The Great War, the Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem 9781350027039, 9781350027022, 9781350027015

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The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

Also published by Bloomsbury British Children’s Literature and the First World War, David Budgen The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound, Michael Kindellan Modernism, War, and Violence, Marina MacKay Perspectives on World War I Poetry, Robert C. Evans

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem Oliver Tearle

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Oliver Tearle, 2019 Oliver Tearle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Anna Berzovan Cover image © No Mans Land (b/w photo of the battlefield in the Marne between Souain and Perthes, 1915) / Buyenlarge Archive / UIG / Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tearle, Oliver, author. Title: The Great War, The Waste Land and the modernist long poem / Oliver Tearle. Description: London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030084 (print) | LCCN 2018032211 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350027039 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350027022 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350027015 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918–Literature and the war. | English poetry–20th century–History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)–Great Britain. | Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965. Waste land. Classification: LCC PR605.W65 (ebook) | LCC PR605.W65 T43 2019 (print) | DDC 821/.91209358–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030084 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2701-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2702-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-2703-9 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Towards the Long Poem 2 Writing the Mother-City: Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem 3 Battered Books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 4 A Poem without a Hero: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 5 Machine: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’ 6 Arden to Ardennes: Richard Aldington, A Fool i’ the Forest 7 Nancy Cunard’s Parallax and the ‘Emotions of Aftermath’ Afterword: Towards the Epic Notes Bibliography Index

vi 1 11 41 59 77 117 135 153 171 175 190 197

Acknowledgements T. S. Eliot once remarked that no poet has his complete meaning alone, and it is as true of the critic as it is of the poet. My first debt of thanks, therefore, is to the numerous scholars, critics, biographers and literary historians whose work on T. S. Eliot and modernist poetry has helped to make researching this book so stimulating and enjoyable an experience. Closer to home, I  must record a debt of thanks to my colleagues in the School of the Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University, especially Anne-Marie Beller, Carol Bolton, Deborah Burton, Barbara Cooke, Andrew Dix, Nick Freeman, Karen Jarram, Paul Jenner, Sarah Parker and Helen Relf, and I am indebted to the staff of Loughborough University Library for helping me to locate some obscure and out-of-print modernist writings. In addition, I would like to thank the many students I have taught over the last few years, for stimulating seminar discussions about Paris, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and The Waste Land, especially those students on my undergraduate module ‘The Modern Poet’ and the Mirrlees-Eliot sessions on the MA module ‘Icons and Iconoclasts’. I must record a special debt of thanks to my MA students, Matt Vallance and Anamarija Krassnig, for helpful and enjoyable discussions about Richard Aldington, Nancy Cunard and T. S. Eliot. I am also grateful to Keele University for inviting me to speak about Cunard and Eliot in April 2018 as part of their English research seminar series. My thanks go to David Avital for having faith in this idea from the start and to the rest of the wonderful team at Bloomsbury. I am also indebted to the thoughtful comments from four anonymous reviewers who commented on the book. Finally, thanks to Carole, Philip, Matthew and Rachel for support, encouragement and conversation while I was writing this book.

Introduction

In the 1920s, a long poem was published, the most ambitious that its author had yet undertaken. It fused images of the First World War with the ancient world and descriptions of modern-day London. The poem is highly multilingual, alludes to numerous works of literature in different languages, and utilizes many different styles and forms, from rhyming couplets to snatches of popular song. The ‘I’ who speaks in the poem is several different characters, who are all designed to represent one consciousness. The poem, in taking modern post-war Europe as one of its settings, attempts to speak for the world at large but is also a very personal depiction of a poet’s dissatisfaction with urban modernity and the loss of poetry in the new, post-war age. The process of writing the poem and confronting his own life and experiences led to the poet having a nervous breakdown. All of this could apply to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a landmark work of modernist poetry published in 1922. But it might also apply to an altogether less well-known poem published three years later and written by a different modernist poet  – indeed, a poet who was uncomfortable with much of ‘modernism’ by this stage of his career. The author of this ‘other’ Waste Land was Eliot’s sometime friend and fellow modernist Richard Aldington, whose 1925 poem A Fool i’ the Forest was, in part, a response to Eliot’s more famous postwar poem about decaying Europe. Other poets  – including another of Eliot’s friends Ezra Pound as well as less celebrated writers such as Hope Mirrlees and Nancy Cunard – would also write long poems in the modernist mode during the years immediately succeeding the end of the war. At least one of these, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris, was written three years before The Waste Land was published and anticipates Eliot’s poem in startlingly specific ways. Yet this history of the modernist long poem, which is so little known as to be almost a secret history, has not been told in full. This is surprising given the centrality of The Waste Land to our understanding of modernist poetry of the 1920s; yet Hope Mirrlees’s

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striking precursor to Eliot’s poem remains largely unknown, even among avid readers and students of modernist literature. This book tells the story of these other poems, and in doing so offers a significant and original contribution to our understanding of modernist poetry produced in the years following the Great War. Why were modernist poets drawn to the long poem during the immediate postwar years? Stephen Spender recalled Eliot confiding to him that The Waste Land ‘could not have been written at any moment except when it was written – a remark which, while biographically true in regard to his own life, is also true of the poem’s time in European history after World War I. The sense that Western civilization was in a state which was the realization of historic doom lasted from 1920 to 1926.’1 Indeed, the popularity and influence of The Waste Land partly accounts for the long poems of Aldington and Cunard which were written a few years after Eliot’s poem appeared in 1922. But Eliot’s work, groundbreaking though it was, did not inaugurate or invent the notion of the modernist long poem: there were Waste Lands before The Waste Land. The long poems of Ezra Pound and Hope Mirrlees, among others, demonstrate this. To treat The Waste Land as a unique symptom of this post-war impulse to produce longer works of experimental verse is mistaken and clouds our understanding of not only Eliot’s poem but also the context that gave rise to it. For there is a hidden history of the modernist long poem that begins, not with The Waste Land, but several years before Eliot’s poem. Indeed, in the years immediately following the Armistice in November 1918, there was a sense that the events of the war and its social, political and psychological fallout necessitated something that went beyond the imagist poems and shorter works that had dominated the modernist poetry written in English until this point. Both Pound and Aldington, who would go on to write long poems, were founding members of the imagists, while before the First World War, Eliot, himself no imagist, wrote poems which shared many features with that movement, such as ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ as well as some of the poems in the notebook posthumously published in 1996 as Inventions of the March Hare. For modernist poets, the challenge was to find ways of fitting the concrete miniature representations of modern life offered by imagism into a broader framework that could encapsulate the full feeling of alienation and despair which characterized the post-war period. The canvas on which such an artistic statement could be made would necessarily have to be larger than the typical single page of the imagist poem. ‘The understanding of Modernism has been obscured by isolated close readings of the long poems as independent, revolutionary experiments’,

Introduction

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Margaret Dickie wrote in 1986, with ‘each poem annotated and explicated as a unique accomplishment’.2 Since Dickie wrote her study of the modernist long poem, there has been an even greater shift in modernist studies towards a consideration of the ‘other’ modernists who experimented with the long poem. But these considerations have generally taken the form of short articles and chapters focusing on one or two of these marginalized poems, which has only served to reinforce Dickie’s point about modernist works being viewed individually as independent experiments. The tendency among readers  – but also among students and academics, as a glance at the set texts on university undergraduate modules reveals  – is to see The Waste Land as a sui generis work of modernist poetry which arose out of Eliot’s own particular artistic and political worldview. But since the 1960s in particular, there has been a move away from a consideration of The Waste Land as a standalone phenomenon in the history of the post-First World War modernist long poem. Hugh Kenner’s important 1971 study titled The Pound Era helped to place Pound, not Eliot, at the centre of a modernist network and to highlight Pound’s significance as a modernist poet. The publication in the same year of the annotated drafts of The Waste Land revealed the extent of Pound’s involvement in what was, at least at the crucial editorial stage, a collaborative work. In terms of Pound’s own poetry, for a long time it was The Cantos that was viewed as the Pound poem that most closely corresponded to Eliot’s modern epic The Waste Land. Such a view was questioned by Walter Sutton, who observed in 1968 that among Pound’s poems it is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and not The Cantos, that is closest to The Waste Land in its ‘scope and its evocation of the mood of a particular period’, that period being the immediate wake of the Great War.3 Since then, Eliot and Pound have often been seen as the twin pillars of Anglo-American high modernist poetry as it took shape in London in the postwar years, and only in the past decade or so has their virtual monopoly been seriously challenged. An important development in this regard was achieved thanks to the work of Julia Briggs, who rescued Hope Mirrlees’s long 1920 poem Paris from obscurity and put it back into publication. Another significant but forgotten long poem, Nancy Cunard’s Parallax (1925), is now back in print, for the first time since its original publication over 90 years earlier. Sandeep Parmar, who edited Mirrlees’s Collected Poems for Fyfield books in 2011, is also the editor of Cunard’s Selected Poems. Richard Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest (1925), this present study argues, is another largely forgotten example of the modernist long poem which helps to give a fuller and clearer picture of modernist poetry being produced in England in the 1920s. This poem is still out of print and,

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I would argue, critically undervalued in the history of the modernist poem and modernist responses to the Great War. Placing Mirrlees’s and Cunard’s poems alongside Eliot’s and Pound’s reveals several things. As Tory Young has recently remarked of these two poems by largely forgotten female poets, ‘recognition of their performativity as exerting a critique of constructions of Modernism is long overdue’, especially in the context of ‘the cultural materialist revision of Modernism’.4 Although critics such as Briggs and Young have begun the work that is necessary to salvage Mirrlees’s and Cunard’s long poems from critical (and wider) obscurity, further work remains to be done not only in understanding these still relatively neglected works of modernist literature but also in placing them in their post-war context and determining their precise position within the modernist canon. There has been a tendency in recent criticism of Mirrlees’s and Cunard’s work, much of which has consisted of feminist readings of their poems, to see the history of the modernist long poem in male-female terms, with the canonical male poets Eliot and Pound on one side and the non-canonical female poets Mirrlees and Cunard on the other, with these two women poets respectively foreshadowing and critiquing the more famous male-authored poems. While it is important to acknowledge the role that gender has played in constructing this narrative for Anglo-American modernist poetry, such a dichotomy threatens to oversimplify the complex set of relations between the modernist canon and ‘counter-canon’. In this regard, the sixth chapter of this study will examine another modernist long poem by a male writer, Richard Aldington, which occupies an even more marginal position on the fringes of the modernist canon than either Mirrlees’s or Cunard’s work, since until now it has been more or less completely absent from considerations of the modernist long poem. Aldington’s poem is a complex response to Eliot’s The Waste Land which highlights the surprising ways in which modernists writing after The Waste Land tried to move poetry forward and attempted to respond to issues thrown up by the First World War. The poem also helps us understand the fraught and complex relationships within the modernist communities of the 1920s. It is also, even more explicitly than The Waste Land, a long poem about the war, in which Aldington had fought. It is at once a war poem and a post-war poem. Consideration of these other long poems also reveals a different, and more complex, picture of British and Anglo-American modernism in the years immediately following the Great War. Because of the neglect, and virtual invisibility, of a poem like Paris for so many decades, a picture of Anglophone modernist poetry developed which placed T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound at the head of the movement. This means the temptation, on university English Literature

Introduction

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courses and in the popular consciousness, is to view the post-war mood as one governed by pessimism, disorder and fragmentation, but such fragmentation need not be a symptom of the ‘ruins’ of modern civilization:  such ruins may be seen as liberating, signalling a breaking apart of outmoded systems and traditions and the forging of a new, distinctly modern mindset. Although both Mirrlees’s Paris and Eliot’s The Waste Land quote from, and allude to, many works of classical and Renaissance literature, they do so for very different reasons and reach different conclusions about the relationship between past and present, old and new, traditional and modern. However, Mirrlees’s poem forces us to question many of our assumptions about modernist poetry:  we might even say that it encourages us to go back and reread Eliot’s and Pound’s poems in a new light. The Waste Land is more in the tragic mode than in the comic, and many of its literary allusions – Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy – are even to plays belonging to the tragic genre. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is arguably the tragedy of a would-be poet’s failure to recover the sublime. But Paris appears to be altogether more celebratory and ‘comic’ in that it is about communion and celebration rather than isolation, failure and pessimism. Hope Mirrlees’s poem is far more optimistic – ‘Hope-ful’, we might say. The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem aims to explore what these poems can tell us about a crucial moment in the history of modern literature. Another aim of this study is to question the notion of 1922 as the single ‘high point’ of modernism and to explore how 1925 is another pivotal moment in the history of modernist literature. 1925 was the year of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, another important response to the war, but it was also the year of Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’, Richard Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest and Nancy Cunard’s Parallax. All three of these poems might be seen as a response to The Waste Land and the issues surrounding the nature of modern poetry and contemporary culture that Eliot’s poem placed at the forefront of the modernist aesthetic. Similarly, Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway can be seen as her response not only to the war itself but also to the two key texts of 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, as well as (to a lesser extent) a response to her 1922 novel, Jacob’s Room, and the ensuing debate with writers like Arnold Bennett that her 1922 novel sparked. In other words, the second ‘high point’ of modernist writing, 1925, was in many ways a response to the first high point, 1922. My focus on 1925 as another key watershed in modernism is designed to interrogate how modernists themselves reshaped and rethought the canon of modernist writing even as it was being formed.

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With this in mind, The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem is arranged into two interlinked sections, partly in order to suggest a ‘culmination’ not in 1922 but in 1925, the next stage of modernism after its high moment of 1922. As such, my chapters will explore other cultural and literary issues of the time. My analysis of ‘The Hollow Men’ sees the poem as Eliot’s attempt to move beyond The Waste Land; just as Aldington’s poem can be seen as his attempt to bring himself out of Eliot’s shadow, so Eliot, too, had to bring himself out from under the long shadow cast by The Waste Land and, indeed, by his collaboration with Pound. Another way of putting this is to say that, whereas the writing that crowned the annus mirabilis of 1922 looked elsewhere in mythological and literary tradition for its narratives and language (Ulysses to Greek myth, The Waste Land to a whole host of literary and religious texts and traditions), the second annus mirabilis of 1925 saw modernism feeding on itself: Mrs Dalloway on Ulysses, The Waste Land and Jacob’s Room; ‘The Hollow Men’ on The Waste Land; A Fool i’ the Forest on The Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; and Parallax on The Waste Land as well as some of Eliot’s other early work. By 1925 the role of the modernist long poem had shifted, from a cry of despair in the immediate wake of the Great War to a creative critique of the first wave of modernist long poems. Modernists had become uncertain about precisely what those first poems signified for modernism and for poetry itself, and a number of these poems of 1925 consider the future of the modernist endeavour itself, particularly in the wake of Ezra Pound’s departure from London. As Eliot had suggested of all great poetry in his 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, his own poetry soon became part of the tradition of English poetry. The modernist poems written in the wake of The Waste Land engage with the issue of allusion in modern poetry which Eliot’s poem had brought to the fore – and, to an extent, ‘The Hollow Men’, A Fool i’ the Forest and Parallax all allude to The Waste Land, as if it had become the principal source of literary allusion in modern poetry. Following this introduction, the first chapter of this book focuses on the long poems that were produced in the years during, and immediately following, the Great War. Some of these poems were not modernist per se but nevertheless demonstrated that the ambition to write a long poem was far more widespread than Eliot’s The Waste Land, taken in isolation, would suggest. This chapter examines why modernist poets in particular favoured long poems about postwar despair and loss of confidence at this time. The second chapter considers Hope Mirrlees’s long modernist experiment, Paris: A Poem, written in 1919 and published a year later by the Woolfs’ own

Introduction

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Hogarth Press. Similar in length to The Waste Land, Mirrlees’s Paris also shares many other features with Eliot’s more famous poem:  a focus on the post-war metropolis, soldiers being demobbed, death and burial, vegetation rituals, nymphs, parallels between the classical and modern ages, images of crowds travelling over a bridge, explanatory notes that confuse as much as they elucidate and many more besides. In this chapter, I see Paris not simply as a precursor to Eliot’s poem but also as an important post-war modernist long poem in its own right, which vividly captures the fragmented states of consciousness which the war had partly brought about. My focus here will be on the ways in which Mirrlees uses psychoanalysis to suggest unconscious or half-buried links between various phenomena in modern-day Paris, as a means of describing both a literal journey around the city and a psychological train of thought or ‘stream of consciousness’. The chapter also explores Paris as an example of an alternative route for Anglophone modernism drawing on French poetry and art, which failed to attain the recognition or success that Eliot’s version of modernism, with its engagement with the English literary tradition, did. The third chapter then examines Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a long poem preoccupied with the place of art – chiefly, poetry – in the post-war era. I offer a reappraisal of this poem, often overlooked in favour of Pound’s much longer magnum opus The Cantos, viewing it as a modernist long poem concerned with fragmentation and a crisis in modern culture. The chapter also argues that Pound’s work on the poem was important in helping him to work through a number of core issues pertaining to the modernist long poem, and that this helped him when he came to help Eliot to edit The Waste Land the following year. The fourth chapter offers a reconsideration of The Waste Land, paying particular attention to the ways in which the poem offers an unheroic vision of modern London and Europe in the wake of the war. Examining the ways in which Eliot’s allusions call up, only to reject or render impotent, various heroic figures from literature and myth, as well as the stylistic design of the poem as it emerged from Eliot’s drafts, the chapter re-examines some of the most widely held assumptions about the poem in light of its specific post-war context, as one of several notable modernist long poems rather than a sui generis work without precedent. The second half of the book then moves from the 1922 watershed marked by The Waste Land to 1925, the year in which three further modernist long poems, or responses to the long poem, were produced. To some degree, all three of these later poems are responses to one or more of the three long poems discussed in

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the first half of this book. The fifth chapter, for instance, argues that ‘The Hollow Men’ – a poem that has received comparatively little attention in Eliot’s oeuvre – was Eliot’s conscious attempt to rewrite The Waste Land, following the weakening of his close collaboration with Pound and his struggle to move forward as a poet. Ironically, the motifs of imprisonment and stasis which feature in The Waste Land offered Eliot one way of escaping the creative deadlock into which he had fallen following the success of his 1922 poem. A chief consideration in this chapter is Sweeney Agonistes, the modernist verse-drama Eliot tried, and failed, to complete prior to writing ‘The Hollow Men’. The sixth chapter discusses Richard Aldington’s long poem A Fool i’ the Forest. Aldington knew both Pound and Eliot personally and this largely forgotten work of modernism engages with The Waste Land, but Aldington, who took issue with the more nihilistic aspects of Eliot’s worldview, borrows from the style of The Waste Land only to overturn it. Aldington’s poem is an important work of modernist poetry because it offers an insight into the sense of ennui, disillusion and mental breakdown that many people felt following the end of the war, but unlike many of the other poems discussed in this book it was written by someone who had seen military combat in the trenches. Aldington’s loose rewriting of Eliot’s poem helps us to understand modernism’s sense of post-war despair more fully, given Aldington’s more direct engagement with war, both in his life and in his poetry, and the psychological effects that the war had on him. The seventh chapter on Nancy Cunard’s Parallax follows several critics in seeing the poem as a pointed response to, and revision of, the message of The Waste Land. After an analysis of some of the ways in which Cunard renews and rewrites the images and phrases of Eliot’s poem, the chapter examines a peculiar feature of Cunard’s poem which, I suggest, was one of the things she learnt from The Waste Land and then found a way to adapt as well as adopt. This is what I propose to call homorhyme, where repetition of a word or phrase is used at the end of two adjacent lines of verse in place of traditional rhyme. This is an important feature in The Waste Land, and it is also something which Cunard uses on a number of occasions in Parallax. But whereas Eliot uses the homorhyme to suggest paralysis and imprisonment, Cunard innovates with this poetic feature, implying a more hopeful vision of modern life. I  also discuss homorhyme in relation to modernist poetry in the first chapter. It is not my intention to see those modernist long poems which precede The Waste Land as mere John the Baptists to T. S. Eliot’s Jesus; for one, this would be dishonest in the instance of a poem like Hope Mirrlees’s Paris, given that Mirrlees’s poem seems to outstrip even Eliot’s in terms of its determination

Introduction

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to push the boundaries of creative expression into new and daring territory, experimenting with what a page of text can do. At the same time, however, the importance and, ultimately, the centrality of The Waste Land in the development of the modernist long poem is undeniable, and it is always the locus classicus of this literary form, the touchstone against which we compare other similar poems. My intention is to steer between these two extremes and explore the other possible pathways Anglophone modernist poetry might have taken, and, in some cases, did.

1

Towards the Long Poem The wreck of 1918 In December 1918, one month after the Armistice marking the end of the First World War, the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, oversaw the publication of a slim volume of poems by a virtually unknown poet who had been dead for nearly 30  years. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins heralded the publication for the first time of many of the poems of the Jesuit priest who had died in 1889. One of the curious things about Hopkins’s poems is how quickly they appeared to become relevant, owing to world events that had occurred during the year of their publication. Hopkins’s long poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, inspired by the sinking of a ship called the Deutschland in 1875, never saw the light of day at the time – it was rejected for publication in 1876 – but instead it entered the world in 1918, when the country of ‘Deutschland’ or Germany was a political and financial wreck following the defeat of Kaiser Wilhelm II at the end of the First World War. Although neither modernist nor about the war, Hopkins’s poem was greeted by a readership that was responding to both relatively recent ‘events’: the advent of literary modernism and the end of the Great War. What is more, the language of Hopkins’s poem was far more unusual and innovative than that found in most Victorian (and even Georgian) verse: Five! the finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man’s make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced – Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.1

For all of their differences in language and style, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and The Waste Land have much in common, beside the idea of a wrecked ‘land’

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that is glimpsed  – through wordplay only  – in Hopkins’s poem as well as in Eliot’s. Both are at least partly about a shipwreck; both feature drowned bodies; both are elegies or laments for something that has been lost (the lives of the nuns in Hopkins’s poem; spirituality and a sense of purpose in Eliot’s). Both are partly about religious faith – and the loss of that faith – in an increasingly secular age. But what most strikingly brings the two poems together in their post-war publication context is the way they both represent a radical break with the norms and conventions of the poetry of their time. In his influential 1932 study, New Bearings in English Poetry, F. R. Leavis chose to discuss Hopkins alongside the two major figures of modernist poetry in Britain, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But although many of Hopkins’s poems only found themselves into print for the first time in 1918, a number of them had already appeared in several anthologies, and one of these, The Spirit of Man (1916), attracted a substantial readership thanks to its popularity among soldiers in the trenches. This anthology included the opening stanza of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, meaning that when the first full edition of Hopkins’s poems appeared barely a month after the Armistice in 1918, a keen readership had already been created from soldiers returning from the war. Martin Dubois has recently noted that one notable early reader was F. R. Leavis, who ‘was one of a number of the poet’s early critical champions to conceive of Hopkins as an advance party in the modernist effort to renew and revitalize forms of poetic expression’.2 Leavis was working as an orderly serving ambulance trains and later described his championing of Hopkins in pointedly warlike terms: ‘Hopkins in fact gave one a good military opportunity’ for ‘an effective attack in that sector could tell in the campaign to get recognition for a greater poet – [T. S.] Eliot’.3 But aside from its opening stanza, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ would remain largely unpublished until 1918 when the war was over. It had been written in 1876 but was rejected for publication, and remained in manuscript form for over 40 years. Whether Eliot encountered Hopkins’s poetry when it was published in 1918, we do not know for certain; he may have read Hopkins only later and had certainly done so when he came to write of Hopkins as a ‘fine poet’ if of ‘narrow range’ in his 1934 book After Strange Gods.4 But we are not talking about influence here so much as the cultural atmosphere which gave rise to Eliot’s poem, and part of that cultural atmosphere must include the publication of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ as well as the writing and publication of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris and Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, both written and published prior to Eliot’s. Hopkins’s poem is different from the other three in having been written long before the war rather than immediately after it. But it



Towards the Long Poem

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is like theirs in that readers – aside from Bridges and a few others who had read ‘The Wreck’ in manuscript – would only first encounter Hopkins’s long poem in full in the immediate post-war era. Robert Bridges declared of Hopkins’s poem that it ‘stands logically as well as chronologically in the front of his book, like a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance’: a challenge not just to the reader’s comprehension but to their tastes and expectations for poetry and the poetic.5 Early critical responses to Hopkins’s work – such as influential readings by I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis – effectively heralded Hopkins as a modern poet, more at home with the modernists than with Tennyson or Browning. In their Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), Laura Riding and Robert Graves call Hopkins one of the ‘first modernist poets to feel the need of a clearness and accuracy in feelings and their expression so minute, so more than scientific, as to make of poetry a higher sort of psychology’.6 Humphry House went so far as to claim that ‘hardly a poet writing between the wars was not directly influenced by Gerard Hopkins’.7 The bafflement experienced by some early readers of Hopkins was similar to the confusion which Eliot’s poetry provoked in his early readers. Gillian Beer has noted, ‘When Robert Bridges first published Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1918 the modernist movement claimed him as a displaced contemporary stranded among the Victorians with whom he was assumed to have had little in common.’8 Although more recent criticism has shown just how thoroughly ‘Victorian’ Hopkins was in many respects, the fact that Bridges felt his friend’s work could only appear before a patient public once the First World War was over is important in directing us to the various crossovers between the modernist enterprise and Hopkins’s own distinctive approach to prosody, poetic language and imagery. ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is an elegy:  a word which, according to Stephen Spender, Eliot once used to describe The Waste Land; and The Waste Land is, on one level, certainly a poem in memory of the dead.9 As J. Hillis Miller noted, Hopkins’s poem is ‘an elegy for the dead, part of the long tradition of elegies in English stretching from “Lycidas” to The Waste Land and “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” ’.10 The difference between the two poems is that in Eliot’s poem there is an almost surreal sense that the dead will not stay dead: the first section is titled ‘The Burial of the Dead’ but ends with the poem’s speaker asking Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden has begun to sprout (ll. 71–2). In ‘Death by Water’, where the sea replaces the earth as the site of uncertain burial, Phlebas the Phoenician has been ‘a fortnight dead’ (l. 312)  but appears to be reliving his life as he bobs up and down on the water: ‘As he rose and fell / He

14

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

passed the stages of his age and youth’ (ll. 316–17), with ‘rose’ offering the grim possibility of resurrection, a hope that is immediately negated with the words ‘and fell’. He is, like Hopkins’s drowned nuns, merely floating on the sea’s tide, but he cannot be roused from death. And, of course, Eliot’s poem opens with an epigraph about a woman, the Cumaean Sibyl, who should have died long ago but has been kept alive to wither and fade over many years. The drowned Phoenician sailor, and other aspects of The Waste Land, have been interpreted as representations of Jean Verdenal, the young French poet to whose memory Eliot dedicated his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. Although Hopkins died before the outbreak of the war, his long poem first came to public attention just as the British reading public was recovering from a four-year war. The prefatory poem to the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Robert Bridges, dated June 1918, noted that ‘Hell wars without’, and as John Schad has suggested, ‘the Deutschland’ or Germany was, by 1918, ‘virtually wrecked by four years of war’ and so ‘becomes the hidden subject’ of Hopkins’s poem.11 If The Waste Land is a poem concerned with prophecy, whether in the form of Tiresias having ‘foresuffered all’ (l. 243) or Madame Sosostris dealing out her Tarot cards, there is a sense that, in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins’s portrait of suffering is also an example of foresuffering. There is another peculiar coincidence between ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and The Waste Land: the fact that, when they were first published in book form, they carried editorial notes, as if they had already become works of scholarship as well as canonical works of literature, even upon initial book publication. In his June 1922  ‘London Letter’ for The Dial, Eliot praised Hopkins’s editor, Robert Bridges, as ‘the best living specimen in England of the good academic poet; and the word “academic” is not to be read in a pejorative sense’.12 It is commonly thought that Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land were added as a belated afterthought ‘to provide a few more pages of printed matter’, in Eliot’s own words, ‘with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day’.13 But as Lawrence Rainey points out, letters which have subsequently emerged suggest that the notes ‘were not merely a late and arbitrary addition imposed by the publishing exigencies of Horace Liveright, as often argued, but an integral part of the work as Eliot himself wished to have it published’; Rainey goes on to suggest that Eliot had in mind one of the original inspirations for the early drafts of The Waste Land, Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, which came with detailed notes.14 In fact, scholarly notes added to long poems were more common in the early twentieth century than we might initially be led to believe, given the emphasis placed on Eliot’s ‘bogus



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scholarship’ displayed in his own notes.15 When Hope Mirrlees published her long poem Paris in 1920 with the Hogarth Press, she appended a handful of notes to the poem, although Mirrlees’s notes focus on details concerning the locales of Paris rather than the textual allusions in the poem. Why did Eliot, and other poets associated with the modernist movement, turn their minds to the task of a long poem in the wake of the First World War? The publication of Eliot’s own The Waste Land in 1922, and its ensuing popularity and almost instant admission into the literary canon, showed other writers that a long modernist poem was not only possible but even, perhaps, the most fitting poetic response to the events of the previous few years. Nancy Cunard’s Parallax and Richard Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest, both published in 1925, are in part responses to The Waste Land. But this simply returns us to the original question: what inspired Eliot to write his long poem? We cannot say that Eliot’s poem was the first modernist long poem, for both Hope Mirrlees’s Paris and Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley predated Eliot’s by several years. What inspired them to try their hands at something on a greater scope than modernists had, by and large, previously attempted in poetry? The first sign that Eliot was at work on a longer poem  – something that would dwarf his longest published poems to date, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’ – appears to have been in a letter he wrote on 5 November 1919 to John Quinn, in which he expressed his ‘hope to get started on a poem that I have in mind’; the following month, he wrote to his mother that his New Year’s Resolution was ‘to write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time’.16 How long ‘a long time’ exactly was is now difficult to ascertain, but even if we propose that Eliot had had the idea for a long poem in mind since the beginning of 1919, it may be that the end of the war and Eliot’s formulation of his next major poetic work coincided, and that he already had the idea that one might be used to inform the other: in other words, that he could write a long poem partly about life in Britain after the war. But there may have been another incentive at work as well as the end of the war: another event, cultural rather than historical, which occurred in 1918 and inspired Eliot to turn his hand to something on a larger scale than ‘Prufrock’ or his other early poems. In 1918, the Little Review began to serialize James Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot must have foreseen that when Joyce had finished writing the novel, he would publish it as a single volume. (By coincidence, it would appear in Paris in the same year as The Waste Land.) Ezra Pound said of his long 1920 poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley that it was his ‘attempt to condense the James novel’; The Waste Land began, in part, as Eliot’s attempt to condense the Joyce

16

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

novel.17 The original opening section of the poem, drafted by Eliot some time in 1921 and describing a drunken night out in Boston, was heavily influenced by the serialization of Ulysses in the Little Review, of which Eliot had written, in a letter to Scofield Thayer dated 30 June 1918, as ‘the superb new novel of Joyce, which I do commend to your attention’; on 7 November, just four days before the Armistice, he wrote to Mrs Jack Gardner, ‘I admire Ulysses immensely’.18 Although Joyce set his novel based on the events of the Odyssey ten years before the outbreak of the First World War, on 16 June 1904, he began publishing excerpts from Ulysses in 1918, the year the war ended. Odysseus became a potent figure in post-war poetry partly because of modernist poetry’s antiheroic and antiepic sentiments, which can be understood as part of its broader commitment to what T.  E. Hulme called ‘classicism’ or a belief in the natural limitations of man but also as its response to the events of the First World War.19 Modernist poets thus often use Odysseus ironically to suggest the unheroic age that followed the war. Ulysses, or Odysseus to use his ancient Greek name, is a recurring character – bordering on a motif – in many modernist long poems written after the end of the war. From the identification of ‘E. P.’ as a latter-day Odysseus figure in the opening stanzas of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley to the original drafts of The Waste Land and the presence of his son Telemachus in Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest, he is the most frequently used figure from classical myth in modernist long poems written in the immediate wake of the war. Odysseus has a double significance in these poems. First, as James Joyce had shown, the story of Ulysses/Odysseus could be used as a model for the modernday narrative, which was important for Joyce in providing a framework for a long modernist novel. A  modernist short story, such as many of the stories contained in Joyce’s earlier Dubliners (1914), can afford to do without a plot, but a modernist novel of 700 pages benefits from an in-built structure. Modernist poets seeking to make the same transition from short poems – whether dramatic monologues like Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J.  Alfred Prufrock’ or sketches of individual moments such as those written by the imagists  – to longer works needed to find a similar way to structure their work so that, even if it remained episodic and fragmentary, as both The Waste Land and Ulysses do to some extent, there is nevertheless the ghost of a structure underpinning the episodes described. The story of Odysseus was ideal for Joyce’s purpose because its plot was relatively loose in any case, detailing the journey home of its wandering hero and the events befalling his wife and son back home on the island of Ithaca. In other words, its largely episodic composition  – taking in the hero’s encounters with the Sirens, Circe, the Cyclops Polyphemus and others  – was



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especially suited to the modernist enterprise. Eliot, too, was drawn to classical epics focusing on post-war voyaging rather than epic tales of wartime: in 1951 in a radio broadcast on Virgil, Eliot outlined his schoolboy preference for Virgil’s Aeneid over Homer’s Iliad, adding, ‘It might have been rather different if we had started with the Odyssey instead of the Iliad.’20 Indeed, alongside the structural support which Homer’s Odyssey provided writers like Joyce, another reason why Odysseus was a significant figure for modernist poets writing in the wake of the war was more important. Poems like The Waste Land do not follow the story of Homer’s poem in the way that Joyce’s novel loosely does. Instead, something more symbolic was encoded in the story of the Odyssey, which might be described as the first post-war poem in Western literature, charting the return journey of Odysseus after the end of the Trojan War. Odysseus is also a ‘writer’ of sorts himself: a storyteller and accused liar, he recounts a significant portion of the events narrated in the Odyssey himself. I would argue that Odysseus was used by modernist poets to suggest not only the link between war’s aftermath and the writing of poetry but also a continuum between ancient and modern wars, and classical and modern poetry. Even if it was Joyce’s Ulysses that gave Pound, Eliot and others the idea of using Odysseus in a longer modernist work, they interpreted the character’s significance in a different way from that of Joyce:  its episodic plot was less important to them than what the character symbolized.

