The Waste Land and Other Poems (13 page)

15
(p. 73)
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea:
See Eliot’s note to line 221.

16
(p. 73)
carbuncular:
The word ‘carbuncle’ may describe a precious gem, but here the meaning is more pedestrian—pimply.

17
(p. 74)
a Brad ford millionaire:
Bradford is a manufacturing town in northern England that created many wealthy people, whom Eliot regards as nouveaux riche.

18
(p. 74)
When lovely woman stoops to folly:
See Eliot’s note to line 253.

19
(p. 74)
‘This music crept by me upon the waters’:
See Eliot’s note to line
257.

20
(p. 74)
along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street:
These locations are in the City of London, the financial district, where Eliot was then working.

21
(p. 74)
Lower Thames Street:
Near London Bridge.

22
(p. 74)
Magnus Martyr:
See Eliot’s note to line 264.

23
(p. 74)
The river sweats:
See Eliot’s note to line 266.
Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods;
first performed in 1876) is the fourth part of Wagner’s
Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).
In
Götterdämmerung
a stolen magic golden ring is returned to the Rhine Maidens.

24
(p. 75)
Leicester:
Lord Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, was rumored to be Queen Elizabeth’s lover. See Eliot’s note to line 279.

25
(p. 75)
Highbury.... Richmond and Kew:
Highbury is a gloomy neighborhood in northeast London. Richmond and Kew are districts on the Thames, west of London. See Eliot’s note to line 293. The lines from Dante’s
Purgatorio
translate as: ‘Remember me, who am La Pia. / Siena made me, Maremma undid me.’

26
(p. 75)
Moorgate:
Station on the London Underground, in the financial district.

27
(p. 75)
Margate Sands:
Seaside resort where Eliot went to recuperate at the beginning of his breakdown (before traveling to Lausanne) and where he began to compose
The Waste Land.

28
(p. 76)
Carthage:
Ancient north African city. See Eliot’s note to line 307.

29
(p. 76)
Burning burning burning burning:
See Eliot’s note to line 308.

30
(p. 76) O
Lord Thou pluckest me out:
See Eliot’s note to line 309.

1
(p. 77)
Death by Water:
This section resembles the last lines of ‘Dans le Restaurant’ from
Poems
1920.

1
(p. 78)
What the Thunder Said:
See Eliot’s note at the head of his notes to part V.

2
(p. 78)
agony in stony places:
This passage echoes the agony of Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion.

3
(p. 78)
Here is no water but only rock:
In a letter to Ford Madox Ford, Eliot called lines 331-358 ‘the water-dripping song’ and said he felt it was the best part of the poem.

4
(p. 79)
hermit-thrush:
See Eliot’s note to line 357.

5
(p. 79)
Who is the third who walks always beside you?:
See Eliot’s note to line 360.

6
(p. 79)
What is that sound high in the air:
See Eliot’s note to line 367-377. Hesse’s lines translate as: ‘Already half of Europe, already at least half of Eastern Europe, on the way to Chaos, drives drunk in sacred infatuation along the edge of the precipe, sings drunkenly, as though hymn singing, as Dmitri Karamazov [in Dostoevsky’s
Brothers Karamazov]
sang. The offended bourgeois laughs at the songs; the saint and the seer hear them with tears.’

7
(p. 80)
Co co rico co co rico:
Alternate rendering of ‘cock-a-doodledoo.’

8
(p. 80)
Ganga:
The River Ganges, in India.

9
(p. 80)
Himavant:
Mountain in the Himalayas.

10
(p. 80) Datta: See Eliot’s note to line 402.

11
(p. 80)
the beneficent spider:
See Eliot’s note to line 408.

12
(p. 80)
I have heard the key:
See Eliot’s note to line 412. Dante’s words translate as: ‘And I heard below the door of the horrible tower being locked up.’

13
(p. 80)
Coriolanus:
The hero of Shakespeare’s play of that title.

14
(p. 81)
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me:
See Eliot’s note to line 425.

15
(p. 81) Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina: ‘Then he stepped back into the fire which refines.’ See Eliot’s note to line 428. Dante’s lines translate as: ‘Now I pray you, by that virtue which guides you to the top of the stairway, be mindful in due time of my pain. Then he stepped back into the fire which refines.’

16
(p. 81) Quando fiam uti chelidon: ‘When shall I be like the swallow?’ See Eliot’s note to line 429.

17
(p. 81) Le Prince d‘Aquitaine à la tour abolie: ‘The Prince of Aquitaine, to the ruined tower.’ See Eliot’s note to line 430.

18
(p. 81)
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe:
See Eliot’s note to line 432.

19
(p. 81)
Shantih shantih shantih:
See Eliot’s note to line 434.

In 1965 Robert Lowell said of T. S. Eliot, ‘His influence is everywhere inescapable, and nowhere readily usable.’ The publication of
The Waste Land
in 1922 introduced a dilemma for America’s poets, who were simultaneously inspired and suffocated by Eliot’s innovations. Poets as diverse as Ezra Pound, H. D., Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Delmore Schwartz, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Penn Warren felt the immediate impact of Eliot. But many found it difficult to respond to his contribution to English verse, one which indisputably demanded acknowledgment. Nonetheless these poets, whether they moved toward Eliot or away from him, strove to respond to his technical advances and his articulation of the horrors of modern life, especially in relation to the ‘machine age’ and World War I.

