritable rock that guards the narrow straits connecting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic Ocean; southward toward Nigeria and South Africa and Rhodesia; the Atlantic across the Caribbean Ocean to Bermuda, and then into the islands of Jamaica and Trinidad, it was an axiom that was far more true than anyone might ever believe that “the sun never sets on the British flag.” Queen Victoria’s long reign had just come to an end, and George V ruled as the emperor of India as much as he was the king of Ireland, England, and Scotland. In keeping with such preeminence, London, which had been founded as a military encampment by the Romans on a bend in the Thames River nearly 2,000 years before, was only enhanced by the fact that it was also, in terms of population if not its sprawling urban and suburban outreaches into the surrounding English countryside, the largest city on Earth, a title to which it easily clung well into the 1960s. The city that Eliot knew most intimately, however, was limited to two areas primarily, just as anyone’s experience of a phenomenon as over-

whelming as a human city from ancient times to the present is confined to those districts that most fulfill his or her attentions, intentions, and needs. In Eliot’s case, one of those districts of London was the City of London itself, or what one would call the old or original city. This ancient human domicile is entered by traversing a bridge that has been built and rebuilt many times over the centuries but that has always been called, in some dialect or another, London Bridge. In Eliot’s day, although that bridge was a major thoroughfare into the teeming heart of the great metropolis, it would strike one today as quaintly old fashioned. In any event, the City of London remains to this day the heart of London in so many ways that the metaphor fails. There are Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral with its landmark dome and the Exchange, now an upscale shopping mall but then the financial center of world trade, finance, and commerce. Immediately near the bridge was the Church of St. Magnus the Martyr, a fishermen’s church (London is a river city) that Eliot locates in The Waste Land, and only a bit further up the street is the Church of St. Mary Woolnoth. There the wool workers would once have gathered. It, too, is featured in The Waste Land, and in Eliot’s time one would more likely have found within its pews, if anyone at all, stock traders and bond salesmen, bankers and lawyers and myriad clerks, as well as tradespeople and shopkeepers, waitresses and barbers. Eliot ended up in an apartment in fashionable Kensington for a time, but he knew the city’s working-class haunts and music halls as well as its salons and private clubs for gentlemen who really were gentlemen. Located nearby, amongst the chop houses on narrow streets where one might catch a bite to eat for lunch before returning to work, were the offices of Lloyds of London, that major banking house and insurance firm for which Eliot worked on international banking accounts for seven years until he finally landed himself a position as poetry editor and a member of the board of directors with the London publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, later Faber & Faber, in 1925. That brings this tour of Eliot’s London to its next and last stop, and that is the Bloomsbury district, famed in literary history for giving its name to

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This building housed Faber & Faber during Eliot’s years there. From its roof Eliot acted as a fire watcher during Germany’s air raids on London in World War II. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

The Art Deco elegance of the Senate House, located on the campus of the University of London, bespeaks the ambiance of nearby Russell Square, the heart of London’s Bloomsbury district. (Courtesy of Russell Murphy)

the Bloomsbury Group, organized not by but eventually around Leonard and VIRGINIA WOOLF. There, on a corner of Russell Square, Faber & Faber located its offices within easy walking distance of the main campus of the University of London with its reasonably towering Senate House on Mallet Street and the

monumental British Museum, which houses, to this day, among other treasures and artifacts, the famous Elgin marbles that inspired John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. From this vantage point, for the next 40 years, the so-called Pope of Russell Square, poet of The Waste Land and defender of the realm of human tradition, did not hold court but, rather, worked. A very proper English figure with tightly wrapped umbrella, bowler hat, and striped waistcoat, Eliot became the sort of Englishman and Londoner that he would have been had his ancestor Andrew Eliot never left the village of East Coker three centuries earlier. They say that he even took the tube, or London subway, to work. Once, on a bus, he was asked by a curious citizen if he was not the poet T. S. Eliot. Speechless, he turned and ran the other way. As if to seal his destined relationship with this great city, although Eliot’s ashes are at St. Michael’s, the East Coker village church, he is commemorated by a plaque at Westminster Abbey in London, one of England’s highest honors.

M Morrell, Ottoline (1873–1938) Like many of the leading lights of English cultural life during that period of radical change and catastrophic conflict that characterized Britain during the period in which the modernist movement in the arts and literature was just coming into its own, Ottoline Morrell was particularly well born and well heeled. While she figures in the history of the Bloomsbury Group centered around such individuals as Leonard and VIRGINIA WOOLF, Lady Ottoline was a cultural force of her own by virtue of the literary talent that peopled her salon and weekended at her country estate outside London. Born Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck in 1873, she became Lady Ottoline in 1879 when her half-brother became the sixth duke of Portland. Lady Ottoline was also a cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later to become queen to King George VI, the parents of the present Queen Elizabeth II. Educated at home as a child, Lady Ottoline grew up to be a very reclusive, almost religiously austere individual, who first sought out a quiet life in the country far from the bustle and glitter of London. Later, she studied politics and history at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1902, however, after her marriage to the attorney Philip Morrell, she took up residence with him on Bedford Square in London’s Bloomsbury district. While their marriage would last for the rest of her life, in keeping with the quietly scandalous behavior of her crowd of unconventional aristocrats, theirs was an open marriage.

In their politics Lady Ottoline and Morrell were equally unconventional. Perhaps in keeping with the fact that much of her early education had been confined to memorizing passages from the Bible, she did nothing by halves. Morrell was elected to Parliament as a Liberal in 1906, and the couple was so critical of the government during World War I, from 1914 to 1918, that they pointedly sheltered a number of conscientious objectors on their country estate at Garsington near Oxford, including the future war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Morrell did not stand for reelection in the general election of 1918. It was Lady Ottoline’s literary salon that has earned her a place in the history of modernism, however. Beginning in 1908, Lady Ottoline entertained the political and literary celebrities of the day on Thursday evenings at her townhouse on Bedford Square. The same crowd weekended frequently at her country retreat at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, not far outside London. In addition to Sassoon, she counted the American novelist Henry James, the mathematician and philosopher BERTRAND RUSSELL, the Woolfs, the British novelist D. H. LAWRENCE, and the English social satirist Aldous Huxley among her friends and acquaintances. J. MIDDLETON MURRY, who later crossed swords with Eliot over their social and political views on the pages of reviews during the 1920s, was another frequent guest. For her kindness and hospitality, Lady Ottoline is now remembered for being 544

Murry, J[ohn] Middleton ridiculed by Lawrence as the pretentiously dense Hermione Roddice in his 1920 novel, Women in Love. Huxley would satirize her, too, in his take-off on the contemporary literary scene, Crome Yellow, published in 1921. Bertrand Russell, who had been one of Lady Ottoline’s many lovers, introduced Eliot to Morrell’s salon in 1915, and it was through that connection that Eliot made his first real entry into London’s social life, which also happened, at the time, to include its literary circles, so much were all the “smart” people of the day engaged in the revolution in the arts and learning then taking place. Her most significant claim to fame is that it was Lady Ottoline who, when Eliot was on an extended leave from Lloyds Bank in late 1921 to recuperate from nervous exhaustion, recommended to him that he take what was then a fashionable rest cure at Dr. Roger Vittoz’s clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was Eliot’s taking her advice that has led to the legend that he had been committed to an insane asylum after suffering a nervous breakdown while he was in the process of composing The Waste Land. Murry, J[ohn] Middleton (1889–1957) It is not unusual for a literary critic or scholar, or even a creative type, to achieve literary notoriety primarily by virtue of his or her getting caught up in a principled debate with a figure whom history will later come to regard as particularly significant. The literary conflict between the British literary journalist and author J. Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot provides a fairly dramatic example. Born on August 6, 1889, in London, Murry was the author of some 40 books, but it is doubtful that any of them remain in print today. The husband of the short story writer Katherine Mansfield and a close friend of novelist D. H. LAWRENCE, Murry had, by 1921, become editor of the Athenaeum, one of the most prestigious literary periodicals of its day. Although it folded shortly afterward as an independent journal, it continued publication well into the 1930s by merging first with the Nation and later with the Statesman. Despite its somewhat leftist leaning, the Athenaeum included the best writers of the day among

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its many contributors, Eliot being one of them. It was from this vantage point, however, that Murry was able to promote his essentially liberal and romantic views—read humanist—of art and literature as a means of shaping the new materialist and spiritually enlightened culture that seemed at the time to be rapidly supplanting the last thousand years of a traditional Christian and hierarchical culture in England. As the battle lines were drawn up throughout most of the 1920s, it became a conflict between classicists and Catholics (meaning a universal Christian church) on the one hand and romantics and humanists (meaning a secularist tolerance for all points of view) on the other. Eliot would fire the first or at least the most historically memorable salvo in his “Function of Criticism” in 1923, in which he holds Murry up as a perfect model of the new kind of intellectual emerging on the English cultural stage. Eliot sees them marching under the banner of “Muddle Through” and believing that the only moral guide that they require is an “Inner Voice.” For his own part, Murry would accuse Eliot, particularly after the latter’s formal conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, with having an agenda that was not purely literary at heart. Eliot effectively ended the war in 1934 in After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy in which Murry again was displayed for ridicule and invective as a model of the sort of thinking that was deceiving the reading public by proposing an “anything goes” approach toward issues of moral choice. The fallout was as deleterious for Eliot’s career—in Strange Gods he had inveighed against “free-thinking Jews” and criticized the work of such celebrated contemporaries as W. B. YEATS, EZRA POUND, and Lawrence—as not, for he came through sounding petty, mean-spirited, and self-righteous. Eventually, in works such as The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot could admit that theirs was in fact an absolutist versus a relativistic approach toward the foundations and maintenance of culture. Furthermore, more pressing matters, such as the approaching World

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War II and its attendant ideological conflicts, would soon intervene even in literary affairs. Years later, Eliot would wonder what all the fuss had been about, as well he might. However, so-called culture wars have been a staple of human societies for perhaps as

long as they have existed, and the debate between traditionalist conservatives and liberal reformers will last, no doubt, just as long. Murry died in Suffolk, England, on March 31, 1957.

P Pound, Ezra (Weston Loomis) (1885–1972) For many of his contemporaries the leading light of the modernist movement in letters in English, the American poet Ezra Pound was a startlingly original innovator as a poet, a garrulously adept critic and editor, and, for a slew of fellow artists, a staunch friend and ardent promoter. A rabid anti-Semitism that eventually infiltrated his work nevertheless continues to mar one of the 20th century’s most accomplished and noteworthy literary careers. Born on October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, Pound was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with two other future poets, Hilda Doolittle, who would later publish under the pseudonym H. D., and William Carlos Williams. After receiving a degree from Hamilton College in 1905, Pound, whose primary area of academic interest was medieval Romance literature, specifically the troubadour poets of Provence, taught college for a year before traveling to Europe, where he settled in London in 1908. His earliest poetry, which he first began to collect in 1908 in volumes with such exotically delicatesounding titles as A Lume Spento, is in the ornately formal and archaic style of the love poetry of the troubadours whom he so greatly admired, particularly Arnaut Daniel, himself a primary influence on the poetry of DANTE ALIGHIERI. Pound would also explore their work in his first major critical study, the scholarly The Spirit of Romance (1910). Pound’s subsequent close association with the Anglo-Irish symbolist poet W. B. YEATS, for whom

he acted as personal secretary for a number of years, and his introduction to the work of Ernest Fenollosa, a student of Oriental languages, had a profound effect on transforming Pound’s aesthetics and, so, the direction that modernist poetry would take. Influenced by the concept behind the Chinese ideogram, in which there is often little distinction between the referential meaning of a word and its appearance on the page, Pound was instrumental in founding the imagist movement in poetry. As Williams would later summarize it in his rallying cry, “No idea but in things,” the movement was inspired by the two economies of brevity and simplicity and by a suspicion of the abstract and generalized. Precision of expression became a keynote. A volume of Pound’s translations from the Chinese, Cathay (1915), was inspired by such new and rigorous principles of poetic composition, including VERS LIBRE, which literally freed the poetic line from what Pound characterized as the tyranny of the metronome. Pound had cemented his bonds with the literary movement in London by marrying Dorothy Shakespear, the daughter of Yeats’s erstwhile lover Olivia Shakespear, in 1914. Always a leader, along with other avant-garde writers, artists, and thinkers of the time, such as the novelist and poet Wyndham Lewis, the critic T. E. Hulme, and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound now was able to give the burgeoning modernist movement a coherent direction under the banner of vorticism. This broader movement, encompassing all the arts and, 547

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in the midst of a world war begun in 1914, social protest as well, was given voice in the pages of Blast, a literary review about which everything was bold and new right down to its layout and typography. The war took an even greater toll on Pound, however, than it did on such comrades of his as Hulme and Gaudier-Breska, who had both been killed in action. The war’s catastrophic destructiveness embittered and disheartened Pound, causing him to doubt the efficacy of art. In postwar poetry volumes such as Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound satirically denounced the aestheticism of his own earlier efforts on the part of the “dead art of poetry” and bemoaned a world in which many fine young men could die for “old men’s lies” and a “botched civilization.” Like the rest of Europe and the world, neither Pound nor his poetry would ever be the same again. Back in September 1914, however, just as the war had been beginning and Pound was himself caught up in the thick of his own impassioned and often frenzied activities on the part of his fellow creative artists, an event occurred that would bring a brilliant and continuing respite of sorts into the course of Pound’s life. A young American graduate student from Harvard who had arrived in England earlier that July to study philosophy at Oxford’s Merton College was introduced to Pound by another Harvard man then living in London, the poet CONRAD AIKEN. This young man had also been dabbling seriously in poetry writing, and the poems that he showed to Ezra Pound inspired the older man to proclaim him to the editor Harriet Monroe as a poet who had “made himself modern all on his own.” The young American in question was, of course, T. S. Eliot, and one particular poem that had so stunned Pound that he convinced Monroe to publish it in her review, Poetry, was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This initial meeting of somewhat kindred if slightly mismatched spirits would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Pound was garrulous and outgoing, Eliot shy and unassuming. Pound was an operator and player; Eliot was a philosopher with an accountant’s soul, or an accountant with a philosopher’s soul. Nonetheless, they hit it off

famously, all in the name of the new art that was then emerging everywhere. Pound took a willing Eliot under his wing, and along with Aiken they succeeded in getting him into other literary circles where he would meet editors and publishers, including Leonard and VIRGINIA WOOLF of the Hogarth Press, and where he would get an opportunity to do some editing and reviewing himself. By 1917, largely through Pound’s help, Eliot saw the Egoist Limited Press publish his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations. Returning the favor, Eliot wrote an introduction to Pound’s poetics, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, which was published anonymously in 1917 in conjunction with an American edition of Pound’s work. Then, when Eliot began to imagine that his days as a poet were over, as would often be the case with Eliot throughout the first few decades of his poetic career, it was Pound who got him into writing poetry again by experimenting heavily with the quatrain form, which Pound had borrowed from the mid-19th century French poet Théophile Gautier. Pound, for example, would use it to great effect in his Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. These fourline stanzas with their shortened, four-beat lines (in contrast to the typical line of poetry in English since the time of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, which would have had five beats) rhymed on each paired couplet to create a lively, breezy tone and pace. Eliot, meanwhile, employed the quatrains mainly in seven exercises composed between 1917 and 1919 that included such notable works as “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” and “Whispers of Immortality.” Pound and Eliot’s collaboration truly came to a head, however, when Eliot, on the way to Lausanne, Switzerland, for a rest cure in the winter of 1921, stopped to visit Pound in Paris, to which city Pound had moved from London in 1920. Eliot brought the manuscript of a long poem that he had been working on. Tentatively titled at the time He Do the Police in Different Voices, it was the famous first draft of a poem that would enter literary history as Eliot’s The Waste Land. Pound’s “editing” of Eliot’s original, giving the poem its trademark fragmented structure, has long since been docu-

Pound, Ezra mented literary history as well, but it would be with the conclusion of this chapter of their virtually lifelong friendship that their master-and-apprentice relationship ended. There would be one last comic turn, however, in which Pound’s efforts to raise enough money to get Eliot out of his job with Lloyds Bank backfired when the British press got wind of it, embarrassing all involved. Back in the midst of the war, in 1915, in the meantime, Pound had already begun to work on what would become his own “long poem.” Called the Cantos, they began as a very loosely organized sequence of poems, more a series, that treated vorticism’s principal belief that history can be summarized and discerned in a series of outstanding moments taking place at various places and times but all having in common a collective energy that reemerges at some later date in some other place. (Pound and his friends thought of the London of their time as just such a vortex.) The first four had been published in 1919 in The Fourth Canto. Then, commencing with the publication of A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925, Pound would write or publish very little else throughout the remainder of his poetic career, so that the Cantos, rather like the 19thcentury American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass before it, became one of literary history’s great continuing and unfinished poems. It was a poem intended to “contain history,” as Pound put it, but it also contained a great deal of his social, economic, and political theory, which can be summarized under the concept of social credit. Though it did not originate with him, Pound embraced its novel economic theory, gradually becoming committed to, if not obsessed by the idea. Following the massive destructiveness of the war, which, like most wars, had been funded with borrowed money, those sources of credit subsequently “dried up” once hostilities and the capacity for profiting from them had ceased, creating widespread economic hardship. As a corrective, social credit proposed that the use of money, as opposed to its exchange as a commodity, ought itself to be taxed. The end result would be that the accumulation of wealth in a few hands would be stifled, and those who lent money could no longer profit from the exorbitant interests that they were permitted to charge.

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Somewhere along the line of this otherwise complicated reasoning, however, Pound’s obsession with usury, as the lending of money at interest is called, ran afoul of an apparently engrained streak of anti-Semitism in Pound. In Pound’s view, the Jews, who were thought to control some of the most influential banking houses in Europe, were at the root of the entire problem; “usury age-old and age-thick,” he had labeled the problem in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Once Pound was on this soapbox for social and economic reform, there was no getting him off or turning him off. As long as he confined these ideas and the prejudices that they enflamed in him to his poetry, there may ultimately have been no great harm. Indeed, Pound may have ended up writing his way out of the moral and ethical miasma that was drenching his creative juices. Instead, to what would eventually be his own great chagrin and shame, Pound began to try to live the very sort of historical reality that he was preaching and poeticizing. In 1924 he had moved again, this time from Paris to Rapallo, Italy. Some two years earlier the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had succeeded in becoming prime minister. Though at least at this time in its development Italian fascism was not especially anti-Semitic in its social and political policies, the fascist model of a state that controlled all aspects of national life, including its economic and industrial capacity, without stifling private initiative, as Soviet communism was then doing in Russia, seemed to Pound to be a system that might ultimately enable a social credit system to operate. Furthermore, Pound was attracted to the idea that great men are the true motive force behind history, and he saw the pompously charismatic Mussolini as just such a figure. What Pound could not have foreseen was the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, followed by Italy’s joining the war in June 1940 on the so-called Axis side with Germany, rather than with its former English and French allies. Pound had remained living in Italy for all those intervening years, continuing to work on the Cantos and trying to get the powers that be to entertain his economic theories. He once had gotten as far as to have Mussolini read some of the Cantos,

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which the puzzled Italian dictator had pronounced “un divertimento,” that is to say, an entertainment. This was hardly the response that Pound had been hoping for, no doubt. The truly tragic consequences of these choices and actions came, however, on December 8, 1941, when, following the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the United States declared war on Japan and its European allies, Germany and Italy. Although Italy was now an enemy country, Pound remained there throughout the war, still attempting to influence public policy for what he thought, in the long run, would be the best—and still writing and, as best he could, publishing the Cantos. When Mussolini was removed from office by the Italian king Victor Emmanuel III following Allied victories in the south, the Italian dictator fled northward, and Pound continued to support his regime, until Mussolini’s arrest and execution in the spring of 1945. Arrested by Italian partisans in May 1945, Pound later turned himself in to U.S. forces, who confined him in an open cage in Pisa for 25 days. From this ordeal came the Pisan Cantos, which won him the Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948. That was the result of a rather ironic turn of events, however. Pound had earlier been charged with treason and, found mentally unfit to stand trial, had been declared insane and confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., from 1946 to 1958. The assumption is that the insanity plea was entered in order to avoid Pound’s possible execution if he had been found guilty as charged. Many a figure in American liter-

ary circles rallied to his defense, viewing him as a seriously misguided but hardly criminal or mentally ill individual. Among them was his old friend Eliot, who visited him at St. Elizabeths as circumstances allowed. On his release in 1958, Pound returned to Italy, where he remained until his death in Venice on November 1, 1972. In later years, Pound supposedly regretted his obsession with an anti-Semitic view of modern history, but it is unclear whether he ever actually rejected it. Equally problematic is the place of himself and his work in American literary history. The scope of his influence in the early days of modernism is alone enough to have earned him an enduring place in that history, and the quality of his poetry before his anti-Semitic beliefs became an indisputable part of it is as well too masterful to be easily dismissed. Perhaps Pound has become an outstanding example, and victim, of a critical dilemma embodied in his and Eliot’s own arguments against focusing more on the poet’s life than on his work and other accomplishments. Just what are the limits, and where the division should be made, become more than academic issues when the poet’s personal beliefs are undeniably expressed in the poetry, and among those beliefs are totally unjustifiable viewpoints that are perniciously hateful and harmful. Pound passionately defended the proposition that the artist is compelled to give what he called a true report, that the artist should omit nothing of his view of humanity from his work. But what are the limits of frankness and of honesty when the artist honestly believes something that is reprehensible and, by any standard of human decency and justice, wrong?

Q Quinn, John (1870–1924) A wealthy corporate lawyer in New York and of Irish descent, John Quinn became a significant patron of the arts following a 1902 meeting with the Irish poet W. B. YEATS when Yeats visited New York City in the midst of an American tour. Through his acquaintanceship with Yeats, Quinn later became acquainted with the American poet EZRA POUND, who by 1908 had become the elder poet’s personal secretary. Through Pound, Quinn eventually became so closely associated with the destiny of a work by another young American poet, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, that his outstanding generosity has earned him a deserved place in modernist literary history. Pound had first met Eliot in September 1914 soon after the latter’s arrival in London to begin a course of graduate studies at Merton College, Oxford. Convinced of Eliot’s genius as a modernist talent, and equally convinced that his younger American friend needed all the help that he could get to free up his time for poetry writing, Pound was already seeking by September of 1916 to secure for Eliot, whom he wished to characterize as a struggling young poet, a patron in Quinn. When in January 1918 Knopf published in New York Eliot’s Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, a critical introduction to Pound’s latest work, Pound would confide again in Quinn his own continuing interest in both furthering and protecting Eliot’s literary career. Pound wrote to tell Quinn that he did not want Eliot’s name to be too much associated with his own as a

critical voice, since it might impede Eliot’s progress and promise as a poet in his own right. Later that year, Pound sought Quinn’s assistance and advice in keeping Eliot from enlisting in military service once the United States had entered the war in Europe late in 1917. The opportunity for Quinn to step up to the plate to assist Eliot in his poetic career did not come for another four years, however. That occurred when Eliot, returning from a rest treatment in Switzerland, rejoined his wife, Vivien, in Paris in January of 1922 and paid a visit to Pound, who was by then living in the French capital. After their meeting. Pound reported to Quinn that Eliot had had in his suitcase “a damn good poem (19 pages),” one that he, Pound, hoped that Scofield Thayer would soon publish in the pages of the DIAL, a stylish New York review of arts and letters that had already attracted Quinn’s attention. The manuscript was, of course, Eliot’s The Waste Land, albeit while it was still tentatively titled He Do the Police in Different Voices and had not yet been subjected to Pound’s famous pruning. After that poem’s simultaneous publication, in October 1922, in Eliot’s Criterion in London and Thayer’s Dial in New York, with Pound working as usual behind the scenes, it was Quinn nevertheless who made the necessary arrangements for Eliot to receive from the Dial that year’s prestigious and lucrative Dial Award, a prize of $2,000. Subsequently, as a token of Eliot’s esteem for Quinn’s generosity, Eliot would remand manuscripts of much 551

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of his early poetry to Quinn, including the original Waste Land manuscript, which includes Pound’s and Vivien’s suggested revisions, most of which Eliot had incorporated into the finished poem. Quinn died in 1924, and that manuscript, a literary treasure, effectively disappeared from the public consciousness until October 25, 1968, when the New York Public Library revealed that it had been sold to its Berg Collection in April of 1958

by Quinn’s niece, Mary (Mrs. Thomas F. Conroy). Eliot had passed away, on January 4, 1965, but his widow, Valerie, would publish these original drafts of The Waste Land in both facsimile and transcript in a superbly scholarly book-length edition in the spring of 1971. The existence of that significant contribution to the archival history of literary modernism has the generosity of John Quinn to thank for its existence.

R Roman Catholicism See CATHOLICISM, FORMS OF.