The aftermath of war Margaret Dickie’s On the Modernist Long Poem (1986) is the one sustained study of long modernist poems written prior to this present study, but Dickie adopts a different approach to categorization. Her book discusses The Waste Land alongside poems as varied as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Pound’s The Cantos, a grouping which illuminates the disparate approaches modernist poets took to the enterprise of the ‘long poem’. But for the present study I have seen fit to draw a distinction between long poems like The Waste Land and much longer poems – poems which aspire to the status of modern epics – such as Pound’s The Cantos and Williams’s Paterson, as well as other, later works of epic modernism such as H. D.’s Helen in Egypt. These are much more ambitious works on an entirely different scale from The Waste Land. There is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and then there are The Cantos: the two are not comparable in the same way as Mauberley and The Waste Land are. What the

18

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

present study means by ‘modernist long poem’, then, is a more specific subgenre of modernist poem of a particular length (book-length, but hundreds rather than thousands of lines long) and produced at a particular moment in AngloAmerican modernism (namely in the years immediately following the First World War). As with Eliot’s The Waste Land, the war is an important contextual factor in the modernist long poem as it is here formulated. Such a taxonomy may appear wilfully arbitrary or reductive, or as an attempt to impose a schema on a group of poems that simply happened to be written by modernists and to be roughly the same length. But I do not think that the similarities between these poems are a matter of coincidence. As the title of this study indicates, The Waste Land cast a considerable shadow over modernist poetry in the 1920s, and three of the poems this book discusses were conceived as responses to The Waste Land, to varying degrees. But it is not entirely a coincidence that The Waste Land ended up taking the shape that it did, as suggested by Pound’s role in editing it down to roughly half the length of the original drafts. The fact that Pound had recently written a poem of a similar length, also engaging with the aftermath of the war, seems less a biographical footnote than a revealing case of artistic cross-fertilization. Having just written Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound had experience of putting together a longer modernist poem that worked by collage and fragmentary vignettes. As I  will argue in this book, such experience helped him to work out what Eliot was trying to do with The Waste Land and to help Eliot realize the shape of the poem he was writing. Dickie’s book is an illuminating study of the impact, both positive and negative, that The Waste Land had upon a number of important longer modernist poems written in its wake. Crane’s The Bridge and Williams’s Paterson were both conceived as responses to Eliot’s poem, with Crane commenting that he found Eliot’s poem ‘good’ but ‘so damned dead’: The Waste Land inspired him to ‘take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction’.21 Williams, similarly, conceived Paterson as ‘a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands’, in a pointed swipe at the learnedness of Eliot annotated poem.22 But we know now that The Waste Land was not, as Dickie writes, ‘the first long poem of the Modernist experiment’, and that Mirrlees’s Paris got there three years before Eliot.23 The present study also makes the case for Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as a long poem which helped to shape the length and structure of The Waste Land, and Pound, similarly, got there before Eliot. Dickie’s measured and persuasive justification for her taxonomy of the ‘long poem’ is also worth considering:



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The long poem, for all its inadequacies as a designation, has the merit of distinguishing the salient feature of this otherwise unidentifiable genre. Epic and various permutations of that term  – proto-epic or pre-epic  – have been appropriated both by the poets and their critics as useful classifications. They too point to the length of the Modernist long poems, but they point to other qualities as well, all absent from the Modernist long poem, that require extraneous explanation. In the same way, the poetic sequence, another term for the long poem, obfuscates more than it clarifies, since sequence suggests an order of development nowhere evident in these poems’ compositions. Bare and simple as it is, the long poem as a term identifies nonetheless the single feature that most attracted the poet and made his work most problematic. Long in the time of composition, in the initial intention, and in the final form, the Modernist long poem is concerned first and last with its own length.24

These are all fair points, but if length is to be made the chief criterion for classifying the modernist long poem, it becomes problematic if we choose to apply this criterion equally to The Waste Land and The Cantos, as Dickie goes on to state.25 A 20-page poem cannot be on the same scale as a 900-page one. Therefore the distinction between ‘long poem’ and something approaching the modern epic in scale and size may be useful in helping us focus on one particular period in the development of the long poem.

The origins of the modernist long poem The modernist long poem predates the Armistice and its aftermath. Even while the First World War was ongoing, poets were trying to forge a new poetic language and form to reflect the new experiences that the war was exposing them to, whether first-hand or indirectly through news reports. Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Antwerp’ (1915) is one of the first longer free-verse poems to respond to the war. Published when Ford, who had been an associate of Pound’s since before the war, was still writing under the name Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘Antwerp’ focuses on the Belgians’ resistance to German invasion; in 1917, T. S. Eliot called it ‘the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war’.26 In ‘Antwerp’, Ford’s use of off-rhyme is sometimes arguably misplaced (rhyming ‘anthem’ with ‘fan them’ and ‘Allah’s’ with ‘Valhallas’ seems more at home in a comic poem in the vein of Lord Byron than one about a contemporary war), and in many ways its rhetoric is more at home in a work-like Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ than a contemporaneous poem like Yeats’s

20

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

‘Easter 1916’. As Peter Robinson has observed, ‘Ford is rarely more than halfmodern in his poetry’.27 Yet in ‘Antwerp’, the irregular line lengths suggest a movement away from the traditional and predictable in poetry towards something approaching free verse, and the erratic line lengths of poems like The Waste Land and Nancy Cunard’s Parallax. Ford’s use of rhyme, like Eliot’s in much of his poetry, is erratic and forever changing throughout the poem, including the use of repetition for emphasis: And that shall be an honourable word; ‘Belgian’ shall be an honourable word28

Such a couplet – a non-rhyming couplet – uses repetition simply to reinforce the honourable nature of the Belgians in resisting German invasion, but Eliot would put such a device to more psychologically suggestive use in The Waste Land, as would those who followed him. Tellingly, Ford later altered ‘honourable word’ to ‘honourable name’ in the first line, removing the repetition, but the seed had nevertheless been planted. We know that Eliot knew of ‘Antwerp’, and such repetition-as-rhyme would become a key part of Eliot’s poetic style in The Waste Land, and, following Eliot, in the work of later modernists. Moreover, something of ‘Antwerp’ appears to have influenced Yeats in the writing of his poem ‘Easter 1916’: But that clatter of sodden corses On the sodden Belgian grass – That is a strange new beauty.29

Ford’s ‘strange new beauty’ becomes Yeats’s ‘A terrible beauty is born’.30 Indeed, Ford’s parallels between the current war and previous wars – including the Punic Wars, also present in The Waste Land – and his poem’s use of mythology mark it as a curious and overlooked precursor to Eliot’s poem. Ford’s ‘Antwerp’ also prefigures The Waste Land in focusing on the fact that the war had displaced and uprooted vast numbers of people from their homes:  section VI of ‘Antwerp’ depicts Belgian refugees in London. Some 250,000 refugees fled the country and came to the capital following the invasion: A great crowd, all black that hardly whispers aloud. Surely, that is a dead woman – a dead mother! She has a dead face; She is dressed all in black; She wanders to the bookstall and back, At the back of the crowd;



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And back again and again back, She sways and wanders.31

The repetition and circling back which Ford’s lines capture would be something that would continue, not just as part of the aftermath of the invasion of Belgium but in the aftermath of the war as a whole. Looking back on the modernist revolution that began in verse in the first decade of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound asserted, ‘The critical light during the years immediately pre-war in London shone not from Hulme but from Ford.’32 Pound’s fellow imagist, and the poet who had inspired him to coin the word ‘Imagiste’ to describe a new movement, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), also wrote a longer poem shortly after the end of the war. ‘Hymen’, published in Poetry in December 1919 and then in H.  D.’s collection Hymen two years later, is a combination of verse and prose, describing a marriage ceremony filled with the Hellenistic trappings which H.  D.  had used in her imagist poetry during the war. ‘Hymen’ might be read as a stepping stone towards the longer modernist poem: the interspersing of prose directions lends the poem a dramatic quality, as if we are reading a series of stage directions, while the poetic sections read like short imagist poems that have been linked together under the general theme of the marriage ritual. Ironically, while H. D. was writing ‘Hymen’, her marriage to her fellow imagist Richard Aldington was falling apart: they would separate in 1919. Eliot, Pound and H. D. had all been born in the United States but had moved to London. Back in the United States, more and more poets who had not made the decision to cross the Atlantic turned their sights to the ambitious task of a long poem. The anarchist poet Lola Ridge (1873–1941), who had been born in Ireland but had moved to the United States with her mother while she was still living in New York at the end of the war, wrote ‘Sun-Up’, a long narrative poem published in Sun-Up and Other Poems in 1920. This is free verse written by a poet born in Dublin, though she later moved to New Zealand and died in New York. So although she was not English or Anglo-American, she did move towards the free verse most commonly associated with Anglo-American modernism at the time. Indeed, she was one of the first to write a longer modernist poem in free verse about urban life and modernity: two years before ‘Sun-Up’, Ridge published ‘The Ghetto’, a long poem in free verse about modern urban life: The street crawls undulant, Like a river addled With its hot tide of flesh

22

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem That ever thickens. Heavy surges of flesh Break over the pavements, Clavering like a surf – Flesh of this abiding Brood of those ancient mothers who saw the dawn break over Egypt …33

‘The Ghetto’ depicts the sprawling modern metropolis, a place of bustle and movement where many nationalities live side by side. Although Ridge was writing towards the end of the First World War, at a time when the United States had joined the conflict, ‘The Ghetto’ does not engage directly with the war and so stands apart from The Waste Land in this respect. Another American poet to write a long poem in 1918 was Conrad Aiken, a Harvard friend of T.  S. Eliot and one of the first poets to review The Waste Land. Aiken’s ‘Senlin:  A Biography’ stands between ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land in several crucial ways. It bears the mark of Eliot’s influence, particularly the invented persona of Prufrock himself. But its length, its incorporation of different metres and line lengths and its use of particular tropes and phrases (the idea of death-in-life, and even the phrase ‘the burial of its dead’) prefigure Eliot’s more famous long poem of four years later.34 But the poem stops short of the daring experimentation associated with The Waste Land and depicts a very different world from the post-war metropolis that Eliot would make the focus of his long poem. Aiken was a modern poet who never quite became modernist. In Britain, too, the long poem in free verse was not confined to those associated with the modernist movement. Bernard Gilbert’s Old England: A God’s Eye View of a Village (1921), a long series of sketches of various characters inhabiting a fictional village, Fletton, at the end of the First World War, seems poised between the provincial world of the Georgians and the radical experimentation of Eliot, Aldington and others. Gilbert’s attempts to capture the natural speech of Lincolnshire villagers through free verse anticipate Eliot’s own attempts to capture the Cockney speech of Lou, Bill and the other pub-goers at the end of ‘A Game of Chess’ in The Waste Land. In its combination of free verse and prose poetry, Old England is bold experimentation, even while its subject matter looks back to the villages and hedgerows of the poetry of Rupert Brooke and others shortly before the outbreak of the war.35 Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–5), a long narrative poem influenced by Cubism and Futurism, shares its avant-garde approach to form and language with Hope Mirrlees’s Paris in particular. Loy’s poem was written



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in the wake of Eliot’s The Waste Land but deals with very different themes and does not explicitly touch upon the recent war. It is closer to personal autobiography, dealing with the hybrid nature of Loy’s own family history, than a poem endeavouring to capture the more widely felt post-war mood of 1920s Europe. In this respect, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, in being more interested in autobiography and with what happened before the war, is closer to Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley than it is to Paris. In Loy’s poem, which is around three times the length of The Waste Land, she explores her own history by going back to her Hungarian-born Jewish father and her English mother, exploring how her hybrid Anglo-European identity is the product of her parents, whom she refers to as ‘Exodus’ and ‘English Rose’, respectively. Despite her British and European ancestry, Loy is often called an ‘American’ modernist: as Marjorie Perloff notes, stylistically Loy is seen to belong to the tradition of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, rather than the European modernism in which Pound and Eliot operated.36 Loy’s poem stands apart from The Waste Land and the other poems treated in subsequent chapters of this book, and it cannot be said to enter into a dialogue with Eliot’s poem as the poems of Mirrlees, Pound, Aldington and Cunard do, whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously. Loy’s poem is a stand-alone achievement, belonging to a different tradition, and perhaps even inaugurating a new one all of its own. One of the first recognizable modernist long poems published after the war was written by a poet who had been one of the chief contributors to Pound’s imagist anthologies: F. S. Flint. Flint’s long poem ‘Otherworld’ (1920) is written in a loosely free-verse form, what Flint called ‘unrhymed cadence’, that anticipates The Waste Land.37 In ‘Otherworld’, the narrator pictures an ideal world of beauty and nature, contrasting this with the real world of drudgery and mechanical living which he is forced to inhabit: he is a respectable family man with a day job and feels as though he and his peers are ‘gaoled / In a prison of our own making that we might destroy tomorrow!’38 Such everyday imprisonment within the workaday world prefigures not only the various people sleepwalking through their daily lives in The Waste Land, such as the typist in her bedsit and the clerks flowing over London Bridge, but also the fate of Aldington’s narrator in A Fool i’ the Forest. Indeed, at one moment, Flint alludes to a moment during the war when he had accompanied a friend and his army unit on a march from Waterloo to London Bridge station; the friend who inspired this passage was his fellow imagist, Richard Aldington, to whom ‘Otherworld’ is dedicated. Although the style of ‘Otherworld’ is somewhat different from Eliot’s, Flint’s mention of the

24

The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

modern city, London Bridge, clerks, war and railway stations, all anticipate the world of The Waste Land: And when they arrived at London Bridge, And stood in the gas-lit, frowsy station, The sweat was on their face, and the hall was filled With the smell of healthy men. What was my friend doing there, The singer of beautiful things, the beautiful singer? What was any man of that company – Clerk, shopkeeper, labourer, poet – Doing each with the other, Clothed and loaded alike and marching together, With the thought of each man’s heart and brain written off, And their common manhood Trained to move in one direction and to fit one shape? What is war? … What are nations? My friend has gone from me; I could not have even him And yet in those men There was so much kindliness, so much humour, And so little desire to kill.39

Flint’s ‘Otherworld’ predates the long poem written by its dedicatee Richard Aldington by five years, but it shows how the free verse pioneered by both Flint and Aldington, and their fellow imagists, during the early war years could be developed into a long narrative poem that responded to the events of the war. Such poems, written by Eliot’s precursors and peers, are worth considering because they show how much disparate material, and how many diverse themes and preoccupations of his contemporaries, Eliot succeeded in bringing together in The Waste Land, although many of these elements – personal autobiography, urban observation, the recent war, literary and mythological allusion  – Hope Mirrlees would already have brought together in her 1919 poem Paris. And something else which defines both Paris and The Waste Land is an emphasis on space and geography  – indeed, psychogeography  – and its relation to modernity. ‘The Ghetto’ signals in its title an emphasis on a specific kind of city space, one associated with underclasses, immigration, poverty and distinct minority communities. Paris: A Poem places the French capital at the centre of Mirrlees’s ambitious exploration of post-war modernity. The Waste Land offers up as its central metaphor a multifaceted space, an image that can be literal



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or geographical and metaphorical or psychological: Eliot’s poem is concerned with both literal waste lands (deserts and other sterile spaces) and cultural and moral waste lands (the modern city, especially as it is viewed as a hotbed for prostitution and other forms of loveless sexual experience).

Homorhyme In T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, Christopher Ricks picked up on a distinctive feature of The Waste Land. Quoting from Henry James’s The Tragic Muse, in which Miriam Rooth recites a couplet from Shakespeare’s King John, Ricks points out the peculiar power of the couplet’s rhyme: For I am sicke, and capeable of feares, Opprest with wrongs, and therefore full of feares.40

‘What this terrible turn intimates’, Ricks observes, ‘is the meeting of an irresistible force and an immovable object’ where ‘as Shakespeare wrote it, and as James and his heroine realized it, there is no moving on, no remission from something which is at once a lock-jaw and the wild organ-tones of her irony and wrath’.41 This ‘turn’, as Ricks puts it, is ‘alive in some of Eliot’s greatest lines, alive as they are to the grain of the language’.42 We see it at several points in The Waste Land: A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many (ll. 62–3)

Ricks brilliantly observes of this couplet that it is a ‘grim rhyme, at once more richly a rhyme than any other could be, since it is the repetition of the very word itself, and yet more poverty-stricken than a rhyme could be, since it is not truly a rhyme at all, is not a creative cooperation of two things but instead has what is here the singleness of a consternation without parallel’.43 As Ricks implies here, there is something reminiscent of rime riche in Eliot’s and Shakespeare’s use of this repetition-as-rhyme, although we cannot strictly call it rime riche. Whereas rime riche involves rhyming two homophones with each other, such as ‘rain’ and ‘reign’, Shakespeare’s pairing of ‘of feares’ with ‘of feares’, and Eliot’s of ‘so many’ with ‘so many’, simply offers two words or phrases which are, in fact, identical. I propose the term ‘homorhyme’ to describe this technique that is so near and yet so far from being the perfect rhyme. Homorhyme was an innovative way of capturing a sense of deadlock or frustration, an inability to think beyond one’s

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current hopeless state of mind; it was also particularly useful to modernist poets writing in free verse, who wished to avoid more conventional or predictable rhymes. Examining Eliot’s poetry in its wider literary context, we see that homorhyme was far more widespread than a few isolated examples from The Waste Land, and perhaps even partially inevitable as free verse became increasingly popular among poets. D. H. Lawrence’s ‘New Heaven and Earth’ (1917) shows the modernist long poem struggling to be born, while the war was still raging. It is an early example of a longer poem dealing with the war, as part IV demonstrates: At last came death, sufficiency of death, and that at last relieved me, I died. I buried my beloved; it was good, I buried myself and was gone. War came, and every hand raised to murder; very good, very good, every hand raised to murder! Very good, very good, I am a murderer! It is good, I can murder and murder, and see them fall the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a multitude one on another, and then in clusters together smashed, all oozing with blood, and burned in heaps going up in a foetid smoke to get rid of them the murdered bodies of youths and men in heaps and heaps and heaps and horrible reeking heaps till it is almost enough, till I am reduced perhaps; thousands and thousands of gaping, hideous foul dead that are youths and men and me being burned with oil, and consumed in corrupt thick smoke, that rolls and taints and blackens the sky, till at last it is dark, dark as night, or death, or hell and I am dead, and trodden to nought in the smoke-sodden tomb; dead and trodden to nought in the sour black earth of the tomb; dead and trodden to nought, trodden to nought.44

Of particular interest is the triplet that runs: War came, and every hand raised to murder; very good, very good, every hand raised to murder! Very good, very good, I am a murderer!

In ‘New Heaven and Earth’, the use of repetition and homorhyme reflects the paralysed mind of Lawrence’s speaker, just as they would be used to similar



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effect by Eliot five years later. Lawrence’s insistent repetition also prefigures Ivor Gurney’s ‘To God’, written after he had been committed to an insane asylum in the 1920s, and which I will discuss in my chapter on The Waste Land. Another poem that would pave the way for Eliot’s vision of waste and apocalypse is W.  B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919), which also uses homorhyme, as well as deploying the pararhymes that Wilfred Owen had used in his war poems: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.45

It is notable how Yeats’s words suggest the chaotic nature of world events and the disaster this spells: ‘loosed’ and ‘world’ suggest this worldwide anarchy, only for the two words to become joined in that doom-laden word, ‘worst’, a few lines later. There is nothing worse than the loosing of anarchy on the world. The same is true of the poem’s lack of rhyme, but although it is unrhymed, it utilizes other techniques that stand in for traditional rhyme: pararhyme (‘hold’/‘world’, ‘man’/‘sun’), homorhyme (‘at hand’/‘at hand’) and what we might call semantic rhyme (‘sleep’/‘cradle’): Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?46

Like The Waste Land, ‘The Second Coming’ ends with an ominous sign, but whether it is a sign of apocalypse or salvation remains undecided.

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As Marina McKay has recently observed, ‘a “war about to start” had helped to create modernism, but the war that arrived had killed it’.47 The modernist poet and philosopher T. E. Hulme wrote much of his poetry, as well as prose essays arguing for the revitalizing of poetry, in London in the pre-war years. He wrote just one poem while on active service; or rather, he both did and did not write it, since he dictated it to Pound, who wrote it down and published it in his Catholic Anthology in 1915. The poem was given the title ‘Trenches: St Eloi’, along with the subtitle: ‘T.E.H. Poem: Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr T.E.H.’ suggesting that, before he edited The Waste Land, Pound may have edited Hulme’s poetic composition: Over the flat slopes of St Eloi A wide wall of sand bags. Night, In the silence desultory men Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess- tins: To and fro, from the lines, Men walk as on Piccadilly, Making paths in the dark, Through scattered dead horses, Over a dead Belgian’s belly. The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets. Behind the line, cannon, hidden, lying back miles. Beyond the line, chaos: My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors. Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.48

Robert Ferguson remarks in his biography of Hulme that this poem ‘feels like poetry’ but ‘looks like prose’, but we might just as easily turn such an assessment on its head, and decide that Hulme’s poem looks like poetry (albeit the new free-verse form of poetry) but feels like prose, given its refusal to romanticize or sentimentalize life in the trenches.49 Ferguson goes on: ‘The mere fact that it could be considered a poem at all is a mark of the triumph of the poetic revolution Hulme had helped to start just seven years earlier.’50 Ferguson is alluding to Hulme’s 1908 proto-imagist poem ‘Autumn’: A touch of cold in the Autumn night I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer.



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I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.51

The very fact that Hulme’s later war poem was spoken by him, that he refused to write it down and that it had to be ‘abbreviated’ by Pound is what makes it a noteworthy marker of a sea change in English poetry. Although it is undoubtedly a ‘war poem’, it makes us go back and reassess what we mean by ‘poem’ and ‘the poetic’. Like ‘Autumn’ it is written in unrhymed vers libre, and its style and tone are understated, even verging on flat, as all emotion is restrained and brought under control. For Wilfred Owen the poetry may famously have been in ‘the pity’ – that is ‘the pity of War’ – but Hulme had very little time for pity, either in this poem or in his other war writing.52 His letters and war notes see him maintaining the understated and restrained approach that was characteristic of his earlier literary style. As he puts it in an essay called ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, which he wrote in around 1912, English poets should turn away from the ‘romantic’ impulse (which was too effusive, too indulgent and too overtly personal and emotional for Hulme’s tastes) towards what he calls the ‘classical’ spirit: What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.53

In the trenches, of course, man is literally confined and limited, restricted and constrained – but this also has a psychological impact, Hulme’s trenches poem seems to say: the mind becomes narrowed like a corridor and the soldier cannot think beyond the confines of the trenches and tunnels in which the body moves. The modern soldier in the Western Front was both physically and psychically restricted, both his visual and mental horizons narrowed. ‘Trenches: St Eloi’ does not rhyme, but it does create its own substitute for rhyme through repetition: The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets.

And: My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.

This rhythmic patterning is significant in Hulme’s poem because it suggests this trapped and confined nature of life in the trenches: there is no romantic self-pity

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here, no talk of infinity or limitlessness. The immediate problem is that the enemy has rockets while the English soldiers do not have anything to retaliate with, and such tunnel vision extends to the mind’s eye as well: the mind becomes a corridor, like a trench or tunnel, and is unable to think about anything else. The repetition of ‘corridor’/‘corridors’ in that second example brings this home, the repetition providing this unrhymed poem with a rhythmic pattern which stands in for rhyme, but which also reflects the sense of fixation and powerlessness that was part of the psychological life of men in the trenches. In June 1917, T.  S. Eliot wrote a letter to the Nation enclosing an excerpt from a letter ‘lately received from a young officer’ who had ‘entered the Army directly from a public school, and began his service in the trenches before he was nineteen’.54 This officer was probably Maurice Haigh-Wood, Eliot’s brotherin-law. In the letter, Haigh-Wood drew attention to ‘the practical impossibility of the uninitiated to realize or imagine even dimly the actual conditions of war’, before going on to outline the unpleasant realities for the Nation’s readers: Perhaps you are tempted to give them a picture of a leprous earth, scattered with the swollen and blackening corpses of hundreds of young men. The appalling stench of rotting carrion mingled with the sickening smell of exploded lyddite and ammonal. Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge – porridge that stinks in the sun. Swarms of flies and bluebottles clustering on the pits of offal. Wounded men lying in the shell holes among the decaying corpses: helpless under the scorching sun and bitter nights, under repeated shelling.55

This description of life in the trenches shares Hulme’s prose-like style and focus on the realist detail of war, with the repetition (‘Mud like porridge, trenches like shallow and sloping cracks in the porridge’) even echoing Hulme’s ‘My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.’ Perhaps inspired by his brotherin-law’s documentary-style snapshot of a soldier’s environment, Eliot also wrote something approaching a ‘war poem’, although he never saw active service. In a short, undated, untitled poem, beginning ‘In silent corridors of death’, which remained unpublished until 1996, Eliot appears to take up Hulme’s image of the trenches as corridors. The poem ends with a reference to the scent ‘Of the alleys of death / Of the corridors of death’.56 What emotion is present in this poem tends to be muted (it refers to ‘stifled breath’ and ‘silent sighing’) or indistinct (we are told that the soul is crying ‘somewhere’). The speaker is both ‘without hope’ and ‘without fear’.57 And in choosing to end his poem with the non-rhyme or homorhyme of ‘death’/‘death’ – deadening, we might say, after the vivid life of the



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earlier rhymes in the poem (where ‘death’ had been rhymed with ‘breath’) – he offers a flat, emotionless response to a traumatic and emotionally damaging reality. While Hulme was fighting in the trenches of northern France and Belgium, and Eliot was imagining the life of a soldier from London, a number of poets in London had taken the ideas Hulme had outlined in his poetry and had formed a new movement which their ringleader, the American expatriate Ezra Pound, had named ‘imagism’, because it placed the poetic image at the centre of poetry. Imagism adopted many of the ideas which Hulme had already expressed, with a typical imagist poem written in free verse with no formal rhyme or metre. Imagist poems tended to be short and observational, employed surprising and original metaphors and comparisons and frequently used understated rather than excessively rhetorical language. Aldington, one of the three original imagists along with Pound and H. D., was a poet who, like Hulme, enlisted into the British Army before conscription was introduced and would go on to write a number of war poems about his experience, many of them adopting modernist and imagist principles. In the five-line poem ‘Insouciance’, in which the poet writes poems that resemble a ‘flock of doves’, we are told, in a flat ‘doves’/‘doves’ homorhyme, that these poems ‘fly away like white-winged doves’.58 ‘Insouciance’ is more formally regular than Hulme’s trench poem, but it is still unrhymed, and the last two lines end on the same word, ‘doves’. Once again, there is a refusal either to sentimentalize the emotionally fraught experience of trench life or to shy away from depicting such realities in poetry. The white of the doves’ feathers suggests the white paper on which Aldington’s poems were written, but ‘doves’ also cleverly summons both war and peace: peace because of the association between doves and peace, of course, but war because doves and pigeons are related birds, and carrier pigeons were one of the chief methods of communication in the trenches. In choosing to end his unrhymed poem with this non-couplet of ‘doves’/‘doves’, Aldington takes us back to Hulme’s trench poem, with its repetition of ‘rockets’/‘rockets’ and ‘corridor’/‘corridors’, and to the ‘death’/‘death’ non-rhyme of Eliot’s poem. Rhyme requires similarity but also difference: the words sound the same but they are also distinct, with the second word moving away from the first even as it rushes to complement it. We might think of rhyme as a key fitting a lock: the first word, ‘breath’, locks with the second, ‘death’, neatly and perfectly. But ‘death’ and ‘death’ offers no such combination of difference and similarity: there is only more of the same. It is as if the deadening experiences of the war do not lend themselves to easy rhyme but instead to the fixation upon the same thought or word, which the speaker finds it difficult to move away from.

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Here it might be worth contrasting such a stylistic feature of these poems with a more canonical war poet who was by no means a modernist but who nevertheless found conventional rhyme to be inadequate for conveying the feelings and experiences of men in the trenches: Wilfred Owen. One of his most famous poems, ‘Strange Meeting’, begins: It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, – By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.59

Owen knew the safety and comfort of rhyme could not adequately convey the turmoil and unease of life in the trenches, and so here – as in many of his other poems – he uses off-rhyme or what has been called pararhyme to evoke this: ‘escaped’/‘scooped’, ‘hall’/‘Hell’. Yet elsewhere, in ‘Insensibility’, Owen made room for the same repetition-as-rhyme which modernists such as Hulme, Aldington and Eliot had employed: We wise, who with a thought besmirch Blood over all our soul, How should we see our task But through his blunt and lashless eyes? Alive, he is not vital overmuch; Dying, not mortal overmuch; Nor sad, nor proud, Nor curious at all. He cannot tell Old men’s placidity from his.60

As ‘besmirch’ and ‘over’ merge and mutate into the grim pararhyme ‘overmuch’, so ‘overmuch’ returns like a revenant, forming a grim parody of a rhyming couplet by being ‘rhymed’ with itself: Alive, he is not vital overmuch; Dying, not mortal overmuch;



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And this is a poem about being unable to feel in a usual sense:  insensibility, the deadening emotional effects of war, much like Septimus Smith’s recollection, in Mrs Dalloway, of his inability to feel anything in response to his friend and comrade Evans’s death.61 But this ‘overmuch’/‘overmuch’ doubling is a rarity in Owen’s work, which more commonly uses pararhyme as its rhyming innovation, although there is an example of something that gestures towards the ‘nonrhyming couplet’ in his most famous poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’: Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.62

Although separated by a middle line, ‘drowning’ and ‘drowning’ lock into each other and refuse to let go, perfectly conveying the helpless experience of suffocating, or watching somebody be suffocated, by poison gas. War poets who fell somewhere between Owen and Hulme, such as the relatively unknown Frederick Victor Branford (1892–1941), wrote in a style that tempered anger and despair with a stoic British restraint, such as in Branford’s five-line poem ‘Flanders’: Two broken trees possess the plain,     Two broken trees remain. Miracles in steel and stone That might astound the sun, are gone.     Two broken trees remain.63

This microcosmic image of nature surviving industrial warfare, albeit in ‘broken’ form, sounds a quiet note of hope at the end of the war: the poem was published in January 1919, just two months after the Armistice. Yet the repetition of the second line as the poem’s final line also suggests an inability to think beyond this rather bleak starting point. How can one rebuild the world one has lost from two broken trees?

