The Waste Land and Other Poems (2 page)

We present in this volume T. S. Eliot’s first three published poetic volumes: two slight and rather odd collections of a dozen poems each, and then (in Ezra Pound’s words) ‘the longest poem in the English langwidge,’
The Waste Land.
The poems here were conceived and begun in 1910, and published in 1917, 1919-1920, and 1922. In the wake of these publications, Eliot became a profoundly important voice in modern literary and cultural affairs, a position he would sustain over the next half century.

Eliot was, technically, an American. Born in St. Louis in 1888, he escaped the Midwest for the East Coast when he matriculated to Harvard University in 1906. Thinking that perhaps Cambridge, Massachusetts, could satisfy his intellectual and cultural appetites, he stayed there to complete his B.A. in 1909 and M.A. in 1910; he embarked upon (and essentially completed) his doctoral work in philosophy, but by the time he was deep into his graduate training, he became convinced that even the esoteric Harvard atmosphere was insufficient for his needs, and he abandoned America for Europe. He went to Oxford in 1914, and ended up settling in England for the rest of his life.

Eliot cemented his English connection by marrying, precipitously, an English woman, Vivien Haigh-Wood. This alliance proved unsuccessful in every way. The misogynistic strains of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ ‘Hysteria,’ ‘Sweeney Erect,’ and ‘Lune de Miel’—poems that become profoundly troubled when women or even the thoughts of women are proximate—probably illuminate Eliot’s difficulties in his marital relationship. But Eliot displaced the unhappiness of his private life with the increasing success of his public career. He rose through the ranks of the preeminent London publishing firm Faber & Faber, where he grew into the figure that he had always longed to be: an influential English poet and critic. Recordings of his poetry readings reveal a studied, careful, august, and slightly doleful English accent that he acquired as the
pièce de resistance
in his transformation from a midwestern American to a cosmopolitan European.

 

It is tempting to read Eliot’s first three collections in the Hegelian mode of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Prufrock and Other Observations
(1917), the first term in this formulation, represents a series of (as the title promises) ‘observations’—detached, cynical, and weary (this from a man in his twenties!). Eliot offers a variety of scenes and tableaux—the genteel drawing rooms of ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘Aunt Helen,’ the tawdry streetscapes of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ ‘Preludes,’ and ‘Morning at the Window‘—in which not much happens, prompting the poetic ‘hero’ to ratiocinate and intellectualize ... and again, in this process, not much happens.

The upshot of the speaker’s careful observation and deliberation is always anti-climactic, unsatisfying. At the end of a potentially illuminating meeting with Mr. Apollinax in the poem of that title, the speaker clutches desperately and pathetically to discover some meaningful token of the encounter but finally, appraising the milieu that he had hoped would be so rarefied, can say only, absurdly, ‘I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.’ In all these poems, if there is any conscious insight or action that results from the observations recounted, it is negative and passive: disappointment, deflation, repression, flight.

The poetic narratives, such as they are, are quietly understated and bleakly banal. It is as if the reader is seeing the poem’s action from a distance, perhaps because the poet cannot bear to approach the scene any more closely. Prufrock worries: What if a potential friend, ‘settling a pillow by her head, / Should say: “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” ’ Anticipating possible failure, the speaker foregoes any attempt at communion, and the poem ends with self-protective solitude: ‘I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.’

A recent edition of Eliot’s notebooks from 1909 to 1917,
Inventions of the March Hare
(edited by Christopher Ricks), generates many fascinating insights into the composition of the early poems. The notebooks illustrate how long Eliot spent carefully working and nurturing the relatively few poems he actually published, and demonstrate the difference between the published work and a considerable number of other attempts, most of which one would classify as juvenilia, that he did not publish.