Harvard, who now was editor of the DIAL housed in New York City, Eliot was hoping to launch a London edition of that review that might give it a highly competitive and unique publishing presence as an international journal of the arts. For her part, Lady Rothermere wanted to endow a new publication that would cut a swath through the so-called smart set by featuring cutting-edge fiction and essays. As two of the leading lights of the modernist movement then sweeping literary England and America, Eliot and Thayer were easily able to convince Lady Rothermere that they could fulfill their part of the bargain. She apparently was taken with Eliot. It was she who had offered him the loan of her cottage in Alps during his famous episode with a “nervous breakdown” in late 1921 while he was composing the poem that would become The Waste Land. In any event, Lady Rothermere finally struck a publishing deal with Eliot, to the exclusion of Thayer. Rather than a transatlantic journal, she would underwrite the publication of a review housed in London and edited by Eliot. The result was the CRITERION, and its first issue would be a publishing landmark. Coming out in October 16, 1922, it contained Eliot’s new poem, The Waste Land, which the Dial published simultaneously in New York. Despite such an auspicious debut, Lady Rothermere thought the first issue rather “dull,” and it was Eliot’s constant aim to try to please the taste of his wealthy patroness. By July 1925, as her three-year

Rothermere, Lilian, Viscountess (1868?–1937) Born Mary Lilian Share, the future Lady Rothermere married into what would become one of the largest private fortunes in England when she wed Harold Sidney Harmsworth, later the first viscount Rothermere (1868–1940), whose brother, Arthur Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, was the publisher of the Daily Mail. Following the American model of a small, cheap newspaper that provided brief—and often lurid and scandalous—stories to appeal to the lowest common denominator of popular tastes, the Daily Mail at one point had a circulation approaching 2 million, and for his interest in the papers, including the Daily Mirror, Lord Rothermere would eventually amass a fortune in the neighborhood of $125 million, an unheard of sum in its day. By the time Sidney Schiff, who wrote novels under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson and was himself a wealthy art patron, introduced Eliot to Lady Rothermere in the summer of 1921, she was already estranged from Lord Rothermere. Nevertheless, she was extremely prominent in London’s social and artistic circles, throwing her considerable wealth and influence behind such eccentric figures as the Greek-Armenian mystic, author, and teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866–1949). These credentials made her the perfect contact for Eliot’s own somewhat avant-garde issues and interests. With Scofield Thayer, his friend from their schooldays back at Milton Academy and then 553

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contract with its publisher moved toward its expiration, Eliot began to fear that he might end up having to close the review down. Instead, Lady Rothermere made an agreement with Faber & Gwyer, the new publishing house with which Eliot had just taken a position as poetry editor and a board member, to take over publication of the Criterion, now launched as the New Criterion, in January 1926. By May 1927, Faber & Gwyer began to publish the Criterion, till then a quarterly publication, as a monthly, and the increased production costs that resulted finally forced Lady Rothermere, in December 1927, to summon Eliot and inform him that she was withdrawing her financial support. The blow nearly caused the Criterion to cease publication, but Geoffrey Faber decided differently. Using his own considerable influence among the London establishment, he succeeded in getting enough financial support to keep the Criterion going, albeit as a quarterly again. Lady Rothermere, who had lost two of three sons in World War I, died on March 16, 1937, as Europe hovered on the brink of a second world war. The Criterion would continue publication for another two years after the death of the wealthy woman whose initial support had given Eliot the opportunity to make his publishing dream an impressive reality. Royce, Josiah (1855–1916) An absolute idealist in the same vein as F. H. BRADLEY, Josiah Royce was one of the thinkers and teachers who would exert a powerful influence on Eliot’s own ways of thinking during his student years at Harvard. From the first of Royce’s contributions to the field of philosophical inquiry, in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, published in 1885, Royce posited the idea of an Absolute Knower, an infinite mind that contains all that is knowable. Like Bradley, he believed that the disparate nature of ordinary experiences and our categorical knowledge of them is only apparent and that all knowledge and experience actually constitute a unified whole. Born November 20, 1855, in a mining town in northern California, Royce began his teaching career at the University of Califormia, Berkeley,

in composition and literature in 1878 but soon chafed at being at such a great distance from the intellectual centers of contemporary American thought then located on the East Coast. In 1882, he accepted an offer from Harvard to replace William James during his sabbatical year from that campus. Royce ended up resigning his appointment at Berkeley in order to do so. By 1892 he had achieved an appointment as professor of the history of philosophy at Harvard, and he would remain on the philosophy faculty there until his death in September 1916. Royce and James, whose own thinking had led him into areas of philosophical inquiry that were relativistic and pragmatic in nature, depending more on empiricism and practical reality for their validation, would maintain a healthy rivalry throughout their academic careers. Ultimately, it would be James’s more positivistic and logically verifiable approach to knowing that would prevail in academic circles, eclipsing the speculative and metaphysical approaches that had been developed by the likes of Bradley and Royce. Eliot had already been exposed, before encountering Royce, to the speculative philosophy of the day during his student year in 1910 and 1911 in Paris, where he attended lectures given by the French philosopher HENRI BERGSON. Eliot’s purchase, in June 1913, of Bradley’s major work, Appearance and Reality, suggests that Eliot, who was by then enrolled in a doctoral program in philosophy at Harvard, continued to be drawn to an absolute idealist line of reasoning. It comes as no surprise, then, that that fall semester Eliot enrolled in a course in various types of scientific methods being offered by Royce. The paper that he produced for that course, on assessing primitive rituals, would conclude that any scientific validity is flawed by virtue of the fact that the observer’s observations are distorted by his own experiences. Tenets such as these, questioning the human ability to access any experience that might be said to approximate an objective reality, are the foundation of idealism, which depends on the finite limits of human knowing, and would ultimately form the foundation for Eliot’s dissertation on Bradley,

Russell Square “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” which he completed in April 1916 following a year of additional graduate study under Bradleyan Harold Joachim at Merton College, Oxford. Such tenets are also at the foundation of much of modernism as a movement in the arts, largely as a result of the exposure that poets like Eliot had to these ways of thinking during their philosophical heyday in academic circles in the late 19th and early 20th century. Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970) Bertrand Russell is noted primarily for his revolutionary work in the area of mathematics and logic theory, and he is regarded as one of the foremost logicians of the 20th century. Russell’s Paradox, which he formulated in 1901, essentially undermined the foundations of set theory by proposing the set of sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set would contain sets that existed only if they did not exist. A paradox, by virtue of itself, need not make logical sense; that, indeed, is its purpose for being. But mathematics must make logical sense or perish, and Russell had succeeded in exposing a paradox at the heart of mathematical logic. In a nutshell, if mathematics is not founded on unassailable logical principles, then what good are the results of its conclusions? While this is largely a problem in analytical philosophy rather than practical application, it is nevertheless a problem. Clearly what Russell had discovered was a serious logical flaw in the manner in which set theory had first been promulgated. Russell then went on to make a career for himself by—and in 1950 was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature for—attempting to resolve the intellectual turmoil that had resulted from his introduction of the paradox. Beginning with his Principles in 1903 and culminating in his central work, Principia Mathematica, published between 1910 and 1913 and on which Alfred North Whitehead worked as a collaborator, Russell succeeded in proposing a theory of types, or hierarchical sets, that would permit a member of a set not to be a member of itself by stratifying the set.

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Born in Wales on May 18, 1872, and grandson of a former prime minister under Queen Victoria, Russell was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he earned degrees in both mathematics and moral philosophy. His academic career was cut short, however, when he engaged in antiwar activities and was dismissed. A second episode of such conduct while World War I continued earned him a six-month jail sentence. Russell also earned himself a reputation as a notorious womanizer, so much so that in the 1940s he was denied an appointment to City College, New York, for being morally unfit for classroom teaching. Eliot would have first met Russell in the spring of 1914 when the latter was a visiting professor at Harvard, where Eliot was a graduate student in philosophy. He and Russell renewed their acquaintance when Eliot traveled to England to continue his studies at Merton College, Oxford, in July 1914. It is generally assumed that the jovial visiting celebrity of “Mr. Apollinax” fame is Bertrand Russell. (Eliot published the poem in 1917.) There is strong evidence to suggest that Russell had an affair with Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, whom Eliot had married in June 1915. Although Russell was said to have regarded the marriage as a bad match, he allegedly justified the adultery by arguing that it would force the young couple to improve their own sexual relationship. In his later years, Russell, who had continued his political activism through several unsuccessful runs for a seat in Parliament, became a staunch opponent of nuclear armament. He lent his credentials as a ranking member of the British intelligentsia and a Nobel laureate to protests regarding England’s nuclear weapons program through the 1950s and into the 1960s. With Albert Einstein in 1955, he issued a manifesto calling for a curtailment in the manufacture and testing of nuclear bombs. Prominently politically active into his 90s, Russell died in Wales on February 2, 1970, at the age of 97. Russell Square

See LONDON.

S St. Louis The city of Eliot’s birth, St. Louis, Missouri, is among a handful of American cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco, that hold a virtually mythic place in the American psyche. In the case of St. Louis, that city’s fame as a river city, located at the confluence of the Mississippi with the Missouri, the North American continent’s two major waterways, would alone have earned it an enduring place in American history. The further fact that St. Louis also happened to be the spot along the river through which pioneers heading west passed throughout the better part of the 19th century, giving the city its sobriquet as the Gateway to the West, remains a mark of distinction in which St. Louis takes pride to this day and celebrates with her imposing and impressive Gateway Arch. Despite its location deep inland, far from the English colonial settlements along the Atlantic seaboard from which the fledgling American republic eventually would emerge in 1776, the region surrounding the future site of the city was explored as early as 1673 by the French Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette and his companion, Louis Joliet (Jolliet). By 1682 René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle would claim the entire Mississippi valley for France, naming the area Louisiana in honor of the French king. St. Louis was no sooner itself founded by two French settlers, Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau, in 1764, than, in 1767, Louisiana was ceded to Spain as a result of the French defeat in the French and Indian War. The Spanish would return Louisiana to

France in 1800, and on March 10, 1804, as a result of the famous Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the territory was transferred to United States. At the time of the purchase the population of St. Louis was approaching 10,000, a sizable enough community for what was then still rugged frontier. By the time Eliot’s paternal grandfather, WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT, ventured to St. Louis in 1834, a young man of 23 prepared to forge his destiny by bringing UNITARIANISM to the rugged frontier, the population had increased to more than 15,000. William’s choice of destination was a most fortuitous one, for U.S. expansion into the uncharted West would shortly be taking off, and no city in America would benefit as much from this surge of population westward as would St. Louis. In 1840 the city’s total population had grown to 35,979. Impresssive though that may be, a halfcentury later, in 1890, two year’s after the poet’s birth, the city had become one of the major North American metropolises of its time, with a total of 451,770 residents, of whom more than a quarter were foreign born. So urbanized had this former frontier town become within William’s lifetime (he would pass away in 1887) that Locust Street, where he had built the family home and founded his Church of the Messiah, would be facing innercity blight by the time of Eliot’s birth in 1888. Though not on the Eastern seaboard, the St. Louis of the day was quite able to give the future poet the experience of the grime and grit and excitement of a modern metropolis. In a word, 556

Shakespeare, William the city was a player, so much so that Hungarian-born Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), who had in 1872 become the owner and publisher of the St. Louis Post, which he later merged with the Evening Dispatch, could easily build on those successes. By 1883, Pulitzer was able to move to New York, where he acquired the New York World and gave newspaper mogul William Randolph Hurst’s Journal-American a run for its money that became one of the first media wars in U.S. history. Although Eliot did not reside in the city for any considerable length of time following his departure for Milton Academy in Massachusetts at age 17 in 1905, he would later recall how it had given him the sensibilities of a child raised “in the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis, . . . in an industrial city in America.” His subsequent readings in the French symbolist poets CHARLES BAUDELAIRE and JULES LAFORGUE would teach him that poetry could be made from experiences of this order. The so-called urban apocalypse of the 20th century that Eliot’s The Waste Land would notoriously chronicle in 1922 was not, then, born on the streets of New York or Boston or London but on the banks of the Mississippi, a fact that Eliot would duly celebrate in his famous opening to the third of his Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages”: “I think that the river / Is a strong brown god.” Speaking in 1953 on the topic of “American Literature and the American Language” at St. Louis’s Washington University, an institution that his grandfather William had helped found, Eliot could say, “I am still very satisfied with having been born in St. Louis: in fact I think I was fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.” Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) If there is any one figure in world literature who can lay claim to being universally regarded as a writer for all times, all peoples, and all places, it has to be William Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot’s uses of Shakespeare, which seem to fall so glibly from his pen, have been discussed by many scholars. However, Eliot probably alluded less to Shakespeare than to others. Surely, as a world author Dante must lead the pack as the “most alluded to” literary figure in Eliot, yet

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it is telling that, for all the renown that Dante has achieved in recent times, some of it due no doubt to Eliot, allusions to Dante often require a footnote that explicate the source and possible purpose, whereas allusions to Shakespeare, even when they do stand out as such, speak for themselves. Prufrock’s musings beginning “No, I am not Prince Hamlet . . . ,” and ending with “Almost, at times, the Fool,” make any reader more than barely literary instantly feel quite comfortable suddenly with a poem that, like the desert in The Waste Land, otherwise provides no relief. In The Waste Land itself, while it need not be known that the echoing refrain “Good night, sweet ladies” with which part II, “A Game of Chess,” ends harks back to Ophelia’s own parting words, knowing as much lifts the entire episode off the ground instantly, giving it wings to move any reader toward meaning, even if that meaning, like Ophelia’s parting, be in vain. The point is how sparingly Eliot uses his Shakespeare and yet how effectively. When he writes that Shakespeare and Dante share the world of literature between them and that there is no third, it seems almost as if it were more a nod to Dante than a conviction. Eliot criticized, in the street sense of “faulting,” Shakespeare only once, in his famous 1919 essay “Hamlet and His Problems.” There, organizing a process of thought that culminated in his formulating the idea of the objective correlative, Eliot argues that Shakespeare fails to dramatize Hamlet’s plight in a manner sufficient to make it immediately apparent what his plight is. The point, though unintended no doubt, is obvious: Even when he fails, there are lessons to be learned from Shakespeare. Shakespeare informs English poetry to such a degree that is impossible to tell where his influence in any one writer begins and ends. Learn his cadences—hallmarks as sure to mark his distinctiveness as any other feature of the writing—and you will hear him in Byron and in Keats, in Tennyson, in Faulkner, and in YEATS. You may never hear him in EZRA POUND, but you will most assuredly hear him in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” While they surely must exist, it is hard to think of an important critical piece of Eliot’s that does

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not at some point make reference to Shakespeare. Most assuredly, whenever Eliot is speaking of those attitudes of mind or thought or feeling, belief or expression or description that make for the great artist, he never fails to draw at some point on Shakespeare for the sake of a positive example, as if it were a sacrilege not to. Eliot, after all, is writing in the same language in which Shakespeare wrote—and thinking and feeling in that language as well. Along with maintaining a whole and consistently developing vision of life and of the world, Eliot argues that the great poet virtually makes a language out of the raw material that was at hand and available to him. Surely Dante’s Italian is Italian because no one can express himself better in that language and all its varying dialects. Just as surely, for the same reason, Shakespeare’s English is the modern English that all English speakers can recognize. To make one’s language one’s own is a rare achievement for a poet, because it means that everyone who follows wants to sound like that or succeed in failing to. Eliot was one of the first poet-critics to recognize in conscious ways that English as a literary language can and should grow and change around Shakespeare, but that it can never escape his shadow and still be English. In 1943, Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding,” which is for all intents and purposes the last major poem that he ever wrote, that the task of poets is to “purify the dialect of the tribe.” To give one’s fellows the means of expression whereby they fall in love and raise families and wage war and praise God and argue the purposes of Creation is no mean accomplishment or unworthy aim or small task, but the poets do do it, and, in English, Shakespeare did it best. Sitwell, Dame Edith See SITWELLS, THE. Sitwell, Sir Osbert

See SITWELLS, THE.

Sitwell, Sir Sacherevell

See SITWELLS, THE.

Sitwells, the The three Sitwell siblings were so prominent in English literary circles throughout most of the first half of the 20th century that they have generally been regarded as a literary group

in and of themselves. Descended on their mother’s side from the Plantagenets, the royal family who had ruled England until the Tudor dynasty emerged in the early 16th century, and sired by Sir George, fourth baronet, himself an antiquarian and geneaologist known for his upper-class eccentricities, the Sitwell children were, more than a literary group, virtually a species unto themselves. In order of birth and eventual celebrity, they were Dame Edith Louisa, born on September 7, 1887; Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell, fifth baronet, who was known as Osbert and born on December 6, 1892; and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, sixth baronet, born on November 5, 1897. All three ended up devoting their lives to art and literature and, to some degree, controversy, since their social status permitted them to live their lives as they thought fit, which was not always conventionally. Dame Edith, for example, lived with her former governess for quite a while but supposedly had a love affair with a Russian painter who was himself a homosexual. Much later in life, living again in England after a decade or more of residence in France, she converted to Roman CATHOLICISM, always a problematic alternative for a member of the British ruling class, for whom Anglicanism was the established church. Edith had first begun to publish her poetry in 1913 and, from 1916 to 1921, edited an annual poetry anthology, Wheels. An impassioned and authoritative advocate of the “new” poetry then emerging in virtually every corner of Anglo-American culture, London included most prominently among those venues, her most significant work would be Gold Coast Customs, published in 1929. That poem addressed, like many another modernist text, the superficiality and artificiality of contemporary urban life and modern society, a theme underscored by a tom-tom beat and her use throughout of other jazz rhythms. Sir Osbert and Sir Sacheverell were no less renowned and active in literary circles. Often in collaboration with each other and with their sister, they were constantly involved with one writing project and art exhibition after another, all of them generally well received, although the Sitwells’ privileged position and familial solidarity often made

Symbolist Movement in Literature, The 559 them the victims of unwarranted criticism. Each of the sons was educated at Oxford and served with distinction in World War I, as would be expected of young men of their class and background. Osbert began to write poetry during the war; however, he ultimately turned his talents more to novel writing and, after he had succeeded to the baronetcy, published a five-volume autobiography that is essentially a personal history of 20th-century British nobility. Sacheverell, the youngest of the three, was primarily a poet, although in reaction to the kinds of criticism that the Sitwells often received, he refused to publish his poetry for many years. He established a considerable reputation as well as an art critic and a writer on architecture. The Sitwells, despite their affinities for each other as siblings, were hardly reclusive loners. They mingled freely among the literary groups that formed early in the century in a city as cosmopolitan and open to daring and change as London was at the time. They were associated with the celebrated Bloomsbury Group that had formed around individuals such as VIRGINIA WOOLF and her husband, Leonard, and they frequented Lady OTTOLINE MORRELL’s weekend gatherings of writers and artists at Garsington, her country estate outside Oxford. Indeed, it was at Garsington sometime in 1915 that Dame Edith first became acquainted with the young Harvard graduate student and poet T. S. Eliot. According to all reports, she was quite taken with him, not a typical response to the shy and often socially awkward Eliot, and would keep up a lifelong acquaintanceship with him, as did her brothers. Dame Edith died on December 9, 1964, barely a month before Eliot’s death on January 4, 1965. She still enjoyed a wide reputation as an eccentric but formidable literary talent and modernist poet. She was followed on May 4, 1969, by her brother Osbert, who had been for many years the victim of Parkinson’s disease. The last born, Sacheverell, who then succeeded to the baronetcy, passed away nearly two decades later, on October 1, 1988. Symbolist Movement in Literature, The When T. S. Eliot wrote in 1930 in the pages of the Criterion, the international literary review that he had helped found and that he edited, that he owed

ARTHUR SYMONS “a great debt,” Eliot was speaking of Symons’s by then well-known introduction to contemporary French literature, particularly its poetry, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. By the time of Eliot’s remark, the Symons book had undergone several revisions since its first publication in 1899. In the view of most commentators, the two latest revised editions, in 1919 and 1924, which expanded Symons’s list of “symbolist” poets considerably and therefore may have diluted his original idea of a concerted movement, did little to improve a text that, by all accounts, had inflamed a generation of young writers in English on both sides of the Atlantic. It may have been the 1908 revised edition that inspired the young Eliot, then an undergraduate at Harvard, when he read the Symons book in December of that same year. In any case, that edition was substantially unchanged from the original edition that had been published in London in September 1899, and it is undoubtedly to that first version that critics and scholars still refer when they cite the book for the powerfully constructive and creative effect that Symons’s work had on the directions that the English-language poetry of the time subsequently took. In those same remarks of his cited earlier, Eliot singles Symons out for having introduced him to the work of Arthur Rimbaud and JULES LAFORGUE, the latter of whose influences on Eliot’s early poetry, and thus, by extension, all his subsequent work as well, are incalculable. Eliot concludes his 1930 homage to Symons by saying that his is one of those books that have “affected the course of my life”—substantial praise coming from a man who by that time, as the poet of The Waste Land and author of such influential critical essays as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems,” was one of the most prominent living writers in English in the world. Added to Eliot’s praise is the fact that Symons had dedicated the original edition of his book to another foremost practitioner of poetry writing in English, the AngloIrish poet and 1925 Nobel laureate WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (who would also later acknowledge a heavy debt to Symons), making it impossible to deny that Symons’s influence played a pivotal role

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in shaping poetry and poetry writing among English speakers at the beginning of the 20th century. There must nevertheless be some puzzlement as to what there was in what Symons had to say about French-speaking poets that could have had such a profound effect on another national literature, English, that already had a rich and varied tradition all its own, one including such highly regarded luminaries as Geoffrey Chaucer, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Lord Byron, to name just a few, and one going back more than a thousand years. The key to the particular effectiveness of Symons’s thesis is his emphasis on symbolism. An understanding of just what he meant by the symbolist movement then taking place in French literature goes a long way toward explaining that movement’s virtually instantaneous and total absorption and subsequent exploitation by poets living and writing across the English Channel from France, and even across the Atlantic.

LITERARY SYMBOLISM At first glance there may seem to be nothing either so startlingly new or refreshingly different about a literature that is symbolist, or symbolical, in its orientation toward reality that it would require someone, in this case Symons, to write an introduction to it as a literary movement. Readers nowadays tend to think of the symbol as the poet’s stock in trade, and there is no reason to assume that there would have been a very different attitude toward the common notion that the symbol is a standard device in both the literary and pictorial arts in Symons’s time. Indeed, the symbol-making capacity of the human mind has long been regarded as one of the most outstanding and principal features of human intelligence. Language itself, some have argued quite successfully, is nothing more than a vast, complex, and continuously updating system of symbolic structures within symbolic structures within symbolic structures. Symons, in his brief introductory chapter, goes out of his way himself to make the same points about the longevity and universality of symbolism and of the symbolic structures identified with the workings of the human mind; nor is it any

part of his intention to suggest that he is, in the most general terms, introducing his readers to concepts with which they are not already familiar. He begins with the indisputable assertion that “without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, even language.” He then defines the word symbolism in equally straightforward terms, according to accepted wisdom, as “a form of expression, at the best but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until it has obtained the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness.” Perhaps Symons’s effort toward definition is more easily accomplished when he next cites the observation of a French scholar and critic who says that a symbol is “a representation which does not aim at being a reproduction.” That is the crux of the matter. The symbol must be something entirely other than the thing, or abstraction, that it symbolizes, yet it must instantly represent, summarize, or symbolize that thing. For present purposes, and very briefly, the rose provides as good an example of what all that may mean as not. From the point of view of nature, the rose is a flower produced by the rose bush largely for the purposes of reproducing the species by attracting, through its scent, insects that then enable pollination. From the point of view of the human, however, although a rose is a rose is a rose that by any other name would smell as sweet, thanks to the efforts of countless love poets in even more countless love poems, the rose betokens—represents but is not a reproduction of—a wealth of meanings, values, emotions, and commentaries on the exquisite fragility of youth and beauty and love, meanings that the object itself, as gorgeous as it may be, does not itself have even the remotest connection to inasmuch as nature is concerned. To return to Symons’s earlier shorthand definition, the rose, as symbol, is an arbitrary expression that becomes a convention approximating all those other, unseen realities that the consciousness may apprehend in it, but only if someone has taken the trouble to put it forth as a symbol. Then all those implied realities are called immediately to mind. Symons notes that what the poets hope is “that our convention [or symbol] is indeed the reflection rather than merely the sign of that unseen

Symbolist Movement in Literature, The 561 reality.” That is, of course, a high hope, one with immense implications for the relationship between language, or human signs, and objective reality, as the philosophers refer to raw experience. Symons can further, and finally, conclude his definition by stating that “We have done much if we have found a recognisable sign”—certainly one of the great understatements in the history of English literary criticism. Symons next addresses the question of what he is hoping to achieve if he begins a work ambitiously entitled The Symbolist Movement in Literature with the completely valid critical admission that symbols, and so by extension symbolism, have been with us since time immemorial, indeed, from the beginnings of the foundation of human language systems. Citing the Scottish philosophical writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) as his authority, Symons sees something more in the symbol than any mere literary device. He sees “some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite,” and he then explains that it is “in such a sense as this that the word Symbolism has been used to describe a movement which, during the last generation, has profoundly influenced the course of French literature. . . . What distinguishes the Symbolism of our day from the Symbolism of the past is that it has now become conscious of itself.” That is a critical qualification on Symons’s part, perhaps the most critical distinction that he makes: These French poets are symbolists not because they are the first to employ symbols (that having been done since time immemorial) but because they are employing symbolism consciously in their poetry in order to reflect hitherto disregarded dimensions of human spiritual and psychological experience. In the remainder of his book, Symons singles out and discusses the comparative merits and innovations of this group of French poets, thereby introducing the young T. S. Eliot to what would have seemed to him to be an entirely new theory of how works of literature ought to be produced, that is, by the conscious construction of symbolic relationships within the poem. It was on this very distinction that much of Eliot’s later critical theory, and indeed modernism as a literary movement, would pivot.

THE FRENCH SYMBOLISTS In the original 1899 edition of the Symons book as well as in the slightly revised edition of 1908, one or the other of which Eliot would have read, the French symbolist poets include Gerárd de Nerval, a playwright and suicide driven mad by his love for an actress (and whom Symons identifies as an unconscious symbolist inasmuch as the subsequent symbolist movement originated with him); Villiers de l’Isle-Adams, author of the immensely influential play Axël, which set a tone for an entire generation and involved itself with the occult; Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, all of whom were already enjoying critical reputations as radically innovative poets; Stéphane Mallarmé, most significant for his prose translations of the poems of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe; and JULES LAFORGUE. It was, in Symons’s view, these contemporary French poets’ very self-consciousness of the fact that they were writing as symbol makers, or symbolists, that makes them interestingly new and that continues to do so to our time. On this point, however, Symons does not go out of his way to establish that earlier poets were not themselves equally as self-conscious in their creation of symbols. While that would not be an easy task, it leaves unclarified what Symons precisely means by the self-consciousness of the French symbolists in their own creative endeavors. His point is well-taken, nevertheless, if by it he means that these French poets made the construction of vivid and often daring and shocking symbols and symbolic connections the essence of their poetic line, to which all other considerations of form and statement were relegated to an inferior status. Even then, there are two ways of approaching the idea of what constitutes a symbol and the symbolic. In the case of Mallarmé, for example, the symbolic involved richly vague references to ideas that the poet may have had but that were never clearly related, almost as if the poet were speaking in a secret code. The vaguer the symbol, the better. For Baudelaire, in contrast, the symbolic might be found in a skewed view of the ordinary, so that elements in typical urban landscapes took on the until-then unrecognized characteristics of decay and deceitfulness. For Laforgue, meanwhile, the symbolic might

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entail making a farfetched connection. In one poem, he compares his ideas to a foreign lamp. His meaning is not obscure or even complicated so much as totally unlikely and therefore surprising (and, finally, sensible in a coercive fashion). Influenced by Symons’s recommendation of the French symbolists, Eliot’s poetry and the poetry of other English modernists such as EZRA POUND and Yeats partake of and exploit all these various modes of symbolizing and symbol making. By now, no doubt, it has become a style of poetry writing that takes little getting used to, so much did it come in the modernist era to dominate the English literary landscape as a result of Symons’s book and of the stock that the young poets of the time placed in it. As with any work whose reception is overrated at first, Eliot, while never modifying his sense of a deep indebtedness to Symons, would eventually say, in 1952, that the elder poet’s criticism did not in and of itself stand the test of time. Part of the problem was that Eliot felt that Symons neglected some other important examples of the movement, but it may also be that Symons was more adept at defining than describing or presenting.