The need for the long poem What happened to create the miniature genre-within-a-genre  – what we might call the ‘micro-genre’  – of the modernist long poem? One answer, as I  suggested in my discussion of the Odyssey, is ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses’. For an

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important feature of the modernist long poem is its engagement with classical myth, and with the myth of Odysseus, or Ulysses, looming largest of all over the modernist long poem. As Eliot remarked of Joyce’s novel in ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ (1923), ‘I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.’64 This essay is often cited in relation to The Waste Land and Eliot’s supposed adoption of the mythic method in his poem, but what is often overlooked is that the central thrust of Eliot’s argument derives from his disagreement with his fellow modernist poet, editor and critic, Richard Aldington: I think that Mr Aldington and I are more or less agreed as to what we want in principle, and agreed to call it classicism. It is because of this agreement that I have chosen Mr Aldington to attack on the present issue. We are agreed as to what we want, but not as to how to get it, or as to what contemporary writing exhibits a tendency in that direction. We agree, I hope, that ‘classicism’ is not an alternative to ‘romanticism’, as of political parties … It is a goal toward which all good literature strives, so far as it is good, according to the possibilities of its place and time.65

Aldington’s response to Ulysses two years earlier, in a piece written for the English Review in April 1921 while Joyce’s novel was still being completed, argued that Joyce had used his ‘marvellous gifts’ to ‘disgust us with mankind’, and in doing so was ‘doing something which is false and a libel on humanity’.66 And by the time he came to write his own modernist long poem in 1924–5, Aldington had become disillusioned with classicism as an artistic approach. Aldington’s essay on Joyce’s influence is worth considering in more detail: I remember reading one of the ‘Episodes’ about three years ago in a front-line trench, and I  think the situation was most appropriate. There indeed were vile smells, abrupt nerve-wracking noises, dirt and disease; life was confined to a dismal hide-and-seek with annihilation; the conveniences, the amenities of existence were reduced to the compass of a large hole underground; lack of sleep, nerves, monotonous diet, no baths had made us all fit subjects for Mr. Joyce’s sneers and satire.67

Aldington had been reading Ulysses in the trenches, and so the depiction of humanity’s degraded aspects, which he identified so keenly in Joyce’s novel, chimed with his own immediate surroundings. Eliot, meanwhile, was reading Joyce in London. Although Ulysses is a post-war book in its chronology of



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publication rather than in its themes, its use of the past to illuminate the immediate present – not just the ‘present’ in which the book is set, 1904, but the even more immediate world of 1918–21 when it was published – also raises important questions about the novel’s influence on post-war writers, some of whom had seen active service in the war and some of whom had not. The implied division between those modernist writers who remained civilians in London and those who, like Aldington, had been developing their modernist aesthetic against the very different backdrop of shellfire and trench warfare is important for reappraising modernist responses to the war. Aldington’s own long poem, discussed in Chapter 6, is a case in point. Eliot’s closing remarks in ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ return to the common ground he identifies with Aldington in their shared attitude towards modern art: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. … It is simply 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. … Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I  seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr Aldington so earnestly desires.68

To what extent Eliot’s use of myth – and the past more widely – in The Waste Land helps to create ‘a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ will be discussed in the chapter on The Waste Land. The world of the 1920s modernist long poem is a phantasmagoria. This word has been used to describe a number of the poems under consideration in this study: Ian Bell has used it to describe Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, while Richard Aldington subtitled his long poem of 1925 A Phantasmagoria, immediately pointing up the poem’s dreamlike elements, and a reviewer in the New  York Times observed that Aldington’s ‘phantasmagoria unmistakeably suffers when placed in comparison with “The Waste Land” ’.69 As early as 1923, John Crowe Ransom was describing The Waste Land as a ‘phantasmagoria’, while Ronald Schuchard has written of the ‘phantasmagoria’ of the poem with its ‘visionary and phantasmal planes’ and Margaret Dickie has noted ‘the phantasmagoria of the woman fiddling on her hair’ in the poem’s final section.70 The First World War haunts these poems, and this goes some way towards explaining the presence

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of phantasmal and ghostly elements in these poems. But a ‘phantasmagoria’ implies something more than phantoms: the ghosts that haunt these modernist poems are products of the mind, dreams or nightmares, illusions conjured on the borderland of consciousness. Eliot’s reference to the ‘Unreal City’ of London in The Waste Land, lest we forget, is followed immediately by his description of the ‘crowd’ flowing over London Bridge, which ‘death had undone’ (l. 63). And his poem’s later reference to the ‘Unreal’ landscape of London – which, by this stage in the poem, has been transformed or eroded into a post-apocalyptic waste land – is preceded by another description of a crowd, this time of ‘hooded hordes swarming’ over ‘cracked earth’ (ll. 368–9). I explore this aspect of Eliot’s poem, which identifies the nightmare of the crowd as a counterpoint to the stranded individual figure, in more detail in Chapter 4. Frederick Victor Branford’s ‘Flanders’, with its repeated line ‘Two broken trees remain’, appeared in the short-lived magazine Voices, which ran from 1919 until 1921 and featured both Georgian and modernist verse. Voices was specifically set up to provide a publishing outlet for soldiers returning from the Western Front, and so much of the content reflects upon the recent war. Branford’s poetry, collected in the 1922 volume Titans and Gods, bears the influence of not only the Georgians but also, in some poems, the imagists, such as in ‘Night at Scheveningen’: The North Sea shakes    His ranks  in       Thunder       Through    The  moon, Beats and breaks    His flanks  in       Sunder       To    The  dune.       Cold       Song,    And pitiless On rock and century.       Bold,       Strong     And cityless My soul is as the sea.71



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And many modernist periodicals and magazines which flourished in the years immediately following the war  – many of them short-lived and, in some cases, running to only a few issues – allow us to observe the shift from traditional to more experimental verse at a time when the old certainties about life, art and the world more generally were ripe for reappraisal. The Sitwells’ journal Wheels, named after one of Nancy Cunard’s early poems, ran to just six issues or ‘cycles’, published annually between 1916 and 1921. In 1919, a number of Wilfred Owen’s poems, including ‘Strange Meeting’, were posthumously published in the ‘fourth cycle’ of the magazine so that Owen’s war poetry appeared alongside the more modernist experiments of the Sitwells and Sherard Vines, among others, blurring the line between ‘Georgian’ and ‘modernist’ and highlighting Owen’s innovative use of pararhyme in his verse. The evolution of Wheels across its six issues also shows its contributors gradually becoming more ambitious with the scope and length of their poems. Sacheverell Sitwell’s 1920 poem ‘Laughing Lions Will Come’, whose title and central figure of Zarathustra are drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche, anticipates The Waste Land in its depiction of a post-war world of desert landscapes; with its mention of prophets, the music of a mandolin, the sound of water, boats, oars and fishermen, its tropes and images anticipate Eliot’s more famous poem from two years later.72 An even clearer example of the nascent modernist long poem can be seen in the final issue of Wheels, published a year later. H.  R. Barbor’s ‘Subjective Odyssey’, whose title summons the ancient Greek poem that will prove so central to many major modernist long poems of the 1920s, offers a detailed and sometimes tongue-in-cheek description of its speaker’s nocturnal wanderings around London, in a style possibly designed to imitate the Eliot of ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’: In the cool of evening I and myself go voyaging, Seeking a ghoul-grotesquerie, a sublimated Intensified paradisal Piccadilly Circus with its half-past-one-a.m. Denizens – doxies and drabs And rubber-heeled custodians of the woe That world-wide mediocrity has made In its own blear image And christened after Christ.73

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As with other poems this book will examine, Barbor’s ‘Subjective Odyssey’ almost appears to be outright parody of Eliot’s style at times, making it difficult to draw a clear line between flippant ridicule and sincere imitation. In any case, Barbor’s poem shows that, by 1921, Eliot had become firmly established as a poet and his influence on other poets was plain. It also demonstrates the extent to which poets writing about the city, influenced already by Eliot’s urban pictures (with Eliot himself being influenced by Charles Baudelaire), came to view the post-war metropolis as constantly changing, hallucinatory or, in Eliot’s own word, ‘unreal’. The Waste Land depicts the city as an unreal space, but it also touches upon very real mental and emotional trauma that was both personal to the poet and more widespread, owing to the cases of long-term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and ‘shell shock’ that were becoming more and more known about in the wake of the war. Eliot’s own experience – his diagnosis of aboulia or ‘lack of will’ and subsequent treatment at Lausanne – mirrored the PTSD and shell shock suffered by many combatants returning from the trenches at the end of the war. As Daniel Hipp has observed, Eliot’s ‘recipe for human salvation offered at the end of The Waste Land has much in common with the methods enacted by certain soldiers of the Great War to reconstitute a sense of coherence or wholeness out of the ruin the war left in its wake’.74 For Hipp, the ‘fact that Eliot completed the poem while recovering from his own psychological breakdown offers a connection in terms of psychological suffering’.75 Other modernists writing in the wake of the war would similarly draw on personal experience, but unlike T. S. Eliot, some of them had experienced conflict first-hand. Richard Aldington is a case in point. The year 1922 was not only that of The Waste Land; it was also the year that the Report of the War Office Committee Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock’ was published. Four years later, reviewing Eliot’s Poems, 1909–1925 for the New Republic, Allen Tate remarked on ‘the sense of a contemporary spiritual crisis, which shell-shock had already rendered acute’, a crisis which Eliot’s poetry captured.76 Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory has shown how poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen responded to the traumatic events of the war and wrote about the reality of the trenches.77 But when the war was over, its aftermath would have far-reaching psychological effects, even on those who had not seen active combat. Eliot’s first great post-war poem focusing on a non-combatant, and a stepping stone of sorts to The Waste Land, was ‘Gerontion’: I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain



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Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought.78

Eliot wrote ‘Gerontion’ in the summer of 1919, shortly after the Germans reluctantly agreed to sign the Treaty of Versailles at Paris in late June 1919. The signing took place in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, alluded to in the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ which ‘multiply variety’, according to Gerontion.79 When John Maynard Keynes published his response to the treaty later in 1919, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he described the conditions under which the treaty had been agreed using imagery which chimes with Eliot’s in ‘Gerontion’: In Paris where those connected with the Supreme Economic Council received almost hourly the reports of the misery, disorder, and decaying organisation of all of Central and Eastern Europe, allied and enemy alike, and learnt from the lips of the financial representatives of Germany and Austria unanswerable evidence of the terrible exhaustion of their countries, an occasional visit to the hot, dry room in the President’s house, where the Four fulfilled their destinies in empty and arid intrigue, only added to the sense of nightmare.80

Gerontion’s dry house seems uncannily to echo the dry room of the house where the four major world leaders decide the fate of Europe. Margaret MacMillan notes of the controversial terms of the Treaty that Keynes objected to ‘a peace that completed the economic destruction done to Europe by the war’.81 For Keynes, the excessively punitive terms of the reparations ‘would drive [Germany] to despair, and probably revolution, with dangerous consequences for Europe’; Eliot agreed.82 The mood that followed the Armistice in November 1918 was not monolithic or homogeneous:  as the largely chronological discussion of the modernist long poem that follows will reveal, even the national mood changed with time, particularly as the fallout from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 became fully apparent, but there was never one mood shared by every European, Briton or American at any point. Just as everyone had had a slightly different war, so every modernist  – seeking their own way to break with convention and provide a response to the events they lived through – had a slightly different post-war life, while still inhabiting the same world of sprawling cities, fast-paced modernity and political and economic unrest.

2

Writing the Mother-City: Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem

In her 1926 essay ‘Listening in to the Past’, Hope Mirrlees posited the idea of an ‘aural kaleidoscope’: If the time ever comes when we can listen in to the past, I shall immediately order a wireless, though this will be due more to my love of a kaleidoscope than to my love of the past. My knowledge of the relation between sound-waves and ether-waves is of the vaguest, nor do I  know anything about electricity, magnetism, or the Quantum Theory, nevertheless I  am sure it will be very difficult to control the old fragments of human speech blown in from the waste places of the universe to be lost again for another thousand years. No, it will be an aural kaleidoscope, rather than a lesson in history:  disparate fragments of Cockney, Egyptian, Babylonian, Provençal, ever forming into new patterns for the ear, but not for the mind.1

It is revealing that, for Mirrlees, such an invention would be appealing not principally because she has any great love for the past but because it would provide a new, modern way of tuning in to the past. This concept of the ‘aural kaleidoscope’ offers a way of understanding Mirrlees’s technique – especially her approach to literary allusion  – in her poem Paris, written seven years before ‘Listening in to the Past’. Virginia Woolf described Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem as ‘a very obscure, indecent, and brilliant poem’, while Julia Briggs called it ‘modernism’s lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition, written in a confidently experimental and avant-garde style’.2 Yet this brilliant masterpiece has received very little serious critical attention or sustained analysis, despite its challenging and elliptical structure and its complex relationship to modernism more widely. Paris raises interesting and important questions about the modernist long poem, and about The Waste Land, but aside

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from a few notable exceptions, critics have been reluctant to ask them. Paris also raises questions of its own about the various differences between English and continental modernism. As Nancy Gish has framed it,  ‘When The Waste Land was published in 1922, it received many reviews, both good and bad. … Yet no such interest greeted Hope Mirrlees’s poem Paris.’3 Only now, nearly a century on from its original publication, are critics paying Mirrlees’s poem closer attention. Mirrlees’s poem, like Eliot’s The Waste Land, is an evocation of life in the metropolis in the immediate wake of the First World War. But whereas Eliot’s poem is centred on London, Mirrlees chooses the French capital for her focus. The poem is set during the Peace Conference, held in Paris during the first six months of 1919 following the end of the war the previous November. The poem was dated 1919 (the end of the poem has ‘spring 1919’) but published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in May 1920. The Hogarth Press printed 175 copies. Mirrlees allowed the poem to be reprinted in the Virginia Woolf Quarterly in 1973, but with some cuts, since by then she had converted to Catholicism and considered numerous passages in the original to be blasphemous; in any case, the journal in which the poem reappeared had a limited print run and, once again, the poem failed to reach a wide audience. In 2011, Mirrlees’s Collected Poems were published, and Paris became available in an affordable edition for the first time since its original publication.4 The obvious question many readers ask is:  did Eliot know of Paris when he wrote The Waste Land? Mirrlees’s poem was the third poetry volume to be printed by the Hogarth Press; the volume published immediately prior to Mirrlees’s was Eliot’s Poems, in the summer of 1919. The similarities between Paris and The Waste Land are striking:  their use of multiple languages; their allusive quality; their unconventional typography (which Mirrlees learnt from, among others, Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau); their focus on the postwar metropolis, soldiers being demobbed, death and burial, vegetation rituals, nymphs; and the parallels between classical and modern, mingling everyday demotic speech with high-flown phrases and literary references. In Paris we are told, ‘In the Algerian desert they are shouting the Koran’ (l. 395), while in The Waste Land we find people shouting snatches of the Upanishads in the desert of the final section. A cock crows in both The Waste Land and Paris. The river is central to both poems:  the Thames to The Waste Land, the Seine to Paris. There is a hallucinatory and dreamlike quality to both poems. A crowd of people marked by death pass over a bridge in both: London Bridge in Eliot’s poem, the Pont Neuf in Mirrlees’s.



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If we did not know better, we would place Mirrlees’s poem later than Eliot’s, identifying it as one of a number of imitations of Eliot’s defining poem such as Nancy Cunard’s Parallax. But this is partly because we are so used to viewing Eliot’s poem as the influencer and the originator of much modernist poetic technique, including many of the features just outlined. The fact that Mirrlees came to many of the same conclusions about the modernist experiment, but independently of Eliot and before him, raises important questions about the development of the modernist poem after the First World War. It is almost as if such a long poem were inevitable in the years following the Armistice. Nor do the similarities between Paris and The Waste Land end at their numerous local crossovers and shared motifs and images:  the parallels are structural in some respects, too. Both poems are around the same length (Eliot’s is 433 lines, while Mirrlees’s is 445), and both include explanatory notes at the end, notes which confuse as much as they elucidate. Yet for all these similarities, both local and general, there is no external evidence that Eliot read Mirrlees’s poem, and perhaps he did not have to. Although it is tempting to identify Mirrlees as an influence on Eliot, something even more curious may have occurred: both poets independently arrived at the same idea for a poem, viewing the long poem containing classical and modern parallels and utilizing literary allusion as the ideal vehicle for what they had to say about the state of the modern world after the war. Eliot makes no mention of Mirrlees’s poem in his letters or other prose from this period, and the long poem he began writing in 1921, which would eventually become The Waste Land, originally bore little resemblance to Mirrlees’s paratactic piece of avantgarde poetry. For Cyrena Pondrom, ‘There is thus plenty of circumstantial evidence that Eliot knew of Mirrlees’s Paris, but no explicit confirmation’.5 But even the circumstantial evidence hardly builds to a strong case. It is possible that Mirrlees influenced the final shape of Eliot’s poem, even if Eliot did not have sight of her poem, because Ezra Pound, who was the one who helped to edit Eliot’s poem down into the shape it eventually took, could have read it and learned how to adopt a similar form and length for the drafts of The Waste Land. But Pound makes no reference to Paris in his letters either, and the form and length of The Waste Land as it emerged during Pound’s editing of it was more likely to have been influenced by his own Hugh Selwyn Mauberley than by another relatively unknown long poem. Yet in the face of such an overwhelming number of crossovers and echoes between the two poems, can Paris and The Waste Land have really ended up bearing so many similarities purely by chance?

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The answer is ‘no’, but the alternative here is not blind chance but rather shared influence, or what I  have elsewhere called ‘parafluence’, or a kind of convergent evolution of thought inspired by the same sources.6 Many of the similarities between Paris and The Waste Land can be explained by the fact that these ideas and images were in the cultural atmosphere of the time. The mythic elements to both, for instance, were probably influenced by James Joyce’s Ulysses, which members of Woolf ’s Bloomsbury Group and their associates had read and known about for several years, since Joyce’s novel had begun serialization in the Little Review in 1918. Ulysses forms a network with both Paris and The Waste Land:  each one takes as its theme, or one of its themes, the life of the modern city, but in a different capital in each:  Dublin, Paris, London. One critic proclaimed, ‘What Joyce has done for Dublin and Eliot for London, Hope Mirrlees has done for Paris’.7 Joyce had shown the way forward for modernists: what could be achieved in fiction could also stand as a model for what modernist poems, especially longer and more ambitious poetic works, could do. Something else which Paris shares with Ulysses is its time frame: it is, effectively, a poem set over the course of a single day. ‘The text is circadian’, Tory Young observes; ‘time passes from day through night to the next day’s dawn. From start to finish the pilgrim is a devotee of Paris, honouring and saluting the metropolis, its art, writers, history, migrants, and nightlife’.8 Ulysses, like both Paris and The Waste Land, is novelistic in the sense that it focuses less on plot or coherent narrative than on episodes, impressions, observations of everyday ‘real’ life, woven together with references to other literary works, and an attempt to capture not only the sights but also the sounds of the modern city. Similarly, in 1919, when Mirrlees wrote Paris, Eliot had already demonstrated what literary allusion could do in a modernist poem, as his incorporations of Dante, Hamlet and John the Baptist into ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – another text well known among Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group – make clear. But just as I do not think Mirrlees necessarily influenced Eliot, it is difficult to detect the direct influence of Eliot’s early poems on Paris, which is far more indebted to avant-garde French poetry of the early twentieth century; Mirrlees lived in the capital for several years during the pre- and post-war years. Mirrlees’s poem is similarly allusive, referring, among others, to Shakespeare, Aristophanes and Tolstoy, as well as to posters on the subway and snippets of conversation overheard on the Parisian streets. There are also references to Victor Hugo, Moliere, Voltaire, Freud, Verlaine and many others. But whereas Eliot tried  – however retrospectively – to give his ‘fragments’ an illusion of mythical unity, through drawing on the Fisher King legend and the vegetation rituals he had



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encountered in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Mirrlees is more content to let her fragments remain as fragments. Snippets of myth are found throughout Paris, but they lack a cohesive sense of narrative. In The Waste Land we find the Fisher King; Paris offers us only ‘king-fishers’ (l. 272). And in many respects, Paris and The Waste Land could not be more different. Mirrlees’s poem is more consciously avant-garde in terms of its typography and appearance, in incorporating so much French into the text. It is also less a series of dramatic scenes (what The Waste Land comprises) than one speaker’s sensory experience of the city. The speaker of Paris is a flâneuse: wandering as well as wondering. As Julia Briggs observed, with Paris Mirrlees ‘managed to sidestep national or conventional poetic models by adopting the iconoclasm of high French culture. While other modernists harked back to classical, Celtic, or even far Eastern traditions, Mirrlees tuned into the voices of French contemporaries such as Guillaume Apollinaire’.9 On the surface, this appears to be one of the chief dividing lines between Paris and The Waste Land:  while Eliot’s poem is in love with the past, Mirrlees’s is rooted in the present moment, although her poem acknowledges the presence of the past within the present. Similarly, the French literary influences on Mirrlees’s poem come from the twentieth century (Apollinaire, Cocteau, Cendrars), whereas Eliot’s largely stem from the nineteenth (Baudelaire, Laforgue, Corbière). It is these influences that make Paris something of an oddity within English literature. While poets such as Eliot learnt from French Symbolists of the previous century, Mirrlees was reading, and associating with, contemporary poets of the early twentieth century and drawing on their ideas and styles in her work. If her poem had reached a wider audience, the face of modernist poetry in English may now look very different. But we can just easily turn such a conjecture on its head and suggest that it was precisely these overly unfamiliar and radically new elements – the paratactic method, the collage effect, and the focus on the French city – which led to the relative neglect of Paris, despite its fresh and exciting new approach and appearance. I would argue for two key literary influences on Paris. The first is ‘Zone’, Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem about a journey through the French capital over the course of one day, first published in the poet’s own journal, Les Soirées de Paris, in December 1912. The second is Ulysses, which began serialization in the Little Review in 1918 and, famously, charts the wanderings of Leopold Bloom around Dublin over the course of one day. Paris shares with both ‘Zone’ and Ulysses this one-day time span; Mirrlees’s poem shares with Apollinaire’s its eye for local Parisian detail and with Joyce’s novel a blending of the contemporary and the classical, the real and the mythical, and its commitment to convey the

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life of the city through its observation of human detail. Mirrlees was the first modernist poet to realize that Joyce’s technique could be applied to poetry as well as fiction, several years before Eliot seized upon the same idea of ‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’.10 And although Paris does not borrow from the narrative structure of Homer’s Odyssey in the way that Joyce’s novel does, Mirrlees appears to have been aware that to sustain a longer poem – a poem nearly three times as long as ‘Zone’ – she needed to infuse her poem with at least the semblance of an epic structure. And like Joyce’s novel, Paris contains all of the nominal ingredients of a great epic, but brought down to earth and shrunk down to size. The descent into the underworld is no more than a journey on the Paris underground Metro system, the mighty battle is the ‘ritual fight’ between the Virgin Mary and the April moon (ll. 260– 2), and the nymphs (ll. 30–3) are real flesh-and-blood women as much as they are spiritual entities, the implication being that these ‘Nymphs’ are prostitutes. The vast nation or empire that typically provides the setting for the epic is here reduced to a single city so that Mirrlees can focus on the small everyday details of life in the metropolis. ‘Zone’, in the words of James Cannon, ‘contained numerous, erudite references to past civilisations’ and ‘chartered a circular if meandering course between two mornings’: Mirrlees would include both of these characteristics in her poem.11 But Mirrlees adds to Apollinaire’s model in several significant ways. One of the chief differences between ‘Zone’ and Paris is the way in which the various images and scenes of the poems are linked together. In ‘Zone’, as Cannon observes, ‘the modern cityscape acts as a catalyst for free associations between the past, present and future of the poet-narrator and of civilisation as a whole’.12 But in Mirrlees’s poem, there is a stronger, more thematically profound link between the various stages of the poem and the movement from one to the next. The poem’s ‘journey’ motif doubles up as a geographical journey and a psychological stream of consciousness, making the poem a form of psychogeography. It describes both a literal journey around the city and a psychological train of thought. Here it is significant that the poem opens on a literal train line, in the Paris Metro: from the start of this poem-journey, Mirrlees establishes her poem as a mirroring of a physical journey. But the journey is also psychological. ‘I want a holophrase’ (l. 1): so begins Paris, with a nod to a word used by Jane Harrison in Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion: Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began with whole sentences, holophrases, utterances of a relation in which subject and object have not yet got



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their heads above water but are submerged in a situation. A holophrase utters a holopsychosis. Out of these holophrases at a later stage emerge our familiar ‘Parts of Speech’, rightly so called, for speech was before its partition.13

‘A holophrase utters a holopsychosis’:  the linguistic interconnectedness embodied by the holophrase reflects the interconnectedness of things as we, or our ancestors, once perceived them. Harrison continues,  ‘As civilization advances, the holophrase, overcharged, disintegrates, and, bit by bit, object, subject and verb, and the other “Parts of Speech” are abstracted from the stream of warm conscious human activity in which they were once submerged.’14 Mirrlees’s opening line signals the desire to return to a time when such linguistic and cognitive holism was possible but knows that such a wish may be futile. According to Cyrena Pondrom, the ‘holophrase’ of Paris can be identified ‘with the primitive Greek societies of Harrison’s study of classical archeology or with a primal and communal substratum of ideas of the metropolitan vortex which was the city Paris’.15 The past is part of the present, the two coexisting in modern-day, post-war Paris. The city’s history is inscribed in its cemeteries and churches, in the names of its museums and its Metro stops. The station from which the poem’s speaker alights, ‘CONCORDE’ (l. 17), collapses postRevolutionary France (the stop is named for the Place de la Concorde) into present-day, post-war Paris, the location of the Peace Conference set up to decide how best to establish and maintain ‘concord’ among the nations of the world. Indeed, for Mary Beard, Paris is a poem which hints at the lesbianism of the capital in the early years of the twentieth century, since Paris was ‘a city whose very name could be a shorthand for sapphism’.16 ‘Significantly’, Beard continues, ‘the first line of the poem … is an allusion to Harrison’s discussion of early language in Themis, while its end is marked by the very same diagram of the constellation – Ursa Major, the Bear (aka the Big Dipper) – that signed off several of the notes and letters written by Harrison to Mirrlees, “in the name of the Bear” ’. There is, for Beard, ‘a lesbian resonance’ in the poem.17 But we should resist the temptation to see the poem as a sort of coded love letter from Mirrlees to Harrison simply because its opening and closing lines draw on Mirrlees’s friendship with Harrison. It is worth remembering that Mirrlees would also include the Ursa Major constellation at the end of the first edition of her 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist. Although Mirrlees’s reference to the concept of the holophrase was clearly inspired by Harrison’s work, it is not the only thing we can point to in order to understand the techniques her poem uses. Pondrom also draws a ‘parallel’

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between the holophrase and Ezra Pound’s concept of the ‘Image’, which he defined as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’.18 Pound wrote, ‘I use the term “complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists.’19 This psychological meaning of ‘complex’ is defined by the OED as a ‘group of emotionally charged ideas or mental factors, unconsciously associated by the individual with a particular subject, arising from repressed instincts, fears, or desires and often resulting in mental abnormality’. What links the holophrase to the Poundian Image is the notion that a concise statement will call to mind numerous multiple associations. Before we have even begun our journey on the Paris Metro, then, Mirrlees is reminding us of the sort of imagistic thinking which is famously exemplified by another Metro poem, Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ from 1913. Critics of Paris have often mentioned the importance of the ‘holophrase’ to the poem:  its origins in Jane Harrison’s work (as has already been noted), its implication of a primitive Ur-language which Mirrlees is seeking to recover, its suggestion of totalising wholeness that will shore up the fragments of the modern city into a coherent and explainable entity. This is understandable given the word’s prominence in the poem’s opening line. But it may be that Mirrlees gave the word such prominence in order to use the holophrase as a cover for what she was really doing, introducing the word to shunt readers onto a different train of thought from the one she was actually pursuing with Paris. Pierre Reverdy’s concept of the ‘image’, with which Mirrlees was almost certainly familiar, helps to explain the workings of the poem much more clearly than the more contrived links with anthropology, primitive cultures and linguistic atavism which the word ‘holophrase’ encourages. Like Eliot’s use of the Fisher King myth, the holophrase tells part of the story but cannot tell the whole story by itself. In this respect, it is more helpful to seek to understand Paris not by looking to its first line, which references the holophrase, but by looking to its second, ‘NORD-SUD’, with its double meaning taking us both to the Paris Metro (the site of Pound’s most famous poem about the ‘Image’) and to Reverdy’s journal of that name. Reverdy published his article, ‘L’Image’, in Nord-Sud in March 1918, just over a year before Mirrlees began writing Paris. ‘The importance of Pierre Reverdy’s theory of the image has long been acknowledged’, Michael Bishop wrote some years ago, ‘though perhaps more so by poets than by critics’.20 Reverdy’s theory sees the poetic image as a ‘third term’ which connects reality with the poet’s mind, creating something which is neither real nor imaginary but a fusion of the two influences. In this respect, a comparison can be drawn between Reverdy’s image and the idea of the haiku, in which two elements, one of which is some



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general image drawn from nature, such as a mountain, and the other of which is the poet’s fleeting impression of that scene, are joined, and from which a ‘spark’ or frisson arises, through the juxtaposition of these two elements. As Bishop observes of Reverdy’s use of the image,  ‘It is to discover and delight in those marvellous, unheard-of relationships between things that the poet writes and it is via the spontaneous combustion of the image that such miracles may occur.’21 Such an approach to the poetic image is central to Mirrlees’s Paris. ‘CONCORDE’ (l. 17) is both the name of the Paris Metro stop and the feeling the poem’s narrator experiences as she travels through peace-time Paris as the Peace Conference is ongoing. Such buried or implicit meanings lurk behind the poem’s opening lines. The NORD-SUD movement at the start of the poem is also a movement on the Metro line that runs from Montparnasse to Montmartre – literally, the mountain of poetry and the mountain of war. Poetry and war are thus cryptically joined from the outset, fusing the literal geography of the Paris Metro system with the more abstract thematic connections that run under Mirrlees’s poem. Physical movement and metaphysical thoughts enjoy an uneasy parallel coexistence in Paris, right from the start. Nord-Sud denotes not only the Metro line but also a painting by Severini of that name. But Nord-Sud was also the name of Reverdy’s journal which sought to promote Dadaism and the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, thus further linking Parisian art and Parisian geography, acting as a Reverdy-inspired image communicating associations of various kinds, both cultural and geographical, in a single condensed expression. This fusing of the physical with the psychical to create an image that is neither wholly real nor wholly imaginary is crucial to the poem’s effectiveness as a depiction of the city. As the narrator later observes, as the phantasmagorical feel of the Parisian landscape intensifies as if wandering deeper into the smoke of hashish, ‘I wade knee-deep in dreams’ (l. 310), dreams which later reach her waist (l. 376). The visual phenomenon of modern Paris is indistinguishable from the thoughts and impressions that it inspires within the observer. ‘Blackfigured vases in Etruscan tombs’ (l. 6) introduces the past into the present, as the blackness of the modern ‘LION NOIR’ shoe polish is contrasted with the black artefacts of an ancient civilization. But ‘Etruscan’ suggests two other themes which will be important to the poem: linguistic obscurity (the Etruscan language remains only partially deciphered) and imperial expansion (not least through the connections between the Etruscans and ancient Rome). What appears at first to be merely documentation of the flâneuse’s surroundings as she physically journeys through the city turns out to be something working on a psychological as well as physical level: after all, the vases in the Etruscan tombs are not visually

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present, so we are already leaving behind the world of what is merely seen and being asked to engage with what might be imagined or recalled in response to one’s immediate surroundings. In Ulysses, Joyce had mapped Leopold Bloom’s perambulations around Dublin onto a mythic structure, the story of Odysseus’ voyage home. Mirrlees sidesteps any grand attempt to provide a ‘deeper’ framework to her poem’s description of the city, but she does link the individual details in her poem thematically and mentally, suggesting the kind of stream of consciousness found in Woolf ’s fiction, such as the short stories Woolf was writing at the same time as Mirrlees was working on Paris. Woolf ’s 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ echoes Mirrlees’s depiction of the metropolis: How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grassgrown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley.22

The features which Woolf touches upon here  – the city-dweller’s sense of the surrounding countryside, the hooting owl and the rattle of a train – also appear in Paris, with its reference to ‘a thousand villages’ the city ‘carries’ in its ‘heart’ (l. 72), the taxi which ‘hoots like an owl’ (l. 412) and the ‘Brekekekek’ (l. 10)  designed to echo the rattling of the Metro train carriage. Both Woolf and Mirrlees pay attention to the silence as well as the bustle and noise of the city and are alive to the natural world within the metropolis alongside the modernized, mechanical elements. The hooting owl, summoning Minerva and the female goddess of wisdom, acts as a counterpoint to the rattling of the train in Woolf ’s description of London, just as Mirrlees’s simile likening the taxi horn to an owl’s hoot collapses the two worlds, natural and industrial, timeless and modern, into one, much as the Japanese haiku seeks to overlay the fleeting onto the eternal. That the poet’s literal tour of Paris should carry a secondary meaning  – a psychological or even psychoanalytical significance  – should not surprise. Julia Briggs observed of Mirrlees’s poem: ‘Yet while the poem looks outward, recording the forms and colors of the city, it also looks inward, charting the long day’s journey into night, and the fluctuating life of the unconscious.’23 One of the defining features of Paris is the way in which the exteriority and interiority of the narrator’s sense-impressions are often collapsed into each other so



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that we cannot be sure whether the next line or image of the poem has been prompted by something the speaker has seen, or something she has thought or recalled. When we go from reference to Solomon’s sister who has no breasts to an advertisement for milk (‘LAIT’) in ll. 138–9, the latter advertisement needs to be understood as being potentially both in physical proximity to the observer and the result of an internal chain of mental associations, where ‘breasts’ lead to ‘LAIT’. The maternity encoded in this breasts-milk connection reminds us that Paris is in part a poem about motherhood and the maternal, about the city as a life-giving force: a literal metropolis, to put it one way, and to return us to the ‘Metro’ where the poem begins. Women in The Waste Land are frequently depicted as tragic victims: Lil the soldier’s wife, Philomel the victim of rape by her brother-in-law and the three Thames-daughters lamenting their lost innocence. Paris, by contrast, is full of references to strong female characters from history and literature, women who had agency and used it, for good or ill, or who are celebrated for their womanhood rather than viewed as passive victims: Lysistrata, Pandora, Venus, the Scarlet Woman and the Virgin Mary. Such associations are found throughout the poem. Tory Young has observed,  ‘When the woman in the Metro is asked, “Vous descendez?”, the question’s verb, coming after the advert for Dubonnet depicting a “Scarlet Woman”, has a strongly sexual connotation.’24 Descent is both physical and symbolic. Like the ‘breasts’ and ‘LAIT’ example already discussed, such associations involve thinking not only between the visual and the psychological but also between languages, English and French. Mirrlees, a British poet touring a French city, is fusing actual Parisian geography with the free association made by the mind between subjects; in this light, the poem’s reference to Freud makes sense as it conjures up ideas of word association between disparate things. The old question concerning which language we think in, so pertinent to multilingual speakers, is here relevant, since the focalizer of Paris is also its narrator: the flâneuse who is witnessing the city is also describing it, tasked with putting it into words. ‘I can’t / I must go slowly’ (ll. 18–19), as she announces near the beginning of her Parisian odyssey. And Mirrlees’s own status as a polyglot whose first language was English means that the poem’s catalogue of events in Paris in spring 1919 often entails a slippage between the two languages, such as when the poem’s associations are collapsed into a single word, witnessed most clearly in the punning reference to the ‘silence of la grève’ (l. 263), where the French word for ‘strike’ and the English grave are condensed into one word.