The notebooks reinforce how carefully Eliot modulated the diction and tenor of this poetry. We see, for example, in a passage from the fourth stanza of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ in which a street-lamp surrealistically speaks of ‘the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, / Slips out its tongue / And devours a morsel of rancid butter,’ that the word ‘rancid’ was a late addition. We may surmise that that word carries an especially potent resonance: that it was (as Flaubert would say)
le mot juste,
carrying the connotation that, Eliot judged as he perfected the poem, emphatically conveyed the atmosphere of this scene. In the next stanza, it is a deletion that shows how Eliot conveys the mood: The line that reads ‘A washed-out smallpox cracks her face’ began, in draft, as ‘the hideous scars of a washed-out pox’: But Eliot must have decided that it was too heavy-handed and obvious; the more suggestive and understated description is more powerful. The whole milieu is, of course, hideous, but it is more effective if readers infer that instead of the poet explaining it.

The most interesting textual revelation in these notebooks concerns a long section (thirty-nine lines) that originally had been part of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ but was finally suppressed. Eliot called this section ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ (a pervigilium is an all-night vigil), and it describes an experience strikingly more feverish and nervous than the rest of the poem and close in tenor to the spirit of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night.’ Of course, the fact that this section does not appear in the final draft of ‘Prufrock’ means that it is not, precisely, part of the poem’s ambience, but nevertheless it colors our understanding of the character. The fact that such writhing, nauseous madness (as Eliot describes it) pervades the pervigilium that Prufrock might have kept helps readers to appreciate the sublimated tensions in the poem that may otherwise seem unexpected, or exaggerated, or perverse. The dark energies of the ‘Pervigilium’ suggest how terrifying the world of this quiet, mannerly character might have become.

 

As antithesis to
Prufrock and Other Observations,
we have
Poems 1920:
highly wrought (overworked and nearly impenetrable, one might reasonably conclude) and densely allusive. The voice is intellectually haughty, which seems to be another mode of achieving the distanced isolation that pervaded
Prufrock.
The poems are wrenched with unstable combinations of classicism and fetid contemporary Hobbesian turmoil. What had been a minor strain in Eliot’s first collection—the interiorized angst of ‘Hysteria,’ the tensely uncomfortable atmosphere of ‘Mr. Apollinax’—blossoms into a full-blown neurosis in the second. If the poems in
Prufrock
were almost too simple, those in Eliot’s 1920 collection were far too difficult—and both the simplicity and the difficulty suggest a strategy of evasiveness that Eliot employs to avoid what he will finally achieve in
The Waste Land:
a direct, honest, realistic appraisal of the condition of the world around him.

Poems
1920 (published in a nearly identical edition in 1919 as
Poems,
and also published under a different title,
Ara Vos Prec,
in 1920) has an offhand but insistent anti-Semitic taint, as Anthony Julius has convincingly expounded: from the squatting Jew in ‘Gerontion’ to the saggy Chicago Semite in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,’ from the stereotypically fiduciary Sir Alfred Mond in ‘A Cooking Egg’ to the stereotypically voracious and whorish Rachel
nee
Rabinovitch in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales.’ The slurs that resonate in these poems testify to Eliot’s increasing disturbance, and probably, as in most cases of prejudice, a desire to blame ‘the other’ as a scapegoat for the cultural decadence and failure of the mainstream, empowered society. The poems here are philosophical, in a perverse, anti-rational way—exactly what one might expect from someone who had embraced but then abandoned the discipline of philosophy. Eliot’s eclectic (and sometimes disorienting) influences in this collection include Lewis Carroll, Henry Adams, John Ruskin, French Symbolists, and Jacobean dramatists, among many others.

Three of the poems feature a character named Sweeney. Eliot once described him ‘as a man who in younger days was perhaps a pugilist, mildly successful; who then grew older and retired to keep a pub.’ He is meant to evoke, obviously, an Irishman (with all the class and nationalist prejudices one might expect from an elitist English perspective) who is coarse and boorish but also, disturbingly, casts a powerful presence: He is a loose cannon, sexually potent and physically aggressive. He stumbles into Eliot’s tableaux and causes a rude disturbance: The quatrain poems attempt to regroup themselves, to adapt to his existence, which they do with a strained, excessive, tenuous classicist intellectualism that sets off Sweeney’s character all the more sharply. Sweeney embodies Eliot’s obsession, in his 1920 poems, with a visceral figure who is starkly opposed to the demure, repressed, polite (if artificial) society figures that populate
Prufrock.