SYMBOLIST POETRY In applying his definition of symbolism to the actual poetry, Symons is often scant of detail and does not always keep on task, leaving it to the reader’s own sense of exactly what this new French poetry is doing that is new and different, to determine any real understanding of the features that distinguish the movement and its style. Indeed, a reader steeped in literary history might otherwise identify Symons’s attributes of French symbolism as similar to what in the English literary tradition was called metaphysical poetry. It was itself a movement of sorts that had flourished in the early to mid-17th century and was practiced by such poets as JOHN DONNE and Andrew Marvell, both of whom the young Eliot also came later to admire and to imitate. Eliot would himself observe this obvious affinity between a French symbolist such as Laforgue and an English metaphysical poet such as Donne in his essay, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), noting their mutual admiration for farfetched comparisons,

or conceits, and their bold, unconventional use of language, borrowing as freely from the language of religion and science as from any literary models. That same affinity between the English metaphysical poets and the French symbolists would also be observed by the American literary critic Edmund Wilson in his landmark 1931 study of modernism, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930. Indeed, Wilson argues that it was through the French symbolists, themselves influenced by Mallarmé’s bad translations of Poe, that an earlier vigor was restored to English poetry, which had itself lost sight of the accomplishments of elder poets such as Donne. Finally, however, Symons does not have to adhere to the same standards of judgment and precision to which we hold those who, their ideas shaped by him, were able to refine the concepts at Symons’s expense. Toward the end of his introductory chapter, Symons can speak of the new style that these symbolists bring to poetry writing in impressionistic terms that do little to benefit a reader’s understanding now. He talks of their “perfecting form so that form may be annihilated”; notes how “description is banished that beautiful things may be evoked, magically”; and says that “the regular beat of verse is broken in order that words may fly, upon subtler wings.” One hundred years and much literary theory later, those ideas may seem to hold very little water or to have very much in the way of substance behind them, but they inspired those who could then better grasp their meaning in their freshness, Eliot among them. These ideas of Symons’s, expressed in a prose filled with the same symbolic intensity as the new kind of poetry that he was attempting to introduce, did in fact create a new kind of English poetry, despite how much, on closer examination, that new poetry may be seen to have flourished as well from roots that had already been firmly established in the English literary tradition. Symons believed that in the symbol literature “may at last attain liberty, and its authentic speech.” Precisely what that may mean may be up for debate for decades to come, but readers have Eliot’s own testimony that through the influence of Laforgue, whom he encountered first in the pages

Symons, Arthur 563 of Symons, Eliot found a way to write poetry in his own language and idiom. That discovery on Eliot’s part went to form an even greater part of the birth of modernism. There are very few works of literary criticism that can claim such impressive results as Symons’s on that count alone. Symons, Arthur (1865–1945) The late 19thcentury English poet and critic Arthur Symons is one of the few among those poets writing in English at the time that Eliot chose poetry writing as a profession whom Eliot would later cite as having had any shaping influence on his own poetry. From this vantage point, it is clear that that acknowledged influence was due largely if not entirely to Eliot’s exposure to Symons’s groundbreaking critical study, The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE. First published in 1899, it would be encountered by Eliot in December 1908 when he was a young Harvard undergraduate, and in its pages he would discover the French symbolist poet JULES LAFORGUE, from whose influence much of the most apparently idiosyncratic features of Eliot’s first major poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” outstanding among them, would come. Born February 28, 1865, in Pembrokeshire, England, and a near contemporary of the AngloIrish poet W. B. YEATS, to whom The Symbolist Movement was dedicated, Symons was a recognized literary figure in his own right when his celebrated

critical study appeared. Along with Yeats and Ernest Dowson, he was a member of the Rhymer’s Club; had published work in the Yellow Book, the outstanding avant-garde journal of his day; and had become, in 1896, the editor of the Savoy, whose art director was none other than the remarkably talented illustrator and designer Aubrey Beardsley. In keeping with the symbolist techniques that he did much to popularize, Symons published two volumes of poetry—Silhouettes in 1892 and London Nights in 1895—that lyrically confronted the increasing complexities of urban life. He also translated the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine and wrote travel pieces. A mental breakdown in 1908, however, effectively ended Symons’s writing career, although he published, in 1930, Confessions, an account of his ordeal. Symons died on January 22, 1945, having outlived most of his contemporaries from the aesthete movement that had characterized Edwardian English poetry and had left a young T. S. Eliot without any viable role models in his native tongue, either British or American. Nevertheless, much earlier, in 1930, Eliot had felt confident enough to say that he owed Symons “a great debt” for having introduced him those many years before, through the pages of The Symbolist Movement in Literature, to both the spirit and the masters of that movement in France, thereby giving impetus and a profound shape to Eliot’s own then burgeoning career as a poet.

T,U Thayer, Scofield See DIAL.

ally acquainted with Luther, and Michael Servetus (1511–53), who died at the stake for his writings rejecting the Nicene dogma of the Trinity that had been in place among orthodox Christians since the time of the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. That historic gathering had been convened at the order of none other than the Roman emperor Constantine for the express purpose of clarifying and codifying Christian beliefs. Given those circumstances surrounding the sect’s origins, it is not difficult to see how Unitarians quickly came to embrace as well a thoroughgoing respect for the rule of reason and for so-called free thinking. While the Unitarian view of Christ and the nature of his divinity might have remained a topic of debate and frequent readjustments among them, none of these views would have passed muster with beliefs held by Catholic, or Trinitarian, Christians. Indeed, Unitarianism is regarded by some as a return to the Arian heresy from the days of early Christianity, later manifested among the Albigensians in Southern France in the late Middle Ages and generally associated with doctrine that falls under the heading of gnosticism. While accepting Christ as some species of a divine being, the Arian heresy rejected the notion that Christ was true god and true man, a point of contention that was the real crux of the doctrinal dispute that had been settled at Nicaea. Unitarianism made inroads on the continent of Europe, particularly in Poland and Hungary, but

Unitarianism Although Unitarianism has taken various forms over the centuries as the name of the movement clearly denotes, the central tenet of Unitarian Christianity is that it opposes the doctrine of the Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost—but recognizes the moral authority of Jesus of Nazareth, whom most Christian sects venerate as the Christ, the second person of the Trinity or Son of God. Unitarianism as a historical system of belief—that is, one whose emergence can be documented—dates back to the first decades of the Protestant Reformation that was inspired, in 1517, by Martin Luther’s rejection of Roman authority in directing church teaching. For Luther, the individual Christian should be guided by faith and conscience, founded on a careful attention and strict adherence to Holy Scripture, rather than the dogmatic assertions of Roman CATHOLICISM, with its hierarchical gridlock on doctrine guided by an individual, the pope in Rome. The freedom to think and to believe as one chose led to a wide variety of reforms and conflicts within what until then had been traditional Christian doctrine; among those dissenters were those who took an anti-Trinitarian view of the godhead. God was one—hence, Unitarianism. Foremost among this hardly new but, in Christian circles, totally reinvigorated doctrine were Martin Cellarius (1499–1564), who was person564

Unitarianism it did not become firmly and formally entrenched in England until the last quarter of the 18th century. Regarded as nonconformism, Unitarian ideals understandably tended to flourish with far more vigor in England’s American colonies, however, particularly the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded in and around BOSTON, and especially in the wake of the religious revival known as the “Great Awakening” in the early part of the 18th century. Peopled by individuals seeking religious freedom and many times themselves former victims of intolerance, American Unitarians tended to take on a more and more open-minded, service-oriented aspect. By the middle of the same century, HARVARD College was a center for Unitarian thought, and Unitarian congregations began to appear throughout New England. As Congregationalism, indeed, it became the more or less “established” religion of English colonists and their descendants in that region of the future American republic. William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) eventually would emerge as the leader of American Unitarianism, which was further shaped by the transcendental idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Unitarian Universalism, as the church eventually came to be called, was respectful of the dignity of the individual and of the freedom to think as one chooses, yet its membership by 1900 is said to have numbered little more than 100,000. Among them would have been a young T. S. Eliot, whose grandfather, WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT (1811–87), had attended Harvard Divinity School, from which he was ordained a Unitarian minister on August 17, 1834. Indeed, although his paternal grandfather had passed away the year before Eliot’s birth, the infant Eliot would be baptized in the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Messiah that his grandfather had founded more than a half-century earlier when, newly ordained minister that he was,

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he had traveled westward to ST. LOUIS to perform missionary work for his faith. Anyone even only vaguely familiar with the path that Eliot’s own religious, intellectual, and spiritual life took almost from the time of his earliest maturity would recognize the apparent paradoxes that all the foregoing suggests. Put simply, Eliot became more and more a Trinitarian, expressing his devotion to Catholicism and opposition to humanism in essays beginning with “The Function of Criticism” in 1923 and continuing into such pieces as “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt” in 1927, the year of his famous conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Although in several of the quatrain poems composed between 1917 and 1918—“The Hippopotamus” and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” come most immediately to mind—a youthful Eliot had appeared to be appropriately irreverent in any expressions of belief, by 1919, in “Gerontion,” he speaks of “Christ the tiger” in tones that suggest more awe than reverence, but that still suggest something more substantial than the rational idea. He does as much in responding to the chaos and increasing secularism of modern life, itself perhaps a by-product of the reformist zeal inspired by Luther and his contemporaries, the early Unitarians among them. And yet in doing so Eliot himself was rejecting the traditions of a free-thinking liberalism in which and with which he had himself been raised. Rather than looking for an underlying psychology, however, it is easy to see in Eliot’s conversion just that—a genuine conversion back to what were for him the traditions and faith of his ancestors before humanism and its attendant secularism burst on the scene in the late 15th century. Even that reading, however, gives Eliot’s conversion a sociocultural spin, whereas fairness and respect for a fellow should compel us finally to imagine that it must have been inspired, as such things most often are, by a genuine spiritual need.

V vers libre There is probably no single literary term peculiar to the last century that is more widely known than vers libre, or free verse and yet, too, no other term that has been more freely adapted and applied, suggesting that, in keeping with its own insistence on a measure of liberality, the term has been as loosely defined as the sort of poetry and poetic style it purports to identify. Generally, vers libre is most often associated with the modernist poetry that was emerging in the early 20th century in America among young writers such as T. S. Eliot and EZRA POUND, although it initially had been applied to a loosely organized movement dubbed the symbolist movement by ARTHUR SYMONS that had originated in France in the midto late 19th century. The term could be applied as well, however, to experimentation with the poetic line occurring coincidentally in England and, to a greater extent, America at the same time. The American poet Walt Whitman experimented openly and intentionally with rhythms and line lengths in his personal epic Leaves of Grass, and he did not hesitate to describe his unfashionable verse as “barbaric yawp” and “lawless music,” a “type of the modern,” in good iconoclastic American fashion. Another Civil War–era American poet, Emily Dickinson, meanwhile, used, it seemed, whatever poetic form that her fancy, and the fancy of the moment of inspired creation, took, writing short, enigmatic poems with little more than dashes for punctuation. In England, during relatively the same period, Gerard Manley Hopkins was experi-

menting with what he called “sprung rhythm”— lines of varying syllabic length that nevertheless had the five strong stresses required of the pentameter, or five-beat, line that, primarily as blank verse, had been the mainstay of English prosody since the time of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE and John Milton. Still, Dickinson and Hopkins were not widely or extensively published until well into the early part of the 20th century, and Whitman’s voice, style, and persona were so uniquely his own as to preclude if not in fact to defy imitation. Indeed, Eliot would say that he did not know Whitman at all as a youth and that even into his adulthood Whitman’s poetry took some getting used to for him. It would be the French symbolist poets, particularly those to whom Eliot had been introduced by Arthur Symons in his 1899 study, The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, that would give rise and impetus to Eliot’s own initial interest in and then advancement and further development of free verse in English poetry. Once again, the term must be approached cautiously and in a relativist manner. While the idea of free verse can sometimes imply as much as a total abandonment of all formal considerations in the writing of poetry, the tenets of vers libre, if the practices that emerged could be called tenets, were hardly ever meant to encourage the complete disregard of formal elements such as meter or even rhyme in poetic compositions. Pound put it best when he urged fellow poets to write not according to the mechanical precision of the metronome, 566

vers libre with its monotonous repetition of fixed beats in keeping with the rigid requirements of the English iambic pentameter line, but in the spirit of the musical phrase instead. For the French symbolist precursors, JULES LAFORGUE prominent among them, poets to whom Eliot was introduced initially by the Symons book, the rules governing the formal structure of French poetry were so strict that even only tampering with their rigidity by shortening or randomly varying lines and the length of stanzas would have qualified them for the title of free verse, although such tamperings often resulted in a poetry that might strike a typical reader as being rather formalist by today’s standards. The mid-19th-century French poet Théophile Gautier, for example, whom Symons would include among the symbolists (but only as an afterthought in a later edition than the one that first inspired Eliot), worked extensively with quatrains—four line stanzas of tetrameter (four-beat) verse that rhymed generally only on the second and fourth lines—that were employed successfully, more or less, by both Eliot and Pound in poems that they composed in the late teens, primarily 1917 through 1919. While it is true that such a strictly formal stanza would not count as free verse by virtually anyone’s standards, Eliot, in poems such as “Sweeney Erect” and “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” created a poetry that is unmistakably modernist in its tone and attitude. In the final analysis, it is safe to say that the free verse movement, such as it was, has taken roots that it is difficult to imagine ever being undone and has come to typify, perhaps unfairly and certainly a bit misleadingly, the spirit of modernism in poetry as being one of a free-wheeling and rebellious cast. Surely, if nothing else, the free exercise of the principles of free verse prosody did serve notice to readers everywhere that nothing in poetry writing would ever be the same again. As WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, a poet not at all enamored of free-form composition, might have it, with the emergence of vers libre, a terrible beauty was born. Nevertheless, the vers libre of poets such as Pound and Eliot requires as much, if not more, precision, control, and craftsmanship as any more-formal and rigidly prescribed prosody ever might, and that is a point

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that the casual reader and more-casual novice poet often forget or neglect. In “Reflections on Vers Libre,” a 1917 essay first published in the New Statesman and then reprinted by Eliot many years later, in 1965, in To Criticize the Critic, he would ridicule the notion that there is any such thing as vers libre, concluding that “there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.” The parochial interests inspiring the cleverness of that sort of a formulation aside, it would be equally as ridiculous to deny that the freeing of verse from long-established formal constraints remains one of the most outstandingly obvious achievements of the modernist movement in poetry. Much of Eliot’s poetry, even from long after such modernist innovations had become passé, can be regarded as outstanding examples of that kind of liberated poetry. For Eliot, whose poetic ear seemed for the most part to require a dramatic context for it to be most fully realized, vers libre was akin to what he would call the spoken idiom of colloquial speech, as opposed to the stilted and often artificial-sounding qualities of what is called poetic diction. In his remarks on his early influences, Eliot often stresses that quality of natural speech to be found in the poetry of the contemporary English poets whom he most admired in his youth, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson in particular. (As for American models, Eliot remarked emphatically in a 1936 lecture that “there were no American poets at all” available to him in his youth.) He also frequently attributed his early attraction to Laforgue to that poet’s showing him the value of shaping one’s own personal idiom or voice into a poetic tool. The notion of a poetry that would sound like speech as it is spoken is, then, perhaps the best and certainly the broadest definition that can be applied to vers libre. If nothing else, it is an idea endorsed by Eliot when he likened Laforgue’s vers libre to the later verse of Shakespeare, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur, all of them 17th-century dramatists and, as such, not even vaguely contemporary writers. To use vers libre is not, then, to write as if one were speaking in a current vernacular so much as to write as if one were using a language whose rhythms are shaped by the ebb and flow of living, natural speech, and the dynamics of natural experience that shape

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it. Such poetry is “free” then to take it own shape as the exigencies of the moment require, rather than being contrived to fit a predetermined rhythm, rhyme scheme, and so forth. For his own part, Eliot would maintain the principles of free verse, particularly in its analogy to music and to the spoken language, throughout his career, although for the popular imagination his use of it very likely achieves its most outstanding expression in the fragmentary lines, disjointed sentences and ideas, and chaotic stanzaic patterns of

his 1922 masterwork and most celebrated achievement, the famously unreadable The Waste Land. It is difficult to deny that in that poem Eliot brings to bear vers libre principles, in the sense of the unbridled and the unkempt, for the very purpose of exposing in epic terms the catastrophe of a culture and value system that can no longer cohere but that still clings to survival. Suitably enough, then, more than any other poet of the period, Eliot is to be credited with making vers libre and modernism synonymous in the popular imagination.

W Washington University A major American research institution of higher learning, Washington University was founded in ST. LOUIS in 1853 by WILLIAM GREENLEAF ELIOT (1811–87), the poet’s grandfather. Originally called, over William’s protest, the Eliot Seminary, the academy was intended to be the educational arm of the Church of the Messiah, which was the first church west of the Mississippi devoted to UNITARIANISM and which William had also founded, in 1834. In 1857 the seminary was reorganized into Washington University, largely with the support of Eliot’s congregation, and Eliot would serve as its president from 1870 to 1887, contributing funds as well to its continued construction and maintenance. In keeping with the spirit of tolerance and freedom of thought out of which the Unitarian movement had sprung in the early 16th century, the university’s charter forbade sectarianism in religion or politics. At the time of William’s death on January 23, 1887, there were 1,600 students enrolled in the university, and 100 faculty members were teaching in its colleges and schools of law, medicine, dentistry, fine arts, and engineering, an impressive achievement. On June 9, 1953, Eliot would deliver the address “American Literature and the American Language” at the university. By then, Eliot had long since renounced his U.S. citizenship in order to become a British citizen, and he had never before, in a long and illustrious career as a literary critic and scholar, turned his attention to the accomplishments in letters of his native land. His choice of topic that

evening was apparently inspired by, and certainly endorsed, the debt that he owed to the culture and social life of St. Louis for the formative experiences that he had encountered there during the first 17 years of his life. Weston, Jessie L[aidlay] (1850–1928) An independent scholar, Jessie L. Weston entered the pages of literary history when her iconoclastic work on the origins of the legend of the Holy Grail, FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE (1920), was cited by T. S. Eliot in his headnote to the notes that he appended to The Waste Land when Boni & Liveright published that celebrated modernist poem in book form in New York in December 1922. Although not an unknown in the areas of folklore and medieval Arthurian literature in which she had been publishing since 1896, Weston in From Ritual to Romance challenged the long-held tradition among scholars that the Grail legends were wholly Christian in origin. She proposed that they were instead the result of overlaying a Christian mythos on older Welsh myths regarding a so-called Dish of Plenty. Following a methodology famously introduced by Sir JAMES FRAZER in his monumental anthropological study The Golden Bough (1890), Weston used cross-cultural sources in folklore as much as literary and historical sources in an attempt to validate her contentions and conclusions. Though much railed against, as any daringly original work of critical scholarship is liable to be, Weston’s study continues to have an influence on the direction 569

570 Woolf, Leonard that legitimate Grail studies take to this day. At the very least, she proposed a thesis that, once it has been introduced into the discussion, can never again be easily overlooked or dismissed. In The Waste Land, Eliot seems to have focused primarily on the vegetation myths and rituals that, according to Weston’s reading of the Grail legend, apparently underlie it, rather than on the tradition that the legend magically underscores that transformation of the natural universe rendered by Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Woolf, Leonard See WOOLF, VIRGINIA. Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941) The English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost practitioners of modernism in literature at the height of that movement’s heyday. A member of the famous Bloomsbury Group, which included such other literary and intellectual notables as E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s husband), and Vita Sackville-West, who was for a time Virginia’s lover. With Leonard, Virginia also ran the Hogarth Press, which published many of the avant-garde writers of the day, Eliot among them. Born in London’s fashionable Hyde Park district as Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, Woolf was the daughter of the eminent editor and critic Sir Leslie Stephen, himself the widower of novelist William Thackeray’s daughter. Such luminaries as the American novelist Henry James and poet James Russell Lowell were frequent guests at the Stephens’s home, and Woolf was raised not merely in the lap of luxury but in a very literary environment at the heart of London’s intellectual life. It was no surprise, then, that she herself should become a noted novelist and essayist. Her most critically acclaimed and very likely most enduring works are the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), each utilizing the complexities of a stream-of-consciousness narrative technique and multiple points of view that change without warning. In keeping with modernism’s focus on the ordinary, on the other hand, they tell rather homely tales bordering on the trivial, which they seek to enhance. Supposedly, the novels were loosely

based on her recollections of her own childhood. Woolf suffered a nervous breakdown when she was only 13, apparently as a result of sexual abuse by her two half-brothers, and serious bouts of mental illness would trouble her all the rest of her life. She eschewed the label of being a feminist writer and duly regarded hers as the great themes of humanism, inspired no doubt by the tragedy of her childhood. Leonard (1880–1969), the son of a London barrister, was himself a member of the Cambridge Apostles from whom the Bloomsbury Group, named for its reasonably fashionable London locale, emerged. A political theorist and civil servant by training and profession, he had married Virginia in 1912, and together they began the Hogarth Press using a small, hand-operated printing press in 1917, partly as part of Leonard’s efforts to keep Virginia distracted from the frequent bouts of intense depression that she continued to suffer. Hogarth published several of Eliot’s early volumes, including his Poems in June 1919, but later had a professional parting of the ways in 1925 when Eliot, now an editor with Faber & Gwyer, not only began to publish under their imprint but lured other writers from the Woolfs’ stable. Virginia had a begrudging love-hate relationship with the shy but immensely talented and proper young American poet. He intimated to the Woolfs many of the anxieties that his first marriage to Vivien caused him over the years. For her part, Virginia saw him as a stuffed shirt who wore a “four-piece suit,” so uptight was he. Leonard, who was Jewish, was among the first to acknowledge that Eliot had a steak of the gardenvariety ANTI-SEMITISM typical of men of his class, background, and the times. Virginia recorded in her diary in 1925 that her husband regarded Eliot as a “queer shifty creature”—which could mean a variety of things, none of them approving or complimentary. Eliot could count many Jews, most notably Woolf himself and Sidney Schiff, the novelist and art patron, among “some of his best friends,” as the standard protest against being prejudiced goes. Nevertheless, that may have been the very problem— that Eliot did not recognize what was anti-Semitic in his attitudes and behavior. What someone like Leonard very likely had encountered in Eliot was a tacit assumption on Eliot’s part that categorized

Woolf, Virginia Jews collectively as cultural outsiders and so helped foster the stereotypes that are at the root the cause of more virulent forms of anti-Semitism. With the passage of time, and somewhat as a result of the breach caused by Eliot’s employment with Faber, the Woolfs and the Eliots saw less and less of each other, particularly as the Eliots’ marriage began to disintegrate in the mid- to late 1920s.

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Virginia’s perennial depressions, through which Leonard nursed her, would only be exacerbated by the outbreak of war in September 1939. She committed suicide by filling her pockets with stones and wading out into the River Ouse near her home in Rodmell on March 28, 1941. Her last work, Between the Acts, was published posthumously, also in 1941.

Y Yeats, W[illiam] B[utler] (1865–1939) The Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats remains one of the most significant literary figures writing in English during the 20th century. His career as a poet, essayist, and eventual dramatist began, however, as early as 1885, when the young Yeats published a handful of poems in the Dublin University Review. If T. S. Eliot had never become aware of him in any other way, he would have been familiar with Yeats’s name and reputation as a symbolist poet from the time when, in 1908, the young Eliot read The SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE, that landmark 1899 critical work dedicated to Yeats by its author, ARTHUR SYMONS. Such a singular distinction comments on the renown that Yeats had achieved as a poet among his own contemporaries. Born the son of a pre-Raphaelite painter in Dublin on June 13, 1865, Yeats would have been exposed from his childhood to the world of avantgarde literature and art, and that exposure would only have been intensified when the family made its home in London from 1867 to 1881. Yeats originally planned to be an artist himself, but his interests were drawn more to two vaguely related areas of arcane knowledge that seemed better suited to literary expression. One was the occult, with its emphasis on secret ritual, ancient wisdom, communication with spirits, astrology, and mystical experiences. The other was ancient Ireland’s body of Celtic mythology, which was just then undergoing a revival and which included, along with the typical stories of legendary heroes,

strange tales of human interaction with the world of fairies and sprites. Yeats’s further, fervent association with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that incorporated Rosicrucian and possibly Masonic traditions, found its match only in the intensity with which he devoted himself to trying to preserve the remnants of Ireland’s long neglected Celtic traditions. Finally, largely through an on-again, off-again love affair with another young Dubliner, Maude Gonne, Yeats became attached as well to Ireland’s increasingly open struggle for political independence from the British Crown and the parliamentary authority of the English. The resulting combination, in his poetry, of the romantic with the realistic, the practical with the spiritual, the passionately private with the publicly impassioned, and the ancient with the modern made it easy for Yeats to accomplish successfully the transition from being a flighty poet of the late Victorian or Edwardian period, with its emphasis on ars gratia artis (“art for art’s sake,” that is, art with no interest in effecting social, moral, or political change) to being a major poetic voice of the modernist period. No doubt the transition was made even easier under the tutelage of his American protégé EZRA POUND, who served as his personal secretary from 1908 to 1913. More often than not, nevertheless, Yeats managed to accomplish this transition in poem after poem by finding, in his lifelong obsession with discovering symbolic patterns and discerning historical 572

Yeats, W[illiam] B[utler] repetition, an apparently ceaseless order to human existence and, hence, art itself. Yeats’s hallmark lyricism became less flowery but no less delightfully eccentric. If, then, some of his earliest poems deal with fairies, Irish heroes, or Rosicrucian mysticism, his later poetry deals with finding in ancient conflicts, such as the Trojan War of Homeric myth, and in fabulously ancient cities, most prominent among them Byzantium and Constantinople, the symbolic roots of present dichotomies between peace and war and between the requirements of artistic creation and the practical necessities of natural processes and human societies. There was one other factor intervening, however, in shaping the world poet that Yeats eventually became. That factor was Yeats’s own interest, as time passed, in identifying himself and his people with the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy although he associated himself with the cause of Roman Catholic Ireland’s freedom. During the first few decades of the 20th century, Protestant Ireland, the Ireland of Yeats’s people, was witnessing the erosion of its three-centuries-old power base as the older order of indigenous ethnic Irish, primarily Roman Catholics who had been reduced to penury and peasantry by their Protestant English overlords, seized more and more power both by legitimate political means and through armed conflict with the troops and police forces of the British occupation. Thus, Yeats’s earliest poetry offered such titles as “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” “Fergus and the Druid,” “The Man Who dreamed of Faeryland,” “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Secret Rose,” and his most renowned poem from this period, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” During his middle career he turned to such titles as “No Second Troy” and “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation,” or a mouthful such as “To a Wealthy Man who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if It Were Proved the People Wanted Pictures.” So much, indeed, did Yeats become embroiled in the conflicting claims of Irish nationalism and his own identification with the Anglo-Irish ruling class that as cataclysmic an event in modern European history as the hostilities on the continent that began in August 1914 and that eventually became

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known as World War I hardly figure in his poetry except as that violent conflagration affected him personally. The death, in aerial combat, of Robert Gregory, the son of Yeats’s dear friend and benefactor, Lady Gregory, resulted, for example, in two exceptionally powerful poems, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” Yeats also addressed the social and political turmoil that would ensue as a result of the war in one of his most widely anthologized poems, “The Second Coming,” published in 1919. Otherwise, Yeats’s poetry writing continued in a relatively insular fashion until 1916. Then two events, occurring within 18 months of each other, provided the further impetus that would shape much of the remainder of Yeats’s career as a poet, allowing him to escape his 19th-century sonorities, but not their essential sentimentality. The first was the armed Irish nationalist, or republican, uprising of Easter 1916, popularly known to history as the Easter Rebellion. Though the bloody assault on Dublin’s General Post Office was a military disaster, and the leading conspirators, including Maude Gonne’s husband, Captain John MacBride, were captured, tried, and executed by England, the effort was such an affront to British authority in Ireland that it culminated, in 1921, in the formation of an Irish Free State in the south of Ireland. The north of Ireland would remain under British authority, as it has to this day. Competing Irish nationalist factions would first come to blows over the terms of the so-called peace and partitioning of Ireland. By the mid-1920s, however, enough military order and political stability had been achieved in the south for Yeats himself to serve as a senator in the government of the fledgling republic that that portion of Ireland quickly became. If that series of developments effectively provided closure for the impassioned spirit of Irishness that had both benefited and afflicted his poetry virtually from its beginning, the other event, occurring in October 1917, provided his poetry with new sources of meaning and inspiration that would also come both to benefit and to afflict the clarity of his poetic vision. That October, Yeats’s new wife, Georgie, later George, Hyde-Lees, who was also interested in occult lore, began to channel what

574 Yeats, W[illiam] B[utler] she claimed to be, and what Yeats took for, spirit communications. How authentic these experiences were will forever remain in the realm of critical and biographical debate in Yeats studies. What remains indisputable, however, is that much of his best later poetry, beginning with the 1919 volume The Wild Swans at Coole, would result from Yeats’s theories of human psychology and human history that subsequently emerged from these alleged communications “from beyond.” Most notable among the same poetic achievements are the two Byzantium poems, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1925) and “Byzantium” (1931). With their mystical talk of phases of the Moon and of the primary and antithetical gyres, meanwhile, the communications also gave Yeats the material for A Vision, a complexly obscure prose analysis of the system that he was thus able to propose. Indeed, if any one work of Yeats’s would have permitted Eliot, in 1933, to take Yeats to task as a poet for having created, in his visionary poetry, a world that is not one of “real Good and Evil, of holiness or sin,” it would have to be because of the ostensibly outlandish ideas that Yeats put forth in A Vision, which was first published in 1925 and subsequently revised and reissued in 1937. Having been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, Yeats had by then been a leading figure on the world literary scene for nearly a halfcentury. Yet his spirit of poetic daring and thematic experimentation never stinted, despite Yeats’s constantly shifting interests and allegiances. In “Among School Children,” another renowned poem from

that same period, and culminating in his volume The Tower in 1928, Yeats could, in powerfully personal terms, review the essential tragedy of human aspiration while still endorsing such aspiring. During the last decade of his life, Yeats’s creative vision underwent one last period of revitalization and renewal. Without necessarily forsaking all his earlier emphases on pagan myth and the occult, not to mention the passions of Irish republicanism and the conflicts of Irish identity, in such later poems as “Lapis Lazuli” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” both from 1938, Yeats could, with the same lyrical beauty that had infused the fairy poems of his youth, direct an unforgivingly harsh light on his earlier and, some might argue, virtually lifelong unwillingness to accept life on its terms. “Now that my ladder’s gone,” Yeats concludes “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” It turned out to be one of his last poems, composed in September 1938 (he would die the following January). Yeats’s enduring greatness as a poet is ensured by an even greater unwillingness on his part ever to rest on his laurels or leave well enough alone. While his apparently insatiable thirst for truth and restless quest for wisdom may have frequently led him down paths better left unexplored or, if explored, unexpressed, they made his a body of work that incorporates the very essence of those drives, transforming their raw and often destructive energies into what he once termed “monuments of unaging intellect”—that is, into the beautiful, into works of art.