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Such word association is playful rather than ominous, and all of this is bound up with modernist writers’ wider interest in psychological processes and psychoanalysis. As Peter Howarth has observed, One attraction of the unconscious for modernist poets, in fact, was that Freud thought the people, events and words narrated by dreams all to be transformations of a basic knot of anxieties, so that nothing that takes place is insignificant. When the modernists borrow dream-logic for their sudden transitions and condensed metaphors, they are suggesting how apparently separate things – high culture and low desires, the curves of bodies and the shapes of places – are all forms and disguises of each other.25

As well as causing high and low to become conflated, Paris also merges French and English. Julia Briggs remarked that Paris ‘seeks comprehensiveness by reducing traditional boundaries, between different languages and literatures, as well as between different kinds of discourse and different levels of culture’.26 For the poem is not just about Paris:  it is important to bear in mind that it is an outsider looking in, an Englishwoman writing about Paris but seeing the city through ‘English’ eyes (although Mirrlees was born in England, her parents were Scottish). So when the ‘Algerian tobacco’ summons the French Empire, this is balanced, a few lines before, by the reminder of the British imperial presence elsewhere on the globe, as ‘indiarubber’ summons the spectre of the British Raj in India (l. 201). Zoe Skoulding has noted, ‘The switch of languages and the international sources of the smells present the city as simultaneously immediate and global; the uncomfortable physical closeness implied by the smell of sewage blends with the more exotic scents of rubber, rice and tobacco that reveal the colonial relationships inherent in locality.’27 Any account of the events contributing to the outbreak of the war, and the resulting events which the war triggered, must make reference to empire, and the clash and eventual fall of empires in the years immediately following the war (the Russian, the Ottoman, the German and the Austro-Hungarian). Since the First World War had been about the fall of empires and had cast doubts over the long-term future of imperialism, this reference to France’s imperial possession alongside England’s is revealing. The poem’s mention of the ‘Roman Legions’ fighting ‘their last fight in Gaul’ (l. 174) reminds us, as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had done, that the Roman Empire had been there before and was now no more. Similarly, the Gaulish warriors catching venereal disease from Parisian prostitutes are suggested through a subterranean link between Venus and the venereal, two words which are etymologically related. Mirrlees’s line ‘Le départ



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pour Cythère’ (l. 29), summoning Watteau’s painting L’Embarcation pour Cythère, introduces Venus by one of her alternative names; this is immediately followed by lines about ‘nymphs’ whose ‘bite’ Pasteur had ‘made the Gauls immune’ against (ll. 32–3): a coded reference to venereal infection. Like the nymphs whose memory haunts the Thames in The Waste Land, Mirrlees’s nymphs are at once a reminder of a lost mythological tradition and a representation of modern-day prostitution in the metropolis. Similarly, when a few dozen lines later we read of the ‘ivory paper-knives’, the ‘workmanship of [which] is Empire’ (ll. 51–3), and are told that ‘Lysistrata had one’, we are invited to see a parallel between Lysistrata’s classical war and the clash of empires that was the First World War. The imperial object of the ivory knife then gives way to the ‘Arc de Triomphe’ (l. 55), a monument to another war and another empire and empire-builder, Napoleon Bonaparte. When the Arc de Triomphe is described in the next line as being ‘Square and shadowy like Julius Caesar’s dreams’ (l. 56), the link between the classical and modern is yet again present, and they are linked through the suggestion of empire, modern and ancient, French and Roman. Mirrlees effects such a French-English commingling through language as well as imagery and historical reference. French names play off the sounds of English words: Saunters the ancient rue Saint-Honoré Shabby and indifferent, as a Grand Seigneur from Brittany (ll. 67–8)

‘Saunters’ turns into ‘Seigneur’ by way of ‘Saint-Honoré’, and in doing so turns English into French, Britain into Brittany. Such multilingual wordplay can be found elsewhere in the poem: An English padre tilts with the Moulin Rouge (l. 422)

The line is written in English, yet describes a tableau in France; the padre is English but ‘padre’ is not English, nor is it French. The line is almost in iambic pentameter, the quintessentially English metre used by Shakespeare and Tennyson, but its metre is not quite of uniform regularity. (Metric, we might say, yet not fully conforming to the metric system.) ‘Moulin Rouge’ is French, but ‘tilts’, given the literal meaning of Moulin Rouge (‘red windmill’), introduces a Spanish element, under pressure from ‘padre’, as the ghost of Don Quixote appears behind the line. The line may be considered a laboured pun or an extension of the poem’s commitment to a reflection of internationalism and the

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way that different languages and nationalities, different traditions and cultures, are interacting with each other: a celebration of France’s pluralism. But at the same time, the Christian padre appears to be offended by the presence of the permissive and bohemian Moulin Rouge, yet we should note that he is described as tilting ‘with’ it rather than ‘at’ it. Once again, we have a compact and concise statement that, when analysed or decoded, expands and reveals much else, including ambiguous signifiers: a form of holophrase such as the poem’s speaker called for in the opening line of Paris. It is vital to keep in mind the immediate context of Paris:  the poem is exploring Anglo-French relations in the wake of the Great War and during the ongoing peace talks. This is exemplified by the fact that it is an English poem, written by an English poet, but set in France. Its title is English – the full title is Paris: A Poem – but that title names a French city. Its first line is in English, its second in French and the ensuing poem jolts and moves uneasily between English and French, both in terms of language and points of reference. When the poem engages with specific French details, English ghosts are also disturbed. And puns, too, are exposed: can the poem entirely expunge the suggestion of the low and bawdy, when we find such lines as these? One often hears a cock Do do do miii (ll. 77–8)

The second line, when read with English rather than French in mind, seems to be a call to ‘do me’: coming hot on the heels of a ‘cock’, the Freudian garbage of repressed sexual desire seems to be struggling to make itself heard. But of course the cockerel is also the national emblem of France:  Gaul as well as galling. This collapse of geographical and linguistic boundaries, at a time when the Treaty of Versailles was being drawn up in Paris, is of particular significance, but the poem takes a playful and exploratory approach to such national and linguistic freedoms. Written slightly later, The Waste Land will offer an altogether less sanguine response to this collapse of national boundaries. As Peter Howarth has noted of Mirrlees’s allusion to The Frogs in the words ‘Brekekekekek coax coax’, this is significant not just because we are underground at this moment, travelling on the Paris Metro (just as the Frogs in Aristophanes’ play resided in the Underworld), but also because the plot of Aristophanes’ play concerns ‘the underworld, where Dionysos the god went to



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bring the poet Euripides back, so he could write new poems and stop Athens from continuing a crazy war’.28 This is also true of the poem’s other prominent allusion to Aristophanes:  the reference to Lysistrata is relevant in light of the post-war context because the plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata concerns the plan devised by the title character, an Athenian woman, in order to bring an end to the war between Athens and Sparta. To convince the men to end the war, Lysistrata persuades her fellow Athenian women to go on sexual strike until peace is declared. Thus three of the principal themes of Paris – the role of women in society, war and strike – are all deftly brought together in one reference to Lysistrata in one line of Mirrlees’s poem. Lysistrata is thus an example of the ‘holophrase’ – the one word which will sum up and denote a much longer and more complex phenomenon  – that the speaker of the poem claims to ‘want’ in the poem’s opening line, or a Reverdy-inspired ‘image’, calling up additional associations to the narrator and, by extension, the reader. I began this chapter by quoting from Mirrlees’s 1926 essay ‘Listening in to the Past’, and her concept of the ‘aural kaleidoscope’. As Nina Enemark has recently noted of this idea, the ‘unwieldy fragments’ from the past that such an imaginary device would enable the listener to hear ‘would comprise a ghostly material artefact, producing the physical shock of connection to the past that she describes as a mystical experience’.29 Much as Eliot would do three years later with the mythic and literary allusions in The Waste Land, Mirrlees raises the spirits of the dead through such references and, in doing so, raises important questions about the relation between the past and the present at a crucial time in the twentieth century, when the political consequences of the war  – what might be called present-day history – were being debated in Paris. But such resurrections of the past also raise questions about the Gothic undercurrents to Mirrlees’s poem. In her 1928 article ‘Gothic Dreams’, Mirrlees would argue that ‘the Middle Ages were frightening because they were pre-eminently Catholic Ages’, and that since the medieval period Catholicism and the Gothic have often been interlinked: This is not to suggest that the craving for the sublime sprang entirely from a sense of the ambivalence of Rome. It is merely pushing the symbol a stage back and discovering behind the Gothic castle a Popish church. What lay behind that would take a psycho-analyst to discover; and as the patient would be a couple of centuries instead of an individual, Professor Freud himself might find it a nut too hard to crack.30

Mirrlees’s point that the Gothic is related to Catholicism is relevant to our understanding of Paris as a Gothic poem. Like The Waste Land, whose ‘bats with

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baby faces’ (l. 379), ‘planted’ corpses (l. 71) and ‘hooded hordes’ (l. 368) render its sterile landscape a Gothic space, Mirrlees’s Paris is shot through with Gothic imagery, from the vision of the dead passing over the Pont Neuf (ll. 369–74) to the description of night ‘like a vampire’ (l. 408), to the reference to the abode of the dead in the river Acheron (l. 81). Paris also contains many references to Catholicism, from the nods to Nôtre Dame which begin and end the poem to the presence of the Virgin Mary (ll. 261, 294, 444). The two forces are joined in the reference to ‘the cyclic Grand Guignol of Catholicism’ (l. 131). In her diary in June 1920, Woolf wrote, ‘Nowadays I’m often overcome by London; even think of the dead who have walked the city.’31 Such a remark has obvious relevance to The Waste Land, but London was not the only city which might remind one of the dead in the wake of the war. The dead will not stay dead in Mirrlees’s poem. Paris is full of the dead coming back to life, or being unable to take their rest, such as the numerous references to ghosts, like the ‘ghost of Père Lachaise’ who is ‘walking the streets’ (ll. 175–6), as if the whole cemetery had woken from its slumbers. ‘The only things that they can see are ghosts’ (l. 350), we are told of the city’s houses with ‘impassive windows’ (l. 348). ‘They are not like us’, the narrator of the poem confides, ‘who, ghoul-like, bury our friends a score of times before they’re dead’ (ll. 194–5). This blurs the line between death and life, much as the reference to the ‘eidola’ of the ‘gaillards’ (ll. 183–4) suggests the spiritual and ghostly. Yet although the poem does not shy away from death, it is first and foremost an affirmation of life in the midst of a time of death and mourning, just after the end of the war. Mirrlees presents Paris as a city in which Eros and Thanatos, life and death, are locked in a struggle, although the positive ending to the poem encourages us to conclude that Eros triumphs over Thanatos. In the year that the poem was published, Sigmund Freud, who figures in the poem, published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which, like Paris, responds to the events of the First World War by exploring the relationship between the two impulses of Eros and Thanatos. At one point in Paris, Mirrlees tells of a ‘ritual fight’ between ‘two virgins – Mary and the moon’ (ll. 260–1), effectively staging this oppositional tension between the life-giving, maternal, fertile female figure and her counterpart, the ‘wicked April moon’ (l. 262), which threatens to blight crops and inhibit the growth of new life. Enemark has pondered these female figures: How much might the regeneration aimed for in the poem’s ritual depend on reinstating these powerful, forgotten, female religious figures? The invocations of these past religious potencies – a multiplicity of forms of the Great Mother



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figure of the ancient world – are woven into the sense impressions of the poem’s speaker, the flâneuse who absorbs the urban sights on her journey, but who is also the present-day priest of this modernized ritual, the antiquarian restoring the city’s spiritual ghosts in the hope of spiritual rejuvenation.32

But if the narrator of Paris is a latter-day priestess of Venus, she can restore those ‘spiritual ghosts’ only to partial life:  they remain dead, or rather Undead, like that vampire glimpsed in the simile in l.  408. Here Paris might be tentatively aligned with The Waste Land in its failure, or rather refusal, to perform any kind of resuscitation on the past: the dead can be visited, but Dionysus is never going to make it back to the world of the living with Euripides alive and well. For Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, part of the death drive or Thanatos was the compulsion to repeat. Paris is a poem marked by repetitions: an image appears only to reappear or be reprised later in a different context. After Dubonnet has been mentioned twice in the context of the Metro advertisements (ll. 7–8), it returns as aperitifs (l. 146) and then as vermouth (l. 155); Aristophanes is summoned first in that allusion to The Frogs and then in the reference to Lysistrata; the carousel appears first with the children riding ‘round and round on wooden horses’ (ll. 25–6) and then as ‘Place du Carrousel’ (l. 268); pigeons first appear perching on statues (l. 27) and then return in the child’s game Pigeon vole (l. 90). But in each case, the resurfacing of the same image or phrase marks a departure and serves to emphasize the multiplicity of meanings and values that the city holds: such doublings belong not to the death instinct of Freud’s theory but are instead part of the poem’s acknowledgement of the multifarious nature of modern Paris. Rather than emphasizing a sense of deadlock or stasis, an inability to escape memories of the recent war, the repetitions reinvent the nature of the images and phrases summoned, as if the city itself is engaged in the act of free association. It is noteworthy how many of these doublings and echoes involve images associated with the recent war being co-opted for child’s play, as if reminding us that there is a new generation now growing up, a generation largely untouched by the war and shielded from its horrors. The pigeons used in the trenches to deliver messages are recast as the children’s game of Pigeon vole, and although the children riding the carousel are wearing ‘black overalls’ (l. 23) in memory of their dead fathers, with the ‘wooden horses’ they ride summoning Odysseus’ idea of the Trojan Horse which the Greeks used to infiltrate Troy’s city walls, at the same time they are children lost in the thrill of play, involved in games and without full awareness of the other connotations these games carry. In this

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sense, the children’s delight in play is close to the poem’s own enjoyment of the free association between languages and between real and imagined phenomena. Similarly, when the high affairs of state are alluded to at the moment when President Woodrow Wilson is spotted grinning like a dog, ‘sniffing with innocent enjoyment the diluvial urine of Gargantua’ (ll. 126–7), the adult world of Rabelais segues a few lines later into ‘Le petit Jésus fait pipi’ (l. 135), baby Jesus innocently urinating. The poem, then, embraces Eros over Thanatos: unlike The Waste Land it is ultimately a celebration of love and sex, rather than dwelling on the sordid or unfulfilling aspects of human relationships. One of the many parallels between the two poems is their reference to ‘nymphs’ as a euphemism for prostitutes. But whereas Eliot’s ‘nymphs’ plying their trade by the side of the Thames (ll. 175, 179) appear against a backdrop of sexual violence (the rape of Philomel), mechanical physical relationships (the typist and her boyfriend who appear later in ‘The Fire Sermon’), and Sweeney coming to Mrs Porter, Mirrlees tells us that her ‘nymphs are harmless’, going on to enjoin the reader, ‘Fear not their soft mouths’ (ll. 30–1), because medical advancements have discovered a way to treat venereal disease. Similarly, as the poem’s reference to Lysistrata suggests, Mirrlees’s metropolis is a space where women are in charge of their own bodies, unlike Lil from ‘A Game of Chess’ in Eliot’s poem. Like the Virgin Mary and the city of Paris herself, the women of the modern city are ‘PLEIN DE GRACE’ (l. 445) or full of grace, not marked by shame or disgrace. For Mirrlees, although memories of the recent war haunt the capital, the explosion of creativity and the sense of a new generation coming to consciousness in the post-war metropolis override the culture of mourning. As the closing lines of the poem tell us, ‘In the Abbaye of Port-Royal babies are being born’ (l. 439).

3

Battered Books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Modernist long poems often engage in a dialogue with each other, and none more so than Pound’s and Eliot’s two contributions to this mini-genre. Lyndall Gordon has described Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) as ‘a covert dialogue with Eliot, a composite biography of two great unappreciated poets whose flaws are frankly aired’.1 Gordon goes on to suggest that ‘Pound criticises a Prufrock-like poet too given to hesitation, “maudlin confession”, and the precipitation of “insubstantial manna” from heaven’.2 The vague preposterousness of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock seems to lurk behind Pound’s similarly triple-named Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. The echoing of ‘J. Alfred Prufrock’ in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ is significant partly because it reflects Pound’s admiration for Eliot’s poem and the younger poet’s modernist use of personae in his work. ‘Prufrock’ was, in 1920, still Eliot’s great achievement as a poet. The Waste Land was two years away, and Pound would not see drafts of the poem until late the following year. But ‘Prufrock’ was the poem that Pound had helped to get into print, twice: first in the June 1915 issue of Poetry and then again as the lead poem in Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917, a volume whose costs of production Pound subsidized. If Pound’s editing work helped to make The Waste Land what it is, this chapter seeks to offer a complementary reading of Pound’s own long poem and explore how Eliot’s influence helped to make Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley what it is. If Mauberley is about a failed poet, then Pound’s invented persona surely carries significance in terms of Eliot’s creation. Eliot was, in Pound’s words, a poet who had ‘modernized himself on his own’.3 ‘Prufrock’ was the poem that most clearly demonstrated this act of self-modernizing. ‘Mauberley’ is an ironic name not least because it brings home Pound’s failure to do what Eliot had already done: find a way of moving English poetry forward and liberating it from the stale aestheticism of the Rhymers’ Club. Yet by the time Pound wrote Mauberley, there was also a fear that Eliot would fail to match the achievement of ‘The Love

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Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in his subsequent work. Eliot expressed concerns that ‘Prufrock’ would remain his ‘swan song’, concerns of which Pound, who helped Eliot to write his way out of his creative inertia, would have been only too aware.4 J. Alfred Prufrock had been conceived before the outbreak of war  – Eliot completed the first draft of the poem in 1910–11 – but the poem found its way into print after the declaration of hostilities, appearing in Poetry magazine in June 1915, and then again, in Eliot’s first volume of poems, in 1917. When Pound was inspired to create Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, under the influence of Eliot’s creation, he was doing so in a post-war London in which, for the last decade, he had seen modernist poetry grow out from the ‘School of Images’ led by T.  E. Hulme into imagism led by Pound himself; he had met Eliot in London and had got him into print. The similarities between Mauberley and Prufrock do not end at the tripling of names (with each successive name longer than the last, growing faintly absurd by the final name): there are the drawing rooms and chattering women, the stifled romantic lives of the two protagonists, the unfavourable comparisons between the protagonists and heroic figures from mythology and the recurrence of sea imagery throughout both poems. Pound is not rewriting ‘Prufrock’ in Mauberley as such, but he clearly learnt much from Eliot’s depiction of the crippled inner life of his feckless protagonist and used what he learnt from Eliot to construct Mauberley’s various false starts and failures of resolve. Both poems are modernist Hamlets about characters who fail to act, with inevitably tragic consequences. Pound’s own comment about Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in a letter to Felix Schelling, is revealing not merely because of its reference to Henry James but because of its imagist superposition, or at least juxtaposition, between Henry James and J. Alfred Prufrock: ‘(Of course, I’m no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock. Mais passons.) Mauberley is a mere surface. Again a study in form, an attempt to condense the James novel. Meliora speramus.’5 But Eliot himself had already attempted to condense the James novel, at least on the surface: the poem that follows ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in Prufrock and Other Observations and which belongs to a similar period of Eliot’s life is ‘Portrait of a Lady’, its title and some of its inflections markedly Jamesian in nature, with its title being, of course, a direct echo of James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady. Pound was following Eliot’s lead in writing a Jamesian poem, although there is something Jamesian about not only ‘Portrait of a Lady’ but ‘Prufrock’ as well. In Mauberley, Pound is offering a commentary on contemporary attitudes to poetry, with his use of the quatrain form influenced by Théophile Gautier’s hard, precise verse in Emaux et Camées (1852), a volume which would also prove



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influential, at Pound’s suggestion, on Eliot’s own quatrain poems. Indeed, one way to think about the delicate links between modernist poems of this period is to see Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as a stepping stone between ‘Prufrock’ and The Waste Land, much as the poems of Eliot’s second volume, Poems (1920), are a bridge between these two Eliot poems. (It is worth recalling that ‘Gerontion’, which Eliot initially planned on including in the book publication of The Waste Land, and ‘Dans le Restaurant’, the French poem that featured the original lines about Phlebas the Phoenician which would later resurface in ‘Death by Water’, appeared in this 1920 volume.) Pound’s ambitions in Mauberley are on a grander scale than Eliot’s in ‘Prufrock’; The Waste Land, with its multiple speakers and focalizers, would be on a grander scale still. When Pound was at work on Mauberley, Eliot was writing short poems which built on the work that had appeared in his first Prufrock volume but did not suggest any real growth of ambition: the longest poem in his second volume, ‘Gerontion’, is shorter than ‘Prufrock’. Instead, it was Pound who first saw what writing a longer poem could do for the modernist movement in poetry, although he struggled to find a way to bring together the disparate elements into a cohesive whole. What had happened between Eliot’s writing of his dramatic monologue in 1910–11 and Pound’s writing of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is the First World War, which called for a collective response:  not just the ‘life’ of one individual but his ‘contacts’ as well, not just a focus on an individual but a consideration of a whole generation, something Pound addresses in sections IV and V of the first half of the poem. We can also see Mauberley as offering a hesitation between the monologue and the kind of poetic ‘play for voices’ that The Waste Land, with its numerous speakers, approaches: it is unclear precisely who speaks in the first part of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and whether the poet being described is ‘E. P.’ (a semi-fictionalized version of Pound himself) or Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (an even more fictionalized version of Pound himself). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley hovers uncertainly and ambiguously between being merely about Mauberley and being about two figures, ‘E. P.’ and Mauberley, as if stretching and exploring the space between ‘T. S. Eliot’ and ‘J. Alfred Prufrock’ which Eliot’s poem presents to the reader. As well as hovering indecisively between being a poem about a fictional poet and being a poem about a real poet, Mauberley also offers itself up as both one poem and many poems. It is not taken for granted that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a long poem at all. Certainly next to The Cantos it is on a smaller scale, and the fact that its title is sometimes rendered by critics after the convention of shorter poems (as ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’) rather than accorded the italics of

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The Waste Land reveals the extent to which scholars of the poem remain divided over its status. But Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, like The Waste Land, was published as a standalone volume by John Rodker’s Ovid Press in 1920, and so should be seen as a book as well as a poem, and as a precursor to The Waste Land in this regard. It is possible to see Mauberley not as one long poem but as a ‘suite of poems’. But the fact that Pound grouped the individual poems together and fashioned them into a semi-coherent narrative, beginning with the Odyssean figure and culminating with the failed poet’s wanderings and eventual demise in the South Seas, implies a single poem rather than a collection in the traditional sense, as does the poem’s title. But in a move that strikingly anticipates Eliot’s poem of two years later, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a curious combination of loose narrative and individual episodes: the Mauberley figure serves as the rough ‘hero’ of the poem, but within the poem we are given a succession of scenes and tableaux, much as The Waste Land offers us a series of scenes grouped around a loose theme or mood. So, the case can be made that Mauberley is a long poem and that it is a single poem, albeit of a loose and fragmentary sort, rather than a suite of poems. In this respect, we begin to see how closely it prefigures The Waste Land, and indeed in length it is almost as long as Eliot’s eventual poem. This is worth noting, because of Pound’s role in editing down the original drafts of around 800–1,000 lines to the eventual 433 lines of the poem as published in 1922. ‘That is 19 pages, and let us say the longest poem in the English langwidge’, he told Eliot when the latter suggested prefacing the published poem with ‘Gerontion’ and Pound advised against doing so.6 Curiously enough, in the original Ovid Press edition of Mauberley, published in 1920, Pound’s poem covered 19 pages from p. 9 to p. 28, suggesting that he may have seen 19 pages as the optimum length for a modernist long poem at the time. Margaret Dickie argued that the ‘narrative of The Waste Land’s composition is unique’ and that it ‘suggests something about both the tenacity and the inadequacy of the Modernist imagination as it confronted the dilemma of long form’ not least ‘because of the way one major poet allowed another major poet to revise and reform a long work’.7 The short lyrics which Pound fashioned into the poem that became Hugh Selwyn Mauberley do, in fact, anticipate the construction and evolution of The Waste Land in several important ways: just as Eliot’s poem is more or less bookended by two desert scenes in which the speaker yearns for the ‘sound of water’ (ll. 24, 352, 355), so Pound’s poem begins with the seafaring Odysseus and ends with the poet-as-voyager sailing on the South Seas.



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This seafaring motif, which also lurks behind The Cantos (with the rhythms of its opening canto based on Pound’s own translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’), will prove central to Pound’s vision of the modernist ‘epic’, with the poet cast as an ocean-going hero, a latter-day Odysseus. In addition to their similarities in length and construction, both Mauberley and The Waste Land are ambiguous in terms of who ‘narrates’ or ‘focalizes’ the action presented. Does Tiresias really ‘see’ everything that occurs in Eliot’s poem? And is all of Mauberley about Mauberley, or is the first half of the poem about Pound, ‘E. P.’ as the opening lyric has it?

The war in Mauberley Mauberley, like The Waste Land, is a long poem fashioned from shorter pieces that have been assembled under a common theme. Like The Waste Land, it is partly a response to the war, but it is more self-reflexively about the artist’s or poet’s role in the wake of that war: whereas Eliot’s poem would only obliquely address this, chiefly through his use of quotations from earlier poets, Pound’s poem tackles the issue more directly, assessing the place and value of poetry in a world torn apart by conflict and mass carnage. Eliot’s poem suggests that words have begun to fail the bystander of the modern world, who can only repeat the words of others like some form of poetic aphasia. Pound’s poem, by contrast, summons the ghosts of other writers and literary figures in order to interrogate and hold to account the central poet-figure, whether ‘E. P.’ or Mauberley himself. As well as being about poetry itself, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is also about the First World War and its aftermath, and the impact that the war had on the generation to which Pound belonged. John Espey’s summary of section IV of Mauberley, that the ‘climax of modern stupidity is the sacrifice of youth in the World War’ and those who survived the war ‘return to a society corrupted by usury and hypocrisy, to a chaos of hysteria and formless self-expression’, acknowledges the interrelatedness of these two lyrics which explicitly confront the war and the treatment of art in the modern world that is one of the prevalent themes of the rest of the poem.8 Vincent Miller has remarked that ‘Pound’s critics agree that Mauberley is a beauty-loving aesthete and that he fails as a result to change what he finds a crass and vulgar world’ but ‘that is about all they agree upon’.9 Critics such as Hugh Kenner and John Espey argued in the 1950s that we should not identify Pound with Mauberley in the poem, and that Pound is mocking and condemning,

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rather than romanticizing, the feeble aestheticism of Mauberley. For just as Mauberley criticizes the crass consumerism of the modern age, so Pound seems to criticize Mauberley for his championing of aestheticism  – a sort of ‘art for art’s sake’ – when he should be engaging with ‘the march of events’, especially the events of the Great War.10 The war had exposed the hollowness at the heart of such aestheticism, and Mauberley suggests that there is a chain of development leading from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Rhymers’ Club and through to imagism in the pre-war wears. The war had shown that such poetry, concerned with ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘poetry’ rather than with the events of history such as war, politics and economics, fell short of the epic poetry of Homer’s Odyssey whose scope and approach had allowed the poet to consider war and other weighty themes. The year ‘1918 began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same’:  so Pound would later write in the autobiographical preface to his Selected Poems in 1949.11 This investigation would lead Pound to the economic theories of C. H. Douglas and the idea of Social Credit, ideas which appear to have no part in the writing of Mauberley. But Mauberley is not just a poem about art; it is a poem about art in its inescapably economic context, the capitalist marketplace in which art is bought, sold, consumed and belittled. And the cheapening of art, and ultimately of civilization, finds its way into many aspects of the poem. The reference to the ‘myriad’ who died for ‘a few thousand battered books’ (188) marks Mauberley as a poem about the war and its aftermath; but this status had been asserted in the first section, with the quotation from, and references to, Homer’s Odyssey, a poem set during the aftermath of a great war. The Odyssean allusions continue throughout the poem, such as in Pound’s reference to ‘the imaginary / Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge’ (200), which Pound, in a letter to W. H. D. Rouse, said was his attempt to translate the essence of Homer’s ‘Para thina poluphloisboio thalasses:  the turn of the wave and the scutter of receding pebbles’.12 F. R. Leavis observed of the ‘battered books’ stanzas in the poem, ‘Mauberley came out in 1920. The presence of the war in it, we feel, is not confined to these two small poems: they are not mere detachable items. They represent a criterion of seriousness and purity of intention that is implicit in the whole.’13 Yet the precise ways in which the war haunts Mauberley, the explicit stanzas that comprise sections IV and V of the poem’s first part aside, remain to be shown. Indeed, even those two parts, sections IV and V of the first half of Mauberley, are far from straightforward. The poem appears to lament the fact that so many men in Pound’s generation gave their lives for a ‘botched civilisation’:



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There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilisation, Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books. (188)

If ‘statues’ and ‘books’ are meant to be read as metonymic stand-ins for ‘art’ or ‘culture’ more generally, then our response to these lines is likely to be mixed. Does Pound think art is worth dying for, or not? The men who gave their lives in the First World War were not, after all, dying merely to defend the cheapened modern art which Pound’s poem laments, but all art of all ages. And ‘broken statues’ and ‘battered books’ hardly sound like modern art, but classical art that has been allowed to fall into ruin. In other words, Pound’s lines cast the soldiers as men defending something which the populace could not even be bothered to maintain, but which the artistic champion in him felt was worth dying for. The men who had sent Pound’s generation off to war had also been those who had allowed several thousand years of Western culture to fall into decline. ‘Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid’, as good a line as any Pound wrote in his imagist phase, conveys in just six short words the idea of the earth closing over the eyes of the young men, like an eyelid closing in sleep, although, given the context, a coffin lid is also suggested. ‘Quick eyes’ cuts us to the quick: not just ‘quick’ in the sense of ‘living’ (the quick and the dead) but because death came so quickly in the trenches; and, given the suggestion of men being swallowed up by the earth’s lid, ‘quick’, under pressure from ‘earth’, also threatens to grow into quicksand. Like the most successful imagist poems, the line packs much into a single vivid image. But the war is present in the form of Pound’s allusion to Homer from the opening section onwards. As Leah Culligan Flack has recently observed, Pound viewed Homer’s Odyssey as ‘a storehouse of poetic technique’ and saw Odysseus, ‘in an interpretation shaped by reading Joyce’s Ulysses, as a cosmopolitan wanderer who embodied the ideals Europe needed to hold up in order to heal the wounds opened by the Great War’.14 War and poetry are thus connected through Pound’s allusions to Odysseus in this opening section. But in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley the grandeur of such an allusion is at odds with Mauberley’s own aestheticism,