In many ways Eliot’s
The Waste Land
came to characterize the modernist movement, the dominant literary trend of the early twentieth century. In the essay ’T. S. Eliot as the International Hero’ (1945), Delmore Schwartz asserts that Eliot opened up poetry and made in it a space for modern life, just as William Wordsworth made a space in poetry for nature and Marcel Proust made a space in fiction for time. Modernism is seen in the British and American novel as early as the 1890s, notably in the works of Joseph Conrad and Henry James; Proust and James Joyce wrote novels in this style during the years in which Eliot conceived
The Waste Land;
Virginia Woolf reached her peak in the years just following the poem’s publication. The modernist novel can be characterized by drastic experiments in the depiction of time and consciousness; a deliberate break from conventions of realism, particularly in relation to plot and representation; and an attention to narrative ambiguity, psychological investigation, deliberate self-consciousness, and frankness about sexual matters. Though poets—chiefly Pound and William Butler Yeats—addressed such issues in the years leading up to
The Waste Land’s
publication, Eliot’s poem eclipsed the early moderns in one stroke.

W. H. Auden alludes to Eliot’s radical effect on poetry in his poem ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936), remarking, ‘Eliot spoke the still unspoken word.’ Louise Bogan, too, felt that Eliot changed the direction of poetry, observing in a 1936 review in the
New Yorker
that ‘he swung the balance over from whimpering German bucolics to forms within which contemporary complexity could find expression.’ William Carlos Williams felt a strong sense of betrayal by Eliot, particularly on behalf of American poetry, calling
The Waste Land ‘
the great catastrophe.’ In his 1951
Autobiography
Williams writes that Eliot ’might have become our adviser, even our hero.’ With The Waste Land, however, he felt that his fellow poet had turned his back on ‘local conditions’ and had given the poem ‘back to the academics’ and old Europe. Williams goes on to recognize Eliot’s ‘genius’ and positive contribution to poetry, especially in metrics, but maintains that the author ‘set me back twenty years.’

Ambivalent feelings like those of Lowell, Williams, and others pervade many American poets’ evaluations of Eliot. Because of his profound influence over poetry, poets such as Hart Crane sought to distance themselves from Eliot. A great admirer of Eliot, Crane said in a letter dated January 5, 1923, ‘My work for the past two years (those meagre drops!) has been more influenced by Eliot than any other modern.... However, I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive ... ecstatic goal.’

As the twentieth century came to a close, some scholarly evaluations of Eliot attempted to undermine his grip on American poetry. In
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
(1994), scholar Harold Bloom draws a line of inheritance among American poets: He sees late-twentieth-century writers John Ashbery and James Merrill as descendants of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, who are themselves the ‘children’ of Emily Dickinson ; Eliot does not figure into the family tree. In T. S.
Eliot and American Poetry
(1998), Lee Oser notes that the critic Helen Vendler began
The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry
(1985) with twenty-two pages of poems by Wallace Stevens and included nothing by Eliot, remarking that ‘no one was very surprised. After all, she had long ranked Stevens as the most influential and important of American modernists.’ During his literary career, Stevens himself tried to ignore Eliot entirely. In a letter dated January 15, 1954, Stevens wrote, ‘I am not conscious of having been influenced by anybody and have purposefully held off from reading highly mannered people like Eliot and Pound so that I should not absorb anything, even unconsciously.’ Four years earlier, in a letter dated April 25, 1950, Stevens noted that ‘Eliot and I are dead opposites and I have been doing about everything that he would not be likely to do.’

Critic F. R. Leavis compares the poetry and criticism of Eliot in his essay ‘T. S. Eliot’s Stature as Critic’ (1958): ‘Eliot’s best, his important criticism has an immediate relation to his technical problems as the poet who, at that moment in history, was faced with “altering expression.” ’ Eliot’s writings on literature include
The Sacred Wood
( 1920),
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
(1933),
Elizabethan Essays
(1934),
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
(1948),
Poetry and Drama
(1951), and
On Poetry and Poets
(1957).

Eliot’s influence was singular in developing a type of literary investigation known as New Criticism, which was most influential in the years 1935-1960, although its legacy extends to the twenty-first century. Robert Penn Warren was among the early New Critics, a name that derives from John Crowe Ransom’s book
The New Criticism
(1941), which examines the critical work of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson. New Criticism opposes ‘extrinsic’ approaches to literature, or those that depend on the biography and psychology of an author or the historical and sociological circumstances in which a work is composed. New Critics advocate the ‘intrinsic’ approach, which exclusively addresses the text and the selection and construction of its language. Today New Criticism alone is considered too limited for scholarly applications, but its principle of close reading continues to contribute heavily to literary studies.

Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) prefigures the principles of New Criticism. Rejecting the individualism of Romantics such as John Keats, the essay advances the importance of impersonality in poetry: ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ The Waste Land, which buries the identity of Eliot with the voices of other authors, demonstrates one possible application of this theory.

In ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (1919), Eliot coins the term ’objective correlative.’ This phrase and the vague notion of ‘dissociation of sensibility,’ which appears in his essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), were discussed extensively in the years following their introduction, though the usefulness of each has been reconsidered since. According to Eliot, a dissociation of sensibility in poets took place after the time of John Donne (1572-1631) and Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). The dissociation was between thoughts and emotions, which were unified under Donne, Marvell, and other metaphysical poets. Eliot felt that poetry beginning with John Milton (1608-1674) and John Dryden (1631-1700) and extending into the nineteenth century lost ‘the direct sensuous apprehension of thought’ achieved by Donne and Marvell, who were able to convey ‘their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’ In a related vein, and in connection with the concept of the objective correlative, Eliot claims in ’Hamlet and His Problems’ that
Hamlet
is an ‘artistic failure’ because Hamlet does not express his dominant emotion. Eliot writes that ‘the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.’