PART IV

Appendices

T. S. ELIOT CHRONOLOGY 1888 Born on September 23 in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns.

vard. Begins work on the poems that will eventually become “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and the “Preludes.” 1910 Earns a master’s degree in English literature at Harvard. That fall, sets off for a year abroad in Paris to study French language and literature at the Sorbonne and attend lectures at the Collège de France conducted by the renowned French idealist philosopher Henri Bergson. Works on “Portrait of a Lady,” a poem that he does not complete until November 1911, after his return to America. Strikes up a friendship with a young Frenchman, Jean Verdenal, and becomes interested in Charles Maurras’s Action Française.

1896 Henry, Sr., builds a substantial summer house on Eastern Point at Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the family has been vacationing annually. Eliot learns to sail in these waters. 1898–1905 Is educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis. Publishes several stories in the Smith Academy Record inspired by the native village exhibits at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair. 1905 Spends his last year of secondary education as a student at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, in preparation for matriculating as an undergraduate at Harvard College.

1911 Composes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In April, travels to London, in July to Munich and then south into Northern Italy. Returns home in September and that fall semester enrolls in Harvard’s graduate program to read for his doctorate in philosophy. Composes “La Figlia Che Piange” in November.

1906 Passes the Harvard entrance exam in June. Enrolls at Harvard College, where he completes the undergraduate program in three years’ time.

1912 Meets and falls in love with Emily Hale.

1908 In December, discovers Arthur Symons’s study, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Begins to write poetry inspired by the French symbolists, in particular Jules Laforgue.

1913 In June, purchases a copy of F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, the work that would become the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Studies that fall semester under Josiah Royce. In October, is appointed president of the University Philosophical Club.

1909 Joins the board of Harvard’s undergraduate literary magazine, the Advocate. Graduates from Har577

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1914 In March, meets Bertrand Russell, then visiting at Harvard. Eliot obtains a Sheldon Travelling Fellow in Philosophy to study Aristotle under the tutelage of Harold Joachim, one of Bradley’s disciples at Merton College, Oxford. Arrives in England in July and is in Marburg, Germany, when war between Russia and Germany beaks out on August 1. Meets fellow American poet Ezra Pound in London on September 22. In early October, Pound sends Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine, for which Pound is the European editor. Eliot begins his course of study at Oxford on October 6. 1915 On April 24, meets Vivien Haigh-Wood, the daughter of the landscape and portrait painter Charles Haigh-Wood; they marry on June 26. Jean Verdenal is killed in action in the Dardanelles in May. “Prufrock” comes out in Poetry in June. Summers with his family at Gloucester in July; Eliot will otherwise maintain his residence in England from that time on. Through Lady Ottoline Morrell’s literary salon at her estate at Garsington, comes to know Dame Edith and Sir Osbert Sitwell, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis. Publishes the “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in Blast; “Portrait of a Lady” in Others; and “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” and “Cousin Nancy” in Poetry. Pound includes him in his Catholic Anthology of new voices then emerging in English and American poetry. 1916 Completes his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Knowledge and the Objects of Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.” Harvard accepts his thesis without any defense, transatlantic travel being impeded by the war. Teaches Latin at Highgate Junior School and lectures on modern French and English literature. 1917 In March begins to work for Lloyds Bank’s colonial and foreign department, a job that will main-

tain him financially for the next seven years. In September begins to teach a six-month series of weekly lectures on Victorian literature. Is reviewing for the prestigious Little Review and is appointed assistant poetry editor for the equally significant publication, the Egoist. Publishes “Dans le restaurant.” With Pound, begins to experiment with the quatrain form developed by the 19th-century French poet Théophile Gautier. Poems such as “The Hippopotamus” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales” ensue. 1918 In January, Knopf publishes in New York Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, Eliot’s introduction to Pound’s latest work. 1919 The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press releases Poems in May. Goes on a walking tour of southern France with Pound in August; views the Magdalenian cave drawings to be found there. In September, begins to write leading articles for the Times Literary Supplement. The Egoist ceases publication in December. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is published in its final numbers in September and December. The idea of the objective correlative is introduced in the essay “Hamlet and His Problems.” 1920 In February, Knopf publishes Poems 1920, which includes “Gerontion,” and the Ovid Press publishes Ara Vos Prec. Meets James Joyce in Paris in August. That September, intimates his hopes to find the time to work on “something . . . better or more important” than anything that he has accomplished thus far—the future The Waste Land. The Methuen Press publishes his first collection of critical prose, The Sacred Wood, that November. 1921 In March, Vivien collapses and has to be hospitalized. With Dial editor Scofield Thayer, in July approaches Lady Rothermere with a proposal for a companion journal, the Criterion, that Eliot will edit from London. Works on The Waste Land. In

T. S. Eliot Chronology late September, a physician recommends a prolonged period of total rest for Eliot. Eliot takes a three-month leave from Lloyds. In October, convalesces with Vivien in Margate; in November, checks into a clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland. Introduces the idea of the dissociation of sensibility in the essay “The Metaphysical Poets.” 1922 In Paris in January, shares with Pound the manuscript of He Do the Police in Different Voices, an early draft of The Waste Land. In a letter to New York lawyer and art patron John Quinn, Pound declares it “a damn good poem.” The Waste Land is published simultaneously in the first number of Eliot’s Criterion in London and Thayer’s Dial in New York in October and published in book form, with notes, by Boni & Liveright in New York in December. Through Quinn’s support Eliot is awarded a prize of $2,000 by the Dial. Eliot remands to Quinn the original The Waste Land manuscript, which includes Pound’s and Vivien’s suggested revisions, most of which Eliot incorporates into the finished poem. 1923 Publishes 10 articles between April and December 1923, including “The Function of Criticism.” Begins “Sweeney Agonistes.” Meets William Force Stead, an American poet who has also been ordained an Anglican priest.

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Spends January, February, and March presenting the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, which, titled “The Metaphysical Poets of the Seventeenth Century,” are to be the first part of a never-completed trilogy to be titled “The Disintegration of the Intellect.” Begins to translate the French poet St.-John Perse’s Anabase. Visiting with his family in Rome later that year, Eliot falls to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà. 1927 Asks Stead for his assistance in becoming confirmed in the Church of England. On June 29, is baptized by Stead into the Church of England at Finstock Church in the Cotswold. In November, becomes a British citizen. Publishes “The Journey of the Magi,” the first of five Christmas poems in Faber & Gwyer’s Ariel series. Lady Rothermere withdraws her financial support from the Criterion, which returns to a quarterly publication schedule and now is published by Faber & Gwyer and edited by Eliot. Eliot and Vivien become more and more estranged. In the preface to the prose volume For Lancelot Andrews, declares himself a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. Publishes “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” and “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.” 1928 Publishes “Song for Simeon.”

1924 Abandons “Sweeney Agonistes.”

1929 Publishes “Animula.” Faber & Gwyer becomes Faber & Faber. Publishes “Dante.”

1925 Publishes “The Hollow Men,” a sequence cobbled together from discarded verses from “Sweeney Agonistes.” Begins to be drawn toward orthodox Christianity. Leaves Lloyds for the publishing house Faber & Gwyer, later Faber & Faber. Faber & Gwyer publishes Poems, 1909–1925 in December.

1930 Publishes “Marina.” “Ash-Wednesday,” parts of which had been appearing in the Criterion since 1927, is published by Faber & Faber. Meets his future theatrical collaborator E. Martin Browne at the episcopal palace of George Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chichester, in December.

1926 Launches the New Criterion in January as a monthly review that is more international in scope.

1931 Publishes “Triumphal March,” Eliot’s final contribution to the Ariel series. It will later be incorporated into “Coriolan.”

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1932 In September, Eliot returns to America for the first time in 17 years to assume the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard. In Cambridge, renews his acquaintanceship with Emily Hale. Lectures at University of California, Los Angeles, in December. 1933 Revisits the subject of the Clark Lectures by presenting the Turnbull Lectures, titled “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry,” at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in January. Lectures at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, in February. In February or March, asks his solicitors back in England to prepare a deed of separation from Vivien. She will not learn of the move until July. In April, gives the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The Norton lectures are issued under the title The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Back in England, begins to work with Browne on the scenario and choruses for a pageant play, The Rock, to aid a church building fund for London. 1934 In February, Faber & Faber publishes the Page-Barbour Lectures in After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. The Rock is performed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London from May 28 to June 9. Visits Burnt Norton with Emily Hale, who is in England for the summer. Begins to work with Browne on Murder in the Cathedral. In September, files for a formal separation from Vivien. 1935 Murder in the Cathedral is presented in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral on June 19. Composes “Burnt Norton.” 1936 Begins work on The Family Reunion. In April, publishes Collected Poems, 1909–1935, which includes all of his major work to date as well as minor and unfinished poems. Makes a personal pilgrimage to Little Gidding, the site of a defunct religious community, in May.

1937 In August, visits East Coker, the Eliot ancestral home in Gloucestershire. Completes a first draft of The Family Reunion in November. 1938 Vivien is committed by her family to a private mental hospital. 1939 Publishes Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and The Idea of a Christian Society. The Family Reunion runs for a disappointing five weeks at London’s Westminster Theatre, opening on March 21. In September of that year, begins to work on “East Coker.” Increasing tensions in Europe force the Criterion to fold. 1940 “East Coker” is published in the Easter issue of the New English Weekly. When Faber & Faber publishes “East Coker” in pamphlet form in September, it sells 12,000 copies. Begins to compose “The Dry Salvages.” 1941 Sends a completed first draft of “The Dry Salvages” to his friend and confidante John Hayward on New Year’s Day. Publishes the finished poem in the New English Weekly in February. Completes a first draft of “Little Gidding” in July. 1942 Begins preliminary work on Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Publishes “Little Gidding” in the New English Weekly in October. 1943 Eliot’s Russell Square office and adjacent apartment at Faber & Faber’s is nearly destroyed by a “flying bomb” in June. Four Quartets comes out in book form in October. 1944 Publishes as “a preliminary sketch” a long article titled “Notes towards a Definition of Culture” in three consecutive issues of The New English Weekly.

T. S. Eliot Chronology 1945 “Cultural Forces in the Human Order” is published in Prospect for Christendom, and finally appears as the first chapter of Notes towards the Definition of Culture. 1946 Takes up residence with Hayward in a spacious London flat. Visits America. A new production of The Family Reunion is successfully mounted at the Mercury Theatre in October. Makes a series of radio addresses to the German people on the unity of European culture. 1947 On January 22, Vivien dies of a heart attack at the private mental hospital where she had been confined since 1938. Is in the United States from April to June. Receives an honorary degree from Harvard. The Family Reunion and Murder in the Cathedral are both selected for performances for the inaugural season of the Edinburgh Festival.

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1953 Gives the lecture “American Literature and the American Language” at Washington University in St. Louis on June 9. The Confidential Clerk debuts at Edinburgh Festival in August and opens at London’s Lyric Theatre on September 16. 1954 In the autumn, Faber & Faber publishes what will be his last poem, “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” as a part of their revived Ariel series. 1956 Publishes On Poetry and Poets, a new collection of selected essays. Drafts the first two acts of The Elder Statesman, tentatively titled “The Rest Cure.” 1957 Marries Valerie Fletcher, his personal secretary at Faber & Faber, on January 10. Completes The Elder Statesman that autumn.

1948 In July, sends Martin Browne a draft of the first three acts of a play titled “One-Eyed Reilly.” Publishes Notes towards the Definition of Culture in November. On December 10, in Stockholm, Sweden, Eliot is awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for that year.

1958 In late May, is awarded the Dante Gold Medal at the Italian Institute in London on behalf of the comune of Florence, Dante’s native city. The Elder Statesman debuts at Edinburgh on August 24 and opens at the Cambridge Theatre in London in September.

1949 A production of “One-Eyed Reilly,” now called The Cocktail Party, is successfully mounted at the Edinburgh Festival during the last week of August.

1959 “To My Wife,” his last published poetry, serves as his dedication to The Elder Statesman when it is published in book form.

1950 The Cocktail Party premiers at New York’s Henry Miller Theatre on Broadway on January 21. Eliot is featured on the cover of Time magazine on March 6. 1951 Drafts the first two scenes of The Confidential Clerk. In May, The Cocktail Party opens in London.

1961 The Eliots spend seven weeks in America, where he makes a series of public appearances, followed by an extended holiday in Barbados. 1962 They return to England in March. Contemplates a new play, but never commences work on it. Prepares his Harvard doctoral dissertation for publication. At year’s end, he collapses and is

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hospitalized under continuous oxygen for the next five weeks. 1963 Eliot is in and out of hospitals as his lungs and heart continue to deteriorate. In November, he and Valerie make a last visit to America, returning to England the following April. 1964 Is busy at work on a collection of his essays, To Criticize the Critic. Publishes his Harvard doctoral dissertation under the title Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. In October, collapses at home and is hospitalized in a deep coma and with a paralysis on his left side. 1965 Dies on January 4 at his Kensington home. To Criticize the Critic, a final collection of his prose, is

published posthumously later that year. Eliot’s ashes are interred at St. Michael’s, the East Coker village church. 1967 On the second anniversary of Eliot’s death, a memorial plaque is installed in his honor in Westminster Abbey. 1968 On October 25, the New York Public Library reveals that the original drafts of The Waste Land had been sold to the Berg Collection in April 1958 by John Quinn’s niece, Mary (Mrs. Thomas F. Conroy). 1971 In the spring, Eliot’s widow, Valerie, publishes the original drafts of The Waste Land in both facsimile and transcript in a heavily annotated booklength edition.

SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS BY T. S. ELIOT Unless otherwise noted, Eliot’s London publisher was Faber & Faber; his publisher in New York was Harcourt, Brace.

Murder in the Cathedral. London, 1935. Collected Poems, 1909–1935. London, 1936. Essays Ancient and Modern. London, 1936. The Family Reunion. London, 1939. The Idea of a Christian Society. London, 1939. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. London, 1939. “East Coker.” London, 1940. “Burnt Norton.” London, 1941. “The Dry Salvages.” London, 1941. “Little Gidding.” London, 1942. Reunion by Destruction. London, 1943. Four Quartets. London, 1944. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. London, 1948. The Cocktail Party. London, 1950. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. London, 1952. The Confidential Clerk. London, 1954. The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956. Essays on Elizabethan Drama. New York, 1956. On Poetry and Poets. London, 1957. The Elder Statesman. London, 1959. Collected Plays. London, 1962. George Herbert. London, 1962. Collected Poems, 1909–1962. London, 1963. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. London, 1964. To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings. London, 1965. Poems Written in Early Youth. London, 1967. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London, 1969.

Prufrock and Other Observations. London: Egoist Limited Press, 1917. Ezra Pound, His Metric and His Poetry. New York: Knopf, 1918. Poems. London: The Hogarth Press, 1919. Ara Vos Prec. London: John Rodker, 1920. Poems. New York: Knopf, 1920. The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen; and New York: Knopf, 1920. The Waste Land. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922. Homage to John Dryden. London: The Hogarth Press, 1924. Poems, 1909–1925. London, 1925. For Lancelot Andrewes. London, 1928. Dante. London, 1929. Anabasis, a Poem by St-J Perse. London, 1930. “Ash-Wednesday.” London, 1930. Thoughts after Lambeth. London, 1931. Triumphal March. London, 1931. John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic. New York, 1932. Selected Essays, 1909–1932. London, 1932. Sweeney Agonistes. London, 1932. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London, 1933. After Strange Gods. London, 1934. Elizabethan Essays. London, 1934. The Rock. London, 1934. 583

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The Waste Land [A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts]. Edited by Valerie Eliot. London, 1971. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Edited by Frank Kermode. London, 1975.

The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Edited by Ronal Schuchard. New York, 1993. Adventures of the March Hare. Edited by Christopher Ricks. New York, 1996.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Ali, Agha Shahid. T. S. Eliot as Editor. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986. Allan, Mowbray. T. S. Eliot’s Impersonal Theory of Poetry. Lewisburg, Pa.: Associated University Press, 1973. Alldritt, Keith. Eliot’s Four Quartets: Poetry as Chamber Music. Totowa, N.J.: Woburn Press, 1978. Antrim, Harry. T. S. Eliot’s Concept of Language: A Study of Its Development. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1971. Badenhausen, Richard. T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Bagchee, Shyamal, ed. T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting. London: Macmillan, 1990. Bantock, G. H. T. S. Eliot and Education. London: Faber, 1970. Bedient, Calvin. He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Beehler, Michael. T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Behr, Caroline. T. S. Eliot: A Chronology of his Life and Works. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983. Bergonzi, Bernard. T. S. Eliot. New York: Collier Books, 1972. ———, ed. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: A Casebook. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Bergsten, Staffan. Time and Eternity. A Study in the Structure and Symbolism of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Stockholm: Uppsala, 1960.

Blissett, William. “The Argument of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” University of Toronto Quarterly 15 (January 1946): 115–126. Bolgan, Anne C. What the Thunder Really Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Making of The Waste Land. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1973. Bornstein, George. Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Braybrooke, Neville, ed. T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday. New York: Farrar, 1958. Brooker, Jewel Spears. “Civilization and Its Discontents: Eliot, Descartes, and the Mind of Europe.” Modern Schoolman 73, no. 1 (November 1995): 59–70. ———. Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. ———, ed. The Placing of T. S. Eliot. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. ———. “ ‘The Second Coming’ and The Waste Land: Capstones in the Western Civilization Course.” College Literature 13 (1986): 240–253. ———. “The Structure of Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’: An Analysis Based on Bradley’s Doctrine of the Systematic Nature of Truth.” ELH 46, no. 2 (1979): 314–340. ———, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brooker, Jewel Spears, and Joseph Bentley. Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Brooks, Cleanth. The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.

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———. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. 1939. Rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Browne, E. Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Bush, Ronald. T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Canary, Robert H. T. S. Eliot: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Chace, William M. The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973. Chandran, K. Narayana, ed. “DA/Datta: Teaching The Waste Land.” CIEFL Bulletin 11, no. 1–2 (December 2001). Chiari, Joseph. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir. London: Enitharmon Press, 1982. Childs, Donald J. “Stetson in The Waste Land.” Essays in Criticism 38 (1988): 131–148. Chinitz, David. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Clubb, Merrel D., Jr. “The Heraclitean Element in Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Philological Quarterly 40 (January 1961): 19–33. Comentale, Edward P. Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cowan, Laura, ed. T. S. Eliot: Man and Poet. Vol. 1. Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1990. Cox, C. B., and A. P. Hinchcliffe, eds. The Waste Land: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1968. Craig, Cairns. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and the Politics of Poetry. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Works of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Cuddy, Lois, and David Hirsch, eds. Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. D’Ambrosio, Vinnie-Marie. Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and Fitzgerald’s “Rubáiyát.” New York: New York University Press, 1989. Dale, Alzina Stone. T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher-Poet. Wheaton, Ill.: Shaw, 1988. Davis, Robert Gorham. T. S. Eliot. New York: Barnes, 1963. Dean, Michael P. “Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi,’ 24– 25.” Explicator 37, no. 4 (1979): 9–10. Dillingham, Thomas F. “Origen and Sweeney: The Problem of Christianity for T. S. Eliot.” Chris-

tianity and Literature 30, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 37–51. Donnelly, Mabel C. “The Failure of Act III of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.” College Language Association Journal 21 (1977): 58–61. Donoghue, Denis. “On ‘Gerontion.’ ” Southern Review 21 (1985): 934–946. ———. The Ordinary Universe: Soundings in Modern Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. The Third Voice. Modern British and American Verse Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959. Douglass, Paul. Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Drew, Elizabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry. New York: Scribner’s, 1949. Ellis, Steve. The English Eliot: Design, Language, and Landscape in Four Quartets. London: Routledge, 1991. Ellmann, Richard. Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Everett, Barbara. “In Search of Prufrock.” Critical Quarterly 16 (1974): 101–121. Fabricius, Johannes. The Unconscious and Mr. Eliot. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1967. Foster, Genevieve W. “The Archetypal Imagery of T. S. Eliot.” PMLA 60 (1945): 567–585. Fleissner, Robert F. T. S. Eliot and the Heritage of Africa: The Magus and the Moor as Metaphor. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Flinn, Anthony. Approaching Authority: Transpersonal Gestures in the Poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Williams. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997. Freed, Lewis. T. S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1979. Freedman, Morris. “Jazz Rhythms and T. S. Eliot.” South Atlantic Quarterly 51 (1952): 419–453. Frye, Northrop. T. S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963. Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt, 1969. ———. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Collaborators in Letters. New Haven: H. W. Wenning/C. A. Stonehill, 1970. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. New York: Dutton, 1950.

Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources ———. The Composition of Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1978. ———. T. S. Eliot and the English Poetic Tradition. Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1966. George, A. G. T. S. Eliot: His Mind and Art. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1969. Giroux, Robert. “A Personal Memoir.” Sewanee Review (Eliot Issue) 74 (1966): 331–338. Gish, Nancy K. Time in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot: A Study in Structure and Theme. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981. Gish, Nancy, and Cassandra Laity, eds. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, 1988. Grant, Michael, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. Gray, Piers. T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909–1922. Sussex, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1982. Greene, Gayle. “Shakespeare’s Tempest and Eliot’s Waste Land: ‘What the Thunder Said.’ ” Orbis Litterarum 34 (1979): 287–300. Gunter, Bradley, ed. The Merrill Studies in The Waste Land. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1971. Habib, M. A. R. The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hall, Donald. “Interview with T. S. Eliot.” In Writers at Work: The Paris Reviews, 2d Series, 89–110. New York: Viking, 1963. Harding, Jason. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-war Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hargrove, Nancy. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978. Hay, Eloise Knapp. T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Headings, Philip R. T. S. Eliot. New York: Twayne, 1964. Helmling, Steven. “T. S. Eliot and Ralph Ellison: Insiders, Outsiders, and Cultural Authority.” Southern Review 25 (1989): 841–858. Ho, Cynthia Olson. “Savage Gods and Salvaged Time: Eliot’s Dry Salvages.” Yeats Eliot Review 12, no. 1 (Summer 1993): 16–23.

587

Horgan, Paul. “To Meet Mr. Eliot: Three Glimpses.” American Scholar 60, no. 3 (1991): 407–413. Howarth, Herbert. Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Huisman, David. “Title and Subject in The Sacred Wood.” Essays in Criticism 39 (1989): 217–233. Ishak, Fayek M. The Mystical Philosophy of T. S. Eliot. New Haven: College and University Press, 1970. Jain, Manju. T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Jay, Gregory S. T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Jeffreys, Mark. “The Rhetoric of Authority in T. S. Eliot’s Athenaeum Reviews.” South Atlantic Review 57, no. 4 (1992): 93–108. Jones, D. E. The Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Jones, Genesius. Approach to the Purpose: A Study of the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1964. Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Kearns, Cleo McNelly. T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Kenner, Hugh, ed. T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962. ———. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. 1959. Rpt. New York: Citadel Press, 1964. Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. New York: Random House, 1971. Knoll, Robert E., ed. Storm over the Waste Land. Chicago: Scott, 1964. Kojecky, Roger. T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. London: Faber, 1971. Leavis, F. R. English Literature in Our Time and the University. London: Chatto and Windus, 1969. ———. New Bearings in English Poetry. 1932. Rpt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1971. Lee, Brian. Theory and Personality: the Significance of T. S. Eliot’s Criticism. London: Athlone Press, 1979. Leon, Juan. “ ‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides’: T. S. Eliot and Eugenic Anxiety.” Yeats Eliot Review 9, no. 4 (Summer/Fall 1988): 169–177.

588

Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Lobb, Edward. T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. ———, ed. Words in Time: New Essays on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Lockerd, Benjamin G., Jr. Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1998. Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Malamud, Randy. Where Words Are Valid: T. S. Eliot’s Communities of Drama. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Manganiello, Dominic. “Literature, Science, and Dogma: T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards on Dante.” Christianity and Literature 43 (1993): 59–73. ———. T. S. Eliot and Dante. London: Macmillan, 1989. Mankowitz, Wolf. “Notes on ‘Gerontion.’ ” In T. S. Eliot: A Study of His Writings by Several Hands, edited by B. Rajan, 129–138. New York: Haskell House, 1964. March, Richard, and Tambimuttu, eds. T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. London: Frank Cass, 1948. Margolis, John D. T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development: 1922–1939. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Martin, Graham, ed. Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium. New York: Humanities Press, 1970. Martin, Jay, ed. A Collection of Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968. Martin, Mildred. A Half Century of Eliot Criticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972. Materer, Timothy. Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. Matthews, T. S. Great Tom: Notes towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harper, 1974. Matthiessen, F. O., and C. L. Barber. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Maxwell, D. E. S. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge, 1952.

Mayer, John T. T. S. Eliot’s Silent Voices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. McDonald, Gail. Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. Miller, Milton. “What the Thunder Meant.” ELH 36 (1969): 440–454. Montgomery, Marion. T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the American Magus. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969. ———. The Reflective Journey toward Order: Essays on Dante, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Others. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973. Moody, A. D. T. S. Eliot: Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Naik, M. K. Mighty Voices: Studies in T. S. Eliot. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1980. Newton-De Molina, D., ed. The Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot. London: Athlone Press, 1977. Olney, James, ed. T. S. Eliot: Essays from the “Southern Review.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Ozick, Cynthia. “A Critic at Large: T. S. Eliot at 101.” New Yorker, November 20, 1989, 119–154. Patterson, Gertrude. T. S. Eliot: Poems in the Making. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971. Perl, Jeffrey M. Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and After Eliot. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Pinion, F. B. A T. S. Eliot Companion: Life and Works. London: Macmillan, 1986. Pratt, William. “Eliot at Oxford: From Philosopher to Poet to Critic.” Soundings 78 (1995): 321–337. Raffel, Burton. T. S. Eliot. New York: Unger, 1982. Rajan, Balachandra. The Overwhelming Question: A Study of the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Read, Herbert. “T. S. E.—A Memoir.” Sewanee Review (Eliot Issue) 74 (1966): 31–57. Rees, Thomas. The Technique of T. S. Eliot. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Ricks, Beatrice. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography of Secondary Works. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber, 1988. Schneider, Elisabeth. T. S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Schwarz, Robert L. Broken Images: A Study of The Waste Land. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1988. Scofield, Mark. The Ghosts of Hamlet: The Play and Modern Writers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. T. S. Eliot: The Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir. Edited by Donald Adamson. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971. Seyppel, Joachim. T. S. Eliot. New York: Unger, 1972. Sharma, L. R. The T. S. Eliot–Middleton Murry Debate: The Shaping of Literary Theory, Modernist to Poststructuralist. Allahabad, India: Silver Birch, 1994. Shusterman, Richard. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Sigg, Eric. The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Simpson, Louis. Three on the Tower. The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. New York: Morrow, 1975. Skaff, William. The Philosophy of T. S. Eliot: From Skepticism to a Surrealist Poetic, 1909–1927. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Smidt, Kristian. Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot. New York: Humanities, 1961. Smith, Carol H. T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Smith, Grover, ed. Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913–1914, as Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry T. Costello. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. ———. T. S. Eliot and the Use of Memory. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1996. ———. T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. ———. The Waste Land. London: Allen and Unwin, 1983.