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which, as critics have observed, fails to engage with contemporary history and politics and instead is content to strive to represent ‘beauty’ in all its forms. Epic poetry from Homer onwards is concerned with history and a response to the vastness of history, something Pound understood all too well when he described the epic as ‘a poem including history’.15 As he would write in ABC of Reading, ‘The news in the Odyssey is still news. Odysseus is still “very human” ’; he added, ‘You can’t tuck Odysseus away with Virgil’s Aeneas. Odysseus is emphatically “the wise guy”, the downy, the hard-boiled Odysseus. His companions have most of them something that must have been the Greek equivalent of shell-shock.’16 Pound’s anachronistic collapsing of the distance between Odysseus’ fictional crew and the real-life sufferers from shell shock in the recent war shows just how far he saw the contemporary relevance of the Odyssey to the modern war. Pound’s word ‘periplum’ to describe the narrative structure of The Cantos was also inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. As Hugh Kenner observed, this word is designed to be ‘minutely accurate according to the Phoenician voyagers’ periploi’.17 Much like Odysseus’ journey, and Pound’s journey through the Cantos which is designed to echo the Greek hero’s peregrinations, the journey through the history of English poetry and culture that we are presented with in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is an episodic ‘periplum’ that ends with Pound, and Mauberley, coming to terms with themselves as poets. But in 1920 there is no going home: unlike Odysseus’ return to Ithaca towards the end of Homer’s poem, Mauberley is destined to die among the South Seas, rootless and solitary, as if to reinforce the impossibility in the modern age of returning to normality after the events of the First World War. And after all, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was a farewell to London, a rejection of Pound’s wartime home and the beginning of his search for another. To understand the extent to which Mauberley, while ostensibly a poem about Victorian aestheticism and its failure to provide a way forward for poetry, is also a poem deeply rooted in the recent war, it is necessary to begin with the poem’s opening section, ‘E. P. Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sepulchre’. The section which opens Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is worth considering more closely. Pound writes of ‘E. P.’ that he ‘passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme / De son eage’ (185), with ‘trentuniesme’, for ‘thirty-first’, being Pound’s coinage: Villon, in his Testament, has ‘trentiesme’, or ‘thirtieth’. Pound’s subtle altering of Villon’s ‘trentiesme’ to ‘trentuniesme’ is important because it points to 1916–17, and Pound’s thirty-first year, as being of crucial significance, otherwise he would not have felt it necessary to adapt Villon’s original. Pound’s method here is close to Eliot’s allusive technique, which often involves employing a line from another



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poet but altering one word, so ‘barge’ becomes ‘Chair’ in the opening line from ‘A Game of Chess’, alluding to Antony and Cleopatra (l. 77). But there is a more important parallel: Pound borrows from and adapts Villon to express something that is at once personal and universal, both grounded in the modern age and yet somehow timeless and unchanging. Pound and Mauberley are both a product of their time and, at the same time, figures who have haunted literary history for as long as poets have existed. When Eliot would seek to convey the post-war mood in London two years later, he would also let other poets’ sentiments speak for him, and for his time. Why, then, did Pound alter Villon’s ‘trentiesme’ to ‘trentuniesme’? It was in 1916–17, when Pound was in his thirty-first year, that he completed, and published, the first three cantos, which appeared in Poetry in June, July and August 1917. The third canto, which would later be reworked into what became the new version of Canto I, features a loose translation of the Odyssey, specifically the moment in the Odyssey when Odysseus voyages into Hades to speak to the dead, notably Tiresias. Given the fact that these three cantos are concerned with the task of writing an epic for the modern age, we are being invited to view Odysseus as Pound’s representative, with the Greek hero’s adventures being a sort of prototype for Pound’s latter-day mission to ‘resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry’ (185), as the opening stanza of Mauberley has it. That ‘trentuniesme’ takes us back to the war years of 1916–17 when Pound was radically rethinking the direction his poetry was going to take and was struggling to find a way of embarking on the Odyssean task of ‘making it new’. Having left behind the dead ends of both imagism and Vorticism by this stage, Pound seized upon the epic as a new way of responding to the ‘march of events’ that were going on around him in wartime. It is little wonder, then, that he was drawn to Odysseus, the cunning and enterprising hero of Homer’s poem whose mission is to return home. Pound is trying to return to his original mission of making it new, just as Flaubert had reinvented what the novel could do:  ‘His true Penelope was Flaubert’ (185). Although the first half of the poem treats a time several decades prior to the First World War, it is aestheticism’s failure to provide a sufficient vehicle for poetry – that would enable the poet to respond to weighty and important themes like a mass-scale, industrial war – that is important, and this is what Pound wishes to highlight. Viewed in this way, the ordering of the various pieces which make up the ‘Contacts’ half of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley can be seen to form a linked, if not exactly coherent, narrative: a paratactic structure of sorts, anticipating The Cantos. So we move from the opening ‘ode’ poem, which establishes the poet’s failure to ‘resuscitate the dead art’ of verse and leave his mark on the literary

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world, to a poem which outlines what he was up against (the sort of literature demanded by the modern public is derivative and superficial), to a poem which considers the wider context of art in the marketplace, to two short poems which conclude that art and literature have been so thoroughly degraded in the present age that they were hardly worth giving one’s life for in the recent war. Indeed, the subtle but specific ways in which Pound links together these early sections of the poem have yet to be fully acknowledged, but they lend credence to the idea that Pound viewed Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as one poem rather than a suite of different lyrics based around a similar theme, and the technique he employs for Mauberley would be replicated in his editing of Eliot’s The Waste Land, where he would later urge Eliot to retain certain sections because he saw how they thematically linked to other parts of the poem. ‘I DO advise keeping Phlebas’, he wrote to Eliot. ‘In fact I more’n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor. And he is needed ABSOlootly where he is. Must stay in.’18 The first half of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley opens with a poem whose final stanza refers enigmatically to the ‘march of events’ and to ‘l’an trentuniesme / De son eage’; this reference to the poet’s age is then picked up in the opening stanza of the second lyric, ‘The age demanded an image’ (186), where the poet’s age becomes ‘the age’ more generally. This lyric’s reference to the mass appeal of the new cinema and its deleterious influence on the novel – the ‘prose kinema’ (186) – then gives way to the third lyric about consumerism more generally, with this lyric culminating in the lines which ask, ‘What god, man, or hero / Shall I place a tin wreath upon!’ (187). This mention of heroes feeds into the fourth lyric, which confronts the ultimately pointless heroism of the men who fought in the recent war, and this poem in turn leads into the short lyric about the deaths of the soldiers in the trenches. The ‘Quick eyes’ then morph into the ‘Yeux Glauques’ or ‘glaucous eyes’ of the following section, whose reference to Dante Gabriel Rossetti paves the way for the section whose title (‘ “Siena Mi Fe”: Disfecemi Maremma’) is borrowed from Rossetti’s namesake, Dante Alighieri. In such a way, Pound brings together the prominent themes of his poem: not just art and modern consumerism but also war and heroism, themes which will also be glimpsed in The Waste Land. Such a narrative (of sorts) is undermined by the moments of uncertainty in the poem: uncertainty borne out by both the language Pound employs and the quatrain form, which appears to offer crystalline stability only to undo this show of solidity at nearly every turn. The numerous allusions and references to artists, writers and mythological figures are central to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, as they will be in The Waste Land and The Cantos. One of the first, and also one of the



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most significant, figures to appear in the poem is Odysseus, with whom the poet ‘E. P.’ is identified in the opening stanzas of the poem: His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles; Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials. (185)

In the previous stanza, we had been given the song of the Sirens, a song which Odysseus alone ‘caught in the unstopped ear’ (185) because he had his crew tie him to his ship so he could not succumb to the Sirens’ seductive singing and steer his ship to destruction upon the rocks. This casting of Pound as ‘E. P.’, and then E. P. as Odysseus, raises questions which are not easy to resolve. Why does Pound see himself, or the version of himself that this opening poem projects, as a Greek war hero, or are we being invited to see the poet-figure as falling short of Odysseus’ heroism? Is this opening poem mock-heroic, much like Prufrock’s comment about himself as John the Baptist? It should be recalled that Prufrock had failed to hear the enchanting song of the mermaids: ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me’.19 Mermaids and sirens, being associated with the sea or with land near the sea, are often conflated in the poetic imagination, and Eliot seems to be inviting us to recall Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens in these lines. But whereas Prufrock had not heard this enchanting song, Pound implies that ‘E. P.’ has, but has failed to capitalize on what he has heard. The subtle link between Prufrock and ‘E. P.’ here along with the mock-heroic association between the poet and Odysseus invite us to pause when reading this opening poem and wonder whether we are reading a tragedy or a satire. If Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, like The Waste Land, begins with a burial of the dead – with Pound effectively killing himself off and placing himself within his own tomb – then it is a mock-burial of a mock-hero. The Odyssean allusions do not end with that opening poem. For much as Eliot’s allusions in The Waste Land operate on several levels simultaneously, so too do many of Pound’s nods to what are ostensibly specific historical or cultural phenomena melt into ambiguous and polyvalent complexity, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti merging into Dante Alighieri, or Homer being anachronistically paired with Flaubert. Such cultural time-slips are underscored by the restless, unstable quatrains which lend the poem its structure only to undermine that structure as their rhyme and composition become continually unpredictable and uneven. A  good example of this is ‘Yeux Glauques’, the title given to the third part of

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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Translating as ‘glaucous eyes’, this title is often said to be derived from Théophile Gautier’s Emaux et Camées, where Gautier uses it to describe the grey-green eyes of beautiful women; Pound applies this term to Pre-Raphaelite depictions of women. But there is also a potential allusion to the Odyssey here. Hugh Kenner noted that Pound responded to the novelistic quality of Homer’s poem, and that ‘Joyce and Pound both saw a novel in its workings: a grip on detailed actuality’; Kenner singles out glaukōpis, the epithet Homer uses to describe Athena, which has variously been interpreted by Homer’s translators as ‘gleaming eyes’ or ‘glaring eyes’.20 Pound knew Homer’s poem well and even singled out the word ‘glaux’, referring to the olive leaf, in Rouse’s translation of the Odyssey.21 Such Homeric resonances matter because these early sections of Mauberley are not concerned purely with the immediate past, the Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite worlds which the poem depicts. These early sections are also preoccupied by the classics, as Pound’s parallels with Odysseus indicate in those opening stanzas. Here, too, there is a suggestion of self-mockery in the exclamation, ‘Better mendacities / Than the classics in paraphrase!’ (186). Whether we should read this simply as Pound’s ridicule of the tastelessness of the modern public, or whether we are right to detect a hint of self-ridicule too (as the disparaging reference to his own poetry as no more than a ‘paraphrase’ of the greats would imply), remains difficult to decide. Is Pound mocking ‘E. P.’, his earlier self, or is he seriously denouncing the tastelessness of the modern public? Can it even, perhaps, be both? F. R. Leavis was one of the earliest critics to realize how deep the influence of the war ran in Mauberley, observing thus: Mauberley is in the first place (the description suggests itself readily) the summing-up of an individual life. It has also a representative value, reflecting as it does the miscellaneousness of modern culture, the absence of direction, of an alphabet of forms, or of any one predominant idiom; the uncongeniality of the modern world to the artist; and his dubious status there. It offers, more particularly, a representative experience of the phase of English poetry in which it became plain that the Romantic tradition was exhausted. One might, at the risk of impertinence, call it quintessential autobiography, taking care, however, to add that it has the impersonality of great poetry:  its technical perfection means a complete detachment and control.22

But how far is the poem a critique of society, and how far is it also sending up its protagonist? Clearly Mauberley is attacking the cheapened philistine consumerism of the modern age, but are we also being invited to laugh at



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Mauberley? He is an aesthete, a self-conscious poet, out of key with the age in which he lives; we can find ourselves responding sympathetically to such a person but we can also find him laughable and faintly ridiculous, much as we are invited to find Prufrock both laughable and sympathetic. Pound’s tone casts into doubt how seriously should we take Mauberley, or Pound’s own self-conscious treatment of poetry.

The irony of Mauberley Another problem in determining how to read the tone of Mauberley is the fact that the individual pieces which make up Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are not offered in a consistent voice. The poem’s influences and styles range from Renaissance lyricists such as Waller to the more chiselled style of Gautier in order to reflect Pound’s shifting interests and imitations. Michael Coyle’s description of Pound’s use of ‘Flaubertian free indirect style’ helps us make sense of the seemingly fluid and shifting voice of the speaker in the poem.23 If Mauberley is a novel in verse – and it is worth remembering here that Pound claimed that the poem was his ‘attempt to condense the James novel’ – then it is a novel of fragments and scenes, rather than one with a unified narrative. James’s influence on Pound’s style can even be glimpsed in his fondness for indirection and subordinate clauses, as well as the Jamesian habit of placing words and phrases in knowing quotation marks:  ‘the sublime’, ‘the march of events’, ‘age demanded’, ‘sculpture’, among many others (these examples all feature in the first two ‘poems’ of Mauberley). The influence of Henry James’s fiction on Pound’s poem is important not just because it helps us to gauge the narrative voice and style of Mauberley but also because it highlights Pound’s determination to write something approaching a novel in verse, albeit one that is disjointed and episodic. If this reminds us of James Joyce as much as it does Henry James, this is no coincidence, for when Pound wrote Mauberley he had read, and even helped to publish, the earliest sections of Joyce’s Ulysses:  another modernist work that reinvents the idea of the novel and does so by turning to the figure of Odysseus. Flaubert was Joyce’s ‘true Penelope’ as much as he was Pound’s. In an article for The Egoist in 1914, Pound praised Joyce’s Dubliners, noting that there is ‘a school of prose writers, and of verse writers for that matter, whose forerunner was Stendhal and whose founder was Flaubert’; the ‘followers of Flaubert deal in exact presentation’ and are ‘perhaps the most beneficial force in modern writing’.24 Pound’s inclusion of ‘verse writers’ alongside prose writers as notable devotees of Flaubert’s style

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and approach is telling in light of Pound’s recent work editing the first imagist anthology, Des Imagistes, earlier in the same year, given that ‘presentation’, as opposed to description, is what Pound had advised for modern poetry in his ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’.25 This emphasis on Flaubert’s model of ‘exact presentation’ would be just as relevant a few years later when Pound wrote Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, whose opening poem explicitly mentions Flaubert. But the fact that Pound joins Flaubert with Odysseus’ faithful wife Penelope is suggestive of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1919–20 when Pound was at work on the poem and overseeing the publication of Joyce’s novel in serial form in the Little Review. Pound may have viewed Mauberley as his attempt to write a Henry James novel in verse, complete with its exploration of the tensions between life and art, but the sense that he had failed to achieve something worthy of the modernist experiment, which James Joyce – using Odysseus as his guide – was now doing, adds an additional layer of meaning to that opening ‘ode’. In 1922, Pound would again praise Joyce, this time in relation to Ulysses, for being, along with Henry James, the chief ‘critic’ of Flaubert.26 Such an uncertainty about the poem’s own meaning, and how we should read its depiction of aestheticism in relation to its clear castigation of consumerism, extends to the destabilizing of the quatrain form which is used virtually throughout. In Hugh Kenner’s phrase, Mauberley is ‘seventeen pages of disrupted quatrains’.27 At times, such as when Pound is lamenting the loss of life in the war, the quatrain form breaks down; here, too, the metre becomes looser and freer. But even when the quatrains appear to be much more chiselled and stable, the rhyme scheme gives us pause. Pound’s use of rhyme in Mauberley has not received close attention, but alongside the Jamesian use of ‘knowing’ quotation marks and the suggestion of mock-heroic irony, rhyme is one of the most suggestive ways that Pound destabilizes any fixed or knowable meaning to his poem. Perhaps the most famous lines from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are these: The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace; (186)

The meaning of this appears straightforward enough:  the modern public demands entertainment that reflects its own grim outlook on the world, rather than the ‘grace’ associated with classical art. But it is not quite so unambiguous



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as it first appears, since ‘grimace’ does not imply frivolous escapism but instead a fervent desire for realism, something that may be more artistically ‘worthy’ for the modern age than an art which reverts to ancient models. In other words, the stanza seems to look two ways at once:  simultaneously chastising the public for demanding crass realism in their art and mocking the poet for thinking that ‘Attic’ art would be a suitable substitute for such realism. Pound may here be recalling Oscar Wilde’s lines from his 1891 preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.’28 In the next section of Mauberley, Pound tells us that, in the modern age, ‘Caliban casts out Ariel’ (186). This ambivalence is reflected in the unsteadiness of the rhyme scheme, for it is unclear whether the quatrain wants to be rhymed abab or aabb. The network of sounds is intricate: ‘image’ and ‘stage’ are ostensible rhymes (-age), just as ‘grimace’ is meant to rhyme with ‘grace’ (-ace; and indeed ‘grace’ can be seen as a tautening of ‘grimace’), giving us an abab scheme; but the lines could as easily be read as aabb, since the vowel sounds of ‘image’ and ‘grimace’ both chime naturally with each other, just as those present in ‘stage’ and ‘grace’ work together assonantly to form a couplet. At this point, we do not know what to expect: we have been prepared for the abab quatrain by the opening section of the poem, but the above stanza heralds the start of a new section, which might as easily carry a different rhyme scheme. The phrase ‘The age demanded’ will also find itself replicated later in the poem, both in the title of one of the sections and in Jamesian quotation marks within one of the other stanzas. This repetition and formal or structural uncertainty reflect the poem’s wider ambivalence about the place and value of poetry after the war, much as the moments of free verse in Eliot’s The Waste Land carry more impact because they appear alongside sections in blank verse and more regular quatrains and couplets. These moments of destabilization in Pound’s poem have an added advantage here in that they invite us to approach the narrator, and the poet being described, with critical detachment rather than unalloyed sympathy, since, like a Henry James narrator, he may be unbalanced or unstable. This aspect of Pound’s poem – the extent to which he uses the rhymes of his quatrains to undermine any solid, knowable meaning and to cast the authority and authenticity of his narrator into doubt  – has not been given the close attention it deserves. Often, because the poem contains so many allusions and complex structural questions, the role of rhyme in the poem’s creation of tone

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is overlooked. In the stanzas that follow Pound’s argument continues to look two ways: The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme. (186)

This is often read as a satire on Pound’s earlier naïve belief that the modern age was degraded because it preferred comforting lies to ‘the classics in paraphrase’ and the simplistic narratives of early cinema to the hardened alabaster and ‘sculpture’ of rhyme. Pound is casting a critical eye over his earlier self, the Pound who had produced loose translations of Sextus Propertius, and mocking his idealistic notion that the public were hostile to art because they were unreceptive to his reworking of the classics. But ‘the classics in paraphrase’ and the idea of rhyme as alabaster sculpture hardly move art on into new and exciting directions but are instead regressive moves, harking back to classical models of art, like the ‘Attic grace’ mentioned in the earlier stanza. Pound, then, is satirizing his own earlier idea that the choice was between cheap popular literature and the classics, whereas true art would be something different that moved art forwards rather than taking it backwards. The beautiful may have been reduced to ‘the market place’ (187), but Mauberley’s version of the beauty, as Hugh Kenner observed, is ultimately derivative: ‘his visual particularity comes out of an art-gallery and his Venus Anadyomene out of a book’.29 The poem’s ambivalence over how to treat Mauberley (or ‘E. P.’)  – with sympathy for trying to modernize poetry in an age of philistine consumerism, or with disdain for making such a botched attempt to do so – extends to the uneasiness of the rhymes we find elsewhere in the poem. Pound’s vision of the struggling writer is a good example of this: Nature receives him; With a placid and uneducated mistress He exercises his talents And the soil meets his distress. (192)

The off-rhyme of the trochaic ‘mistress’ and the iambic ‘distress’ encourages us, in retrospect, to mispronounce one of the two words to make them compatible: in a sort of meta-pun (or metrical pun), we are encouraged quite literally to mis-stress



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the word ‘mistress’, so it will form a natural partnership with ‘distress’; or else we must dis-stress (or de-stress) the word ‘distress’, turning it into a trochee that will chime with ‘mistress’. That such a moment of metrical ambiguity occurs when Pound is outlining the existence of a struggling stylist lends additional significance to the quatrain’s almost comically pathetic destabilization. The disrupted quatrains of Mauberley would return in The Waste Land, as Pound advised Eliot to edit the neat regular quatrains of the typist section from ‘The Fire Sermon’ so that their rhymes were less formulaic and predictable. When Eliot completed The Waste Land, with Pound’s editorial assistance, Pound famously wrote to his friend on Christmas Eve 1921 to congratulate him:  ‘Complimenti, you bitch. I  am wracked by the seven jealousies.’30 His jealousy was motivated not solely by his status as a fellow modernist poet but also by his own attempts to write a long poem nearly two years earlier. He went on to refer self-deprecatingly to his ‘nacre and objets d’art’, declaring, ‘Some day I shall lose my temper, blaspheme Flaubert, lie like a shit-arse and say “Art shd. Embellish the umbelicus” ’.31 In responding in such a way to Eliot’s completion of his long poem, Pound alluded to his own, published the year before. In July 1922, Pound would write to Felix Schelling that The Waste Land ‘is I  think the justification of the “movement’, of our modern experiment, since 1900’; immediately before this he had been discussing Mauberley.32 It is clear that, even before the publication of Eliot’s poem, Pound had come to see it as the definitive statement of the modernist movement in poetry, but also that he viewed The Waste Land and Mauberley as part of the same mission:  to set a crown upon modernism’s effort and to respond in a proportionate and substantial way to the events of the preceding years.

4

A Poem without a Hero: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

‘Comparison and analysis’, Eliot wrote in his 1923 essay titled ‘The Function of Criticism’, ‘are the chief tools of the critic’.1 An analysis of The Waste Land which incorporates, as part of the analysis, a comparison between Eliot’s poem and Mirrlees’s Paris, invites us to take a very different view of The Waste Land from the one we might otherwise have. Next to Paris, the ostensibly radical aspects of Eliot’s poem, such as its use of free verse, literary allusion and ironic contrasts between past and present, high and low, are likely to appear much less extreme. Needless to say, a university undergraduate studying The Waste Land as part of the canon of modernist literature may be tempted to overstate the extent to which Eliot’s poem is radical and experimental. Mirrlees had already shown that it was possible to write a longer poem in a broadly modernist mode, centred on the modern city, and positing complex relationships between the old and the new, the past and the present. Her experimental typography, her paratactic structure that anticipates the more radical aspects of Pound’s Cantos and her broaching of difficult or taboo subjects such as lesbianism, imperialism and the recent war, all showed that modernist poetry could go beyond the small-scale innovations made by the imagists. The problem, of course, was that too few people were aware that she had shown this. It is tempting to mischaracterize the central distinction between Paris and The Waste Land – or between Paris and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, for that matter – as a difference of traditions. In such a formulation, Eliot’s poem stands at the end of a tradition that incorporates Shakespeare, Spenser, Kyd, Dante, Marvell, Ovid, Virgil, Homer and many others, while Mirrlees’s poem, in breaking with such recognizable features of the established literary canon as iambic pentameter and rhyme, seems to stand at the beginning of a new, truly worldly and international movement in poetry, which had been instigated by the French Cubists such as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire and was now being introduced

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into English verse. But this distinction threatens to reduce Eliot’s poem to a conservative attempt to uphold the canon  – a metonymic stand-in for all of Western culture in the poem – in the face of economic, social, sexual, emotional and spiritual disaster. It also overlooks the role that allusion to the existing Western literary tradition plays in Mirrlees’s Paris. Nevertheless, this is one way of beginning to distinguish between these two radical visions of post-war life. Initial reviewers of The Waste Land, most if not all of them unaware of the breakthrough Mirrlees had already made, were themselves uncertain of whether Eliot’s poem heralded something fresh and new in poetry or whether it was essentially presenting them with a conservative view of a society in crisis. Some early critics were baffled by Eliot’s poem and saw it as a clear break with the poetic conventions of the day. Others, however, saw The Waste Land as a poem looking longingly back to a romanticized past and unable to suggest a way forward, either for society or for poetry itself. Michael Cowley, feeling that he spoke for many of his generation, wrote that Eliot ‘not only abused the present but robbed it of vitality’; for Cowley, Eliot’s poem appeared to be suggesting ‘that our age was prematurely senile and could not even find words of its own in which to bewail its impotence; that it was forever condemned to borrow and patch together the songs of dead poets’.2 Cowley went on to assert that the ‘famous “postwar mood of aristocratic disillusionment” was a mood we had never really shared’ and that ‘Eliot’s subjective truth was not our own’.3 Eliot himself famously dismissed the idea that he intended to speak for his generation, writing in a parenthesis in ‘Thoughts after Lambeth’ (1931) that ‘when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more 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 part of my intention.’4 In terms of metre, the vast majority of Eliot’s lines follow the iambic pentameter rhythm, whether in rhymed or blank verse. The sections of the poem which are perhaps the most daringly experimental, typographically and metrically, are ll. 139–72 at the end of ‘A Game of Chess’, ll. 266–311 at the end of ‘The Fire Sermon’ and ll. 346–58 in ‘What the Thunder Said’. The fragmentary ending of ‘The Fire Sermon’ had shown a poem breaking apart, with the section’s final line comprising a single word, while ‘What the Thunder Said’ will continue the decline into fragmentation and decay, as the pentameter line repeatedly returns and then recedes. This aspect of the poem reflects Eliot’s ideas about the essentially illusory nature of the ‘freedom’ of free verse, expressed in his 1917 essay ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’:



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Vers libre … is a battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art. And as the so- called vers libre which is good is anything but ‘free’, it can better be defended under some other label. … But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating it to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.5

So for all that it departs from the pentameter verse line, even ‘What the Thunder Said’ wants us to keep the pentameter in mind, even as the metre breaks down. There is no such rhythm at work in Mirrlees’s poem:  although Paris contains more metrically regular passages, the poem cannot be said to follow a set metre throughout, even sporadically. Her verse is ‘free’ in a way Eliot’s is not. Paris and The Waste Land are also markedly different in their depictions of the modern world. The central distinction between the two poems in terms of their diverging attitudes to modernity is neatly highlighted by the ways they treat the same symbol of metropolitan modernity, the taxi. Mirrlees’s taxi which ‘hoots like an owl’ (l. 412)  prefigures Eliot’s taxi simile in The Waste Land. But whereas Mirrlees offers a seamless incorporation of the mechanized into the natural world – the hooting of the taxi horn at night-time is as natural an occurrence in her vision of Paris as the nocturnal hooting of an owl  – Eliot uses the taxi to suggest that the modern city dweller has lost her agency and become an automaton: ‘when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing, waiting’ (ll. 216–17). Indeed, given his use of the word ‘throbbing’ and the fact that this reference heads the section narrated by Tiresias (who is himself ‘throbbing between two lives’ in l. 218), in which the ‘young man carbuncular’ (l. 231) engages his typist lover in mechanical sex, the reference to the human as a ‘taxi’ takes on additional significance, rendering the human body a space to be commandeered (indeed, entered) by others and used for a short period of time before being abandoned again. They are part of the same commodity culture: the inhuman taxi and the human typist. We have not quite left behind the ‘nymphs’ (l. 175) from the opening lines of ‘The Fire Sermon’. (The semantic homorhyme of ‘waits’/‘waiting’ in ll. 216–17 also neatly reflects the sense of delay and impatience, the rhythmic throbbing of expectation and the mundane repetitiveness of the daily work and commute.) The opening words of Eliot’s poem, ‘April is the cruellest month’, are often interpreted as a riposte to Chaucer’s sweet April showers with their droughtpiercing and life-giving properties. But that opening line is not merely a reaction

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to the beginning of Chaucer’s ‘General Prologue’. For against all of the poetic depictions of April as a positive time of spring and rebirth, we can weigh the other, less salubrious aspects of April, which Hope Mirrlees’s Paris had already highlighted with its reference to ‘The wicked April moon’ (l. 262). Julia Briggs’s note to this line reminds us that a more tempered attitude towards April is needed:  ‘The April moon is the lunar month after Easter, characterised by cold, harsh winds that seem to scorch (roussir) the new growth.’6 The energetic, almost Vorticist present participles Eliot employs in his famous opening lines – ‘breeding’, ‘mixing’, ‘stirring’ – suggest the same wild and unpredictable weather which Mirrlees’s poem implicitly recognizes. April is cruel because its sweet placidity is an illusion: it is a time of energy and fertility, and, as I will explore later in this chapter, such abundance is viewed with suspicion and even horror in Eliot’s poem. While both Paris and The Waste Land respond to the same moment in European history, they provide very different responses to that moment. The year 1919 is central to both poems. It was the year Mirrlees wrote and set her long poem, and the year that Eliot resolved to write his. The discussions surrounding the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles are reflected in both. Yet Eliot’s poem presents an altogether more conservative, even reactionary, picture of post-war Europe. This is not the same as saying that Eliot endorses these views: the poem is an impersonal reflection of a mood that his poem captures through imagery and allusion. For Eliot, the post-war world is marked by a loss of heroism, economic depression and the threat of foreign invasions, three often interlinked anxieties or realities, which are all the more closely linked because it is difficult to decide where reality stops and anxiety begins. Money looms large in the poem, and the poem reminds us that London is governed by vast differences between the rich and the poor, the upper and working classes. This gulf is seen most clearly in the two women from ‘A Game of Chess’, where the rich upper-class woman is likened to Cleopatra, while Lil, whose marriage is so brazenly discussed in the pub at the end of the section, represents the downtrodden working classes. Although there are continuities between the two women – both appear to be unhappily married to men who served in the war – the economic differences between their lives stand in stark contrast to one another. The ‘ivory’ (l. 86) on the first woman’s dressing table reminds us of the false teeth that Lil was ordered to get with the money her husband gave her (ll. 143–4). Whereas the first woman’s room has an ‘antique mantel’ (l. 97), Lil simply looks ‘antique’ (l. 156), despite being only 31  years



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of age. The rich woman may have a depiction of the Philomel myth above her mantelpiece (ll. 97–100), but there is a sense that Lil is somehow living such an existence, being ‘rudely forced’ (l. 100) into granting Albert his conjugal rights. Such class awareness, which threatens to dissolve into snobbery at some points in the poem, such as when Tiresias describes the young house-agent’s clerk as ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire’ (ll. 234–5), is also part of the poem’s wider concerns with the economic climate out of which the poem arose. ‘London has just escaped, from the First World War’, as William Empson put it, summarizing Pound’s description of the context of The Waste Land, ‘but it is certain to be destroyed by the next one, because it is in the hands of international financiers. The very place of it will be sown with salt, as Carthage was, and forgotten by men; or it will be sunk under water.’7 Eliot was keenly aware of the economic situation because of his work at Lloyd’s Bank, where he had been working since 1917. Next to this awareness of economic recession is another preoccupation of The Waste Land, and one which Eliot, as an American living in England, knew all too well: the feeling of not belonging, of being a stranger in a strange land, especially in the face of the considerable international upheaval caused by the war. It is widely believed that the First World War officially ended on 11 November 1918, when the Armistice was signed in Ferdinand Foch’s private railway carriage. Except that this is not when the war was officially brought to an end: that would not happen until 28 June 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. And even then, the treaty did not come into effect until the following year, on 10 January 1920. So when did the war really end? As Trudi Tate frames it, ‘Wars continued after the war, in Poland, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere, and the peace settlements raised new sets of problems which contributed to the rise of fascism and another war in 1939.’8 Where Mirrlees’s Paris, set at the time of the Peace Conference, celebrates the peace that had followed the war, The Waste Land, written a little later after the full ramifications of the peace talks became clear, is haunted by an awareness that peace has not come so easily to Europe, and there is no easy way for ‘war’ to be ended and ‘peace’ to be established. Eliot’s opening note to ‘What the Thunder Said’ announces that one theme of this closing section is ‘the present decay of eastern Europe’.9 Stephen Spender noted that ‘it was of Europe, as much as London, that Eliot was thinking’ when he wrote The Waste Land, and that Eliot, through his work at the bank, ‘had considerable insight into the economic disaster – no mere abstraction but grim reality in the plight of refugees, the starvation of children – after 1918’.10 The

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poem recognizes London’s importance as not simply the heart of an empire but also the centre of trade and the capital city of a superpower that had played a decisive role in the outcome of the war. Spender notes that Eliot’s lines about the ‘hooded hordes swarming’ (l. 368)  reflect ‘the world of Kokoschka’s and Kathe Kollwitz’s posters of the period appealing for help for refugees’.11 This aspect of Eliot’s poem has gone largely unremarked, which is surprising given Eliot’s note pointing up the importance of post-war eastern Europe to the poem and the poem’s concern with not only eastern Europe but also displaced peoples and individuals. As Empson puts it, ‘London is regarded all through with fascination, astonishment or horror, a weird place of exile, shot through with occasional memories of a splendid past, and now insolently rotting away.’12 As well as the Smyrna merchant Mr Eugenides and Tiresias’ reference to Thebes, we have the countess Marie in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, while Eliot’s original drafts of the poem made it clear that he had ‘Polish plains’ in mind  – later altered to ‘endless plains’ (l. 369) in the final poem – for the scenes involving the ‘hooded hordes’ stumbling over ‘cracked earth’ (ll. 368–9).13 Much like the wanderer Odysseus or Ulysses, the various speakers in The Waste Land are uprooted: nomads, refugees or outsiders, members of a displaced people. Eleanor Cook draws our attention to the fact that The Waste Land is spoken from ‘the viewpoint of someone not at home in the world, a peregrine’; these multiple viewpoints in the poem include those of St Augustine, Ezekiel, Ovid and Dante.14 This list should also include those figures who appear in or on the fringes of the poem, figures who are also far from home: Phlebas the travelling Phoenician tradesman; Mr Eugenides from Smyrna, speaking French but in London; the speaker of l.  182 (‘By the waters of Leman’) who borrows from Psalm 137 about the Babylonian captivity and the life of exile; and the poem’s chief focalizer, Tiresias, who has been transported from ancient Thebes to modern London. But there are many more examples: the voice that speaks the line, ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch’ (l. 12), meaning ‘I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German’, encapsulates the same fluidity of national boundaries that we find throughout the poem. As Mirrlees had done with Paris, Eliot depicts London as a global city, a meeting of different nationalities and a window onto a rapidly changing international scene. But in Mirrlees’s Paris, the meeting of different nationalities had largely brought ‘concorde’ and cultural variety, rather than rootlessness. Eliot’s extensive knowledge of the consequences of the Paris Peace Conference means he would have been aware that such displaced peoples were plentiful in the years following the war. As Trudi Tate has observed,



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For many people, the suffering did not end with the war. The peace treaties reshaped the map of Europe, dismantling the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and creating a number of new nations, including Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Austria. While many people welcomed the independent nation-states, there was also a great deal of dissatisfaction with the new boundaries, drawn up in haste with much bickering among the victorious nations. Millions of people were displaced or rendered stateless by the treaties; this caused serious hardship and many people were forced to emigrate. To make matters worse, for some months after the Armistice of November 1918 Britain helped to maintain a blockade against central Europe, creating poverty and even starvation among civilians.15

‘Although it was not the poet’s intention’, Helen Gardner remarked, ‘The Waste Land voices the despairing sense that Europe had committed suicide in the 1914–18 war’.16 Gardner compares Eliot’s poem to Pound’s ‘There died a myriad’ lines from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in this respect. ‘Eliot was entitled to deny that he intended to express the disillusion of a generation, that his poem was intended to be topical’, she continues, before concluding, ‘but it is topical’.17 The eastern European connection in section V of the poem is reinforced by the allusions to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a novel about empire and trade as much as it is a purely ‘Gothic’ novel, with an eastern European title character. Of the ‘bats with baby faces’ (l. 379) which ‘crawled head downward down a blackened wall’ (l. 381) in ‘What the Thunder Said’, Ian Higgins has observed that this scene is ‘taken from the episode where Jonathan Harker is observing Dracula leaving his castle’.18 This entire portion of ‘What the Thunder Said’ (ll. 366–84) is inflected with eastern European significance, with Eliot’s use of the words ‘swarming’ and ‘hordes’ resembling the propaganda surrounding refugees fleeing westward in search of a new home, then and now. The influence which Eliot cites in his notes to the poem is Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (A Look into the Chaos), which he had read while convalescing at Lausanne, where he wrote ‘What the Thunder Said’. The passage Eliot cites, when translated into English, contains the observation that ‘half of Eastern Europe’ is ‘on the way toward chaos’ while engaging in drunken singing; the ‘offended bourgeois laughs over these songs’ but ‘the saint and seer hears them with tears’.19 Even the Joseph Conrad quotation which Eliot planned to use as epigraph to the poem, until he was convinced otherwise by Pound, is important here because it unites two of the most salient themes of the poem: empire and eastern Europe. Conrad, who had grown up in Russian-occupied Poland, understood the fragility of eastern Europe only too well, but, having lived under Russian occupation,

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he also understood something of the effects of imperialism, which feeds into his depiction of Belgian colonialism in Heart of Darkness. ‘He is, for one thing, the antithesis of Empire’, Eliot had written about Conrad in 1919, and Conrad’s ‘characters are the denial of Empire, of Nation, of Race almost, they are fearfully alone with the Wilderness’.20 Eliot was initially reluctant to give up Conrad as the provider of the epigraph to The Waste Land, responding to Pound’s suggestion: ‘It is much the most appropriate I  can find, and somewhat elucidative.’21 Yet he trusted Pound and replaced Conrad with Petronius, and a quotation from the Satyricon, foregrounding the classical rather than modern. And, as with Mauberley, the idea of the classical hero is important for any consideration of Eliot’s poem that seeks to account for the poet’s attitude to war and its aftermath, as well as some of the key themes that the poem conveys:  alienation and the sense of being lost and uprooted in the modern world.