In
Prufrock,
the general milieu of the poems was a detailed, specific, urban streetscape: one that seemed typical of London, though actually many of the poems owe more to Eliot’s youthful meandering among the byways of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In
Poems
1920, the atmosphere is more broadly European: There is a wider and richer (but also, certainly, an ironized and perverted) sense of the entire continent, from Brussels to Limoges, from London and Paris to Ravenna, Padua, Milan, and Venice. (In
The Waste Land,
the topography will synthesize these two extremes: The poem traverses both the localized London streets and the more panoramic spectacle of Europe.) Indeed, four of the poems are in French. Editions published during Eliot’s lifetime did not include translations accompanying these poems; presumably, he wanted them to remain elusive to a monoglot audience, and if one wanted to read poems in French, then one must simply learn French. Perhaps Eliot wanted to celebrate a sense of cosmopolitan culture by including several works in another language; he was probably also showing off his cultural breadth. Finally, as Samuel Beckett (an Irishman who wrote many of his works in French) discovered, a writer may accomplish certain effects by working in a language that is not his primary tongue: a studied sense of detachment or alienation, perhaps. Disregarding Eliot’s resistance to making his French verse accessible to a larger reading audience, the present edition includes English renditions of these poems.

 

If we regard Eliot’s first two collections as thesis/antithesis, then the synthesis was accompanied by (and probably in many ways facilitated by) a personal breakdown in 1921.
The Waste Land
is a record of the poet’s collapse, as well as the sign of his recovery. As he traveled back from Switzerland, where he had undergone treatment, to resume his life in England, Eliot left a draft of the poem in Paris for Ezra Pound to edit. The poem records a nervous breakdown, but more importantly it recounts how the poet imposes a sense of order, coherence, and direction on the cacophonous chaos of the breakdown.

Explicitly, the breakdown in
The Waste Land
is meant to be the breakdown of Europe, but increasingly critics have come to realize that it is also the very personal account of Eliot’s own psychological distress. In part III, for example, he writes, “‘On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” ’ The beach at Margate was where Eliot had vacationed, following a friend’s advice, in an attempt to avert his breakdown; but the holiday did not ameliorate his situation and prompted him to seek the therapeutic assistance of a Lausanne psychologist, Dr. Henri Vittoz. And when the voice of the poem states (in an unusual first-person address) in line 182, ‘By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept ...’ Eliot is describing the simple, powerful nadir of his breakdown: Leman is the old name for Lake Geneva, which Lausanne overlooks. Although Eliot always resisted autobiographical readings of art, the poem inescapably invites such readings. In the closing lines, when Eliot writes ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ it seems impossible not to read that as a description of how Eliot’s embrace and desperate association of the shards that comprise the poem have helped to stave off his psychological ‘ruins.’ The act of assembling these pieces of the European cultural tradition served as a bulwark against the intellectual collapse—in both his public and private worlds—that seemed so imminent.

On the national level, the breakdown Eliot envisioned was a consequence of the state of Europe during and after the Great War. More personally, the poem can be read as an account from the trenches of a poet who, though he didn’t actually fight in that war, fought and survived his own metaphorical war. (Critics have speculated that Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked poet manqué in
Mrs. Dalloway,
was at least loosely inspired by her erstwhile friend Tom.)

The Waste Land
achieves a synthesis between the free-floating observations of
Prufrock
and the anguished, surreal pretensions of
Poems
1920. The philosophical/intellectual praxis of Eliot’s modern epic is less gratuitous, and more pragmatic, than what he pro-pounded in his previous collection—still difficult and harsh, certainly, but in a way that lent itself (at least for Eliot’s initiates, his devotees) to solving, working through. If
Poems
1920 was (and was meant to be) off-putting,
The Waste Land
was somehow, despite itself, addictively compelling. The themes, the tropes, the images, the aesthetic that Eliot created in that poem are still going strong, inescapably etched into our cultural consciousness nearly a century later. (For example, it is virtually impossible to read any newspaper in any April without a headline recalling that it is ‘the cruelest month.’) Eliot postulated that the modern landscape looked harsh, hostile, crazy, fragmented, with the monuments of the past tormenting us amid our present unworthiness and inadequacy, and apparently he was right.