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Soldo, John J. The Tempering of T. S. Eliot. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983. Southam, B. C. A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1987. Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. New York: Viking, 1975. Spurr, David. Conflicts in Consciousness: T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Stead, C. K. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Stephenson, E. M. T. S. Eliot and the Lady Reader. New York: Haskell, 1966. Strothmann, Friedrich W., and Lawrence V. Ryan. “Hope for T. S. Eliot’s ‘Empty Men.’ ” PMLA 73 (1958): 426–432. Sullivan, Sheila, ed. Critics on T. S. Eliot. London: Allen & Unwin, 1973. Sultan, Stanley. Eliot, Joyce, and Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Tate, Allen, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work. New York: Dell, 1966. Thompson, Eric. T. S. Eliot, the Metaphysical Perspective. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. Thormälen, Marianne. Eliot’s Animals. Lund: Gleerup, 1984. Timmerman, John H. T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1994. Tobin, David Ned. The Presence of the Past: T. S. Eliot’s Victorian Inheritance. In Studies in Modern Literature 8. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983. Unger, Leonard. T. S. Eliot: Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. Verma, Rajendra. Royalist in Politics: T. S. Eliot and Political Philosophy. London: Asia House, 1968. Ward, David. T. S. Eliot between Two Worlds. London: Routledge, 1973. Warren, Charles. T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare. In Studies in Modern Literature 66. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987. Williamson, George. A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis. 2d ed. New York: Noonday Press, 1966. Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle. New York: Scribner’s, 1931.

INDEX Note: Page numbers in boldface indicate main entires. Page numbers in italic indicate photographs.

A “Abenddämmerung” 507 Absolute Knower 554 abstraction, in “Burnt Norton” 194 academia, career in 99 academic critics 403 accessibility 125–126, 146, 191–192, 385, 425 action in drama 352 in Four Quartets 200, 206–207, 208, 223, 224, 225–226, 226 in Murder in the Cathedral 327 Action française 87, 288, 500 “Ad-dressing of Cats, The” 349 Admetus (character) 105– 106, 115–116 Advent 304 Advocate (magazine) 6, 7, 497 Aegisthus (mythological figure) 172–173, 382, 390, 433 Aeneas (character) 186, 423 Aeneid (Virgil) 102, 186, 422, 423, 485–486 Aeschylus Agamemnon 172, 381, 389–390, 432–433 Choephoroi 173, 382–383

The Eumenides 172–174 Oresteia 172–174, 180–181, 382–383 aestheticism 53–54, 233. See also pure poetry Africa 390–391, 530–531 After Strange Gods 33–42 anti-Semitism in 405, 500 audience of 34 conservatism of 286, 399 critical commentary 41–42 on criticism 237–238 on cultural deterioration 103 Lawrence in 540 lectures of 20 Murry in 545 publication of 405 public commentary in 135 synopsis 33–41 The Use of Poetry and 412 Yeats in 494 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 172, 381, 389–390, 432–433 Agamemnon (mythological figure) 172, 382, 384, 390, 392 Agatha (character) 174– 180, 183, 184 “Age of Dryden, The” 415–416 aging 130–133, 206, 222 agony 140, 384, 467 Agrarian Movement 423 Aiken, Conrad 7, 476–477, 497–498, 521, 528, 548

air, in “Burnt Norton” 188, 203 Albert (character) 454 Alcestis (character) 105–106 Alcestis (Euripides) 104, 105–106 Alchemist, The (Jonson) 165 Aldington, Richard 410, 514, 521 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 391 alienation 40. See also isolation allegory 146–147, 242, 243 Almayer’s Folly (Conrad) 512 “Al som de l’escalina” 19, 55. See also “AshWednesday” America 317, 500, 565 American Criticism (Foerster) 262 American culture. See Anglo-American culture “American Literature and the American Language” 42–44, 522, 536–537, 557, 569 “Among the School Children” (Yeats) 574 Anabase (Perse). See Anabasis Anabasis 19, 44–47 Anabasis (Xenophon) 44 Anderson, Sherwood 519 Andrewes, Lancelot 100, 277, 285–286 “Andrew Marvell” 47–48 Angel, Lucasta (character) 119–125 Anglicanism 511–512. See also Anglo-Catholicism

590

Anglo-American culture 35–42 Anglo-Catholicism 18, 511–512 Anglo-Catholic Summer School of Sociology 87 Anima Christi (prayer) 71 “Animula” 48–50 child in 144 composition of 19 “Marina” and 303 publication of 143 The Rock and 95–96 Annunciation, in “The Dry Salvages” 212, 213–214 anthologies 487 Antigone (Sophocles) 331, 460 anti-Semitism 498–501 in After Strange Gods 34–35, 405 in “Burbank” 83, 84–85 in “Gerontion” 241 of Pound 547, 549 Woolf (Leonard) on 570–571 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 452 Apocalypse Now (film) 531 Apollo (mythological figure) 173–174 Apology for Poetry (Sidney) 414 “Apology for the Countess of Pembroke” 414–415 appearance, v. reality 127 Appearance and Reality (Bradley) 8, 230, 279, 509 apprehension, perception and 282 “Araby” (Joyce) 534 Ara Vos Prec 13, 83, 249

Index 591 Argentina, in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 390 Ariadne (mythological figure) 394–395, 397 Arian heresy 564 Ariel Poems 19, 50–52. See also “Animula”; “Cultivation of Christmas Trees, The”; “Journey of the Magi”; “Marina”; “Song for Simeon, A” child in 144 conflicts in 301 publication of 143 title of 51 “Triumphal March” and 134 aristocracy 84, 429 Aristophanes, Lysistrata 381 Arjuna (mythological figure) 211, 213, 215, 217 Arnold, Matthew 501–502 Babbitt influenced by 503 Bradley compared to 231 critical theory of 238, 417–418, 419 humanism of 52–54 in “To Criticize the Critic” 402 Arnold, Thomas 501 “Arnold and Pater” 52–54 art in Christian society 267 collaboration with audience 300 complexity in, reasons for 192 in “La Figlia Che Piange” 187 responses elicited by 247 sale of 84 Arthur (character) 178 Arthurian legend, Holy Grail in 524, 569–570 Ascent of Mt. Carmel, The (St. John of the Cross) 207 Ash Wednesday 58–59 “Ash-Wednesday” 54–74 allusions in 55, 60, 62–63, 64, 71 awakening in 59–63 background considerations 55–59

composition of 330 confession in 70 conversion experience in 71–72 critical commentary 71–74 guilt in 59–60 ideology of 15 individual in 58 influences on, Dante 60, 61–63, 62–63, 64, 71 intentions of 55 landscape in 63 meaning of 71–74 as modernist long poem 45 obscurities of 192 as poetry of belief 69 prayer in 61, 65, 67, 70, 71, 73 precursors to 44 publication of 19, 54–55, 515 purgative in 63–65 redemption in 67 regeneration in 63–64 religion in 56–57 simplicity in 57 speaker of 58 spiral staircase of 64– 65, 201, 202 as spiritual biography 72 synopsis 59–71 Part I 59–61 Part II 61–63 Part III 63–65 Part IV 65–67 Part V 67–68 Part VI 68–71 unitive in 65–68 Aspatia (character) 394– 395 Aspern Papers, The (James) 83 Athena (mythological figure) 174 Athenaeum 13, 246, 545 Atreus (mythological figure) 172–173, 392 attachment, in “Little Gidding” 223 Augustine, Saint 447, 462 “Aunt Helen” 11, 74–76, 141, 507 autobiography, poetry and 145–146

autocrats 135 autoeroticism, in “The Death of Saint Narcissus” 150 “Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot” (Laforgue) 129 autumn, in “East Coker” 188 awakening in “Ash-Wednesday” 59–63 in “The Burial of the Dead” 444, 445 in “Burnt Norton 194–195 in The Family Reunion 176, 178, 179 to reality 182–183, 184 in spiritual biography 72 Axël (Villiers de l’Isle Adams) 561 Axel’s Castle (Wilson) 562

B Babbitt, Irving 102, 261, 403, 503–504, 528 Babylonian captivity 95 Baedeker travel guides 82 balance, in “Whispers of Immortality” 489 “Ballad of the Goodly Fere, The” (Pound) 276 Balliol College 501 baptism 463 Battle of Britain 24, 191, 193, 218–219, 220–221, 224, 244 “Baudelaire” 76–80 Baudelaire, Charles 504– 505 Donne compared to 100 influence of 80, 141–142, 313–314, 366, 484 Laforgue influenced by 538 Poe and 234 in symbolism 561 truthfulness in 357 in The Waste Land 450 wit of 47 Beacon Hill 507 “Beast in the Jungle, The” (James) 355 Beatrice 62, 66, 517, 518

Becket, Thomas (character) 324–330. See also Thomas à Becket, Saint beginnings, in Four Quartets 196, 203, 226 belief in Ariel Poems 51–52 in “Ash-Wednesday” 55–58 in Christian society 268 in Dante 147–148 in Davies 373–374 international order based on 87–90 in “Little Gidding” 220 modern problem of 73 necessity of 50, 92 v. poetry in After Strange Gods 37, 38–39 in Ariel Poems 52 critical commentary on 148, 229, 408, 419 in “Goethe as Sage” 246 poetry of 56–57, 67–69, 69, 73, 147–148, 214 of poet v. person 52, 148 Bell, George 21, 22, 91, 322, 509 “Ben Jonson” 164–165 Bergson, Henri 279, 505–506 biography 3–29 critical attention paid to 3 in The Elder Statesman 171 in Four Quartets 188, 196, 204, 210, 218 in poetry 71–72 Blacks (Guelfs) 516–517 Blake, William 491–492 blank verse 98, 360, 414, 415 blasphemy, in After Strange Gods 40–41 Blast (review) 11, 358, 363, 548 Blavatsky, Madame 132– 133 Bleistein (character) 83–85, 499 Blick ins Chaos (Hesse) 468 Bloomsbury district 542– 543, 543

592

Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot

Bloomsbury Group 11, 543, 544, 559, 570 Boleyn, Anne 511–512 Bolo poems. See King Bolo poems bones, in “Ash-Wednesday” 63 Bonfire Night 253–254 Boniface VIII (pope) 518 Boni & Liveright 424, 442 Book of Common Prayer 443 Book of the Governor (Elyot) 204–205 boredom 300, 451–452, 454 Borgia, Lucretia 132 Boston 506–507 in “Aunt Helen” 74–76 in “The Boston Evening Transcript” 80, 81 connections to 3 in “Cousin Nancy” 141–143 high society of 142 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 289, 290 propriety of 74–76, 142 Unitarianism in 565 Boston Athanæum 507 Boston Common 507 “Boston Evening Transcript, The” 80–82 Beacon Hill in 507 “Cousin Nancy” and 140–141 publication of 11 ritual in 315 Boston Tea Party 506 Boutwood Foundation 264 Bradley, A. C. 508 Bradley, F. H. (Francis Herbert) 8, 471, 507–509 Bergson and 505 in “Burnt Norton” 199–200 “Francis Herbert Bradley” 230–232 influence of 281, 282 Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley 279–285 style of 231 in “To Criticize the Critic” 402 Brahma 470–471 Brahmins (Boston) 142, 507

Brémond, Abbé 419–420 Bridge, The (Crane) 200 British Empire 137–140, 542 British Museum 541, 543 British-Norwegian Institution 374 Brito, Richard (character) 329 Broadway 104, 509 “Broken Men, The” (Kipling) 252, 532 Brooks, Cleanth 478 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky) 468 Browne, E. Martin 509–510 collaboration with 21– 22, 91–92, 180, 322 Murder in the Cathedral and 189–190, 322 Browning, Robert 83, 293, 401 Bubu de Montparnasse (Phillipe) 365 Burbank, Luther 85 “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” 82–85, 241, 499 “Burial of the Dead, The” 442–451 allusions in (See Waste Land, The, allusions in) awakening in 444 boredom in 451 death in 451 fear in 449–450 fortune-telling in 448–449 gender in 447 hyacinth garden in 447 London Bridge in 449 love in 448 speaker of 441, 446 spirituality in 56, 70, 383 as structural model 201 success of 143, 313 synopsis 442–473 “The Burial of the Dead” 442–451 “Death by Water” 463–467 “The Fire Sermon” 455–462 “A Game of Chess” 451–455 “What the Thunder Said” 467–473 temptation in 58 title of 436

Ulysses compared to 535 urban life in 200 vers libre in 568 waste in 453 World War I and 428 “Burnt Norton.” See also Four Quartets aging in 133–134 air in 188, 203 allusions in 198, 199–200 awakening in 194–195 as beginning 196 biography in 196 children in 195–196, 201 Christ in 201 composition of 22, 189–190 contrasts in 199, 201 death in 201 eternity in 201 inspiration for 21 memory in 194–197 motifs of 194 movement in 201–202 Murder in the Cathedral and 22, 189–190 music in 198 philosophy in 189, 203 reality in 194–197 reference points of 194 rose garden in 128, 194–195, 200 still point in 199–200 subway in 200–201 summer in 188 synopsis 194–203 Part I 194–198 Part II 198–200 Part III 200–201 Part IV 201 Part V 201–203 time in 194–197, 201 Burnt Norton (place) 188, 195, 197 “Bustopher Jones: The Cat about Town” 349 “Byron” 85–87 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 85–87, 245, 459 “Byzantium” (Yeats) 574

C Cambridge University 99, 523 Campion, Thomas 414

Candide (Voltaire) 473 Canterbury Festival 22, 322, 509 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 324, 443–445 Cantos (Pound) 171, 260, 549 Cape Ann 209, 526–527 “Cape Ann” 310 Captains Courageous (Kipling) 215, 527 cards, suits of 449 Carghill, Maisie (character) 156, 157, 158–160 caricature, Marlowe and 98 Carlyle, Thomas 561 Carroll, Lewis 391 Cathay (Pound) 547 Catherine of Aragon 511–512 Catholic Anthology 11 Catholicism 45, 58, 511–512, 565. See also Anglicanism; AngloCatholicism; Christianity; Roman Catholicism “Catholicism and International Order” 87–90, 511 Catiline (Jonson) 165 Cats (musical) 349 cause, devotion to 258–259 Cavalcanti, Cavalcante dei 60 Cavalcanti, Guido “Ash-Wednesday” and 20, 45, 55, 58–59 Dante and 517 in The Divine Comedy 60 exile of 59, 67–68 Cecil, Hugh 287 celebrity, in “Mr. Apollinax” 317 Cellarius, Martin 564 Chamberlain, Neville 23, 270, 271 Chamberlayne, Edward (character) 106–118 Chamberlayne, Lavinia (character) 106–118 change 115 Channing, William Ellery 565 Channing-Cheetah, Professor (character) 318 Chapel Perilous 468–469 Chapman, George 164

Index 593 character, v. power 135–136 characters in dramatic monologue 401 “Gerontion” and 242, 243 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 297 poet in 165–169 speakers as 395–396 as voice of poetry 400–401 Charles (character) 174– 180, 183 Charles Eliot Norton professorship 20, 33, 37, 388, 411–412 Charles I (king of England) 188, 219 Chaucer, Geoffrey 324, 443–445 Cheetham, Eric 28 cherchez la femme 383 child (children) in Ariel Poems 144 in “Burnt Norton” 195–196, 201 in “Marina” 303 soul as 49–50 Chinese jar 202 Chinese poetry, influence of 345 Choephoroi (Aeschylus) 173, 382–383 choice 112, 113, 127, 153 chorus in The Family Reunion 174 in Murder in the Cathedral 168–169, 324–325, 327–330, 401, 402 Choruses from The Rock 90–98 background considerations 90–92 critical commentary 96–98 publication of 20 social commitment in 97–98 synopsis 92–96 Chouteau, Auguste 556 Chrétien de Troyes 524 Christ anti-Semitism and 498 in Four Quartets 201, 208

in “Journey of the Magi” 276–277 in The Rock 92 in “A Song for Simeon” 377–378 in Unitarianism 564 Virgil and 422 in The Waste Land 446– 447, 464–465, 467 Christendom 87 Christian community, in Christian state 266 Christianity. See also Unitarianism Advent in 304 in After Strange Gods 41 anti-Semitism and 498 in “Ash-Wednesday” 55 baptism in 463 Baudelaire and 78–79 conversion to 16–17, 18 in “Coriolan” 137, 140 in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” 144 in Four Quartets 201, 208, 212, 213–215, 217, 224 freedom in 105 in “Gerontion” 241–242 in “The Hippopotamus” 248–250 international order based on 87–90 in Ireland 573 in “Journey of the Magi” 275–278 in “Marina” 304 in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” 320–322 obligations of 400 soul in 145 universal church in 268, 511 Virgil and 422–424 in The Waste Land 446– 447, 464–465, 467 Christians, community of, in Christian state 266 Christian society components of 266– 268 defining 265 national church in 268 need for 265–266 political organization of 268–269 Christian state 266

Christmas 144, 327. See also Ariel Poems Christmas Carol, A (Dickens) 471 “Christopher Marlowe” 98–99 church abandonment of 94–95 in Christian state 267 in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” 320–322 in “The Hippopotamus” 248–250 national 268 necessity of 94, 97 in The Rock 93–96 Church of England 18, 21–22, 91, 398–399, 509. See also Anglicanism Church of St. Magnu Martyr 456 Church of St. Mary Woolnoth 449, 450 Church of the Messiah (St. Louis) 522, 556, 565 “Circus Animals’ Desertion, The” (Yeats) 574 city of London 449, 542 civilization v. culture 335 family in 339 in Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 532–533 higher v. lower 338– 339 Clark Lectures, The 20, 33, 99–102, 101 class absence of 340 culture and 336 emergence of 338–339 in The Family Reunion 181–182 in “A Game of Chess” 452, 454 in “Morning at the Window” 315–316 of music hall audiences 299–300 Classical Association 102 classicism v. romanticism in After Strange Gods 36, 37–38 in criticism 237– 238

debate of 102, 410, 486–487 Eliot on 89 in Ulysses (Joyce) 410 classics defining 102, 485–487 individual talent and 406–407 language of 486 national literature rooted in 103 “Classics and the Man of Letters, The” 102–103 Claverton, Lord (character) 154–159, 171 Claverton, Michael (character) 156–157, 158–160 Claverton-Ferry, Monica (character) 154–160 Cleopatra (character) 452 cleverness, meaning and 228 Clytemnestra (mythological figure) 172–173, 382, 383, 390, 392, 433 Cocktail Party, The 104–118 allusions in 112, 116– 117, 118–119 background considerations 104–106 choice in 112, 113 composition of 25, 509 critical commentary 113–118 death in 109 in development as playwright 125 faith in 112 identity in 111–112, 114–115 isolation in 110, 111–112 love in 118 as poetic drama 353 premier of 25–26 self in 108–109, 111– 112, 114–115 social masks in 160 success of 152 synopsis 106–113 Act 1 106–110 Act 2 110–112 Act 3 112–113 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on Christian community 267 conservatism of 287

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (continued) critical theory of 416– 417, 420 images used by 236 on imagination 48 Collected Poems, 1909–1935 92, 190, 251, 509 colonialism 427–428, 513, 530 Commedia, La. See Divine Comedy, The communication 146, 148–149 communion bell, in “Coriolan” 137 communism 270, 343 community 94–95, 266 competition, in culture 339 Complaints (Laforgue) 539 Complete Poems 73 composition 312–313 conceits 208, 305–306, 519 confession, in “AshWednesday” 70 Confessions (Symons) 563 Confessions, The (Augustine) 447, 462 Confidential Clerk, The 118–128 accessibility of 125– 126 composition of 26, 509–510 critical commentary 125–128 identity and freedom in 124, 125, 128 influences on 118 kindred spirits in 124, 128 love in 124, 128 parentage in 119–125, 127–128 spirituality in 127–128 synopsis 119–125 conflict in Ariel poems 301 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 297 in Murder in the Cathedral 331 spiritual, in “Sweeney Agonistes” 383 universal 181 conformity, in Lawrence 40 confusion, of Baudelaire’s time 78

Conrad, Joseph 512–513 Heart of Darkness 513, 530–533 in “The Hollow Men” 252–253, 257, 258–259 humanity in 396 in The Waste Land 435 consequences, in The Elder Statesman 161–162 conservatism of Coleridge 287 cultural, in criticism 286 of Eliot 17–18, 398–399 in “Function of Criticism” 91 in For Lancelot Andrewes 91 v. liberalism, in After Strange Gods 36, 89 Conservatism (Cecil) 287 consubstantiation 512 content, v. craft, in poetry 7 context, v. text, in “Mr. Apollinax” 318–319 contraceptives 399 contrasts 199, 201, 204 conventions, in Elizabethan drama 164, 165 Convent of the Sacred Heart (fictional place) 393, 393 conversation, meaningful 129 “Conversation Galante” 128–130 conversion (religious) 16–17, 18, 378 “Cooking Egg, A” 130–134, 395 Coplestone, Celia (character) 106–115, 117 Coppola, Francis Ford 531 “Coriolan” 134–140. See also “Triumphal March” background considerations 134–136 composition of 19, 44 critical commentary 139–140 faith in 97 synopsis 137–139 Coriolanus character of 134 in “A Cooking Egg” 132 in “Coriolan” 139–140

story of 135–136 in The Waste Land 134 corn field, in “The Boston Evening Transcript” 81 Cornwall 447, 464–465 courtly love 62, 517 “Cousin Nancy” 11, 75, 140–143, 507 craft (poetic) 7, 247 Crane, Hart 200, 476 Crane, Stephen 513 creation 58, 208, 238, 407–408 Creative Evolution (Bergson) 505 crime drama, The Family Reunion as 181 Criterion (journal) 513–515 under Eliot 18 European culture and 345–346 founding of 13 “The Hollow Men” and 251 Rothermere and 553 “Sweeney Agonistes” in 251 “The Tunnel” in 200 The Waste Land in 14, 551 critic categories of 403 Eliot as, v. poet 167 experience of 413 professional 235 time periods of 273–274 criticism (literary) of Arnold 238, 417–418, 419, 502 career in, phases of 403–404 of Coleridge 416–417, 420 contributions to 405 creation and 238 cultural conservatism in 286 definition of 412–413 development of 413 of Dryden 415–416 Elizabethan 414–415 ethics in 362 focus of 236 function of 402, 412–422 influence of 235–236 of Johnson 273–275, 415–416

limits of 235 modern 419–420 norms maintained by 274–275 opinion in 238, 239 on poetic drama 150–153 process of 235 purpose of 235–237 religion in 362–363 sensibilities of, time and 273–274 source studies as 236, 370 standards in 238, 239 theology in 362 in “To Criticize the Critic” 402–405 tradition in 238, 239 types of 412–413 use of 402, 412–422 criticism, of tradition, necessity of 36, 41 Critic with Gusto 403 Crucifixion in “Coriolan” 138 in “Journey of the Magi” 277–278 in The Waste Land , “What the Thunder Said” 467 cry, in “Coriolan” 138–139 “Cultivation of Christmas Trees, The” 19, 27, 143–145 cults, in culture 341–342 cultural anthropology 523 cultural criticism 33–42, 502. See also culture “Cultural Forces in the Human Order” 25, 335 cultural imperialism 427– 428, 513, 530 cultural unification, classical heritage in 103 culture. See also tradition categories of 336–337 in Christian society 267, 269 v. civilization 335 class and 336, 338– 339 classless 340 common reference points of 192 competition in 339 contexts of 336 definition of 335, 347

Index 595 deterioration of 103, 274, 315, 375 development of 336, 342, 345, 347–348 disintegration of 337 diversity in 339–341 education and 342– 345, 347 elites of 338–339, 347 faith and 338 friction in 341 in history, interactions in 347 individual and 336 isolation of 346 language in, in satellite cultures 340–341 multilingual, literary language of 375 in Notes towards the Definition of Culture 335–348 organic nature of 335 poetry and 376 politics and 342–343 popular 300, 350–351 regional 335–336, 340–341 religion and 335–336, 337, 341–342, 399 as religion exclusively 337–338 society and 336 transmission of 335, 343–344 unified 339–341, 345–346 in The Waste Land 467–468 World War I and 428 worldwide 341 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 231, 502 Culverwell, Fred (character) 154–155 Cumaean Sibyl 433–434 Curtis, Tony 402 Cyclades 395 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand) 368 Cyril (character) 137–139, 140 “Cyril Tourneur” 166

D Da 470 Daily Mail (newspaper) 553 Damyata 472

Daniel, Arnaut “Ash-Wednesday” and 20, 55 in The Divine Comedy 64, 438, 441, 518 “Little Gidding” and 222 Pound and 547 Daniel, Samuel 414 “Dans le restaurant” 12, 313, 430, 463–464 “Dante” 101, 145–149 Dante Alighieri 516–518 “Animula” and 48, 49, 50 “Ash-Wednesday” and 19–20, 45, 55 belief of 52 Cavalcanti exiled by 59 Donne compared to 100 exile of 67–68 experience rendered by 147 as great European 245 Harvard and 529–530 influence of 149, 404, 484–485, 529–530 language of 485 poetry of (See also Divine Comedy, The) accessibility of 146 allegory in 146–147 belief in 147–148, 371 in “The Hollow Men” 255–256 personal experience in 66–67 Thomas Aquinas and 371 vision of 148 in “What Dante Means to Me” 483–485 Dante Gold Medal 28 Dante Society of America 149, 529–530 darkness 96, 207, 277–278 Darwin, Charles 396–397 Datta 470, 471 Davies, John 372–374 Dawson, N. P. 477 Dayadhvam 470, 471 “Dead, The” (Joyce) 39, 534 death in Alcestis (Euripides) 105–106 boredom and 451

in The Cocktail Party 109 in “Coriolan” 138 in Four Quartets 189, 201–202, 220–221 in “The Hollow Men” 255–256 in Laforgue 539 perfection and 201– 202 reality of 201 soul after 48–49 as state of mind 385 in “Sweeney Agonistes” 385 in The Waste Land 451, 466 in “Whispers of Immortality” 489– 491 “Death by Water” 463–467. See also Waste Land, The, allusions in “Death of Saint Narcissus, The” 149–150, 430 “Death’s Duel” (Donne) 520 decadence, in Baudelaire 504, 505 deception, in “Portrait of a Lady” 356 decomposition, in “Whispers of Immortality” 489 Deianira (mythological figure) 192 Delilah (biblical figure) 383 Demant, V. A. 361–362 democracies 135, 343 Democracy and Leadership (Babbitt) 503 Denman (character) 175 Dent, H. C. 344 Descartes, René 386 desert, in The Waste Land 467 desire 384, 462 despair 65, 384, 388 destruction, in “Little Gidding” 224 detachment, in “Little Gidding” 223 devotion, to cause 258–259 devotional poetry 362 Dial, The (journal) 518– 519 Eliot in 514 “The Hollow Men” and 251