Tracing Odysseus Odysseus lurks behind much of The Waste Land, a ghostly hero whose phantasmal presence is glimpsed in surprising places. That he is largely unseen, flickering only insubstantially on the margins of the text, is fitting for a poem that undoes the heroism and high nobility of the epic. Odysseus, so central to the opening section of Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and to James Joyce’s Ulysses, is not mentioned in the final version of The Waste Land, but initially the poem contained a long section containing a shipwreck, which was, as Eliot later acknowledged, ‘obviously inspired by the Ulysses episode in the Inferno’.22 In Canto 26 of the Inferno, Dante learns from his guide, Virgil, that Ulysses and Diomed are in hell for two reasons: for devising the trick involving the Trojan Horse, and for stealing statues during the war. That ‘wily Odysseus’ is not only a trickster but also a plunderer threatens his heroic status. Like Pound, Eliot turned to Odysseus (or Ulysses) as the archetypal post-war hero in European literature, but unlike Pound he went not to Homer but to Dante: the Dante passage more clearly and succinctly acknowledged that treachery and wrongdoing occurred among both the Greeks and the Trojans. ‘The greatest war poem of Europe is Homer’s Iliad’, Eliot asserted in a radio broadcast of 1942:  ‘it was not written during the Trojan War; and, although Homer was a Greek, I think that he makes the Greeks appear rather more unpleasant than the Trojans’.23 As Eliot observed in his 1951 radio broadcast on Virgil, the Roman poet ‘knew the case for the loser as well as the case for the winner’.24



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Eliot’s use of the Odysseus story has its source partly in the poem Ezra Pound had written five years earlier:  that third canto in which Odysseus descends into Hades to speak with Tiresias before beginning his journey home to Ithaca. Pound’s Canto III, published in Poetry in 1917, was intended to form part of Pound’s modern epic, The Cantos, a poem whose name was inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. This third canto, of course, also features Odysseus in the afterlife, much like Dante’s Canto 26, although the context for the two is different. Nevertheless, there are some key parallels. In both, Odysseus, the war hero of Homer’s epic poem, is being summoned from beyond the grave so that a poet might find his way ahead: Dante is trying to find his way through hell and towards paradise, while Pound and Eliot are both variously trying to use the literary tradition to point a way forward for the modernist mission. In his 1929 essay on Dante, Eliot said of the Ulysses episode in the Inferno that it was Dante’s ‘reconstruction of a legendary figure of ancient epic’ which contained ‘the quality of surprise which Poe declared to be essential to poetry’.25 There was clearly something in Dante’s Ulyssean ‘reconstruction’  – a word that implies not simple imitation but a certain amount of critique – that Eliot intended to incorporate, as a theme, into the original version of The Waste Land. Eleanor Cook has persuasively argued that, in writing The Waste Land, Eliot was influenced by The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written by the economist and member of Woolf ’s Bloomsbury Group, John Maynard Keynes. ‘I wonder if America realises how terrible the condition of central Europe is’, Eliot wrote to his mother in January 1920. ‘I have seen people who have been in Germany and they are most pessimistic about the future, not only of Germany, but of the world. They say that there is no hope unless the treaty is revised. I believe by the way that J. M. Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace is an important book.’26 Valerie Eliot pointed out that Eliot’s work at Lloyd’s Bank at this time involved him in ‘settling all the pre-War Debts between the Bank and Germans’.27 Cook argues that ‘a vision of Rome and the Roman Empire lies behind Eliot’s vision of London and the British Empire’ and that The Waste Land draws a parallel between modern-day London and ancient Rome, with Rome’s defeat of Carthage during the Punic Wars paving the way for the decline of the Roman Empire.28 The Waste Land, for Cook, is ‘not only a London poem’ but ‘also a European poem’:  it features a Mediterranean ‘map’ which ‘coincides roughly with the Roman Empire at its most expansive, and also with the theater of war during World War I’.29 Cook points out that in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes had used the phrase ‘Carthaginian Peace’ to refer to the Treaty of Versailles: Cook observes that this phrase allusively refers to ‘a peace settlement

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so punitive as to destroy the enemy entirely and even to make sterile the land on which he lives. What it does to the victor is another question’; in short, ‘a Carthaginian peace is one that slowly but surely deflects back upon the victor’.30 The idea that Eliot saw London as a latter-day Rome, the capital city of a vast empire, whose punishing defeat of an enemy state (Carthage for the Romans; Germany for London) will end up rebounding back upon Rome (or London) itself is reflected in the poem’s conflation of the land and the body: the Fisher King’s impotence is reflected by the sterility of the land, while the various stories of rape summoned in the poem, as I will argue later in this chapter, eventually recoil upon the perpetrator, leading to his own downfall. In her reading of the poem which sees London as a modern-day reincarnation of ancient Rome, Cook does not mention the ‘broken Coriolanus’ which the speaker of ‘What the Thunder Said’ sees revived ‘for a moment’ (l. 416), offering the temporary hope that the city may be saved from itself. Yet this reference to Coriolanus is important because it reminds us that The Waste Land is a hollowedout epic of a poem, an epic without a hero, and Coriolanus, in being both ‘broken’ and only temporarily revived, is the closest we get to the hero that the hour so clearly needs. In his 1919 essay on Hamlet, Eliot had declared Coriolanus to be, along with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s ‘most assured artistic success’.31 Coriolanus defied the government of his own city, being prepared to lead an army against it in order to salvage it from imminent ruin. Just as Odysseus and Aeneas are nowhere to be seen in The Waste Land, their presence only glimpsed indirectly behind the poem’s sources and allusions, so Coriolanus is summoned only to disappear again. Only Tiresias, the seer who prophesies the downfall or misfortunes the hero is to suffer, survives. Eliot’s allusion to Coriolanus takes us back to ancient Rome and invites us to see Eliot’s poem as acutely aware of the political and economic ramifications of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. It also means that the poem both reflects a fear of revolution and recognizes that only through considerable political upheaval can modern London be saved. But modern London, like The Waste Land itself, lacks a unifying hero, a strong military or political leader like Coriolanus, to bring about such change. For Hugh Kenner, Virgil’s Aeneid lurks behind the early drafts of The Waste Land: he proposed that Eliot ‘may well have had in mind at one time a kind of modern Aeneid, the hero crossing seas to pursue his destiny, detained by one woman and prophesied to by another, and encountering visions of the past and the future, all culminated in a city both founded and yet to be founded, unreal and oppressively real’.32 Like the Odyssey, Virgil’s epic is a post-war poem, detailing Aeneas’ adventures after the end of the Trojan War much as Homer’s epic had



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focused on Odysseus’ journey home following the same war. Eliot, writing in the immediate aftermath of war and with a detailed understanding of the economic consequences of not only peace but also war, appears to have turned to Virgil to find an ancient counterpart for what was going on in Europe in the wake of the First World War. Just as Joyce had turned to the Odyssey, Eliot initially turned to the Aeneid. The Ulysses passage from Dante, I would argue, served a similar purpose as he began to compose a long poem that would respond to contemporary events and attempt to capture the economic realities that he was confronting on an everyday basis in his role at Lloyd’s Bank, where he worked in the Foreign and Colonial department. Pound, in his original version of his third canto, had already shown how Odysseus could serve as a symbol for the modern poet, much as Joyce had shown Eliot how the story of Odysseus could be adapted for a modern narrative. But there are other reasons – political as well as literary – why Odysseus was important for the early drafts of The Waste Land, and, in fact, Odysseus survives into the finished poem – if only as a phantasm – in more ways than may at first be apparent. Eliot’s long section about the shipwreck off the New England coast, inspired by, although not itself about, the hardships suffered by Ulysses and his men, focuses on the disasters crews might face at sea:  ‘Thereafter everything went wrong.’33 But Tiresias, who foresaw this, is an important personage in the final poem, as Hugh Kenner pointed out: There are three principal stories about Tiresias, all of them relevant. In Oedipus Rex, sitting ‘by Thebes below the wall’ he knew why, and as a consequence of what violent death and what illicit amour, the pestilence had fallen on the unreal city, but declined to tell. In the Odyssey he ‘walked among the lowest of the dead’ and evaded predicting Odysseus’ death by water; the encounter was somehow necessary to Odysseus’ homecoming, and Odysseus was somehow satisfied with it, and did get home, for a while. In the Metamorphoses he underwent a change of sex for watching the coupling of snake: presumably the occasion on which he ‘foresuffered’ what is tonight ‘enacted on this same divan or bed’.34

But even Tiresias’ reference to having walked among the lowest of the dead takes us back to Odysseus, since it recalls the same scene from the Odyssey which Pound relates in the original version of his third canto and final version of Canto I, which tells of Odysseus’ journey to Hades to seek the counsel of the shade of Tiresias. Helen Gardner suspected that Tiresias ‘first came into the poem more from the Odyssey than from Ovid, and from the Odyssey via the first three cantos of Pound’s Cantos’ and that Eliot ‘assumed that the Tiresias of Sophocles, the

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Theban seer, burdened with knowledge that is of no avail … and the Tiresias whom Odysseus met in Hades, was the Tiresias that this readers, without the notes he later supplied, would recognise appearing at the poem’s centre’.35 What Eliot’s note quoting from Ovid’s Metamorphoses does is open out the poem’s use of Tiresias to encompass other meanings beyond the Sophoclean and Homeric ones latent already within the poem, as well as provide us with another figure of exile, Ovid himself. But it was the Tiresias of a cursed city living under a plague, and the Tiresias who warned Odysseus that he would suffer a perilous journey as he tried to make his way home, that Eliot principally appears to have had in mind when writing ‘The Fire Sermon’. The other characters who appear in the poem, when we bear in mind this Odyssean trace, take on even greater poignancy. Lil becomes a latterday Penelope, whose Odysseus  – Albert, the demobbed soldier whose return is discussed at the end of ‘A Game of Chess’ – falls short of the devotion and responsibility that characterize Homer’s epic figure. Instead of Telemachus, Lil has George  – her youngest son, whose birth she ‘nearly died of ’ (l. 160); she would have had another child, but she took abortifacient pills to ‘bring it off ’ (l. 159). The modern post-war world is a far cry from the post-war heroics of Odysseus and his patient wife and loyal son who maintained his home in his absence. Eliot’s remark about Tiresias in his notes to The Waste Land has been viewed as a retrospective attempt to unify the poem, but just as it is possible to exaggerate the sincerity of Eliot’s statement, it is also possible to downplay it. For even if the note is an afterthought, it may be that it was only after Eliot had finished the poem, and it had been edited into its final form by himself and Pound, that he was able to see clearly the prominent themes of the poem. Tiresias is a European character from the cradle of continental literature, Greek myth. He is also a prophet, a ‘seer’ who is physically blind but possesses the gift of ‘second sight’ or foresight. We would do well to remember Eliot’s italics: ‘What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.’36 Tiresias cannot see: he can only see. His gift is not for sight but for foresight. Keynes’s vision of post-war Europe in The Economic Consequences of the Peace was bleak: ‘There it is not just a matter of extravagance or “labour troubles”; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.’37 Keynes, who described himself as an ‘Englishman’ who ‘feels himself a European also’, depicts a present-day Europe of 1919 that is dying.38 Britain and London yet stand, but what Eliot did in The Waste Land, building on the implications of Keynes’s prognosis, was offer a future vision of a London that has followed mainland



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Europe into decay:  Britain, too, has become a ‘dying civilisation’. The Waste Land does not, then, merely collapse the boundaries between past and present through its various allusions and intertextual references:  it similarly blurs the boundaries between present and future. At some point we appear to leave the present world for an unspecific and ‘Unreal’ future time that has not yet arrived: Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal (ll. 373–6)

London is the last on this list but also, at the same time, not the last: it is ‘Unreal’ because its demise has not happened yet, although it is forecast. Tiresias the European has, in Eliot’s poem, come to London. The decay of Europe will lead to the decay of Britain. Eliot’s decision to replace Conrad with Petronius for his poem’s epigraph, however reluctantly, also raises further questions. Petronius’ Satyricon was a scurrilous retelling of Homer’s Odyssey:  David Musgrave has examined the interpenetrations between Homer, Petronius and Eliot, and notes that the Satyricon overturns Homer’s poem in that ‘homosexual love is substituted for heterosexual love, the triangle for the couple, realism for idealism’.39 Musgrave also enumerates some of the features of the Satyricon, including ‘a hero who flees his destiny for one who seeks it, the episodic structure, the immature and weak-willed hero, the shipwreck and the hero’s impending trial for murder’, pointing out that these are ‘all elements of the romance genre’.40 Several of these elements, such as the shipwreck and the episodic structure, also feature in The Waste Land, as does the ‘triangle’ being substituted for the ‘couple’, a feature Musgrave also identifies in the Satyricon:41 The Waste Land is a poem preoccupied with ‘the third who walks always beside you’ (l. 359), since as well as the allusion to the adulterous tale of Tristan und Isolde (ll. 31–4, 42), there are the lines about the ‘hyacinth girl’ (ll. 35–41), where ‘Hyacinths’ is suggestively capitalized to summon the classical love triangle between Hyacinth, Zephyr and Apollo; there is also the woman’s coveting of Lil’s husband, Albert (l. 149), in ‘A Game of Chess’. Musgrave proposes that The Waste Land is a latter-day Menippean satire, and quotes from Joel Relihan, who argues that the Satyricon is narrated by ‘a hypocrite and a fool who passively observes the decadent and fantastic scenes and society around him and who unites them through his wholly inadequate and comic attempts to understand them’.42 Reading The Waste

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Land as an out-and-out satire overlooks the extent to which the poem evolved during its long period of composition, although it is clear that Eliot initially conceived the poem as a satire in the tradition of Pope’s The Dunciad, as evinced by the early sections in heroic couplets. But Eliot’s choice of the Satyricon for his epigraph reveals the extent to which Odysseus remains as a trace element in the final poem, alongside the character of Tiresias and the remnants of the original Ulysses-inspired shipwreck. It is worth bearing in mind, too, that the lines from Petronius replaced Eliot’s original choice of epigraph, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: another narrative which implicitly rejects Homeric heroism and undermines the idea of the improving quest or noble ‘odyssey’. If we consider the significance of the epigraph from Petronius, the presence of Tiresias, and the excised section about the shipwreck, there is some reason to believe that although Odysseus (or Ulysses) is not named in the final version of The Waste Land, Eliot had Odysseus as well as Aeneas in mind when he was completing the poem, especially as he struggled to put it together in late 1921 and find an appropriate structure that would bring the various lyrics and scenes into a semi-cohesive whole. But Odysseus comes into the poem only in indirect ways: through Dante’s Inferno, Petronius’ Satyricon and the influence of Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. One other text can be added to this list: Joyce’s Ulysses. By the time he came to write The Waste Land, Eliot had already encountered Ulysses in serialized form in the Little Review and knew that Homer’s epic possessed the necessary archetypal weight to serve as scaffolding for a modern take on the city. As his ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ showed in 1923, Eliot viewed Joyce’s innovation as pivotal to the development of the longer modernist text, in Joyce’s case a novel, going so far as to argue that it had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery’.43 Helen Gardner identified the original, excised opening to ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, involving a night out in Boston, as ‘a bold but unsuccessful experiment, inspired by Ulysses, to see whether the kind of material Joyce was engaged in incorporating into the novel could be made available also for poetry’.44 In many ways, the pub conversation at the end of ‘A Game of Chess’ was Eliot’s more successful attempt to co-opt Joyce’s method for poetry. Second, it was Ezra Pound who chiefly guided Eliot regarding which sections of the poem should be cut and which should be preserved, and Pound – who was also responsible for getting Ulysses serialized in the Little Review – had already introduced Odysseus into the modernist long poem in his own Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, as discussed in the previous chapter. Leah Culligan Flack has noted that ‘Pound’s editorial suggestions for The Waste Land provide some context for his understanding of Tiresias in the modern world’, with Pound’s annotations on



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the poem’s drafts suggesting that ‘he sees Eliot as Tiresias’.45 While Pound had seen himself as Odysseus in Mauberley, he saw Eliot as Odysseus’ adviser and guide in The Waste Land (in an ironic role reversal, given Pound’s invaluable editorial guidance on Eliot’s poem). It is unlikely that Pound could have read Eliot’s drafts of ‘The Fire Sermon’ featuring Tiresias without recalling his own third canto from four years before, in which Odysseus, not Tiresias, had ‘walked among the lowest of the dead’. If the Odyssey is Western literature’s first great post-war poem, Virgil’s Aeneid may well be the second. And even the finished version of The Waste Land carries strong suggestions of the Odyssey: Tiresias’ reference to having ‘walked among the lowest of the dead’ (l. 246) reminds us of the passage in Homer’s poem when Odysseus travels to the Underworld to receive Tiresias’ counsel, while the ‘oneeyed merchant’ (l. 52) in Madame Sosostris’ pack of Tarot cards summons the one-eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus, who imprisons Odysseus and his crew. The oneeyed merchant returns as Mr Eugenides in ll. 209–14 of ‘The Fire Sermon’, where he is described as ‘the Smyrna merchant’ (l. 209), drawing links between him and the ancient Mediterranean (Smyrna was effectively destroyed in 1922, the year that The Waste Land was published). Eliot’s notorious note to the poem about Tiresias has often been viewed as a bit of retrospective leg-pulling: Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias.46

Ferdinand, from The Tempest, is also subtly linked to Odysseus by his being, like Telemachus, another dutiful son who waits on an island, not knowing whether his father is alive or whether he has ceased to be a prince and become king, taking his father’s place. In such a way, Eliot is able to use literary allusion to create the equivalent in poetry of what James Frazer had done in The Golden Bough:  to suggest the simultaneous presence of different periods of European history, like viewing various geological strata in one piece of rock. Such an understanding of literary tradition was in Eliot’s mind when, in the year he decided to turn his mind to the task of writing a long poem, 1919, he wrote ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature

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Eliot’s acknowledgement that the European literary tradition begins with Homer is especially significant given the extent to which the Homeric archetype of Odysseus inhabits The Waste Land, a flickering figure on the margins of the poem. Eliot’s Phoenicians are partly inspired by Virgil’s, but it would be a mistake to conclude that they stem solely from the Aeneid. For the unfortunate drowned sailor of ‘Death by Water’, who is a Phoenician, was appended to the longer drafts which were inspired by the story of Ulysses from Dante’s Inferno, rather than coming directly from Virgil’s poem. Ulysses, not Aeneas, was the hero Eliot was using as his guide when he lifted the lines about Phlebas from the French poem in which they first appeared, Eliot’s own ‘Dans le Restaurant’, and added them to the end of the lines about the shipwreck. In Homer’s Odyssey, as Carol Dougherty has observed, Phoenician sailors are depicted as untrustworthy traders and pirates, and it seems to be this mercantile (and even mercenary) characteristic to the Phoenicians which led Eliot to include them in his poem, as it became clear to him and Pound that trade and economics were emerging as salient themes of The Waste Land.48 Dido and the other Phoenicians who appear in the Aeneid do not put us in mind of trade to the same extent as Homer’s poem does. Writing in 1908, T.  E. Hulme, paraphrasing G.  K. Chesterton, observed of the key difference between old and new poetry that ‘where the old dealt with the Siege of Troy, the new attempts to express the emotions of a boy fishing’.49 The Waste Land might be said to inhabit the space between these two extremes, much as its length places it between the full epic and the miniature and relatively trivial observations of the imagists. Helen Gardner pointed out that the Fisher King does not ‘appear in the final version any more than he did in the first draft’ and that in the finished poem ‘we have only the image of a man fishing’.50 Although Eliot initially included a reference to the ‘fisher King’ in the Tarot section, he subsequently deleted it, perhaps realizing that intimating the myth was more useful than naming it. The Fisher King, in Gardner’s phrase, is ‘behind, not within the poem’.51 The same can be said of Odysseus, another



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‘fisher-king’ of sorts, who also haunts The Waste Land at the level of the poem’s imagery and references. In the opening part of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound, casting himself as a modern-day Odysseus, had described how he had ‘fished by obstinate isles’.52 Odysseus was a king, the ruler of Ithaca, the island where Penelope and Telemachus awaited his return. If he is not the wounded Fisher King of Arthurian legend, Odysseus was nevertheless another fisherking archetype Eliot drew upon when he decided to use the Arthurian figure to suggest a mythic framework for his poem, borrowing this idea from Joyce, who had used Homer’s Odysseus as his archetype. As Eliot acknowledged in his preface to the Notes appended to The Waste Land, his source for the Fisher King story was Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance; when discussing the myth of the Fisher King, Weston had referred to Odysseus: The same idea seems to have prevailed in early Greece; Mr A.  B. Cook, in his studies on The European Sky-God, remarks that the king in early Greece was regarded as the representative of Zeus:  his duties could be satisfactorily discharged only by a man who was perfect, and without blemish, i.e., by a man in the prime of life, suffering from no defect of body, or mind; he quotes in illustration the speech of Odysseus (Od. 19. 109 ff.). ‘Even as a king without blemish, who ruleth god-fearing over many mighty men, and maintaineth justice, while the black earth beareth wheat and barley, and the trees are laden with fruit, and the flocks bring forth without fail, and the sea yieldeth fish by reason of his good rule, and the folk prosper beneath him.’ The king who is without blemish has a flourishing kingdom, the king who is maimed has a kingdom diseased like himself, thus the Spartans were warned by an oracle to beware of a ‘lame reign’.53

Here, Odysseus’ concept of the good ruler is intrinsically linked to a good harvest, with a spotless and just king inspiring abundant crops and fertility across his land. Since Eliot read Weston’s book shortly before he began to put the pieces of The Waste Land together, the link between Joyce’s mythic key of Odysseus/Ulysses and the mythic potential of the Fisher King motif may have helped him decide upon this Arthurian legend as the mythical basis for his poem. Once again, the Fisher King can be viewed as an example of the timeless and temporal existing together, as a form of this ‘mythic strata’ which reveals one literary history and tradition layered upon another:  the speaker in ‘The Fire Sermon’ who fishes ‘in the dull canal’ (l. 189) is a latter-day Fisher King of medieval legend, but the medieval fisherman is himself a reincarnation of that ancient ‘fisher-king’, Odysseus.

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What has changed, however, is the king’s wounds. The key difference between Odysseus and the Fisher King of the Grail legend is that Odysseus is not wounded, symbolically or otherwise. There remains a curious triangulation between Odysseus, the Fisher King and The Waste Land: Eliot seized upon the Fisher King legend because he wanted a mythic framework to draw together the different episodes of his poem, just as Joyce had used the story of Odysseus for the same purpose in his novel Ulysses. But what emerges is a wounded version of the spotless king. Like so many of the allusions in The Waste Land, the classical legend is given a perverse and corrupting twist, with the heroic archetype of Odysseus giving way to the impotent figure from Arthurian legend. When Odysseus returns home at the end of Homer’s poem, it is to find that Penelope, his queen and wife, has helped to defend his land and home. The land of Eliot’s poem has already succumbed to the threats that plague it, and the women of the poem are not strong enough to resist the sexual predations of the male figures such as Tereus, the young man carbuncular or Sweeney. What had been comic and communal for Joyce became tragic and pessimistic in Eliot’s poem. In allowing Odysseus the spotless Fisher King to mutate and decay into the blemished Fisher King, Eliot tacitly offered a commentary on the decline from the heroic age into the age of decadence and sterility which his poem captures throughout.