“Ulysses, Order, and Myth” in 409 The Waste Land in 14, 424, 551 Dial Award 519, 551 dialects 340–341 “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry, A” 54, 150–153 Diana, priesthood of 523 diaspora 95 Dickens, Charles 436–437, 471 Dickinson, Emily 498, 566 “Difficulties of a Statesman” 44 discontent, fortune-telling and 383–384 “Disintegration of the Intellect, The” (lectures) 17–18 dissociation of sensibility Dryden and 272–273 Eliot on 404 metaphysical poets and 286, 306–307, 490–491 Milton and 309 Divine Comedy, The (Dante) 517–518 allegory in 146–147 “animula” in 48, 49, 50 in “Ash-Wednesday” 60, 62–63, 64, 71 Cavalcanti in 60 as classic 102 in The Cocktail Party 112 Easter setting of 60 English translations of 149, 529 geography in 438–439 in “The Hollow Men” 255–256, 259 in “Little Gidding” 221–222, 404 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 290, 291–293 personal struggle in 69–70 as poetry of belief 148 quest in 438 revenge and 518 Satan in 468 soul in 374 as spiritual biography 72 in The Waste Land 64, 437–441, 449

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divine love 58–59, 517 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 396 doctrine 226, 335–336 Dolce Stil Nuovo 517 Donati, Piccarda de 132–133 Donne, John 519–520 Andrewes compared to 285–286 in The Clark Lectures 100 in “East Coker” 208 French symbolism and 562 influence of 404, 537 “Little Gidding” and 193 modernism of 100 “Whispers of Immortality” and 489, 490 wit of 47 Dorchester 359, 507 Doris (character) 383–385, 387–388, 397 “Doris’s Dream Songs” 251 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 468 dove, in “Little Gidding” 224 Downing (character) 175, 176, 179–180, 183 Dowson, Ernest 567 Draft of XVI Cantos, A (Pound) 549 drama. See also Choruses from The Rock action in 352 as amusement 151, 152 conflict in, universality of 181 emotion in 368 faith necessary to 151 as form 151, 152–153 as ideal medium for poetry 388 language of 352 v. life 367 Mass as 151–152 poetic 150, 152, 352–354 poetry in 126 prose composition of 352 purpose of 151–153 understanding in 182 unities of 152, 415 dramatic monologue “Journey of the Magi” 90, 275–276

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 258, 276, 293–294, 295 “Marina” 301 rules of 293 “A Song for Simeon” 90 voice in 401 dramatic poet 165–169, 352–353 dramatic poetry 150–153 “The Hollow Men” as 258 “Journey of the Magi” as 275–276 language of 334 as live language 168, 400 Murder in the Cathedral as 331–333 speakers of 395–396 “Sweeney Erect” as 395 use of 352–354 as voice 165 dreams, in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 391 Dryden, John 152, 272–273, 306, 402, 415–416 “Dry Salvages, The.” See also Four Quartets Annunciation in 212, 213–214 biography in 210 composition of 23–24 ends in 211–212 eternity in 210–211 future in 216–217 Gloucester in 527 Incarnation in 217 Mary in 213–214 Mississippi River in 3 music in 212 Orwell’s review of 229–230, 274 patterns in 212 publication of 190 religion in 211, 212, 213–215, 217 river in 210 St. Louis in 557 sea in 189, 210–211 still point in 212–213 synopsis 209–218 Part I 210–211 Part II 211–212 Part III 212–213 Part IV 213–216 Part V 216–218

time in 216–217 water in 188, 210–211, 214 winter in 188 Dry Salvages (place) 188, 209–210 Dublin 535 Dubliners (Joyce) 534 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster) 491 Dunne, Annie 4, 215, 527 Dusty (character) 383 duty, as virtue 423

E earth, in “East Coker” 188, 204 “East Coker.” See also Four Quartets allusions in 203–204, 207, 208, 209 autumn in 188 beginnings in 203 biography in 204 Christ in 208 composition of 23, 190 contrasts in 204 darkness in 207 earth in 188, 204 ends in 203 Eucharist in 208 language in 189, 204–205 life in 204 movement in 209 paradox in 204, 207–208 past in 204, 206 stillness in 209 subway in 207 synopsis 203–209 Part I 203–205 Part II 205–206 Part III 206–207 Part IV 207–208 Part V 208–209 theater in 207 time in 204–205 East Coker (place) 4, 23, 29, 188, 191, 203, 203, 522 Easter 60, 137 Easter Rebellion 573 economics, in Christian society 266–267 ecumenical movements, culture and 342 Edinburgh Festival 104, 118, 509

education 102–103, 342– 345, 347 Eggerson (character) 119–125 Egoist, The (journal) 521 Eliot at 12, 169, 403– 404, 514 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 405 Eighteen-Eighties, The, “Arnold and Pater” in 52 Elder Statesman, The 153–163 biographical aspects of 171 composition of 27–28, 153, 510 consequences in 161–162 critical commentary 160–163 dedication to 153 forgiveness in 162–163 freedom and identity in 159, 160, 162 guilt in 162 love in 153, 154, 157– 158, 159, 160–162 as morality play 161 premier of 28 reception of 153 redemption in 162 social masks in 160 synopsis 154–160 understanding in 162–163 worldliness in 160– 161 Eleanor of Aquitaine 517 elements, in Four Quartets 188, 203, 204 Eliot, Andrew 3, 204, 506 Eliot, Charles William 7, 412 Eliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns 6 influence of 4–5, 149 life of 3 literary aspirations of 4–5, 521 Eliot, Henry Ware, Sr. 3–4, 514, 521 Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns) 10, 26 accent of 7 American literary influences on 43

Index 597 anti-Semitism of 571 biography 3–29 critical attention paid to 3 in The Elder Statesman 171 in Four Quartets 188, 196, 204, 210, 218 in poetry 71–72 Boston and 142 British literary influences on 43 chronology of 577–582 composition 312–313 conservatism of 17–18 early life 3–6, 5 education of 6–7, 8–9, 528 emphysema of 8, 25, 28 employment of 11–12, 15–16, 17, 99 face powder worn by 16 fame of 26 health of 430 holiday poems of 19 influences on 404 American literature 43 Baudelaire 76–77, 80, 484 Bradley 230, 281, 508–509 British literature 43 Conrad 531–532 Dante 149, 404, 484–485, 529–530 France 6–7 French symbolists 291, 484 influence of 282 Italy 6–7 Laforgue (See Laforgue, Jules, influence of) metaphysical poets 304 symbolism 7, 80, 559 Symons 563 Yeats and 494 literary legacy of 171, 403 as Londoner 542–543 marriage to Valerie 27–28 marriage to Vivien 9–10, 18, 20–21, 411 old age of 28–29

at Oxford 9–10 in Paris 7–8, 290–291, 463, 505–506 poetic focus of 57 Pound and (See Pound, Ezra) as progressive 41–42 publications of 583–584 religious conversion of 16–17, 18, 565 siblings of 4 speakers in poems of 7, 58 teaching career of 11–12 during World War I 428–429 youth of 131 Eliot, Valerie Fletcher 27, 27–28 Eliot, Vivien Haigh-Wood 9 death of 25 health of 9, 10, 14, 430 marriage to 9–10, 18, 20–21, 411, 430 Russell and 9–10, 317, 555 separation from 20–21 Eliot, William Greenleaf 42, 521–522 life of 3 in St. Louis 506, 514, 556 Unitarianism of 3, 556, 565 Washington University and 569 elites, cultural 338–339, 347 Elizabeth (character) 461 Elizabethan criticism 414–415 Elizabethan drama. See also Essays on Elizabethan Drama conventions in 164, 165 as national theater 164 realism in 164 Seneca’s influence on 165, 368–370 tragedy in 165, 168 Elizabethan English 189, 204–205, 558 Elizabethan Essays 163 Elizabethan poetry 414–415 Elyot, Thomas 204–205 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 446–447, 518, 565 emotion 248, 272, 368 emphysema 8, 25, 28 Encolpius (character) 434

ends, in Four Quartets 203, 211–212, 226 England, Christian society for 264–272 English Civil War 219, 223 English language American v. British 42–43 as best language for poetry 345 Elizabethan 189, 204– 205, 558 of Shakespeare 558 English poets, Eliot on 537 English Reformation 203–204, 223, 511–512, 519–520 escapism 407–408 Essays Ancient and Modern 87, 362 Essays on Elizabethan Drama 99, 163–169 Essays and Studies 307 eternity, in Four Quartets 189, 194, 201, 210–211, 226–227 Ethical Studies (Bradley) 508 ethics, in criticism 362 “Et Tu Healy” (Joyce) 534 Eucharist 208, 512 Eumenides (characters) 173, 174, 177, 179, 183 Eumenides, The (Aeschylus) 172–174 Euripides 104, 105–106, 193, 374 Europe culture of 345–346, 427–428 (See also culture) in “Gerontion” 241–242 greatness of culture 244–245 heritage of 83, 103, 241, 487, 499 prewar 427–428 evolution 396–397 experience. See also human experience with aging 130–133 Bergson on 279, 505–506 Bradley on 280–281, 508–509 in “A Cooking Egg” 130–133 of critic 413 Descartes on 386

in Four Quartets 284 in “The Hollow Men” 257 immediate 280–281 in impressionism 513 intellectual, in Dante 66–67 knowledge of 279, 280–281, 282, 554 in Laforgue 537 in La vita nuova (Dante) 148–149 in literary realism 513 Locke on 386 memory of 212 in metaphysical poetry 306 in Milton 307 objective observation of 8–9, 554–555 perception and 281–282 personal, in poetry 66–67, 71–72 of poet 297 in poetry 284–285, 375, 421, 431 rendering of 147 Royce on 554 spiritual 66–67, 148–149 (See also spirituality) in “Sweeney Agonistes” 259 v. truth 386 in understanding 228 verbal formulations of 282–283 expiation, in The Family Reunion 181 “Eyes That Last I Saw in Dreams” 310 Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry 12, 548 “Ezra Pound: His Metric Poetry” 169–171

F Faber, Geoffrey 17, 28, 143 Faber & Faber Ariel Poems and 50 “East Coker” published by 190 location of 543, 543 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats published by 348 The Rock published by 92

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Faber & Gwyer 17, 515, 554, 570 face powder 16 faith in Ariel Poems 51–52 in “Ash-Wednesday” 65 Baudelaire and 78 in The Cocktail Party 112 culture and 338 international order based on 87–90 in “Little Gidding” 220 necessity of 92, 97, 151 requirements of 87, 95 Faith That Illuminates 362 Fall, the 67 family, in culture 339, 343–344 Family Reunion, The 171– 184 allusions in 118–119 awakening in 176, 178, 179 chorus in 174 classical background 172–174 class in 181–182 composition of 22–23, 171–172, 509 critical commentary 180–184 in development as playwright 125 identity in 183–184 individual in 105 Oresteia as basis of 172, 173–174 past in 160 as poetic drama 353 revival of 104 sleep in 176, 178 success of 181 synopsis 174–180 Part I 175–177 Part II 177–180 persons of the drama 174–175 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway) 473 fascism 270, 549 fate 423, 464 Faust (Goethe) 244 Fawkes, Guy 253–254, 258–259 fear 144, 145, 449–450 feelings as objects of experience 280, 281–282

reality of 283 thought and 286, 372–373, 491 Fenollosa, Ernest 547 Ferrar, John 219 Ferrar, Nicholas 188, 218 Ferry, Dick (character) 155 “Figlia Che Piange, La” 8, 184–187 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 228, 236, 535 fire, in “Little Gidding” 188 “Fire Sermon, The” 455– 462 allusions in (See Waste Land, The, allusions in) Fisher King in 458 happiness in 462 London Bridge in 456, 461–462 renunciation in 462 sexuality in 458, 459–461 speaker of 455, 459–460 spring in 462 worldliness in 457 “First Caprice in Montparnassse” 359 “First Caprice in North Cambridge” 359, 507 Fisher King 458, 469–470, 472 fishing industry, in Gloucester 527 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 225 Fitz Urse, Reginald (character) 329 “Five-Finger Exercises” 23, 309, 310–311, 488 “Flea, The” (Donne) 519 fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire) 77, 504, 538 Florence, Italy 6–7, 59, 516–518 Flowers of Evil, The. See fleurs du mal, Les Foerster, Norman 262 Ford, Ford Madox 513 Ford, Harrison 402 Ford, John 166 foreign ideas, in After Strange Gods 35 forgiveness, in The Elder Statesman 162–163 For Lancelot Andrewes 20, 33, 91, 511 form, vers libre and 334

fortune-telling 383–384, 448–449 “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” 99, 163, 164. See also Essays on Elizabethan Drama Four Quartets 187–230. See also “Burnt Norton”; “Dry Salvages, The”; “East Coker”; “Little Gidding” allusions in 192–193 approaches to reading 191–193 biography in 188, 196, 204, 210, 218 composition of 22, 23–24, 220 critical commentary 227–230 elements in 188, 203, 204 epigraphs of 228 experience in 284 general overview 187–189 geography of 188 holiness in 229 human experience in 228 influences on 484, 518 landscapes in 311 love in 202, 225 meaning in 284 music in 189, 193 obscurities of 192, 227–228 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and 351 places in 188, 203, 209–210 poetic style of 57 as poetry of belief 214 publication history 189–191 relationships within 188 religion in 229 rereading 193–194, 228–229 seasons in 188 self-sacrifice in 105 stillness in 201, 202 structure of 201, 205 success of 187 synopsis 194–227 “Burnt Norton” 194–203 “The Dry Salvages” 209–218

“East Coker” 203–209 “Little Gidding” 218–227 themes of 189 Fourth Canto, The (Pound) 549 “Fourth Caprice in North Cambridge” 359, 507 Fragonard, Honoré 318 frame narration, in Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 257, 532 France, influence of 6–7 “Francis Herbert Bradley” 230–232 Franz Ferdinand (archduke of Austria) 426–427 Frazer, Sir James 101, 523–524, 569 freedom in choice 127 in Christianity 105 identity and 124, 125, 128, 159, 160, 162 Lawrence and 541 “free-thinking,” in After Strange Gods 35, 500 free verse. See vers libre free will 50, 51 French poetry 232–234, 504 French symbolists 561–562 achievements of 345 Aiken influenced by 497 Baudelaire in 76–77, 504 “The Hippopotamus” influenced by 249– 250 influence of 7, 80, 249–250, 291, 364, 365, 484 juxtaposition in 316 Laforgue in 537–538 Mallarmé in 198 modernism influenced by 43 Poe and 233 truthfulness of 357 urban life and 76 vers libre of 566–567 Freud, Sigmund 397 “From Poe to Valéry” 232–234 From Ritual to Romance (Weston) 444, 524–525, 569–570

Index 599 “Frontiers of Criticism, The” 235–237 Fuller, Margaret 518 “Function of Criticism” 91, 235, 237–239, 399, 511, 545 “Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The” (Arnold) 238, 502 Furies (characters) 173– 174, 382–383 Fussell, Paul 428 future 178, 184, 194–197, 216–217, 448–449 futurism, Pound in 170

G “Game of Chess, A” 451–455 allusions in (See Waste Land, The, allusions in) boredom in 451–452, 454 class in 452, 454 innocence in 453, 454 speaker of 454 garden 128, 194–195, 200, 447 garlic 198–199 Gauguin, Paul 386–387 Gautier, Théophile 12, 82–83, 131–132, 250, 548, 567 gender 150, 447 generations, modern concern with 398 geography 188, 438–439, 467 Georgics (Virgil) 422 Gerald (character) 174– 180, 183 “Gerontion” 239–244 anti-Semitism in 241, 499 “Burbank” compared to 85 critical commentary 242–243 as dramatic poetry 150, 258 epigraph of 241 heritage squandered in 499 individual in 104–105 mood and tone of 241 personality in 116 in Poems 1920 13

public commentary in 135 reality in 239 self in 104–105 speaker of 240, 395 synopsis 239–242 title of 242 The Waste Land and 379 Gerontion (character) 241 Ghibellines 516 ghost, in “Little Gidding” 221–223 ghost story, The Family Reunion as 181 Gideon Seymour Lecture 235 Glasgow University 333 Glastonbury, in Grail legend 464–465, 524 Gloucester, Massachusetts 5–6, 6, 506, 526, 526–527 God 189, 564. See also Christianity; religion Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 244–246, 403 “Goethe as the Sage” 85, 244–246 Gold Coast Customs (Sitwell) 558 Golden Bough, The (Frazer) 523–524, 569 Gomez, Frederico (character) 154–156, 157, 158–160 Gonne, Maude 572 Gorman, Herbert S. 477–478 Grail legend card suits from 449 Chapel Perilous in 468–469 Fisher King in 458, 469–470, 472 Glastonbury and 464–465 in From Ritual to Romance (Weston) 524–525, 569–570 vegetation myth in 444, 464–465 Great Book movement 503 Great Depression, political consequences of 135 Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) 225 Great Rumpuscat (character) 349

Great War and Modern Memory, The (Fussell) 428 Greek mythology 391, 392. See also Aeschylus; Euripides; Sophocles Greek tragedy 332 Gregory, Robert 573 grief, in “La Figlia Che Piange” 186–187 Grierson, Herbert J. C. 100, 305, 520 Growltiger (character) 349 Guelfs 59, 516 Guido do Montefeltro 292, 432 guilt 59–60, 162, 181 Guinizzelli, Guido 64, 438, 441 Gunpowder Plot 253–254 Gurdjieff, George Ivanovitch 553 “Gus the Theatre Cat” 349 Guy Fawkes Day 253–254, 258–259 Guzzard, Mrs. (character) 119, 122–125

H H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) 521, 547 Hadrian, epitaph of 48–49, 303 Haigh-Wood, Charles 9 Hail Mary (prayer), in “AshWednesday” 61 Hairy Ape, The (O’Neill) 397 Hakagawa (character) 499 Hale, Emily 21, 22, 196 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 246–248 “Little Gidding” and 222 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 557 as poetic drama 352 in The Waste Land 455 “Hamlet and His Problems” 13, 163, 246–248, 368, 557 Hanseatic Goethe Prize 244 happiness, in The Waste Land 462 Harcourt-Reilly, Henry (character) 110–113, 117–118 Hardy, Thomas, as blasphemous 41

Harpies (characters) 173–174 Harvard 528–530 Aiken at 497 Babbitt at 503 dissertation for 11, 279–280 education at 7, 8–9, 279 Eliot (William) at 522 modern languages at 149, 529–530 Royce at 554 Unitarianism at 565 visiting professorship at 10, 20, 33, 37, 388, 411–412 Hayward, John 24, 25 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 513, 530–533 in “The Hollow Men” 252–253, 257, 258–259 humanity in 396 in The Waste Land 435 He Do Police in Different Voices, Boston in 507 Hegel, Friedrich 200, 345 hell, in “The Hollow Men” 255–256 Hemington, Charles (character) 154–155, 157–159 Hemingway, Ernest 473 Henrietta Hertz Lecture 307 Henry II (kind of England) 323–327 Henry VIII (king of England) 511–512 Heracleitus 228 Herakles (mythological figure) 192 Herbert, George 488 Hercleitus, on change 115 Hercules (character) 105–106 Hercules Furens (Seneca) 302, 369 heresy 20, 33–42 hermaphrodism, in “The Death of Saint Narcissus” 150 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 572 Herrick, Robert 488 Hesse, Hermann 468 Heywood, Jasper 368

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Heywood, Thomas 165–166 High Church Anglicanism. See Anglo-Catholicism higher civilization, v. lower 338–339 Highgate Junior School 11 Hinduism 211, 213, 215, 217, 470–472 “Hippopotamus, The” 12, 23, 47, 248–250, 248–250 historical consciousness 78, 274, 275, 407, 486 history 347, 485–486, 549 Hitler, Adolf 270, 501 Hobbes, Thomas 386 Hodgson, Ralph 311 Hogarth Press 11, 17, 570 holiday poems 19 holiness, in Four Quartets 229 Hollow Land, The (Morris) 252, 532 “Hollow Men, The” 251– 260 allusions in 254 The Divine Comedy (Dante) 255– 256, 259 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 257, 258–259, 513, 532–533 choral chant in 90 in The Cocktail Party 116 composition of 16, 330 critical commentary 257–260 death in 255–256 as dramatic poetry 150, 258 epigraphs of 252–254, 258–259 experience in 257 hell in 255–256 individual in 57, 104–105 influences on 530, 531–532 landscape in 63, 256 life in 255–256 love in 256 meaning in 251, 252 modernism in 96 as modernist long poem 45 as pastiche 251–252 personality in 116

prayer in 257 precursors to 44, 251 publication of 251, 515 reading of 254–255 The Rock compared to 96 salvation in 256–257 self in 104–105 shadow in 96, 257 soul in 259 speaker in 252 spirituality in 56, 258, 259 “Sweeney Agonistes” and 251 synopsis 252–257 epigraphs 253–254 general overview 252 Part I 254–256 Part II 256 Part III 256 Part IV 256–257 Part V 257 text 254 title 252–253 technique in 260 title of 252–253 Holocaust 498, 501 Holy Grail legend. See Grail legend Holy Sonnets (Donne) 519, 520 Holy Spirit 224, 564 Homer 245, 395, 409–410 homoeroticism, in “The Death of Saint Narcissus” 150 homosexuality, in The Waste Land 459, 463 honesty, in Blake 492 Hoover, Herbert 412 hope, in “Preludes” 360 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 40, 566 hornéd gate 391 horror tale, The Family Reunion as 181 Horsfall, Captain (character) 384–385 Housman, A. E. 101 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 214 Hughes, Thomas 501 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Pound) 12, 243, 320, 548 Hulme, T. E. 43, 102

human experience. See also experience in Ariel Poems 50–52 boredom in 451, 452 in Four Quartets 211, 226, 228 in “The Hollow Men” 96 identity in 117 labor in 93, 95 limited value of 211 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 297–298 in modernism 97 perception of 471–472 in poetry 421, 431 reality in, capacity for 182–183, 184 in “Sweeney Agonistes” 259, 386–387 universality of 228 in The Waste Land 469 humanism 260–262 Arnold in 52–54, 231 of Babbitt 261, 503 concept of human in 88 as literary experience 262 of Murry 545 Pater in 52–54 v. religion 232, 261–262 religion in 53–54, 151 self in 261 “Sweeney Agonistes” and 386, 387 v. tradition 232 “Humanism of Irving Babbitt, The” 53, 231, 260–262 humanity in Conrad 513 depravity of 396–397 evolution of 396–397 Hobbes on 386 in humanism 88 as noble savage 396 in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 366–367 suffering of, capacity for 79 in “Sweeney Agonistes” 380, 384 in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 393 in Upanishads 470 in The Waste Land 463–464, 469

hyacinth garden 447 Hyde-Lees, Georgie 573–574 Hydraulic-Press Brick Company 3, 521 “Hysteria” 262–264

I idea meaning and 283, 284 as reality 284 as symbol 284 transmittal v. dramatization 371 idealism 230, 279–285, 505–506, 508–509, 554 Idea of a Christian Society, The 264–272 Anglicanism in 399 conversion addressed in 18 critical commentary 269–272 on cultural deterioration 103 inspiration for 23 intentions of 265 synopsis 265–269 identity change in 115 in The Cocktail Party 111–112, 114–115 concealment of 126– 127 in The Family Reunion 183–184 in “La Figlia Che Piange” 186 freedom and in The Confidential Clerk 124, 125, 128 in The Elder Statesman 159, 160, 162 in human experience 117 in Lawrence 40 place and, in “Burnt Norton” 197 public v. self 160 as social construct 126–127 Ignatius, Saint 248–249 imagery, logic of 46 imagination, Coleridge on 48, 416 imagism 43, 170, 547

Index 601 immediate experience 280–281 immigration, to America 500, 506–507 impressionism 53, 513 Incarnation, in “The Dry Salvages” 217 India 341, 470 indifference, in “Little Gidding” 223 individual in “Ash-Wednesday” 57 culture and 336 education for 344 in The Family Reunion 105 in “Gerontion” 104– 105 in “The Hollow Men” 104–105 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 104–105 purpose of 388 reality perceived by 471–472 in “Sweeney Agonistes” 105, 386, 388 tradition and 406–409 Inferno. See Divine Comedy, The innocence 130–133, 453, 454 intellectual experience, in Dante 66–67 intelligentsia, politicians and 287 interextuality 431–432 “Interlude: in a Bar” 359 “Interlude in London” 8, 359 international order, based on Catholicism 87–90 “Ion” (Plato) 408 Iphigenia (mythological figure) 172, 392, 433 Ireland 340, 534, 572–573 Irish Catholics 499, 501 isolation 40, 110, 111–112, 387 Isolde (legendary figure) 447–448 Italian Institute 483 Italians 499 Italy 135, 516, 549–550 Ivy (character) 174–180, 183

J James, Henry 83, 175, 355, 428 James, William 554 Jason (mythological figure) 193 Jesus. See Christ Jew of Malta (Marlowe) 320, 354 Jews. See anti-Semitism Joachim, Harold 9, 280, 508 Joad, C. E. M. 344 John (character) 178 “John Dryden” 272–273 “John Ford” 166 “John Marston” 166–167 John of the Cross, Saint 55, 207, 383 Johns Hopkins University. See Turnbull Lectures Johnson, Samuel 273–275, 305, 402, 415–416 “Johnson as Critic and Poet” 273–275 Johnston, Martyn 518 Joliet (Jolliet), Louis 556 “Jolly Corner, The” (James) 175 Jonson, Ben 99–100, 164–165 Joseph of Arimathea 464– 465, 524 Joseph of Arimathea (Robert de Boron) 524, 525 “Journey of the Magi” 275–279 composition of 19 critical commentary 278–279 as dramatic monologue 90, 275–276 Perse’s influence on 45 personality in 116 publication of 143 speaker of 276–277 synopsis 276–278 joy, in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” 144, 145 Joyce, James 534–535. See also Ulysses “The Dead” 39, 534 Dubliners 534 in The Egoist 521 Finnegans Wake 228, 236, 535 on history 140 “Little Gidding” and 222

modernism of 424 as orthodox writer 39 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 39, 72, 534–535 religion and 362 Ulysses acceptance of 426 composition of 535 in The Egoist 13 on history 140 modernism of 410–411 orthodoxy and 39 reception of 425– 426 review of 409–411 The Waste Land compared to 411, 535 Judaism, as cultural inheritance 85 Julian of Norwich, in “Little Gidding” 192, 223–224 Julius, Anthony 501 juxtaposition, in French symbolist poetry 316

K Kaghan, B. (character) 119, 122–125, 127 Keats, John 390, 417 kindred spirits, in The Confidential Clerk 124, 128 king, sacrificial 524 King Bolo poems 23, 348, 497 kingfisher 201 Kipling, Rudyard 215, 252, 527, 532 Klein, Ferdinand (character) 84 Klipstein (character) 384–385 knights (characters) 327–329 knitting 131, 133 Knopf 13, 169 knowledge 279, 280–281, 282, 294, 554 Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley 279–285, 508 background considerations 279–280 critical commentary 282–285

as dissertation paper 11, 528 publication of 28, 171, 230, 279 synopsis 280–282 Krishna (deity) 211, 213, 215, 217 Krumpacker (character) 384–385 “Kubla Kahn” (Coleridge) 236 Kurtz (character) 253, 257, 258–259, 435, 530–533

L labor 93, 95, 422–423 labor strike, by plebeians 136 Laclede, Pierre 556 La Commedia. See Divine Comedy, The lady, in “Ash-Wednesday” 65, 66, 68 Laforgue, Jules 536–540 “Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot” 129 in French poetry 504 influence of 7, 80 on “Conversation Galante” 129 on “A Cooking Egg” 131–132 on “Cousin Nancy” 141–142 and critical writings 404 Eliot on 484 on “Hysteria” 262 on “Preludes 359 on “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 389 speakers in poems of 7 in symbolism 559, 561–562 truthfulness in 357 wit of 47 Lambert (character) 154 Lambeth Conferences 398 “Lancelot Andrewes” 285–286 “Landscapes” 309–310, 488 language changing 274 in classics 486 in cultural deterioration 375 of Dante 485

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language (continued) deterioration of 209 development of 334– 335 dissociation of sensibility and 306, 309 of drama 352 in “East Coker” 189, 204–205 economy of words in 147 imprecision in 204 in “Journey of the Magi” 276 in Laforgue 536, 538 limitations of 384–385 in “Little Gidding” 558 of love poetry 185–186 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 294 v. meaning 146 in metaphysical poetry 305–306 in Milton 307–308 in “Mr. Apollinax” 319–320 in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” 320–321 in Murder in the Cathedral 325 natural speech 126, 334–335, 567–568 in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 349 poetic 360 in poetic drama 367– 368 in poetry 98, 333–335, 416, 567–568 possibilities of, in function of poet 126 of satellite cultures 340–341 suggestive v. explicit 282–283 in “Sweeney Agonistes 384–385 temporal quality of 222 time and 222 universality of 146 in vers libre 170 in Wordsworth 360– 361, 416 in Yeats 493 La Rochefoucauld, François de 81 La Salle, René-Robert Cavalier de 556

Latin, universality of 486 Latini, Brunetto, Dante and 147, 221, 517 laughter, in “Hysteria” 263 Lausanne, Switzerland, clinic in 14, 430–431 Lawrence, D. H. 540–541 as blasphemous 41 as heretical writer 39–40 later criticism of 404 Morrell and 544–545 Lazarus 295–296 leadership, of Christian state 266 Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 566 Leavis, F. R. 101 Lee, Leah 539 Léger, Alexis Saint-Léger 44 Leicester (character) 461 Leroux, Gaston 357 “L’Hippopotame” (Gautier) 250 Libation Bearers (Aeschylus) 173, 382–383 liberalism v. conservatism, in After Strange Gods 36, 89 life boredom in 451, 452 compromises in 120– 121, 127 cycle of, in “East Coker” 204 v. drama 367 in The Elder Statesman 154 in Four Quartets 189, 204 in “The Hollow Men” 255–256 as labor 93, 95 in Laforgue 539 of lower classes 436 poetry as criticism of 451 in “Sweeney Agonistes” 385 in “Whispers of Immortality” 489– 491 Lil (character) 454 Lindsey, Jack 479 “Lines to a Duck in the Park” 311 “Lines for an Old Man” 310 “Lines to a Persian Cat” 310–311

“Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier” 311 Listener, The (magazine) 422 literary journals. See also Criterion; Dial, The; Egoist, The; Poetry Eliot’s career in 167 failure of 345–346 in London 513–514, 521 literary symbolism 560–561 literature American 42–44 moral judgments of 362 national, classical roots of 103 as religion 151 religion separate from 362–363 religious 362 timelessness of 431 “Literature of Politics, The” 287–288 “Little Gidding.” See also Four Quartets aging in 133–134 allusions in Dante 149, 404 Herakles 192–193 Julian of Norwich 192, 223–224 Medea (Euripides) 193 Battle of Britain in 191, 193, 218–219, 220–221, 224 beginnings in 226 belief in 220 biography in 218 composition of 24, 191 detachment in 223 Divine Comedy (Dante) and 221–222, 404 ends in 226 eternity in 226–227 faith in 220 fire in 188 ghost in 221–223 history in 219 Holy Spirit in 224 influences on 484, 518 language in 558 love in 225 past in 225 on poetic style 57 prayer in 220 publication of 191 religion in 189

renunciation in 219– 220 spring in 188 synopsis 218–227 Part I 219–220 Part II 220–223 Part III 223–224 Part IV 224–225 Part V 225–227 time in 226, 227 understanding in 226 Little Gidding (place) 188, 218, 218 Little Review (journal) 12, 320, 488 Liturgy of the Eucharist, in “Ash-Wednesday” 65 Litvinoff, Emmanuel 498 Liverpool Post (newspaper) 15 Lives (Plutarch) 135 Lloyds of London Bank 12, 15, 130 Locke, John 386 logic theory 555 London 541, 541–543, 543 first visit to 8 literary journalism in 513–514, 521 in The Rock 93 in World War II (See Battle of Britain) London Bridge 449, 456, 461–462, 542 London Conservative Union 287 London Nights (Symons) 563 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 149, 529 Lord Jim (Conrad) 513 Lord’s Prayer, in “The Hollow Men” 257 Lost Generation, Eliot as leader of 15 Louisiana Purchase 556 love. See also courtly love; divine love action and 225–226 in Alcestis (Euripides) 104, 106 in “Ash-Wednesday” 58–59 betrayal by 448 in The Cocktail Party 118 in The Confidential Clerk 124, 128

Index 603 in “Conversation Galante” 129 in The Divine Comedy 518 in The Elder Statesman 153, 154, 157–158, 159, 160–162 in Four Quartets 189, 225 in “The Hollow Men” 256 in Lawrence 540 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 294–295 in “Marina” 302–304 redemptive power of 153 self-denying 62 stillness of 202 as temptation 58 transformative power of 62–63, 304 in The Waste Land 448, 461 in “Whispers of Immortality” 489 love poetry 184–185 love song 294 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” 288–299 alienation in 291 allusions in biblical 295–296 The Divine Comedy (Dante) 149, 290, 291–293 Shakespeare 557 “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell) 47, 296 audience of 293–294 background considerations 289–291 biography in 296–297 Boston in 289, 507 as character study 298–299 in The Cocktail Party 116 composition of 8 concealment of personality in 126 critical commentary 296–299 dramatic elements of 90

as dramatic monologue 258, 276, 293–294, 295 as dramatic poetry 150 epigraph to 149, 290, 291–293, 432 frivolity in 23 Harvard and 529 importance of 288–289 individual in 57, 104–105 influences on Bergson 505–506 The Divine Comedy (Dante) 290, 291–293, 518 Laforgue 290, 537, 538, 539, 563 metaphysical poets 520 landscape in 311 language of 294 listening in 295 love in 294–295 as love poem 185 as love song 294 meaning in 294 modernism of 425 name in 316 objective correlative in 248, 283–284 in Poetry 11, 548 polite society in 142 precursors to 130 publication of 169, 548 sea in 289 sentimentality in 298 social masks in 160 speaker of 185, 289, 294, 395 success of 288 synopsis 291–296 dramatic monologue 293–294 epigraph 291–293 text 294–296 title 291–293 title of 291–293 understanding 294, 295 urban life in 75, 507 women in 295–296 yellow fog of 248, 295 Lowell, Amy 43, 170 Lowell, James Russell 149, 529–530 lower civilization, v. higher 338–339

lower classes in “A Game of Chess” 452 lives of 436 Lowes, John Livington 236 Lucas, F. L. 479 Lucian 317 “Lucifer in Straight” (Meredith) 141 Lucretius 505 Lucy, Saint 144 Ludwig (king of Bavaria) 445 Luftwaffe 24 Lustra (Pound) 169 Luther, Martin 564 Lutheranism, Eucharist in 512 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth) 407 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 381

M Macavity (character) 349 MacColgie Gibbs, Alexander (character) 106–113, 117–118 Machiavelli, Niccolò 83, 371 magi 275–279 Maid’s Tragedy, The (Fletcher and Beaumont) 394 make-believe, in The Confidential Clerk 120– 121 Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, The (Browne) 510 Mallarmé, Stéphane 198, 310, 504, 561 Malory, Thomas 525 Mann, Thomas 519 Mannheim, Karl 338–339 Mantegna, Andrea 83 Marburg, Germany 9 Margate 14 “Marie Lloyd” 299–300 “Marina” 300–304 child in 144 composition of 19 critical commentary 303–304 publication of 143 synopsis 302–303 Marina (character) 301– 303 Maritain, Jacques 17

Marius the Epicurean (Pater) 49 Marlow (character) 252, 257, 435, 530–533 Marlowe, Christopher 98–99, 320, 354, 415 Marquette, Jacques 556 marriage, in The Waste Land 454–455 marriages (Eliot’s) 9–10, 18, 20–21, 27–28 Marsden, Dora 521 Marston, John 83, 166–167 martyrdom, in Murder in the Cathedral 326–327, 330 Marvell, Andrew 47–48, 208, 296, 458, 562 Marx, Groucho 300, 350 Marxism 270 Mary. See Virgin Mary Mary (character) 174–180, 183 Mary, Queen of Scots 203–204 Mary Institute 393 Mass, as drama 151–152 Massinger, Philip 166 masturbation, in “The Death of Saint Narcissus” 150 mathematics 555 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 505 Maurras, Charles 87, 102, 288, 500 Mayer, Louis B. 402 McAfee, Helen 478 meaning assumption of 435 cleverness and 228 in “A Cooking Egg” 131 in Four Quartets 284 in “The Hollow Men” 251, 252 idea and 283, 284 v. language 146 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 294 in “Mr. Apollinax” 316–317, 319 multilevel, in Shakespeare 182 in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 351 patterns in rendering 198 poetry and 146, 333, 408, 420, 435–436

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meaning (continued) in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 364–365 v. source 437, 443 in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 389–390 in “Sweeney Erect” 394 in The Waste Land 438, 469, 481–482 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 241 Medea (Euripides) 193, 374 Medea (mythological figure) 193 Meditations upon Emergent Occasions (Donne) 520 Melanesians 300 memento mori 489 memory 64–65, 194–197, 212, 505–506 “Memory” (song) 349, 364 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 83 Meredith, George 141 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 453, 460 metaphor, in After Strange Gods 35–39 Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Grierson) 100, 305, 520 metaphysical poetry conceits in 208, 305– 306, 519 experience in 306 French symbolism and 562 language in 305–306 “Whispers of Immortality” and 489–491 “Metaphysical Poetry of the 17th Century, with special reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley, The” 99 metaphysical poets 208, 304–307. See also Donne, John; Marvell, Andrew “Metaphysical Poets, The” 13, 47, 272, 304–307, 520, 537 metaphysics of Bradley 508–509 Bradley on 402

definition of 304–305 in Samson Agonistes 381 Methuen Press 13 Middleton, Thomas 164, 165 military, in World War I 429 Milton, John 307–309 education of 103 influence of 306 “Little Gidding” and 222 Marvell compared to 47 reassessment of 403 Samson Agonistes 380–381 “Milton I” 307–309 “Milton II” 307–309 Milton Academy 506 Minor Poems 309–313, 488 composition of 312 critical commentary 311–313 publication history 309–310 synopsis 310–311 minor poetry 487–488 minor poets 487 Minos (mythological figure) 397 Mississippi River 3, 210, 556 mob, in “Coriolan” 137–140 modernism 424–425 as American literature 43–44 in Anabasis 44–45 Arnold and 502 in “Ash-Wednesday” 73 Baudelaire in 77, 504 boredom in 300 Conrad in 530 critical theory of 419 Donne and 100 experimentation in 411 in “The Hollow Men” 96 human experience in 97 influences on 43, 504 of Joyce 410–411, 535 Laforgue and 538 of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 289 Morrell and 544 poetry defined in 46– 47, 421 Pound in 547–548 reaction against 425

review publishing in 513 truthfulness in 357 unpoetic in 316, 319–320 vers libre in 360, 566, 567 The Waste Land in 424 of Woolf 570 of Yeats 572–573 Yeats and 493–494 modern languages, at Harvard 149, 529–530 Monchensey, Amy (character) 174–180, 183 Monchensey, Harry (character) 175–180, 182, 183 Mond, Alfred 132 Monist (journal) 11 Monro, Harold 476 Monroe, Harriet 11, 477, 479, 548 Montaigne, Michel 371 Moore, Marianne 519 morality 79, 232, 362–363. See also After Strange Gods morality play 161, 240 More, Paul Elmer 503 “(Morgendämmerung): Prelude in Roxbury” 507 “Morning at the Window” 81, 313–316, 501, 507 Morrell, Ottoline 11, 544– 545, 559 Morrell, Philip 544 Morris, William 252, 532 Morte D’Arthur (Malory) 525 Morville, Hugh de (character) 329 movement as meaningful action 200 in Murder in the Cathedral 327 perfection and 201–202 stillness and 209 of time 213 “Mr. Apollinax” 316–320 allusions in 319 critical commentary 318–320 epigraph of 317 meaning in 316–317, 319 name in 316–317 reader and 264

Russell and 555 synopsis 316–318 text and context in 318–319 “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” 320–322, 396 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 570 Mulhammer, Claude (character) 119–125 Mulhammer, Elizabeth (character) 119–125, 127 multiculturalism 34, 503 Mungojerrie (character) 349 Murder in the Cathedral 322–333 audience in 331, 332 background considerations 322–323 “Burnt Norton” and 22, 189–190 character v. power in 135 chorus in 168–169, 324–325, 327–330, 401, 402 composition of 22, 189– 190, 331–332, 509 conflict of 331 critical commentary 330–333 in development as playwright 125 as dramatic poetry 331–333 The Family Reunion and 180 language in 325 martyrdom in 326–327, 330 original story 323–324 past in 160 as poetic drama 353 power in 323, 326, 331 self-sacrifice in 105 sermon in 327 synopsis 324–330 tempters in 325–327 themes of 331 Murry, J. Middleton 17, 232, 235, 237, 399, 545–546 music in Aiken’s poetry 498 in Four Quartets 189, 193, 212 of poetry 333–335

Index 605 poetry and, properties common to 198 in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 364 as structural model 201 in “Sweeney Agonistes” 385 music hall 299–300 “Music I Heard” (Aiken) 498 “Music of Poetry, The” 197, 333–335 Mussolini, Benito 135, 270, 549–550 “My Last Duchess” (Browning) 293 mysticism, poetry as 419–420 mythology 391, 392, 409– 410, 465–466

N “Naming of Cats, The” 349 Narcissus 150 Nashe, Thomas 368–369 National Book League 400 nationalism, of Yeats 573, 574 national literature, classical roots of 103 National Medal for Literature 498 nations 339, 345, 429 native tradition 413 Nativity, in “Journey of the Magi” 276–277 nature 141, 393 Nausicaa (mythological figure) 395 Nazi regime, anti-Semitism of 501 Nero (Roman emperor) 434 Nerval, Gerárd de 561 Nessus (mythological figure) 192 neutral society, tolerance in 266 New Criterion (journal) 17, 515. See also Criterion (journal) New Criticism 101, 405 New English Weekly (journal) “The Dry Salvages” in 24, 190 “East Coker” in 23, 190 “Little Gidding” in 24, 191 “New Hampshire” 310

New Humanism, Babbitt in 503 New Statesman (journal) 11, 169, 360 nightingales 392, 393 Nobel Prize 26, 506, 574 noble savage 386, 396 “No man is an island” (Donne) 520 nonsense 23, 348 Norton, Charles Eliot 149, 529–530 Norton Lectures. See Charles Eliot Norton professorship Norwegian language, preservation of 340–341 Nosce Teipsum (Know Thyself) (Davies) 372, 373 Nostromo (Conrad) 513 Notes towards the Definition of Culture 335–348 Anglicanism in 399 “Catholicism and International Order” and 88 Catholicism in 511 composition of 25, 335 conversion addressed in 18 critical commentary 346–348 synopsis 335–346 Chapter 1 335–338 Chapter 2 338–339 Chapter 3 339–341 Chapter 4 341–342 Chapter 5 342–343 Chapter 6 343–345 European culture 345–346 “Nowhere Man” (song) 201

O objective correlative 247–248 Bradley and 283 Eliot on 404 in The Family Reunion 183 in “The Hollow Men” 252 objectivity 8–9, 279, 508– 509, 554–555 objects 283 obscurities 192, 227–228, 401

observation, in “Preludes” 359 occult 127, 572–574 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats) 390 Odysseus (mythological figure) 395 Odyssey (Homer) 395, 409–410, 460 Oedipus the King (Sophocles) 42, 433, 460 Old Gumbie Cat (character) 349 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 22–23, 311, 348–351, 488 O’Neill, Eugene 397 On Poetry and Poets 28, 235, 273, 307 “Poetry and Drama” in 352 “Sir John Davies” in 372 “The Social Function of Poetry” in 374 “The Three Voices of Poetry” in 400 “Virgil and the Christian World” in 422 “What Is Minor Poetry?” in 487 “Yeats” in 493 opinion, in criticism 238, 239 order, in Minor Poems 312 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 172– 174, 180–181, 382–383 Orestes (mythological figure) 173–174, 382–383 Organization Man 252–253, 532 orthodoxy 36, 423 Orwell, George 229–230, 274 Othello (Shakespeare) 83, 279 Others (journal) 11, 514 Our Lady of Good Voyage Catholic Church 215, 215, 527 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 436–437 Outcast of the Islands, An (Conrad) 512 Ovid 453, 460 Ovid Press 13 Oxford University 9–10, 501, 508 Ozick, Cynthia 501

P pagan society 265–266 Page-Barbour Lectures 20, 33, 412, 500 Palm Sunday, as triumphal march 137 Paradiso. See Divine Comedy, The paradox, in “East Coker” 204, 207–208 parentage, in The Confidential Clerk 119– 125, 127–128 Paris, Eliot in 7–8, 290–291, 463, 505–506 Parnell, Charles Stewart 534 parody 349–350 Parzival (Wolfram von Eschenbach) 524 past in The Elder Statesman 161 in The Family Reunion 160, 178, 184 in Four Quartets 184, 194–197, 204, 206, 225 in Murder in the Cathedral 160 patterns of 227 in The Waste Land 82, 453–454 Pater, Walter 49, 52–54 patricians 135–136 patterns, in Four Quartets of action 226 contrasts in 199 in “The Dry Salvages” 212 in “Little Gidding” 226 of past 227 reality as 199 in rendering meaning 198 Pembroke, countess of 415 people, a 36 perception 281–282, 505–506 Perceval (Chrétien de Troyes) 524 “Perch’ io non spero” 19, 55. See also “Ash-Wednesday” Pereira (character) 383 perfection 201–202 Perfect Storm, The (film) 215, 527 performance 299

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Pericles (character) 301, 302–303 Pericles (Shakespeare) 118, 301–303 Perse, St.-John. See Anabasis personal experience 66–67, 71–72 personality in Byron 86–87 concealment of 126– 127 of dramatic poet 165–169 of Ford (John) 166 in Heywood 165–166 imposition of 40–41 ineffectual 116 lack of 115 of Marston 166–167 of Massinger 166 in Middleton 165 poetry as escape from 407–408 poetry united by 166 in “Portrait of a Lady” 357 of Tourneur 166 in Yeats 493 Peter (biblical figure), in The Rock 92 Petronius 433–434 Phantom of the Opera, The (Leroux) 357 “Philip Massinger” 166 Phillipe, Charles-Louis 365 Philomela (mythological figure) 392, 453 philosophy of Blake 492 in “Burnt Norton” 189, 203 poetry and 100–101, 145–146, 229, 373, 415, 417 truth in 386 Phlaccus, Mrs. (character) 318 Phlebas (character) 463–465 Phoenicians 464 Piggot, Mrs. (character) 156 Pipit (character) 130–133 Pisan Cantos (Pound) 550 place, in “Burnt Norton” 197 Plato 408 pleasure, as social function of poetry 375 plebeians 135–136

Plutarch 135 Plymouth Rock 506 Poe, Edgar Allan as American 43 Baudelaire and 504 Europe and 245 influence of 232–234 poetic theory of 233– 234 symbolists and 562 Poems 1909–1925 17, 252 Poems 1920 13 poésie pure 233 poet creation by, experience used in 297 Eliot as, v. man of letters 167 function of 126 historical consciousness of 78, 407 major 487 minor 487 performance of 206 v. person 145, 372, 396 beliefs of 52, 148 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 290, 296–297 Pound and 550 separation of 406, 431 in Shakespeare 370–372 in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 130 in The Waste Land 441 personality of in characters 165–169 in Elizabethan drama 165–169 in Murder in the Cathedral 168– 169 as philosopher 415, 417 relation to poetry 407–408 v. thinker 371 in “The Three Voices of Poetry” 86, 401 voices of 86, 400–402 poetic, vision, of Dante 148 poetic drama 150, 152, 352–354, 367–368

poetic language 360 poetic vision 34, 105, 148, 488, 492 poetry accessibility of 191–192 anthologies of 487 autobiography and 145–146 of belief “Ash-Wednesday” as 69 Dante as 147–148 Four Quartets as 214 function of 56–57 modern capacity for 67–69, 73 v. belief in After Strange Gods 37, 38–39 in Ariel Poems 52 critical commentary on 148, 229, 408, 419 in “Goethe as Sage” 246 of Byron 86–87 changing fashions of 206 communication through 146, 148 complexity in, reasons for 192 craft v. content in 7 as criticism of life 451 culture and 376 as distinct field 145– 146 in drama 126 drama as ideal medium for 388 dramatic (See dramatic poetry) dramatic use of 352– 354 Eliot in redefining 46–47 Eliot’s theory of 420 Elizabethan 414–415 emotion in 272 as escapism 407–408 of everyday speech 126 experience in 284–285, 375, 421, 431 extended works of, rarity of 46 function of 52, 412–422 Arnold on 418, 502 Baudelaire on 504

debate over 413– 414 social function 374–376 idea in 284–285, 371 as immediate experience 281 impersonal theory of (See poet, v. person) language of 98, 333– 335, 416, 567–568 layered meaning in 59 logic of 46 material of, choice of 272–273 meaning and 146, 333, 408, 420, 435–436 minor 487–488 modern requirements of 421 moral choices in 79 music and, properties common to 198 music of 333–335 as mysticism 419–420 native v. foreign influences on 414– 415 obscurity in 401 order in 312 personal experience in 71–72 personality in unity of 166 philosophy and 100– 101, 145–146, 229, 373, 415 Poe’s theories of 233–234 poet’s relation to 407–408 poet’s study of 333 as political literature 288 political use of 419 as portrait 354 v. prose 46, 420 purpose of 234 reality in 284–285 as religion 418, 502 religion in, tolerance of 56 salvation through 419 show v. tell in 306 social function of 374–376 sound in 333–334 statement of 413, 420

Index 607 symbolist 562–563 taste in, development of 414 temporal quality of 222 themes in, clarity of 92 theology and 373 time and 206, 222 as unique medium 420 united by personality 166 use of 412–422 voices of 400–402 wisdom in 246 of World War I 429 Poetry (journal) “Aunt Helen” in 73 “Conversation Galante” in 128 “Cousin Nancy” in 141 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 11, 169, 288 “Morning at the Window” in 313 “Mr. Apollinax” in 316 publication in 11, 514 “Poetry and Drama” 104, 334, 352–354 political writers 288 politicians, intelligentsia and 287 politics in Conrad 513 in “Coriolan” 138–139 culture and 342–343 Eliot’s writing on 287 in Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 530 poetry used for 419 Pope, Alexander 430 popular culture 299–300, 350–351 Portinari, Beatrice 517 portrait, poem as 354 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce) 39, 72, 534–535 “Portrait of a Lady” 354– 358 Boston in 507 composition of 8 critical commentary 357–358 as dramatic poetry 150 Harvard and 529 as love poem 185 polite society in 142

speaker of 354–356, 395 synopsis 354–356 truthfulness in 357 urban life in 75, 507 postromanticism 502 Pound, Ezra 547–550 Aiken and 497 “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere” 276 Cantos 171, 260, 549 career of 10–11 in The Dial 519 Dial Award and 519 friendship with 10–11 in futurism 170 heretical writer 40 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 12, 243, 320, 548 in imagism 170 involuntary commitment of 10, 25, 28, 550 “Little Gidding” and 222 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and 289 Lustra 169 meeting 521 on Milton 309 in modernism 43 modernism of 424 professional encouragement of 12–13, 169, 514, 548–549 quatrain form used by 12, 320, 548 Quinn and 551 subscription raised by 15, 549 transformations of 170–171 vers libre of 170, 361 The Waste Land and collaboration on 10 dedication to 64, 437–438, 471 editing by 14, 45, 411, 430, 437, 548–549 influence in 15 Yeats and 572 power v. character, of Coriolanus 135–136 in Conrad 513

in Murder in the Cathedral 135, 323, 326, 331 time’s ravaging of 206–207 prayer in “Ash-Wednesday” 73 Anima Christi 71 confession 70 Hail Mary 61 Liturgy of the Eucharist 65 Salve, Regina 67 in Four Quartets 216, 220 in “The Hollow Men” 257 Prayer and Poetry (Brémond) 419–420 Praz, Mario 101 prejudices, in After Strange Gods 33–35 Prelude, The (Wordsworth) 72 “Preludes” 358–360 Boston in 507 composition of 8, 358–359 Harvard and 529 hope in 360 “Morning at the Window” and 315 observations in 359 publication of 11 urban life in 75 pre-political area 288 present 184, 194–197 Prester John 129 Priapus (mythological figure) 318 priests (characters) 324– 325, 327–328, 329 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 83 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead) 555 Principles (Russell) 555 Principles of Literary Criticism, The (Richards) 235, 413 Principles of Logic, The (Bradley) 508–509 prison, in The Waste Land 128 Procne (mythological figure) 392, 452–453 professional critics 403

propriety 74–76, 141, 289–290, 355–356 prose, v. poetry 46, 420 Prospect for Christendom 25, 335 Protestant Reformation 342, 511–512, 519–520, 564 Prothalamion, The (Spenser) 457 Prufrock and Other Observations “Aunt Helen” in 73 “The Boston Evening Transcript” in 80 “Conversation Galante” in 128 “Cousin Nancy” in 141 dedication of 8 “La Figlia Che Piange” in 184 “The Hippopotamus” in 248 “Hysteria” in 262 “Morning at the Window” in 313 “Mr. Apollinax” in 316 “Preludes” in 358 publication of 12, 169, 521, 548 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in 363 “Pseudo-Martyr” (Donne) 520 Pulitzer, Joseph 557 Pulitzer Prize 498 pure poetry 233 purgative 63–65, 72–73 Purgatorio. See Divine Comedy, The Purpose (magazine) 493

Q quartet 189 quatrains 12, 82–83 “Burbank” 82–85 “A Cooking Egg” 130 of Gautier 567 “The Hippopotamus” 248–250 importance of 134 language of 425 “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” 320–322 in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 348–349

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quatrains (continued) Pound and 12, 320, 548 structure of 392, 394 “Sweeney Agonistes” 379 “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 392 “Sweeney Erect” 394 “Whispers of Immortality” 488– 491 quest, in The Waste Land 438, 447, 457, 482 Quilpe, Peter (character) 106–113, 117 Quinn, John 12, 14, 436, 519, 551–552 quintessence, in Four Quartets 188