The demise of the body ‘I think young Eliot is the first person I  should like to have confer with you’, Pound wrote to John Quinn on 11 August 1915. ‘He has more entrails than might appear from his quiet exterior.’54 The choice of ‘entrails’ over the more usual ‘guts’ reinvigorates the cliché, implying not so much courage as substance, or even classical groundedness over romantic ‘heart’. This was also the beginning of a long succession of corporeal references Pound would make to Eliot which centre on bodily waste and excreta, on the darker or less ‘romantic’ aspects of the human body. When he wrote to Eliot to congratulate him on the completion of The Waste Land, Pound prophesied his own future behaviour, which would see him ‘lie like a shit-arse and say “Art shd. embellish the umbelicus” ’.55 To the same letter, he appended some lines of bawdy verse (omitted from the original selection of Pound’s letters) which include a reference to ‘the upjut of his sperm’ and entreats, ‘Grudge not the oyster his stiff saliva’.56 This focus on the excretory and scatological alongside the sexual is fitting, since The Waste Land is itself a



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poem that is peculiarly interested in bodily wastes and what bodies do, whether rotting in the ocean or slowly decaying in a bottle or cage, like the Sibyl at Cumae. Bodies are everywhere in The Waste Land, and not just dead ones: next to the ‘white bodies naked on the low damp ground’ (l. 193) we can place Stetson’s ‘corpse’ (etymologically related to the corporeal) and the body of Phlebas the Phoenician but also the discussion concerning Lil’s living body in ‘A Game of Chess’ and the wounded body of the Fisher King. Through the Fisher King myth the weakened body is related to the weakened land, and, developing this association, we might say that the poem’s ‘waste land’ is linked to bodies that are, first and foremost, full of waste. The Waste Land is preoccupied with what comes out of people, whether it is Lil’s five children viewed as so much bodily excreta, the contents of those suspiciously prophylactic ‘other testimon[ies] of summer nights’ floating on the Thames (l. 179), or the urine and spit that, in the poem’s original draft, the spotty young man deposits by the stable after he leaves the typist’s home.57 The lavatorial anagram of Eliot’s authorial name as he chose to formulate it for publication – ‘T. S. Eliot’ – is here even more fitting than we might first imagine, especially when we bear in mind that Eliot described the writing of poetry as ‘almost a kind of defecation’, as having ‘something inside me that I want to get rid of ’.58 The infamous ‘Fresca’ section of the poem’s early drafts, in which she ‘slips softly to the needful stool’, is only one example of the poem’s fixation on bodily fluids, defecation, wastes, lavatories and sewage, which, once it has been acknowledged  – and the extent to which The Waste Land is a ‘waste’ poem becomes far clearer when we view the evolution of the poem and study its various drafts – comes to infect other portions of the poem with suggestive new meanings.59 The ‘Sweet Thames’ is decidedly not sweet, especially in the wake of the Great Stink of 1858, which had brought out into the open the extent of the capital’s sewage problem: Bazalgette’s large-scale sewage system dealt with the technical practicalities of this problem, but the odour, we might say, remains. The chair on which the lady sits at the beginning of ‘A Game of Chess’ may not be a toilet, but she is at her toilet, in a pointed response to Belinda in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, and the ‘strange synthetic perfumes’ (l. 87) surrounding her are there to drown the sense in ‘odours’ (l. 89) and mask the ‘hearty female stench’ that the drafts referred to.60 The woman’s ‘burnished throne’ (l. 77), co-opted from Antony and Cleopatra, even resonates with its newer, slang meaning of ‘lavatory’, a meaning which was certainly current by 1921, and is present in Joyce’s Ulysses, another modernist work which takes us into the smallest room: ‘In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last. … With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne.’61 With such scatological

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meanings accruing to the poem, the ‘dull canal’ (l. 189) behind the ‘gashouse’ (l. 190) seems like an especially inopportune place to go fishing. In 1915, Eliot wrote a poem, ‘Introspection’, which offered an unusual and distinctive anti-romantic metaphor for the human mind, casting it ‘six feet deep’ in a ‘cistern’, with ‘a brown snake’ devouring its own tail, like the mythical serpent Ouroboros.62 Under pressure from this ‘cistern’, it is possible to see this brown snake as symbolic of the grubby business of navel-gazing  – literally directing one’s gaze towards the site of one’s entrails – and the supposedly Romantic idea of introspection as bound up with the dirty work of purgation that the body, as well as the mind, has to perform. The ‘brown snake’ in the water begins to look like an even more grotesque image than it first did. (If so, then the empty cisterns mentioned in ‘What the Thunder Said’ may also resonate with a secondary meaning.) We see such scatological preoccupations in Eliot’s infamous Bolo and Columbo verses, which he sent to Wyndham Lewis in the hope that Lewis would include them in Blast; Lewis declined to publish them with unexpurgated swear words.63 Lyndall Gordon has noted Eliot’s ‘ruthless rejection of the body’s uncleanness’ and his ‘fierce disgust for the flesh’.64 And it is important that it is the body, not just women’s bodies. The Waste Land confronts us with stories about men raping women (Tereus and Philomel); men engaging in paid sex with women (the ‘nymphs’, Sweeney and Mrs Porter); and men taking advantage of women (the clerk and the typist). But this only tells part of the story: all bodies, male and female, are weak, de-romanticized, robbed of their power in The Waste Land. Rape has taken place, but in the stories The Waste Land references, such egregious crimes rebound upon the male perpetrator: the Fisher King’s wound is the result of the rape of women at his court, and Tereus is fed his son, Itys, by his wife Procne after she discovers that he has raped her sister, Philomela. Such appalling crimes have debilitating consequences for those who commit them. As the sexual impotence of the Fisher King and the wrinkled breasts of Tiresias reveal, masculinity is a fragile and broken thing in the poem, and this frailty is frequently focused on the body and on bodily acts such as sex. The three Thames-daughters whose voices we hear at the end of ‘The Fire Sermon’ are wronged, seduced or ‘fallen’ women, but the seduction has not been a simple case of gains for one party and losses for the other: ‘After the event / He wept’ (ll. 297–8), one of the women tells us. The (presumably) male speaker who responds to the words of the ‘hyacinth girl’ in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ displays a similarly brittle masculinity, being unable to speak or see clearly, unsure of whether he is even living or dead, and certain only of the fact that he ‘knew



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nothing’ (l. 40). Phlebas was ‘once handsome and tall’ (l. 321) but is now in a similar condition to the hyacinth girl’s companion. Death has robbed him of knowledge or memory of anything, whether the sound of gulls or the profits and losses of his trade, but he is similarly neither living nor dead, since Eliot’s strange wording implies that it took him a fortnight of being dead to forget these things, and even now – in death – he is passing ‘the stages of his age and youth’ (l. 317), as if his whole life is belatedly passing before his eyes: as Helen Gardner reminds us, a ‘sailors’ superstition’ maintains that ‘this always happens to the drowning’.65 Such fragile masculinities, which affect the physical composition and behaviour of the men involved, run deeper than these few examples. The Thames-daughter who declares that she can connect ‘Nothing with nothing’ (l. 302) speaks in a voice which is as much Eliot’s voice as it is a woman’s, as if he is performing a Tiresias-like act of gender- and narrative-appropriation: after all, we know that Eliot convalesced at Margate following his nervous breakdown. These words also take us back to the male speaker in ‘A Game of Chess’, whose double-nothing assertion, ‘Nothing again nothing’ (l. 120), had been in response to his female companion’s query about the noise of the wind. This male speaker, we are invited to infer, is a survivor of the war, perhaps a shell shock or PTSD victim: his cryptic reference to ‘rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones’ (ll. 115–16) summons the lost bodies of men in the trenches of the Western Front, suggesting that he is doomed to relive his experiences, much like Septimus Smith in Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway three years later. Even the ‘young man carbuncular’, who is filled with ‘assurance’ (l. 232), is reduced to a pathetic pawn in the chessgame of moving automata that constitutes the modern world, his mechanical act of lovemaking (if such it can even be called) culminating in him groping his way home in the dark. Eliot’s ironic allusion to Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’ is as much a jibe at him as it is a reflection on the typist’s willingness to give up her virtue too readily: he is hardly the great seducer or cad of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. Nearly 30 years before Philip Larkin offered his vision of such a wrongful seduction in his poem ‘Deceptions’, Eliot’s young clerk, too, has been proved to be more deceived than the woman he has ‘ruined’. It is well known that Eliot’s poetry reflects the horror of the female body, and The Waste Land in particular is plagued by a fear of conception, childbirth and reproduction. For although the central motif of the poem is sterility or barrenness, as its title makes clear, there is a sense that the alternative – a world of abundance and, to borrow Eliot’s word, ‘Polyphiloprogenitive’ attitudes – is scarcely preferable.66 Indeed, the poem is less about the horror of sterility and

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waste than it is about the horror of fecundity amid the waste. The poem opens at a time of fertility and rebirth, a time of ‘breeding’ as the first line has it, yet this is seen as ‘the cruellest month’ (l. 1), and the rest of the poem is shot through with negative portrayals of fertility, childbearing and fruitfulness. The speaker who responds to the hyacinth girl is rendered speechless and confused by the vision of her ‘arms full’ of hyacinths and her ‘hair wet’ (ll. 37–8), as if paralysed by this image of fertile beauty; it is significant that they are returning from a garden, a site of fruitfulness which takes us back to the very first man and woman in the Book of Genesis, contrasting sharply with the previous section inspired by another Old Testament book, Ezekiel, with its ‘red rock’ (ll. 25–6) and ‘handful of dust’ (l. 30). In addition to Lil’s unwanted pregnancies and the threat of paternity payments encoded in the reference to the ‘heirs of City directors’ having ‘left no addresses’ (ll. 180–1), the cryptic lines in ‘What the Thunder Said’ about the ‘awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract’ as a result of which ‘we have existed’ (ll. 403–5) invite us to see the poem as a reflection of the age-old anxiety about bringing children into a dangerous and uncertain world. It was Vivienne who suggested the addition of the line to the pub conversation in ‘A Game of Chess’: ‘What you get married for if you don’t want children?’ (l. 164). Even the final line of this section, in alluding to Ophelia’s farewell words in Hamlet, reminds us of Hamlet’s treatment of her earlier in the play, and his harsh words which contributed to her madness, words which had specifically cast her, and all women, as breeders of men: ‘Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.’67 Similarly, the proliferation conveyed by the word ‘swarming’ to describe the ‘hordes’ from eastern Europe suggests that, counterbalancing the aridity and sterility of the desert land, there is a fertile abundance discernible among the waste, but it is an abundance of people and things which are inevitably viewed with suspicion or regret. The homorhyme of ‘so many/so many’ in Eliot’s lines about the crowd flowing over London Bridge is meant to put us in mind of death more than the living – ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’  – but Eliot’s repetition of ‘so many’ at the end of the two successive lines invites a different inflection, with the emphasis being on the fact that there are so many among the living who have been affected by death. As elsewhere in the poem, death and life are inextricably conjoined. As well as being foregrounded in the poem’s famous first line, the idea of ‘breeding’ also appears in the excised lines from the drafts about London:



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London, the swarming life you kill and breed, Huddled between the concrete and the sky, Responsive to the momentary need, Vibrates unconscious to its formal destiny68

The ‘swarming’ that will be retained in the poem is that of those hooded hordes from the east, but the above lines contain an implicit nod to the war, and to the ‘baby boom’ that followed: post-war London was a space marked by memories of those who had given their lives in the conflict, but also by a mass increase in population. ‘The largest “birth bulge” experienced in Britain occurred between 1918 and 1920’, Christina R.  Victor observes; this ‘post-First World War baby boom was larger than that which occurred after the Second World War’.69 Catherine Gallagher has charted modernism’s interest in ‘the Malthusian obsession with fertility’, and The Waste Land, far from being the deserted land we might expect from the poem’s title, is in fact a poem teeming with life, reminding us of the crowded state of the metropolis, whether it is the small bedsit occupied by the typist (whose divan, we learn in l. 226, doubles up as her bed) to the ‘crowds of people, walking round in a ring’ whom Madame Sosostris sees (l. 56).70 In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes had summoned the state of post-war Europe: ‘The war had so shaken this system as to endanger the life of Europe altogether. A great part of the Continent was sick and dying; its population was greatly in excess of the numbers for which a livelihood was available; its organization was destroyed, its transport system ruptured, and its food supplies terribly impaired.’71 Eliot was all too aware of the cramped spaces of overpopulated London:  at Lloyd’s Bank he worked in underground offices, while his early poetry about the city hints at the idea of overcrowding in the ‘basement kitchens’ of ‘Morning at the Window’ and the ‘thousand furnished rooms’ of ‘Preludes’.72 Such hopes of ‘a new start’, of course, depend in The Waste Land on transcending the body, as exemplified by the fire sermon’s emphasis on bodily negation in order to attain spiritual enlightenment. Comparing Eliot with an unlikely contemporary Marie Stopes, whose Married Love was published in 1918, Aimee Armande Wilson has recently argued that ‘Eliot and Stopes expressed contrasting views on the role of sex and the body within religion’, since whereas ‘Stopes saw sex as an act that draws humans closer to god’, conversely ‘enlightenment in The Waste Land brings with it disembodiment’ and so ‘the problem of incessant pregnancy will presumably disappear in a rejuvenated modernity’.73 Wilson also observes of the closing section of ‘A Game of Chess’

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that it ‘emphasizes the degeneracy of the rapidly reproducing poor masses’ and ‘we are not encouraged to sympathize with’ Lil in this scene.74 But once again, the poem invites neither sympathy nor disdain: the allusion to Ophelia’s last words in the final line of ‘A Game of Chess’ is poised between identification (Lil, like Ophelia, is a woman cruelly undone by the men around her and for whom death is seen as the only escape) and distinction (Ophelia’s words have a grandeur which these working-class women, who elide ‘Good night’ into ‘Goonight’, so markedly lack). Eliot’s poem expresses a fear of proliferation and reproduction, but such fear is not centred merely on copulation, since it also takes in concerns over population growth and immigration. Eliot’s later remarks in After Strange Gods (1934), about the invasion of ‘foreign races’ to the United States and his belief in the importance of a native tradition,75 as well as his division of Londoners, in a letter of June 1919 to Lytton Strachey, into ‘supermen, termites and wireworms’, suggest that Eliot viewed the city as a teeming metropolis full of swarming creatures of different classes, with the Nietzschean inflection of ‘supermen’ reinforcing the superiority of certain Londoners over others.76 In the same letter, Eliot states that he is ‘sojourning among the termites’, implying that he viewed his own true social position as among the supermen, and his time among the ‘termites’ is merely temporary. As well as the scatological and bodily language Pound used in his letters to Eliot about the completion of The Waste Land, both poets adopted the metaphor of delivering a baby when discussing their work on the poem. Gabrielle McIntire has remarked upon this, noting the ‘reciprocal feminization’ found in the letters the two men wrote to each other about the completion of the poem.77 But Pound was not the only one to respond to the drafts of The Waste Land and to help Eliot edit them, nor was he the first, and Vivienne’s own, earlier comments on the drafts are often eclipsed by discussion of the importance of Pound’s advice and deletions. Pound’s input was more crucial to the editing process, but his were by no means the only important interventions. Even the physical appearance of the surviving drafts, where Vivienne’s comments are made in faint grey pencil while Pound’s annotations, made in darker pencil, are far more prominent, encourage us to see Pound as the sole editor of the poem, when in fact Eliot himself made the decision to cut several passages, such as the original opening lines about a night out in Boston.78 Vivienne’s feedback was important during the earlier stages of the poem’s composition, until Pound performed his ‘caesarean Operation’ during the winter of 1921–2.79 ‘I have done a rough draft of part III’, Eliot wrote to Sydney Schiff from Lausanne in early November 1921, ‘but do not



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know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivienne’s opinion as to whether it is printable’.80 The revisions of ‘A Game of Chess’ are thus almost palimpsestic, with Eliot’s typescript of this section of the poem first being handed to Vivienne before Vivienne’s annotated copy was passed to Pound. There was also some tension between Vivienne’s advice and Pound’s:  Jewel Spears Brooker points out that, while Vivienne’s advice to her husband was to ‘be personal’, this ‘was countered by Pound’s frequent reminders to be impersonal’.81 On the verso of one page of the poem’s typescript, Vivienne wrote in pencil: ‘Make any of these alterations – or none if you prefer.’82 Like Pound, Vivienne was reluctant to do more than suggest, although Pound was more insistent when advancing some of his recommendations. But it is important that Eliot, who saw talent in his wife although she was not an established poet like Pound, should have taken on board her suggestions so readily. There were, then, three people who delivered the ‘baby’ that was The Waste Land into the world. Pound’s depiction of his and Eliot’s collaboration on the poem as a ‘caesarean Operation’ – with the near-imperial adjective being reduced to a lower-case initial letter while ‘Operation’ is upgraded to capital status  – entails, as Gabrielle McIntire has argued, a studied avoidance of the female genitalia.83 Since Pound knew that Vivienne had commented on early drafts of the poem, his casting of himself as a midwife helping to deliver Eliot’s poem leads us to wonder how he viewed Eliot’s wife in this relationship. If Eliot was the mother of the poem, is Vivienne rendered irrelevant and unnecessary? The cross-gender casting of Eliot as the mother to the reluctant baby of the poem, and Pound as the midwife presiding over its delivery, echo the androgynous status of Tiresias but also imply a certain loss of masculine power, a loss for which Pound’s reference, in the same letter, to ejaculation (‘the upjut of his sperm’) is meant to compensate. But it is too late: as Pound’s struggle to undertake further work on the Cantos since 1917 demonstrates, Odysseus cannot play a starring role in the modern epic poem, and instead Tiresias is left prophesying to no one.

The unheroic couplet As well as using Odysseus and other figures from epic poetry for ironic ends, modernism’s antiepic poetry also undid the heroic at the level of form and rhyme. Eliot’s early drafts of the poem, including his pastiche of the mockheroic couplets of Alexander Pope, can be understood as an early attempt to find a suitably wry way of reflecting the loss of faith in heroism, of the grandeur

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and nobility of human behaviour, that was widespread after the war. But Pound was right to advise Eliot to delete these. Mock-heroic poetry was sufficient for Alexander Pope to convey the degraded nature of modern civilization in the eighteenth century, but Eliot’s generation, who had just come out of a war waged on an industrial scale, needed something not mock-heroic so much as antiheroic. Eliot found a way to convey this at the level of rhyme by eschewing the mock-heroic couplet of Pope – rhyming ‘obey’ bathetically with ‘tea’, for example, as in The Rape of the Lock: Eliot has ‘tray’ and ‘tea’ in the original drafts – and employing instead what we might call the unheroic couplet, whereby the second rhyme complements the first, not by chiming with it, but by simply repeating it.84 The unheroic couplet, which utilizes the homorhyme I discussed in the first chapter, conveys the empty feeling engendered by the fallout from the war, and the sense of paralysis being felt. How such homorhyme fits alongside a discussion of war can be glimpsed by turning to another poet who utilized this device around the same time as Eliot. Born in Gloucester in 1890, Ivor Gurney served in the war from 1915 until 1917; he would spend most of his final years in the City of London Mental Hospital, dying in 1937. Among his manuscripts dating from the period 1922–5, between the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’, there is an undated poem, titled ‘To God’. The poem, written while Gurney was incarcerated in Stone House in Dartford, Kent, captures the poet’s pain and frustration at living with what would now probably be diagnosed as bipolar disorder; he was initially diagnosed with ‘deferred shell-shock’.85 Gurney refers to ‘the intolerable insults put on my whole soul, / Of the soul loathed, loathed, loathed of the soul’; the poem concludes with an impassioned cry about the ‘cruelty of man, on man, / Not often such evil guessed as between man and man’.86 ‘To God’ is a powerful poem about mental illness, and Gurney has been overlooked in this respect as in many others: his is an important voice in understanding the minds of men who had experienced the war, although memories of the war do not appear to have been the chief cause of Gurney’s distress. ‘To God’ is a cry for help, written by someone confined within ‘four walls’: a mental as well as literal prisoner, locked within, and unable to free himself from, the confines of his own mind. The homorhymes in Gurney’s poem of ‘soul’/‘soul’ and ‘man’/‘man’ grimly acknowledged the poet’s own inability to think beyond, much less to escape, the walls of his own consciousness. The homorhyme performs a similar function in The Waste Land. This was touched upon in the first chapter, but what was used by D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford and others prior to Eliot attains new significance in Eliot’s poem. Again, examining the evolution of the poem from its early drafts



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to the finished version helps us to understand the peculiar role performed by homorhyme in the poem. The examples that appear in the final poem include: There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) (ll. 25–6) A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. (ll. 62–3) And no rock If there were rock (ll. 346–7) We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison (ll. 413–14)

In each of these examples, there is an inability to get beyond an impasse, or even think of getting beyond it: ‘If there were water’, ‘if there were rock’, the speaker begins in ‘What the Thunder Said’, but never finishes articulating this thought. The stuttering near-aphasia of       If there were  water And no rock If there were rock And also water (ll. 345–8)

Threatens to descend into gibberish, as the parched speaker gapes at the vanity of imagining the prospect of water: if there were water without rock, or if there were water among the rocks, either of those situations would be tolerable, although we are left to infer this, rather than having it explicitly stated. Instead, the lines are elliptical: ‘If there were water … But there is no water’ (ll. 346, 358). These instances of homorhyme – and they are by no means the only examples, for we will find other examples of repeated words concluding lines of the poem elsewhere, such as the recurring ‘mountains’, ‘water’, ‘rock’ and ‘beside you’ used in ‘What the Thunder Said’ – are part of the poem’s stylistic composition, one of its signature details that help to enact one of the poem’s principal themes at a local or miniature level. One reason why Eliot’s decision to end two successive lines with the same word or phrase is so effective is that it subverts the mockheroic rhyming couplets that were present in some of the poem’s earliest drafts,

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most notably in the excised Fresca section. Eliot realized that the mock-heroic couplet of Pope’s Dunciad or The Rape of the Lock was just as inappropriate for the poem he was writing, as he abandoned the exclusively satirical mode of the early drafts and began to write in a range of modes, including the tragic and allegorical. Here, as with many things, Pound helped Eliot to make up his mind: Eliot later recalled that Pound advised him, ‘Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope  – and you can’t.’87 In the Paris Review in 1959, Eliot added that Pound advised him to ‘Do something different’.88 What Eliot did with such examples was take the idea of the (mock-)heroic couplet and imbue it with a quality which at once disrupted the notion of conventional rhyme present at numerous other points in the poem and reflected the sense of mental deadlock and physical stasis which afflicts so many of the speakers of the poem. The formulation of this signature feature of the poem’s style can be found among the drafts of The Waste Land, showing that Eliot initially planned to include more examples: ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? Think. I never know what you are thinking. Think.’89

In this early draft of ‘A Game of Chess’, which was originally called ‘In the Cage’ as if to reinforce the sense of psychological and spiritual imprisonment, Eliot crossed out that first ‘Think’ and replaced it with ‘What?’90 It remains unclear whether he accidentally typed ‘Think’ – knowing it was to crown the following line, his mind jumping one line ahead  – or whether he planned to create a conscious homorhyme of ‘Think’/‘Think’. There is no way to know what he was thinking of (what thinking? Think), but if it had been an unconscious slip, it is decidedly ironic that it occurred on this very word. We also find examples of the unheroic couplet in the two largely discarded ‘death’ pieces among the poem’s manuscript drafts, titled ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ and ‘The Death of the Duchess’. In the first of these, Eliot makes reference to the ‘shadow of this grey rock’,91 where the ‘grey rock’/‘grey rock’ homorhyme served as inspiration for ll. 25–6 of the eventual poem; we also read of Narcissus’ ‘ancient beauty / Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty’ and are told that Narcissus believed he had once been a tree, ‘Twisting its branches among each other / And tangling its roots among each other’.92 ‘The Death of the Duchess’, which focuses on characters whom Jewel Spears Brooker describes as ‘automatons in “silk hats” ’,93 has an unheroic triplet involving tea:



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On Sunday afternoon go out to tea On Saturday have tennis on the lawn, and tea On Monday to the city, and then tea.94

This seems a forerunner to the ‘hot water at ten’ section from ‘A Game of Chess’ and exposes the mundane and repetitive nature of upper-middle-class life before the war, and the complacency which the war had helped to reveal as a sham. Here, the homorhyme is far more effective than Eliot’s rhyming couplets from his early drafts written in the mock-heroic mode, precisely because the lines are imbued with a deeper sense of tragedy, even nihilism, in the face of a worldview irrevocably altered by recent events.

Tuning in to the past Like Paris, The Waste Land is a poem full of satirical potential. Its eventual epigraph was taken not from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but from Petronius’ irreverent comic novel Satyricon, a work of ribald fiction composed against the backdrop of Nero’s decadent court. The change of heart, at Pound’s suggestion, is telling. Hugh Kenner pointed out that the poem began as an urban satire in the tradition of eighteenth-century Augustan poets, but as it developed, the poem took a different turn.95 It is difficult to know how firmly we should take the poem as a cri de coeur or voice of despair, as Margaret Dickie has brilliantly observed of the opening images in ‘The Fire Sermon’: Eliot has fixed the references to the Fisher King and the Grail legend in a setting of modern urban squalor to force another contrast, pointing to the hopelessness of redemption in the modern world. But there are also countermovements to that logic: the original fishing, the lovemaking, and the washing of the feet are all spring rites, and if their form is possible in the modern world, perhaps their value might be restored, so that there is the possibility of continuity as well as discontinuity here.96

Fishing, lovemaking and feet-washing can also be made to resonate with specifically Christian significance, when we recall St Peter, the Song of Solomon, and Christ’s washing of his apostles’ feet after the Last Supper. And this is what makes the tone of The Waste Land difficult to decipher:  its references pull us one way and then in the opposite direction, with some images and allusions seemingly pulling us in two contradictory directions at once.

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It is worth considering the opening to ‘The Fire Sermon’ in this regard. It is tempting to see Eliot’s description of the river as an example of his technique, seen throughout The Waste Land, of unfavourably comparing the modern world with various bygone golden ages from history: here, as later in ‘The Fire Sermon’, the golden age in question being the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth I, where Spenser’s refrain ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I  end my song’ is quoted in ll. 176 and 183. Certainly a modern poet like Eliot could use an epithet like ‘Sweet Thames’ to describe the sewage-filled river only ironically, and so a contrast between values is being implied: by extension, we are invited to compare the context for Spenser’s original poem from which this refrain is taken  – his Prothalamion, celebrating a high-profile double wedding  – with the context for Eliot’s lines describing the modern-day Thames, with its recently littered surface bearing detritus, including the contraceptives presumably used by the ‘nymphs’ or prostitutes and their clients, encoded in the euphemistic and elliptical reference to ‘other testimony of summer nights’ (l. 179). But such a reading almost immediately runs into problems, not least because those ‘nymphs’ – which we are led to believe are ‘nymphs’ in the jocular sense of prostitutes (OED sense 2a) rather than spiritual guardians of the river – will return as the wronged ‘Thames-daughters’ later in ‘The Fire Sermon’. As Cleanth Brooks realized when considering the Elizabethan allusions later in ‘The Fire Sermon’, The passage has a sort of double function. It reinforces the general contrast between Elizabethan magnificence and modern sordidness: in the Elizabethan age love for love’s sake has some meaning and therefore some magnificence. But the passage gives something of an opposed effect too: the same sterile love, emptiness of love, obtained in this period too: Elizabeth and the typist are the same as well as different.97

In fact, any simple contrast between the past and the present had already been problematized earlier in ‘The Fire Sermon’ by Eliot’s reference to a third period of English history lying between the Elizabethan and the modern: the period of the English Civil War. Eliot’s borrowing in the line ‘But at my back in a cold blast I  hear’ (l. 185)  from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, a poem in which not marriage but seduction is placed at the centre of the courting ritual, further complicates the supposedly oppositional relationship between marriage and prostitution that we are being presented with in this passage: a relationship already arguably disturbed by our understanding of royal marriages (undertaken for diplomacy rather than love in many cases, and arguably a different form



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of financial transaction over women’s bodies). Marvell’s poem, it is worth remembering, also mentions being beside the river: Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain.98

Of Marvell’s famous lines (‘But at my back I  always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’), Eliot said, in 1921, ‘A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have closed on this moral reflection.’99 Eliot himself would choose to close the opening verse paragraph of ‘The Fire Sermon’ with a reworking of this sentiment. What Eliot’s juxtaposition of these various riverside couplings, whether actual or hoped, casts into doubt is the idea that there can be any clear distinction between past and present, then and now: if the modernday prostitutes and their clients are morally degraded when compared with Spenser’s fulsome celebration of the sanctity of marriage, then Marvell’s desire to seduce his ‘mistress’ (pointedly not his wife) represents the sliding scale between Spenser’s piety on one side and the modern decadence of the Thames’s ‘nymphs’ on the other. Those nymphs beside the Thames may have departed but will return as the ‘Thames-daughters’, disembodied voices which recall the sexual encounters given later in ‘The Fire Sermon’. The lines quoted above are then followed by the rat crawling ‘through the vegetation’. The absence of litter from the surface of the Thames signals the lack of couplings that have taken place there lately; the word ‘departed’ to describe the heirs to the City directors is ambiguous, since ‘departed’ is also a euphemism for ‘dead’. The ‘nymphs’ or prostitutes have gone elsewhere to ply their trade. Eliot’s 1920 poem ‘Gerontion’, which was his first attempt to write a poem about the post-war mood and which he considered including as a preface to The Waste Land until Pound advised him against it,100 opens with an ‘old man’ being ‘read to by a boy’: the missing generation, of course, is the middle one falling between age and youth, old and young, and points up the losses to the middle generation in the war.101 In this connection the twisting of Marvell’s lines that follows in ll. 185–6 of ‘The Fire Sermon’ (‘But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones’) is not merely an act of ironic appropriation, since it reminds us that Marvell, like Eliot, was writing against the backdrop of a recent war: the English Civil War was a conflict that had literally decimated the male population. Both he and his mistress have a new-found awareness of the brevity of life, since the recent war had presumably intensified its fragility. The ‘cold blast’ summons the blasts of the shrapnel and grenades in the trenches, the ‘rattle’ mimicking

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the ‘rapid rattle’ of the rifles which Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ had captured in a poem first published in 1920, two years before The Waste Land was published.102 The heirs of City directors have left no addresses not only because they were avoiding a paternity suit in the event of getting one of the ‘nymphs’ pregnant; they have died leaving no overtures or ‘addresses’ to rival Marvell’s great address ‘to his coy mistress’. Here another literary borrowing and twisting, that of the Book of Psalms, also makes sense as part of the poem’s depiction of a post-war landscape. ‘Leman’, as well as being the French name for Lake Geneva, is an old word for ‘lover’ – or, as it is sometimes rendered, ‘mistress’. (The OED offers the following for sense 2:  ‘One who is loved unlawfully; an unlawful lover or mistress. In later archaistic use chiefly applied to the female sex.’) This allusion to mistresses paves the way for Eliot’s borrowing, in the following lines, from ‘To His Coy Mistress’, meaning that in this opening verse paragraph we have references to prostitutes, nymphs, wives and mistresses, with no explicit judgement being passed on any; we also have another example of the ‘literary strata’ of Eliot’s poem, with the Old Testament, Elizabethan England, Interregnum England and Eliot’s modern age all being presented alongside one another. Margaret Dickie resisted the urge to take Eliot’s espousal of the ‘mythical method’ as a blanket indication – or implication – of Eliot’s own desire to use such a method in The Waste Land: ‘Eliot’s writing is not like the mythological method of Joyce that Eliot so admired. Where Joyce sets up parallels between ancient times and modern, Eliot breaks down any consistent parallel in order to present conflicting evidence, to suggest difficulties, to test possibilities, and in the process to reveal his initiating inventiveness and energy.’103 The poem’s literary allusions, then, do not so much guide us towards the ‘meaning’ of the poem as lead us further away from any hope of identifying a single, unified message or tone. The ‘different voices’ that make up The Waste Land operate similarly to spirit voices, as if Eliot is channelling the dead but with no control over what they say or what it might mean. This helps to explain why his quotations and borrowings, like Mirrlees’s before him, are disjointed, disembodied and introduced without explanation or gloss. The poem, as is often stated, is not an argument; so we are not told what we are to do with the fragments that the poem offers up to us. It is as if we are tuning into the last vestiges of a bygone civilization: ‘Ozymandias’ for the radio generation. Voice recordings are found in The Waste Land in the gramophone belonging to the typist, but they are also implied by her job, which may include, among other things, copying and recording messages orally dictated by her employer. And if The Waste Land does not quite offer us séances,



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it offers us everything else: Cumaean Sibyls, ancient Greek seers and modernday clairvoyants. As Eliot states, ‘What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.’ Such literary mediumship is also at the heart of the poem’s allusive technique, and the way Eliot speaks with the dead, much as Odysseus, in Pound’s Canto III from 1917, travels to the Underworld to speak with Tiresias among the dead. One of the earliest borrowings in the poem is the quotation from The Tempest in l. 48: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes.’ Not only is this a line from a song about a death – the death of Ferdinand’s father, in a song sung by Ariel – but it is placed in the section of the poem in which a fortune teller and ‘clairvoyante’ (l. 43)  deals the Tarot cards, in a variation of the practice of necromancy or communication with the dead. But there is a twist: Ferdinand’s father is not dead in The Tempest, but merely presumed so. In other words, if we are invited to see the poem’s allusion to bygone eras as a way, through writing, of reaching or even raising the dead, then the poem is out to remind us that ‘dead’ and ‘living’ are by no means fixed ideas in the world of the waste land, and that neither ‘living’ nor ‘dead’ is a term that can be easily prioritized when it comes to identifying who are the makers of the poem’s ‘meaning’. The poem’s second line may refer to ‘the dead land’ (l. 2), but life is growing out of it, and even corpses, such as the one planted by Stetson, are expected to rise from it (ll. 71–2). As with Mirrlees’s liminal figures in Paris, Eliot’s poem is, perhaps, less an elegy for the loss represented by the war dead as a poem plagued by the worry that the dead may not, in fact, stay dead, that the dead return to haunt the living. The allusion in the final line of ‘A Game of Chess’ similarly forces us to consider the extent to which Ophelia is being channelled outside the London pub: is the speaker or central consciousness of the poem being reminded of her, or has she arisen like a ghostly voice among the chatter of people who presumably have no knowledge of her significance to their conversation? Maud Ellmann went so far as to say of The Waste Land that ‘the poem can be read as a séance, and its speaker as the medium who tries to raise the dead by quoting them’.104 In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot had cast the modern poet’s role in terms of communion with the dead: ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’105 Lest we forget, not only poets but prophets are to be found among the dead: Tiresias, the alleged focalizer of The Waste Land, had walked ‘among the lowest of the dead’ (l. 246). Such a concept of ‘tradition’ casts the poet as a sort

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of medium channelling the ghosts of past literary ages, a channel for the voices of the departed. As Donald J. Childs has noted, in ‘The Pensées of Pascal’ (1931) Eliot suggests that ‘his experiences during the composition of The Waste Land might be interpretable as an instance of automatic writing’.106 Eliot wrote,  ‘I have no good word to say for the cultivation of automatic writing as the model of literary composition; I  doubt whether these moments can be cultivated by the writer; but he to whom this happens assuredly has the sensation of being a vehicle rather than a maker.’107 Similarly, Stephen Spender remarked of ‘What the Thunder Said’ that it appears to have been written ‘with extreme rapidity, almost as if it were automatic writing. It is visionary poetry, written out of intense suffering and transforms the poet into seer.’108 Such a remark chimes with Eliot’s oft-quoted remark about the writing of this final section: that he composed it in a trance and that ‘I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.’109 In ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ (1951), Eliot even went so far as to draw a link between the poet and prophet in this regard: ‘A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience … yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation. He need not know what his poetry will come to mean to others; and a prophet need not understand the meaning of his prophetic utterance.’110 Childs observes that, when Eliot was studying philosophy at Harvard between 1910 and 1914, he ‘conducted research that introduced him to a variety of information about the occult’.111 Prior to learning of W. B. Yeats’s interest in spiritualism and automatic writing, Eliot was conducting his own research into the occult, making detailed notes on Pierre Janet’s Neuroses et idées fixes. When he arrived in London in 1914, Childs notes, Eliot discussed psychical research with Yeats on numerous occasions.112 Rudyard Kipling, an influence on Eliot from a young age, had explored the intersections between radio transmission, spiritualism and poetic creation in a 1902 story, ‘Wireless’, in which a chemist’s assistant supposedly channels the spirit of John Keats while under the influence of radio waves and in a trance-like state. We might approach the role of allusion in The Waste Land in a similar way, seeing it as an example of what Hope Mirrlees called ‘listening in to the past’. The closing lines of The Waste Land represent the culmination of the poem’s collage of these different voices, presented side by side without further comment aside from the observation:  ‘These fragments I  have shored against my ruins’ (l. 430). In these final lines we find someone fishing (ll. 423–4), echoing the speaker fishing in the canal earlier on (l. 289); London Bridge falling down (l.



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426), recalling the crowd flowing over London Bridge earlier in the poem (l. 62); a reprise of Dante (l. 427), summoning the earlier allusion to Dante in l. 63; while the quotation from Pervigilium Veneris, as Eliot’s note to l.  428 tells us, takes us back to ‘Philomela in Parts II and III’; the penultimate line takes us back to the three interpretations of the thunderclap, Datta, Dayadhvam and Damyata. It is as if the poem’s whole life is flashing before its own eyes: like Phlebas passing the stages of his age and youth as he enters the whirlpool, the remnants of civilization but also the texts that make up that civilization – culminating in this last gasp of culture, Eliot’s own poem – are in the throes of death.