R Rachel née Rabinovitch (character) 390–391, 499 racism, in After Strange Gods 34 “Rannoch, by Glencoe” 310 Ransom, John Crowe 478 Rape of the Lock, The (Pope) 430 Rascoe, Burton 474 rational skepticism, literature under 53 Ravenna, Italy 516–517 Read, Herbert 17, 344 realism, in Elizabethan drama 164 reality ambiguity of 227 v. appearance 127 asleep to 182–183 awakening to 182–183 in “Burnt Norton 194–197 of death 201 of feelings 283 in “Gerontion” 239 human capacity for 182–183, 184 idea as 284 as patterns 199 perception of 471–472 in poetry 284 reconciliation, in The Elder Statesman 160 redemption in “Ash-Wednesday” 67 in “Burnt Norton” 194 choice of 224–225

in The Elder Statesman 153, 159, 162 “Gerontion” and 242 in “Little Gidding” 224–225 through love 153 “Reflections on Vers Libre” 169, 360–361, 567 Reformation. See English Reformation; Protestant Reformation regeneration, in “AshWednesday” 63–64 region, in unified culture 340–341 relationships 357–358, 387 religion. See also Christianity; Hinduism; Judaism abandonment of 94–95 in aestheticism 53–54 Baudelaire and 78–79 in coherent tradition 36, 500 in The Confidential Clerk 127–128 culture and 335–336, 337, 341–342, 399 culture as, exclusively 337–338 divisions in, in culture 341–342 in Four Quartets 229 “The Dry Salvages” 211, 212, 213– 215, 217 “Little Gidding” 189, 224 in “The Hippopotamus” 248–250 in humanism 53–54 v. humanism 52–54, 232, 261–262 in Ireland 573 literature and, separation between 362–363 literature as 151 local, doctrine in 335–336 morality and 232 in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” 320–322 necessity of 94, 97 in poetry, tolerance of 56 poetry as substitute for 418, 502

self in 261 service in 95 social purpose of 93 social structure based on 265 v. spirituality 56 spiritual purpose of 93–94 unification under 88 as universal impulse 56 universality of 342 as way of life 337 “Religion and Literature” 38, 361–363 Religious Aspects of Philosophy (Royce) 554 religious literature 362 Renaissance, Dante in 516 renunciation 219–220, 462 Republic (Plato) 408 resignation 139, 140, 378–379 Resurrection 467 Revenger’s Tragedy, The (Tourneur) 166 Revolutionary War 506 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 363–367 Baudelaire and 366 composition of 8 Harvard and 529 as lyrical poem 364 meaning in 364–365 “Memory” (song) and 349, 364 modernism of 425 “Morning at the Window” and 315 music in 364 objective correlative in 283 publication of 11 speaker of 81 urban life in 75 “‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama” 367–368 rhyming couplets, in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 348 rhythm, in “Burnt Norton” 198 Richards, I. A. 101, 235, 413, 419 Rimbaud, Arthur 504, 559, 561 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge) 236

river, in “The Dry Salvages” 210 River Plate, in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 390 Road to Xanadu, The (Lowe) 236 Robert de Boron 524, 525 Robertson, J. M. 246 Rock, The choruses from. See Choruses from The Rock composition of 21–22, 91, 509 dialogue of 92 The Family Reunion and 180 Murder in the Cathedral and 322 performance of 91–92 social commitment in 97–98 Roman Catholicism American prejudice against 500 v. Anglo-Catholicism 18 as “Catholicism” 511 as cultural expression 512 Eucharist in 512 in Ireland 573 of Joyce 534 in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” 499 romanticism v. classicism in After Strange Gods 36, 37–38 in criticism 237– 238 debate of 102, 410, 486–487 Eliot on 89 Murry on 545 critical theory of 416–417 poetry of 406 pure poetry and 233 Ulysses (Joyce) and 410 Roman tragedy, Elizabethan drama influenced by 168 Rome, ancient in Aeneid 423, 485–486 in “Coriolan” 137–140 Coriolanus in 135–136 influence of 422–423

Index 609 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 412 rose, as symbol 560 rose garden, in “Burnt Norton” 128, 194–195, 200 Rostand, Edmond 368 Rothermere, Lilian, Viscountess 13, 514–515, 553–554 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 386, 396 Roxbury 359, 507 Royce, Josiah 8, 279, 528, 554–555 Rudolph (archduke of Austria) 445 Rugby 501 Ruggieri, Archbishop 440 Rumpelteazer (character) 349 Rum Tum Tugger (character) 349 Russell, Bertrand 9–10, 264, 317, 545, 555 Russell’s Paradox 555 Russell Square 24, 24, 543

S Sacred Wood, The 13, 246, 368, 405 sacrifice 105, 138 sacrificial king 524 “Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats) 574 St. Elizabeth’s Hospital 10, 25, 550 St. Louis, Missouri 556– 557 in American heartland 42 birth in 3 Eliot family in 506, 521–522 foreign-born population of 500 St. Michael’s Church 23, 29 Salem witch trials 506 “Salutation” 19, 55. See also “Ash-Wednesday” salutation, in “AshWednesday” 62 salvation baptism and 463 in Baudelaire 79–80 in “Coriolan” 140 in Eliot’s poetic focus 57

in “The Hollow Men” 256–257 through poetry 419 from time 217 Salve, Regina (prayer) 67 Samson (biblical figure) 326, 381, 383 Samson Agonistes (Milton) 380–381, 389 sapphires 198–199 Sarett, Lew 477 Sassoon, Siegfried 16 satellite cultures 340 satire 248, 272, 317 Satyricon (Petronius) 433–434 Savonarola 4–5 Scala, Cangrande I della 518 Schiff, Sidney 514 School of Donne 99, 100 science, in The Rock 93 Scotland, as satellite culture 340 sea in “Ash-Wednesday” 70 in “The Dry Salvages” 189, 210–211 end of 211–212 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 289 in “Mr. Apollinax” 318 in Pericles (Shakespeare) 301 seasons 188, 445–446, 462, 466 “Second Caprice in North Cambridge” 359, 507 “Second Thoughts on Humanism” 53, 260–262, 503–504 Secret Agent, The (Conrad) 513 sects, in culture 341–342 secular society 265, 400 seduction, in The Waste Land 466 Seldes, Gilbert 474–475, 519 Selected Essays 1917–1932 “Arnold and Pater” in 52 Elizabethan drama essays in 99, 163 essays on drama in 151 “Marie Lloyd” 299– 300

The Sacred Wood and 368 “What Is Minor Poetry?” in 487 self annihilation and reconstitution of 63 in The Cocktail Party 108–109, 111–112, 114–115 in “Gerontion” 104– 105 in “The Hollow Men” 104–105 in humanism 261 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 104–105 v. public identity 160 in religion 261 self-deception, tradition as defense against 41 self-deprecation 132, 230–231 self-discovery, in The Elder Statesman 160 self-purgation, in “AshWednesday” 55 self-sacrifice 105 Seneca drama of 367 Elizabethan drama influenced by 165, 168, 368–370 Hercules Furens 302, 369 stoicism of, Shakespeare and 370–372 tragedy of 369 “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” 99, 163, 368–370 senses 194, 307 sentimentality 131–132, 187, 298 “sept vieillards, Les” (Baudelaire) 450 sermon, in Murder in the Cathedral 327 Servetus, Michael 564 set theory 555 sexuality in Baudelaire 505 in “The Death of Saint Narcissus” 150 in Lawrence 540 in politics 452

in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 391–392 in “Sweeney Erect” 394 in The Waste Land 58, 439–440 “The Burial of the Dead” 444 “Death by Water” 466 “The Fire Sermon” 458, 459–461 “A Game of Chess” 454 in “Whispers of Immortality” 489, 491 Shackleton, Ernest 467 shadow 96, 257 Shakespear, Dorothy 547 Shakespeare, William 557–558 Antony and Cleopatra 452 in “Ash-Wednesday” 59–60 authorship of 370 belief in 371 contemporaneous opinion on 414 education of 103 experience rendered by 147 as great European 245 Hamlet 246–248 “Little Gidding” and 222 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 557 as poetic drama 352 in The Waste Land 455 Marlowe and 98 Measure for Measure 241 The Merchant of Venice 83 Milton compared to 308 multilevel meaning in 182 Othello 83, 279 Pericles 118, 301 stoicism in 370–372 The Tempest 51, 457–458

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“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” 370–372 Baudelaire in 77 composition of 99 in Elizabethan Essays 163 on Othello 279 poetry v. belief in 37, 52 “Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist” 301 Shantih 473, 482 Sheldon Travelling Fellowship in Philosophy 9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 417 Sherek, Henry 104 Shuttlethwaite, Julia (character) 106–113, 117–118 Shylock (character) 83 Sibyl of Cumae 433–434 Sidney, Philip 132, 414–415 Silhouettes (Symons) 563 Simeon (biblical figure) 376–379 Simpkins, Colby (character) 119–125, 128 simplicity, in “AshWednesday” 57 sin, purpose of 223–224, 225 “Sir John Davies” 372–374 Sitwell, Dame Edith 558–559 Sitwell, Sir Osbert 558–559 Sitwell, Sir Sacherevell 558–559 Sitwells, the 11, 558–559 “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” 349 sleep. See awakening Smith Academy 6 social contract 386 social credit 549 social dynamics, change in 115 “Social Function of Poetry, The” 98, 374–376 social masks, in The Elder Statesman 160 social responsibility, v. choice, in The Elder Statesman 153 social roles, in identity 114–115 society 266, 336. See also Christian society

“Song for Opherian” 251 “Song for Simeon, A” 19, 90, 143, 376–379 Songs of Experience (Blake) 492 Sons of Ben, The 99–100 Sophocles 42, 331, 433, 460 Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe) 244 Sosostris, Madame (character) 448–449 soul in “Animula” 48–50 awakening of 444 as child 49–50, 96 in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” 144, 145 in Davies 373 in The Divine Comedy 374 guidance for 50 in “The Hollow Men” 259 labor of 95 in “Marina” 303 in “Morning at the Window” 314 in Murder in the Cathedral 328 in The Rock 95 sound 189, 233–234, 307, 333–334 source, v. meaning 437, 443 Soviets 270 speaker 7, 58, 293, 395. See also poet, v. person in “Ash-Wednesday” 58 as character 395–396 of dramatic poetry 395–396 in “Gerontion” 240, 395 in “The Hollow Men” 252 in “Journey of the Magi” 276–277 in Laforgue 7 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 185, 289, 294, 395 in “Morning at the Window” 81 in “Portrait of a Lady” 354–356, 395 in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 81 in “A Song for Simeon” 377

in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 391 in The Waste Land 194, 473 “The Burial of the Dead” 441, 446 “The Fire Sermon” 455, 459–460 “A Game of Chess” 454 “What the Thunder Said” 472, 473 speculation, in “Burnt Norton” 194 Spenser, Edmund 415 spiral staircase, in “AshWednesday” 64–65, 201 spirit. See soul Spirit of Romance, The (Pound) 547 spiritual biography 72–73 spiritual conflict, in “Sweeney Agonistes” 383 spiritual experience 66–67, 148–149 spirituality in The Confidential Clerk 127–128 in The Divine Comedy 517 in “The Hollow Men” 258, 259 v. religion 56 in Samson Agonistes 381 in The Waste Land 56, 70 in Yeats 494 spiritual struggle, in “AshWednesday” 57 spring 188, 445–446, 462, 466 staircase, in “AshWednesday” 64–65, 202 standards, in criticism 238, 239 statecraft, in “Coriolan” 138–139 states of being, in “Burnt Norton” 194–195 Stead, William Force 16, 18 Stetson (character) 449– 450 Stevenson, Robert Louis 396 stillness 201, 202, 209, 327 still point, in Four Quartets 199–200, 212–213, 227 stoicism, in Shakespeare 370–372

Stoll, Elmer Edgar 246 Strong, Thomas Banks 18 structure, in “Burnt Norton” 198 subway, in Four Quarters 200–201, 207 success, in “Coriolan” 140 Sudetenland 23 suffering, human capacity for 79 summer, in “Burnt Norton” 188 Sweeney (character) in “Sweeney Agonistes” 379–380, 384–385 in “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 387–388, 390–392, 394–395 in “Sweeney Erect” 395–396 in The Waste Land 459 “Sweeney Agonistes” 379–389 abandonment of 16, 388 accessibility of 385 audience of 388–389 background considerations 379–380 characters of 379–380 composition of 16, 44 critical commentary 385–389 death in 385 despair in 384, 388 dramatic elements of 90 epigraphs of 382–383 experience in 259 faith in 97 The Family Reunion and 180 “Fragment of an Agon” 384 “Fragment of a Prologue” 383 “The Hollow Men” and 251 individual in 57, 105, 388 influences on, Oresteia (Aeschylus) 172, 173–174, 382–383 isolation in 57, 387 landscape in 63 language in 384–385 life in 385, 466

Index 611 as poetic drama 150– 153, 332 publication of 251 relationships in 387 setting of 380 synopsis 380–385 first epigraph 382–383 “Fragment of an Agon” 384–385 “Fragment of a Prologue” 383–384 second epigraph 383 title 380–382 title of 380–382 “Sweeney among the Nightingales” 389–394 allusions in 391 anti-Semitism in 499 “Burbank” compared to 85 critical commentary 392–394 epigraph of 381, 382, 390, 432–433 heritage squandered in 499 influences on, Oresteia (Aeschylus) 172, 173–174, 381 Irish Catholics in 499, 501 meaning in 389–390 quatrain form of 12 setting of 391 speaker of 391 synopsis 389–392 title of 390 wit in 47 “Sweeney Erect” 23, 85, 394–397 Swinburne, Charles Algernon 98 Swing, The (painting) 317 symbolism 560–561 in Anabasis 44–45 definition of 560–561 French 561–562 (See also French symbolists) in “Gerontion” 240 literary 560–561 poetry of 562–563 Symbolist Movement in Literature, The (Symons) 559–563

Aiken influenced by 497 influence of 7, 528 Laforgue in 536, 537–538 Yeats in 493–494, 572 Symons, Arthur 7, 563, 567. See also Symbolist Movement in Literature, The (Symons)

T T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Julius) 501 Tate, Allen 28, 423, 478 technology, in The Rock 93 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 51, 457–458 temptation, in The Waste Land 58 tempters, in Murder in the Cathedral 325–327 Tenne Tragedies 368–369 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 147, 209 Tereus (mythological figure) 392, 452–453 terza rima 517 Testament (Villon) 131 text, v. context, in “Mr. Apollinax” 318–319 Thaisa (character) 301, 302 Thames 257, 455, 457–458, 532 Thayer, Scofield 13, 514, 528, 553. See also Dial, The theater, in “East Coker” 207 themes, clarity of 92 theology 362, 373 theoretical critics 403 Theosophical Society 132 Theseus (mythological figure) 395, 397 thinker, v. poet 371 Thomas à Becket, Saint 322–333. See also Becket, Thomas (character) Thomas Aquinas, in Dante 371 “Thomas Haywood” 165–166 “Thomas Middleton” 165 thought feeling and 286, 372– 373, 491 responsible 38–39, 40 without reference to tradition 38

“Thoughts after Lambeth” 135, 398–400 “Three Voices of Poetry, The” 86, 165, 168, 400–402 Ticknor, George 149, 529 Tillyard, E. M. W. 101 time. See also future; past; present forward movement of 213 in Four Quartets 189 “Burnt Norton” 194–197, 201 “The Dry Salvages” 210–211, 213, 216–217 “East Coker” 204–205 “Little Gidding” 225, 226, 227 minor poetry and 488 poetry and 206 as river 210–211 salvation from 217 wisdom and 206 Time and Free Will (Bergson) 505 Times Literary Supplement Eliot at 514 Eliot in 13, 398–399 “The Metaphysical Poets” in 305 “Sir John Davies” in 372 “William Blake” in 491–492 tin, in Cornwall 464 Tiresias (character) 42, 459–461 To Criticize the Critic 28, 402 “American Literature and the American Language” in 42 “Ezra Pound” in 169, 171 “From Poe to Valéry” in 232 “The Literature of Politics” in 287 “Reflections on Vers Libre” in 360 “To Criticize the Critic” 402–405 After Strange Gods and 500 on criticism in youth 98

Lawrence in 540 literary legacy in 171 on “Milton II” 308 Todd, Sweeney 379 “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell) 47–48, 296, 458 tolerance 56, 266 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes) 501 “To My Wife” 27–28, 153 To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 570 tourism, in “Burbank” 82 Tourneur, Cyril 164, 166 Traci, William de (character) 329 tradition in After Strange Gods 35–42 in Christian society 269 as continuum 406 in “Cousin Nancy” 143 in criticism 238, 239 criticism of 36, 41 in Davies 373 as defense against selfdeception 41 deterioration of 103 v. humanism 232 individual talent and 406–409 literature as link to 103 religion in 36, 500 thought without reference to 38 Virgil and 423–424, 487 in Yeats 494 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 405–409 Baudelaire in 77 in The Egoist 13, 514, 521 on poet v. person 52, 90–91, 130, 297 in The Sacred Wood 13, 368 tragedy 165, 168, 369 transcendentalism 518, 565 transubstantiation 512 Treaty of Versailles 243 Trimalchio (character) 434 trinity, in Unitarianism 564 Trinity College 99 Tristan (legendary figure) 447–448

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Tristan and Isolde (Wagner) 447–448 triumph, cost of 138–139 “Triumphal March” 19, 44, 134, 143 Trojan War 384 Trotsky, Leon 419 troubadours 10, 20, 55, 62, 547 truth 386 truthfulness, in modernism 357 Tudor Translation Series 368 “Tunnel, The” (Crane) 200 Turnbull Lectures 20, 33 Turner, Mrs. (character) 397 Twain, Mark 43, 214 Two Sources of Morality and Religion, The (Bergson) 506 Typhoon (Conrad) 512 typist (character) 459–460

U Uberti, Farinata degli 518 Ugolino, Count 440, 471 Ulysses (Joyce) acceptance of 426 composition of 535 in The Egoist 13 on history 140 modernism of 410–411 orthodoxy and 39 reception of 425–426 review of 409–411 The Waste Land compared to 411, 535 Ulysses (mythological figure) 147 “Ulysses” (Tennyson) 147, 209 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” 409–411, 535 understanding allusions in 192–193 v. communication 148–149 through criticism 236 doctrine and 226 in drama 182 in The Elder Statesman 162–163 experience in 228 in “Little Gidding” 226 “Under the Bamboo Tree” (song) 385, 387–388

Under Western Eyes (Conrad) 513 Unidentified Guest 106– 110 Unitarianism 564–565 Christ in 511 of Eliot (William) 3, 521–522, 556 at Washington University 569 Unitarian Universalism 565 Unitarian Universalist Association 507 United States. See America unities of drama 152, 415 unitive 65–68, 72–73 universality, of American literature 43 University of Leeds 402 University of Minnesota 235 University Philosophical Club 9 University of Virginia. See Page-Barbour Lectures unpoetic, in modernism 316, 319–320 Untermeyer, Louis 475– 476 Upanishads 470–472 upper classes, in “A Game of Chess” 452 urban life 507 in “Aunt Helen” 75 in Baudelaire 76 in “The Boston Evening Transcript” 81 in “Morning at the Window” 313–314, 315 noble savage and 396 in “Preludes” 358 in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 363–364 subway as symbol of 200–201 in symbolism 365–366 in The Waste Land 200, 450 Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The 411–422 critical commentary 421–422 lectures of 20, 33 on poetry in drama 126, 332, 388

on “Sweeney Agonistes” 182 synopsis 412–421 “The Age of Dryden” 415–416 “Apology for the Countess of Pembroke” 414–415 “Coleridge and Wordsworth” 416–417 “Conclusions” 420–421 introductory lecture 412–414 “Matthew Arnold” 417–418 “The Modern Mind” 419–420 “Shelley and Keats” 417 “Usk” 310 usury 549 utilitarianism, Bradley and 231

V Valéry, Paul 232–234 values. See After Strange Gods “Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, The” (lecture) 20 variety shows 299 Venice 82–85 Venus (character) 186 Verdenal, Jean 8, 290–291, 293, 536 Verlaine, Paul 504, 561 vers libre 360–361, 566–568 form and 334 of Laforgue 537 language of 170 of Pound 10–11, 170, 361, 547 Vestera, Marie 445 via negativa 207 Vichy government 506 Victory (Conrad) 513 Villiers de l’Isle Adams, Auguste de 561 Villon, François 131, 133 violence 224, 391–392, 466 Violet (character) 174–180, 183 Virgil. See also Aeneid (Virgil) Christianity and 422–424

in “Coriolan” 138 in The Divine Comedy 517 European culture and 245 language of 486 “Little Gidding” and 221–222 virtues of 422–424 “Virgil and the Christian World” 102, 422–424 Virgil Society 485 “Virginia” 310 Virgin Mary in Anglo-Catholicism 512 in “Ash-Wednesday” 66 in The Divine Comedy 517 in “The Dry Salvages” 213–214 in “A Song for Simeon” 377, 378 vision 34, 105, 148, 488, 492 Vision, A (Yeats) 574 vita nuova, La (Dante) 19, 55, 61–63, 148–149, 517 Vittoz, Roger 14, 430–431, 545 Volpone (Jonson) 165 Volsci 136 Voltaire 473 Volupine (character) 84

W W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture 333 Wagner, Richard 447–448 Wales, as satellite culture 340 Warburton, Dr. (character) 175, 176, 177–178, 183 Washington University 3, 42, 514, 522, 569 Waste Land, The 424–483. See also “Burial of the Dead, The”; “Fire Sermon, The”; “Game of Chess, A”; “What the Thunder Said” accessibility of 425, 426 allusions in 193, 431–437 Antigone (Sophocles) 460 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 452

Index 613 Baudelaire 450 Blick ins Chaos (Hesse) 468 Book of Common Prayer 443 Bradley 509 The Brothers Karamozov (Dostoyevsky) 468 Buddha 457 Byron 459 The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) 443–445 A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 471 The Confessions (Augustine) 447, 462 “Dans le restaurant” 463–464 The Divine Comedy (Dante) 64, 437– 441, 449, 471 Fisher King 458, 469–470, 472 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 455 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 435, 513, 531 Les fleurs du mal (Baudelaire) 77 Odyssey (Homer) 460 Oedipus the King (Sophocles) 433, 460 Philomela 453 The Prothalamion (Spenser) 457 Satyricon (Petronius) 433–434 Shakespeare 557 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 457–458 Tiresias 459–461 “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell) 47, 458 background considerations 424–442 author’s notes 441–442 Dante in 437–441

dedication 437– 441 epigraph 432–437 sources of 429– 432 World War I 426–429 bones in 63 boredom in 451–452, 454 Boston in 507 celebrity from 99 class in 452 in The Cocktail Party 116–117 comedy in 23 composition of 13–14, 429–431, 545 contemporary critical response 473–481 in “Coriolan” 139 Coriolanus in 134 Cornwall in 464–465 critical commentary 481–482 death in 451 dedication of 15, 64, 437–438, 441 dramatic elements of 90 editing of 14, 45, 411, 430, 437, 548–549 epigraphs of 432–437 fate in 464 geography in 438–439, 467 Grail legend and 444, 449, 464–465, 468– 470, 570 Hinduism in 470–472 humanity in 463–464 ideology of, Eliot on 15 incoherence of 497– 498 individual in 57 influences on Baudelaire 504 Bradley 509 The Divine Comedy (Dante) 64 The Golden Bough (Frazer) 524 Harvard 529 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 530, 531–532 Pound 15

From Ritual to Romance (Weston) 524, 525 Ulysses (Joyce) 411 landscape in 311 London Bridge in 449, 456, 461–462 London in 542 love in 448 manuscript of 14, 436, 552 meaning in 438, 469, 481–482 modernism of 424 as modernist long poem 45–46 multiculturalism in 503 Nighttown sequence of 365, 430 notes on 236, 441–442 parody in 350 past in 82, 453–454 Pound and collaboration with 10 dedication to 64, 437–438 editing by 14, 45, 411, 430, 437, 548–549 influence on 15 precursors to “Dans le restaurant” 251, 313, 430 “The Death of Saint Narcissus” and 150, 430 “Gerontion” 240, 379 prison in 128 publication of 14–15, 424, 442, 514, 519, 551, 553 quest in 438, 447, 457, 482 reception of 14–15, 425–426, 473–481, 497–498 renown of 424 reviews of 473–481 seduction in 466 sex in 58, 439–440, 444, 454, 458, 459– 461, 466 sources in 429–432 speaker of 194, 473 Sweeney in 459

water in “The Dry Salvages” 188, 210–211, 214 Mary and 214 in The Waste Land 445, 463 Wauchope, Sam (character) 384–385 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 521 Webb-Odell, R. 21, 91, 509 Webster, John 164, 489, 490 Weekley, Frieda 541 Westminster Abbey 29 Weston, Jessie L. 569–570. See also Grail legend “What Dante Means to Me” 77, 221, 483–485, 536 “What Is a Classic?” 102, 307, 485–487 “What Is Minor Poetry?” 487–488 “What the Thunder Said” 467–473 allusions in (See Waste Land, The, allusions in) Christianity in 467– 468 culture in 467–468 Fisher King in 469–470, 472 Grail legend in 468–470 speaker of 472, 473 spirituality in 56 Upanishads in 470–471 Wheels (anthology) 558 Whibley, Charles 368 whimsy 348 “Whispers of Immortality” 488–491 White Devil, The (Webster) 491 Whitehead, Alfred North 555 Whites (Guelfs) 516–517 Whitman, Walt 43, 566 “William Blake” 491–492 Williams, William Carlos 547 Wilson, Edmund 475, 479–480, 562 Winchell, Sergeant (character) 175, 178 “Wind Sprang Up at Four O’Clock, The” 45, 251, 310 winter 188, 445, 466 wisdom 206, 222, 246

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wit in “Conversation Galante” 129 in “A Cooking Egg” 131–132 definition of 48 of Donne 519 of Marvell 47–48 in poetry 47–48 in The Rock 94 Wolfram von Eschenbach 524 women hysterical 263–264 in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 295–296, 297–298 in “Morning at the Window” 314–315 in Murder in the Cathedral 324 in “Sweeney Agonistes” 383 in “Sweeney Erect” 395 in “Whispers of Immortality” 490 Women in Love (Lawrence) 545

Woolf, Leonard 11, 17, 570–571 Woolf, Virginia 11, 17, 570–571 Wordsworth, William autobiography used by 72 critical theory of 205– 206, 407, 416–417 influence of 406 language of 360–361, 416 work, as virtue 422–423 worldliness in “A Cooking Egg” 132 in “Coriolan” 139–140 in The Elder Statesman 160–161 in international order 88–89 lack of comfort in 97 in “Marina 302–304 purgation of 61 in The Rock 94–95 time’s ravaging of 206–207 in The Waste Land 457, 462 World War I 426–429

Byron’s reputation after 86 Eliot during 9, 12–13, 428–429 emotional aftermath of 428 “Gerontion” and 243 impact of 426 Morrell during 544 poetry of 429 political systems after 270 Pound during 547–548 Russell during 555 The Waste Land and 428 waste of 429 Yeats during 573 World War II Bergson during 506 Christian society and 271 Criterion and 515 Eliot during 23–25 Holocaust of 498 Pound during 549–550 shipping during 190– 191, 216–217 Wren, Christopher 449

writers, education of 102–103

X xenophobia, in After Strange Gods 34–35 Xenophon 44

Y “Yeats” 492–494 Yeats, W. B. 492–494, 572–574 heretical writer 40 influence of 493 “Little Gidding” and 222 Pound and 547 Symons and 559–560, 563 on vers libre 567 Yeats Lecture 492–493 yellow fog 248, 295 yew tree, in “AshWednesday” 67 York Mystery Cycle 91, 509 youth 398, 399