Avoiding clichés The proliferation of quotations from other writers in The Waste Land suggests that the modern age has lost the ability to articulate its own sense of spiritual and emotional decay. Just as there can be no one unifying hero at the centre of the modern epic, there can be no strongly asserted poet’s voice guiding us through the modern world. Eliot’s own diagnosis  – in part a self-diagnosis  – of ‘aboulia’ or lack of will coincided with his work on completing the poem, and with his period of recuperation at Lausanne under Dr Roger Vittoz. The precise relation between Vittoz’s book Treatment of Neurasthenia by Means of Brain Control (1913) and The Waste Land has not been closely examined, but we know that Eliot read Vittoz’s book in 1921, shortly before he departed for Lausanne to be treated by the nerve specialist, and however sceptical he may have been about Vittoz’s theories, he was clearly sufficiently open-minded at the time of his period of leave at Lausanne to read Treatment of Neurasthenia and mark particular sections he found interesting.113 This was, we should remember, the crucial period when Eliot completed work on The Waste Land and composed a significant portion of the eventual poem. Lyndall Gordon observes of Vittoz’s methods that he advocated ‘mastery, through reason and will, of what he termed clichés, the painful thoughts in which a diseased mind had become imprisoned’.114 Vittoz’s method ‘was not to suppress memories and desires, but through a return to moral equilibrium, to free a patient of his pain’.115 Eliot’s copy of Vittoz’s book – which he read in the third French edition published in 1921  – has several passages marked by the poet, including a description of ‘aboulie’; a section on excitability, noise and insomnia; and a sentence about the muscles becoming ‘contracted and sometimes painful’, next to which Eliot had written ‘handwriting’.116 Insomnia can be detected in the

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early reference in The Waste Land to nocturnal activity – ‘I read, much of the night’ (l. 18) – but it is more the general focus on concentrating the mind on the business of healing itself that is of relevance to The Waste Land. What is The Waste Land if not the poet’s attempt to avoid clichés in which poetry’s collective mind, as well as Eliot’s individual consciousness, had become imprisoned? It was Cleanth Brooks who remarked of The Waste Land that ‘the Christian terminology is for the poet here a mass of clichés. However “true” he may feel the terms to be, he is still sensitive to the fact that they operate superficially as clichés, and his method of necessity must be a process of bringing them to life again.’117 Many of the images and phrases in The Waste Land are deadened: they have lost their meaning. Spenser’s apostrophe to the ‘Sweet Thames’ has become meaningless poetic convention, even laughable untruth, and it is Eliot’s job to highlight what we have lost but also what poetry has gained: a deeper fidelity to the sordid realities of the world, which were as real in Spenser’s time as they were in Eliot’s. And these clichés are complemented by the various types of imprisonment that the poem highlights. Prisons are everywhere in The Waste Land, from the Sibyl trapped in her cage in the epigraph from Petronius to the prison-themed meditation some 20 lines from the end of the poem: We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison (ll. 413–14)

The prison of the homorhyme ‘prison’/‘prison’ does indeed confirm such a prison, the poet’s mind trapped within its own cycle of thoughts; for just as ‘prison’ concludes both lines, locking them into an inescapable pattern, so ‘We think of the key’ and ‘Thinking of the key’ at the head of the lines suggest an empty mantra or chant, a longing for a key which can be thought or conceived but cannot be grasped or realized. ‘Finally’, Vittoz advised, ‘he should learn how to recognize and overcome abnormal ideas, faulty working of his brain, or any symptoms due to former bad impressions (clichés)’.118 Overcoming the ‘faulty working’ of one’s own brain may manifest itself in poetry through an attempt to overcome those clichés which had trapped the collective poetic brain into bad thinking: These inexplicable causes are really nothing more than former impressions which have been, so to speak, crystallized in the brain, and which, unknown to the patient, always reproduce the same symptom mechanically; he is not always aware of their existence, or if he is, does not attribute to them the symptoms



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they produce. We will make use of the term cliché when speaking of these impressions.119

This psychiatric understanding of mental ‘cliché’ is close to the artistic argument against cliché put forward by the modernist poet T. E. Hulme a few years earlier, in his 1908  ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, although Hulme had argued against ‘clichés or tags of speech’ in poetry precisely because they do not produce any symptoms, or rather effects, upon the reader: ‘being old they have become dead, and so evoked no image’.120 In 1921 Eliot had already established himself as a poet who would seek to overcome and, indeed, overturn poetic clichés, as the opening lines of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ had so stridently announced: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table;121

The opening lines of The Waste Land also signal Eliot’s attempt to overcome poetic clichés. Springtime, celebrated throughout poetry as the season of optimism, life and rebirth, is here recast as a cruel time because new life grows out of the dead, calling to mind the poppies growing out of the blood-soaked fields of No Man’s Land. As if mocking a world shaken by world war, these lilacs remind the observer that the cycle of life continues, even while everything seems to be dead and destroyed. Memory and desire are paired in Vittoz’s advice concerning how the sufferer may recover his willpower through recalling a time before his energy had deserted him: In certain cases it may be useful for the patient to search his memory for what might be called ‘an expression of his will’, and for him to recall some previous energetic action. It is really curious to see that every individual realizes his will power in a different way. The one recalls it best in an abstract idea, another by thinking of something to be done, and a third by recalling some sentiment which affects him.122

Eliot follows up the opening lines of The Waste Land which speak of memory and desire with a series of memories which involve ‘recalling some sentiment’: the speaker who remembers drinking coffee and stopping in the Hofgarten (which, as Eliot later revealed, he based on snatches of conversation he heard at Vittoz’s sanatorium at Lausanne), and the lines spoken by the Countess Marie, recalling her childhood holidays at her cousin’s, the archduke’s (ll. 8–18).

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Vittoz, of course, was using cliché in an altogether different sense, to denote those ‘former impressions’ which ‘always reproduce the same symptom mechanically’. Although it would be reductionist to view the poem as merely Eliot’s own expression of his neurasthenia or depression when he was completing it, the poem clearly sprang in part from his own psychological and emotional problems, but, like so much great poetry, transcends the personal to become universal, as Eliot had said good poetry should do in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. The Waste Land is full of people caught in a mechanical cycle involving the repetition of such clichés, and as the poem began to take its final shape, Eliot may have recalled Vittoz’s theory of such mechanically reproduced impressions. There is the typist (whose job is so governed by repeated action that it even carries the occupational hazard of repetitive strain injury), who ‘smooths her hair with automatic hand’ (l. 255) before playing a record on her gramophone – a device that made the mechanical reproduction of the same recording of a piece of music possible for the first time. There is the Cumaean Sibyl, doomed to exist within a cycle of futile longings for death. There is the barman’s repeated cry of ‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’, Lil’s destructive adherence to the reproductive cycle determined by her demobbed husband and the reiterated longing for water among the dry rock of the poem’s final section. Like Prufrock’s continual wonderings about whether he dares to do something (whether disturb the universe or eat a peach), these mechanical habits or tics suggest people trapped nervously in a cycle from which they cannot conceive of freeing themselves. The unheroic couplet discussed earlier in this chapter, with its effect of stasis and repetition, reflects such a state of automatism. But if The Waste Land echoes Vittoz’s writing on ‘clichés’, it also presents a world of noise and cacophonic babel and babble. ‘Perhaps the greatest curse of my life is noise and the associations which imagination immediately suggests with various noises’, Eliot wrote to John Quinn in September 1922.123 He was referring specifically to the problem of living in a London flat and that ‘one can never forget the lives and disagreeable personalities of one’s neighbours’, but the words imply a long-standing problem of oversensitivity to noise.124 One passage of Vittoz’s book marked by Eliot concerns itself with noise: ‘There is, in fact, often an excessive excitability which makes the sufferer aware of the slightest noise, and is very frequently a cause of insomnia.’125 That Eliot should have highlighted these words in his copy is of interest when we consider how overwhelmingly preoccupied with noises, and a sensitivity to noises, The Waste Land is. It is the absence of any ‘sound of water’ (l. 24)  from the dry stone which attracts the



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speaker’s attention, just as near the end of the poem it will be the ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells’ (l. 384)  that haunt him, alongside the tolling of the ‘reminiscent bells’ (l. 383) and the ‘bats with baby faces’ that ‘Whistled’ (ll. 379–80). Similarly, the speaker has ‘heard the key’ turning in the lock (l. 411: my emphasis). We hear a cock crowing (l. 392), the grass singing (ll. 354, 386) and ‘fiddled whisper music’ (l. 378); earlier, we had snippets of Wagner (ll. 31–4, 42), a ‘gramophone’ (l. 256), the magical music from The Tempest (l. 257) and the jazz of ‘that Shakespeherian Rag’ (l. 128), to say nothing of the ‘pleasant whining of a mandoline’ or the ‘clatter and a chatter’ (ll. 261–2) from the public bar on Lower Thames Street. Of course, not all of these noises strike us or the speaker as unwelcome, but elsewhere the cacophonies that are present in the poem seem to reflect the sort of distractions which Vittoz mentions in connection to a loss of sleep or peace of mind: the ‘sound of horns and motors’ (l. 197) bringing Sweeney to the brothel run by Mrs Porter, for instance, associating insistent noise with moral and sexual decay; or the ‘sound high in the air’ which the speaker identifies as a ‘Murmur of maternal lamentation’ (ll. 366–7) arising from the hordes travelling from the east. Similarly, the repeated shout of the barman in the closing scene from ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’, emphasized with capital letters, reinforces the importance of background noises asserting themselves into the foreground of the poem, just as Eliot’s preoccupation with ‘silence’ (ll. 41, 323, 341, 398) and sounds being ‘unheard’ (l. 175) suggests that the poet can never tune out from the sounds around him, that the poem’s ears are never closed. But the passage in the poem where this hypersensitivity to noise is most apparent is also the place where the poem’s own origins in Eliot’s  – and Vivienne’s – trouble with nerves are most clearly exposed. ‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’ (l. 119), asks the nervous wife of her mentally vacant husband. The couple are at once Eliot and his wife and an imagined couple, a war veteran or shell shock victim and his troubled wife. ‘A phenomenon I have often witnessed’, Eliot observed in his note to the line from The Waste Land detailing the ‘dead sound on the final stroke of nine’ (l. 68) made by the clock tower of Saint Mary Woolnoth church. Such hypersensitivity to sound is part of what makes The Waste Land not just a medley or cacophony of different voices but a reflection of the noise and confusion of the modern city. Like a sensitive recording device or a psychic medium listening out for messages from the dead, The Waste Land is attuned to noise throughout. Like Paris, The Waste Land is all too aware of the flawed and ‘human’ aspects of modern society and the individuals that make up the modern

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metropolis. But unlike Paris, Eliot’s poem is not entirely comfortable with such weakened humanity:  if Paris is a hymn to the variety and vibrancy of the city, The Waste Land is more a prayer of despair. With its collage of quotations, the poem does not seek to bring such disparate ages and nations together, as Mirrlees’s poem does; or, if it does bring them together, it does so in order to raise troubling questions surrounding overpopulation, sexual relationships and the place of heroism in the modern age. This approach to diversity and multiplicity, which differs so pointedly from Mirrlees’s, can partly be attributed to Eliot’s own outlook; however, it was also influenced by the growing sense of pessimism surrounding the fallout from the Treaty of Versailles. The house that Gerontion occupied in 1919 had become London, and, by extension, the whole of Europe.

5

Machine: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’

In January 1925, T. S. Eliot wrote to Scofield Thayer: The fact is that I have done no writing whatever for the last two years except the scrappy contributions and editorials which you may have seen from time to time in the Criterion. This is, from my point of view, a lamentable condition and greatly to my disadvantage. Had I had the time or strength during these years for my writing beyond the above mentioned scraps, you would have been the first to receive specimens; the scraps themselves have been drops of blood out of an exhausted stone.1

With his letter, Eliot enclosed a small selection of short poems which had appeared, or were shortly due to appear, in Harold Monro’s Chapbook, the Criterion and Commerce, a French review. Some of these poems would become ‘The Hollow Men’, Eliot’s first substantial poem to be published after The Waste Land in 1922. ‘The Hollow Men’ was published in 1925 as the concluding piece in Eliot’s Poems, 1909–1925. Each of Eliot’s three major poetic achievements prior to this point were in no small part a result of Ezra Pound’s encouragement. It was Pound who got Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) into print and even helped to fund the publishing costs. Pound had helped Eliot to overcome writer’s block through suggesting that his fellow poet write quatrain poems modelled on those written by the nineteenth-century French poet Théophile Gautier. And it was Pound who helped edit The Waste Land into its eventual form. At each major stage of Eliot’s poetry-writing career since ‘Prufrock’ appeared in print in Poetry in 1915, Pound had provided the central stimulus that prompted Eliot’s new work. After Pound’s departure from London for Paris and the publication of The Waste Land, this vital influence was lessened if not altogether removed. This goes some way towards explaining why the next poem Eliot wrote would not be something wholly new – as each of his previous achievements had been – but something self-consciously familiar viewed from a different angle. ‘At the start’,

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Pound wrote, ‘a man must work in a group; at least, that seems to be the effective modus; later in life, he becomes gradually incapable of working in a group’.2 In October 1925, Eliot sent Pound the majority of the pieces which would become ‘The Hollow Men’, asking, ‘Is it too bad to print?’3 This appears to be the first time Eliot had shown the poems to Pound, and, as they had already been published as individual poems in several publications by this point, Pound’s editorial suggestions were minimal, if he made any at all. Eliot had worked on ‘The Hollow Men’ in fits and starts since finishing The Waste Land, but Pound had no involvement in helping to edit the final poem, in a marked departure from his hands-on approach to that earlier poem. M.  C. Bradbrook wrote of ‘Pound’s collaboration’ on The Waste Land as revealing ‘how close had been the symbiosis between the two poets, which here reached its climax and conclusion’.4 Pound and Eliot would never work as closely or collaboratively on Eliot’s poetry again, but this carried advantages as well as drawbacks for Eliot. Freed from the need to seek Pound’s advice on his editorial choices, he had greater artistic control over his own work. Nevertheless, he found it difficult to find a way forward following the success of The Waste Land. Helen Gardner recommends that we view ‘The Hollow Men’ as a transitional poem: it appeared as the final poem in Eliot’s Poems 1909–1925 and was the last poem he wrote before his conversion to Christianity in 1927.5 The poem is, in effect, a bridge between the spiritless decay of The Waste Land and the spiritual reinvigoration of Ash-Wednesday. But ‘The Hollow Men’ is also a self-reflexive poem, self-consciously drawing on images and ideas that Eliot had already visited in his poetry. It is preoccupied by Eliot’s anxiety over what sort of poetry he could write after The Waste Land. But the poem cannot go about exploring this in a direct sense. Rather than say this is what the poem is ‘about’ in any straightforward manner, then, it might make more sense to propose that the poem is haunted by the difficulty of writing poetry after The Waste Land. The poem explores the difficulties Eliot faced in moving forward and creating a new work that avoided simply repeating what he had already done. It is tempting to view ‘The Hollow Men’ as a mere addendum to the earlier poem, as if it were leftover drafts which had been reluctantly gathered together to create a new poem. But I  want to move away from this understanding of ‘The Hollow Men’ and instead see its similarities to The Waste Land as part of a conscious artistic strategy founded on Eliot’s desire to revisit the former poem and offer a response to it. There are many similarities between the two poems, similarities which might lead us to think that Eliot’s poetry had not moved on in the three years between

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1922 and 1925. Like The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’ is an assemblage of smaller poems, arranged together to suggest a semi-coherent vision or idea. The imagery of the poem picks up on that of The Waste Land: images of desolation and decay, sordid symbols of despair and death, ‘the dead land’ (a phrase which appears in both poems). Both poems are divided into five sections. These overarching structural and aesthetic similarities point to a clear link between the two poems. But what is the nature of that link? Eliot later explained that he arrived at the title ‘The Hollow Men’ by blending two previous titles of poems by other writers:  ‘The Hollow Land’ by William Morris and ‘The Broken Men’ by Rudyard Kipling. This fact is borne out by the early manuscript drafts of the poem, on which Eliot had jotted down the Morris and Kipling titles at the top of the first page. The fact that the title for ‘The Hollow Men’ was partly inspired by a poem titled ‘The Hollow Land’ suggests, as Christopher Ricks has put it, ‘a subterranean continuity with The Waste Land which goes deeper than the manifest syntactical shaping of The Waste Land/“The Hollow Men” ’.6 From The Waste Land we travel to ‘The Hollow Land’, the land of ‘The Hollow Men’. After the title, but before the main poem, we have the epigraph – or, in this case, two epigraphs. First, on the title page, the four-word statement, ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’, from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1902).7 This epigraph has been read by critics in a number of ways: as detailing a wider and more metaphorical sense of hollowness (Kurtz is described in Conrad’s novella as ‘hollow at the core’), possibly in relation to imperial and colonial activity.8 But such an empire-focused interpretation finds little corroboration in the rest of the poem, nor in Eliot’s work as a whole. Instead, the use of these words from Heart of Darkness is highly suggestive of a link between this poem and The Waste Land. In the manuscript drafts of The Waste Land, the original epigraph for the poem was a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.9 Conrad’s novella comes to centre on the mysterious Mr Kurtz, an ivory dealer who has set himself up as a demigod among the African natives in the Belgian Congo. Kurtz dies with the two-word phrase on his lips: ‘The horror! The horror!’10 It was this moment from the novella, Kurtz’s dying words, which Eliot originally planned to place at the start of The Waste Land until he was advised against it by Ezra Pound, who thought Conrad insufficiently ‘weighty’ for the epigraph: Eliot duly replaced Conrad with Petronius.11 According to Valerie Eliot, this was a decision that Eliot later regretted.12 The epigraph to ‘The Hollow Men’ also comes from Heart of Darkness, but from the words of the native African youth who reports Kurtz’s death to the narrator. The Waste Land had originally carried an epigraph containing a dying man’s words; the follow-up

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poem carries an epigraph reporting the same man’s death. The shared source of epigraph for the two poems tell us something about the way Eliot saw ‘The Hollow Men’ in relation to The Waste Land: what had been dying in The Waste Land was dead on arrival in ‘The Hollow Men’. But this return to Conrad as provider of epigraph reinforces the fact that Eliot regretted his decision to drop Conrad from The Waste Land relatively soon after that poem’s publication and sought to make amends by restoring him to the head of the next poem he wrote. (The fact that Conrad was still alive when The Waste Land was completed may have been one reason why Pound considered him not weighty enough; between The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’, in 1924, Conrad had died.) Then there is the second epigraph, ‘A penny for the Old Guy’. ‘Guy’ here, of course, is Guy Fawkes, the Catholic conspirator involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The line ‘A penny for the Old Guy’ refers to the cry traditionally uttered by children on Bonfire Night, seeking donations for their effigies of Guy Fawkes, or ‘Guys’, stuffed with straw. Beyond the obvious ‘straw man’ connection to the ‘headpiece filled with straw’ in Eliot’s poem, the reference to Guy Fawkes serves several additional purposes. It foreshadows the end of the poem, where we are told that the world ends ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’ (84): in being caught red-handed with the gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament, Guy Fawkes failed to bring about an end to the overbearing Protestant world that he and his fellow Catholic conspirators longed for. The ‘bang’ of the gunpowder was replaced with the ‘whimper’ of the condemned men on the rack and scaffold as they were tortured and executed. But the reference to Guy Fawkes also prefigures the earlier lines in that final section of the poem: Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom (83)

There is a link between the lines on the left and the italicized words that appear on the right, and that second epigraph about Guy Fawkes provides the link. The lines allude to Brutus’ words from Julius Caesar: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.13

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Fawkes failed in his planned assassination where Brutus succeeded, although both ended up as tragic anti-heroes. And ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’ makes sense when we recall that these lines come from the Lord’s Prayer, but only appear in the Anglican version of that prayer, not the Roman Catholic, which ends before the lines ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.’ Two years after ‘The Hollow Men’ was published, in 1927, Eliot would be confirmed into the Church of England, but as an Anglo-Catholic. The division between Protestant and Catholic summoned in the mention of Guy Fawkes in the poem’s epigraph returns in the quotation from the Anglican prayer in this final section, reminding us that Fawkes failed, that a ‘Shadow’ fell between the idea and reality of his plot, between the first motion and the acting out of his plan. Both Fawkes and Brutus, of course, were conspirators: they did not plan their assassinations alone. ‘The Hollow Men’ summons two conspirators whose plans failed to bring about the world they desired. But the collaborative implications are also relevant to the composition of ‘The Hollow Men’, given that it was the first major poem Eliot undertook following The Waste Land, which Pound had helped to edit. If The Waste Land, a poem whose final version was the result of collaboration, is dominated by individual voices – Marie, Tiresias, the Hyacinth girl – then ‘The Hollow Men’, a poem Eliot wrote and edited on his own, is voiced by a collective. But the collective ‘we’ of the poem is curiously inactive and inert, trapped in some limbo world, some indeterminate between-space. The more usual rendering of the child’s call, ‘A penny for the Guy’, is here – as with so many of Eliot’s allusions – given a twist, with one word being changed, or, in this case, added:  ‘Old’. Eliot appears to be calling into play the modern slang term ‘guy’, referring to a man and derived from the given name of Guy Fawkes. The term originated in the United States, Eliot’s country of birth, and he was certainly aware of this modern meaning, although he denied that this is what he intended to summon with this epigraph.14 Does the ‘penny’ here have any relation to the ‘penny world’ lamented by the speaker of Eliot’s earlier poem ‘A Cooking Egg’, a world he has since left behind?15 Helen Gardner remarked that ‘The Hollow Men, like Heart of Darkness is in part a work that represents the crisis we call middle age.’16 Both of the poem’s epigraphs tacitly signal that ‘The Hollow Men’ is a poem of mid-life crisis. Then we move to the start of the poem proper. Part I of the poem begins: We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men

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Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! (81)

This vision of emptiness is reflected by the deliberately empty way in which it is conveyed: the lack of punctuation, the repetition and the absence of feeling, with even ‘Alas!’ seeming pathetically feeble in the context. The uneasiness of the rhymes in the lines that follow reflects the unease of the hollow men: the rhyming words are often rather close to each other, almost too close for comfort: ‘glass’/‘grass’, but also ‘glass’/‘Alas’ and ‘glass’/‘meaningless’ (emphasis added); and then the multiple matches or homorhymes: ‘men’/‘men’, ‘together’/‘together’ (81). Such repetitions are found throughout the poem, not just in these opening lines. The poem goes on: Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; (81)

Taken as a whole, this opening section immediately raises a number of paradoxes. How can the men be both hollow and stuffed? How can you have shape without form or gesture without motion? Elsewhere I  have suggested that there is an allusion to the following lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:17 Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all18

The ‘withoutness’ of these lines of Shakespeare’s, along with their rhythm (to say nothing of the ‘eyes’ peeping out from within ‘paralysed’), appears to inform Eliot’s words. This allusion raises further questions: Hamlet utters these words in Shakespeare’s play shortly after he has seen the ghost of his father again, while speaking with his mother, thus drawing questions of haunting and ghostliness into Eliot’s poem. Are the hollow men haunted by something, or even ghosts themselves? One thing they seem to be haunted by is Eliot’s previous poem, The Waste Land. But to interrogate this further, we need to think about the significance of Hamlet to Eliot. His 1919 essay ‘Hamlet’ had argued that Shakespeare’s play is an ‘artistic failure’ because Shakespeare could not find the right way for Hamlet to express his emotions: he failed to find the appropriate ‘objective correlative’. Eliot goes on to define the ‘objective correlative’ as ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked’.19 The emptiness of the hollow men and their

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lack of progress throughout the poem  – in other words, the chain of hollow images and symbols of despair – form their ‘objective correlative’. But does this allusion to Hamlet, in light of Eliot’s previous critical opinion of it as a ‘failure’, also shed light on his attitude to his own artistic success (or otherwise) at the time of writing ‘The Hollow Men’? Shakespeare’s play had failed, according to Eliot, because he had failed to rewrite the original play (the lost Hamlet play, probably by Thomas Kyd) in a way that sufficiently matched the original plot to his own artistic vision. If Eliot had similar doubts surrounding his post-Waste Land poetry, the Hamlet allusion makes more sense. ‘The Hollow Men’ was a gesture towards a new direction for him as a poet, but it was also one that would remain without any clear purpose until his religious conversion two years later. It was, in other words, a ‘gesture without motion’. Here, it is worth remembering that Eliot had quoted from Thomas Kyd in the closing lines of The Waste Land: ‘Hieronymo’s mad againe’ (l. 431). Notions of textual doubling thus inform and infect ‘The Hollow Men’. Its title was supposedly inspired by the titles of two previous poems being put together. One of its epigraphs is taken from the same novella which had furnished Eliot’s previous poem with its original epigraph, deleted at the draft stage. The allusion to Hamlet reminds us of the textual doubling that went into the composition of Shakespeare’s play, the fact that it was a rewriting of an earlier play about Hamlet – a play which some critics have claimed was also written by Shakespeare. The Conradian epigraph then finds itself complemented, within the poem, by a quotation from another Conrad novel, An Outcast of the Islands (1896): ‘Life is very long’ is what Lingard says in Conrad’s novel.20 ‘This is the dead land’, the third section of ‘The Hollow Men’ begins, taking us back to the beginning of The Waste Land: ‘breeding / lilacs out of the dead land’ (ll. 1–2). The ‘crossed staves’ (82) of ‘The Hollow Men’ pick up on ‘the man with three staves’ from the Tarot pack in The Waste Land (l. 51). ‘The Hollow Men’ is a poem about repetition. Its title is repeated twice:  it appears on the poem’s title page, then is repeated on the first page of the poem itself, before cropping up again in the poem’s first line. There is also the exercise in epigraphic repetition that is the double epigraph of ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’ and ‘A Penny for the Old Guy’. ‘Here we go round the prickly pear’ is repeated; ‘prickly pear’ is repeated twice in the line which falls between its two appearances; ‘This is the way the world ends’ is repeated not once but twice. And as has already been mentioned, allusion to Conrad is repeated, for the statement in Part V that ‘Life is very long’ (84), like ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’, quotes from Conrad’s fiction, this time from An Outcast of the Islands, a precursor to Heart of Darkness

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and, if we discount the short work The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), the last full-length novel Conrad had written immediately prior to Heart of Darkness. Viewed this way, ‘The Hollow Men’ reveals Eliot’s distinctive allusiveness caught up in thoughts of writers being haunted by their own work. Conrad had taken the nascent potential of his second novel and built upon it to create something more artistically successful:  Heart of Darkness. But Shakespeare had failed, in his view, to rewrite Hamlet in a way that fulfilled the dramatic potential of the story. If Eliot had already reached the pinnacle of his poetic talent, where was he to go after the artistic success of The Waste Land? There is also the background repetition conjured up by Kurtz’s dying words, words which Eliot had planned to use as the epigraph to The Waste Land: ‘The horror! The horror!’ Repetition is not just a feature of ‘The Hollow Men’ at the level of recurring words, phrases or images. The language of the poem is marked by slippage, as ‘meaningless’ glides against ‘glass’, so near and yet so far from providing the satisfaction of rhyme or repetition to complement it. This slippage is a feature of the very speech of the poem, when we are told that the Hollow Men ‘avoid speech / Gathered on this beach of the tumid river’ (83), but avoiding ‘speech’ may be not so easy when the word threatens to speak itself within ‘this beach’ (emphasis added), sounded within the coastal ground lying between the words. A similar slippage is at work in the line ‘Sightless, unless’ where ‘-less’ is performing different functions in the two classes of word present. These repetitions and slippages can be read as Eliot’s sense of anxiety following the success of The Waste Land; once a poet has achieved both critical and popular success, it is natural that he should worry about repeating himself in his future work. But ‘The Hollow Men’ is not simply a postscript to that earlier, longer poem. It consciously and repeatedly returns to The Waste Land and engages in a rewriting of it, a response that is bound up with revisiting and repetition. This can be seen, for instance, in the way it takes up similar poetic methods and techniques from The Waste Land and recycles them. Take the famous lines that open section V, beginning ‘Here we go round the prickly pear’ (83). It is possible to detect an allusion to not only the child’s song ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ but also another children’s rhyme which has the same rhythm, namely ‘London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down’; the full verse of the song goes, of course, London Bridge is falling down, Falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, My fair lady.

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Significantly, the line ‘London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down’ appears towards the end of The Waste Land (l. 426). Is it a coincidence that the rhythm and structure of Eliot’s ‘prickly pear’ stanza so closely follow that of a child’s rhyme he had borrowed from in his own previous poem? Such a self-conscious reusing of the same technique – the incorporation of children’s nursery rhymes towards the end of the poem – cannot have gone unnoticed by Eliot himself. He had started to borrow, not just from other writers, but from himself. ‘The Hollow Men’ certainly represents the end of one phase of Eliot’s career. After this, his poetry will find new ways of moving forward, and one of those ways is by looking inward. Such inwardness would culminate in his last great poem, Four Quartets, where the echoes of his earlier work  – particularly The Waste Land  – are obvious:  the five-part structure is used again (with, for instance, the fourth part being a short lyric in the manner of ‘Death by Water’), while many lines from Eliot’s earlier poetry are reused and revised. ‘The Hollow Men’ ends with a vision of the end of the world, ‘This is the way the world ends’ (84), the line repeated three times as if recalling the triple repetition that had concluded The Waste Land: ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (l. 433). Margaret Dickie saw the end of The Waste Land as ‘a surrealistic display of the end of the world’, and it is this apocalyptic note that ends ‘The Hollow Men’ in similarly anticlimactic fashion, a whimper replacing a bang, just as the feckless utterances of Hieronymo, Arnaut Daniel and others in the closing lines of The Waste Land had failed to find any solace or illumination in the face of the end of civilization.21 Ruins are all that remain. Compounding these structural similarities are the numerous local details in ‘The Hollow Men’ which look back to, and often shrink down, specific features of The Waste Land: ‘wind in dry grass’ (81) looks back to the ‘wind’s home’ (l. 388) and ‘dry grass singing’ (l. 354); the ‘broken column’ (81) echoes the ‘broken Coriolanus’ (l. 116); the ‘Rat’s coat’ (82) picks up on the ‘rat’s foot’ (l. 195); while the numerous references to a ‘kingdom’ take us back to the various kings who populated The Waste Land. The italicized snatches of the Lord’s Prayer stand in for the voices of the thunder in ‘What the Thunder Said’, with ‘Datta’, ‘Dayadhvam’ and ‘Damyata’ being transmuted into ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’, ‘Life is very long’ and ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’ (83–4). Such details teeter on the edge of self-parody, and as we will see in Chapter  7, Eliot would not be the only one to offer a response to The Waste Land that invited the ‘charge’ of parody.

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Helen Gardner saw the dramatic potential  – potential that the poem deliberately fails to realize, as it powerfully utters its own powerlessness  – of ‘The Hollow Men’: Though it is composed in the fivefold form, it is without the variety within the movements which suggests to us musical analogies. The five sections here recall the five acts of a drama, the first containing the exposition, the second introducing a complication, the third the climax, the fourth a new complication arising from the climax and the fifth a resolution. But it is an inner drama; The Hollow Men is the ghost of a play. It might be called also the ghost of a poem, since all the poetic elements are reduced to their barest essentials.22

‘The Hollow Men’ owes its five-part structure to The Waste Land, which in turn was borrowing from the act divisions of an Elizabethan or Jacobean drama, but its drama has become even more internalized than in the previous poem. ‘In the last ten years’, Eliot wrote to John Middleton Murry in 1925, ‘I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately – in order to endure, in order not to feel.’23 He went on: ‘In leaving the bank I hope to become less a machine – but yet I am frightened – because I don’t know what it will do to me … should I come alive again. I have deliberately killed my senses – I have deliberately died – in order to go on with the outward form of living – This I did in 1915. What will happen if I live again?’24 What will happen if the hollow men escape their limbo and rejoin the world of the living? The ‘inner drama’ of ‘The Hollow Men’ can be linked to Eliot’s own attempts, which began in earnest at around this point, to produce a verse-drama that would be appropriate for modern audiences. Early versions of part of ‘The Hollow Men’ are included in the Collected Poems 1909–1962 as ‘Eyes that last I saw in tears’ and ‘The wind sprang up at four o’clock’. These and several other short verses were published as ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’ in The Chapbook in 1924. The title and use of the name ‘Doris’ points up a link with the work that Eliot had been writing between the publication of The Waste Land and the completion of ‘The Hollow Men’: his abandoned verse-drama, Sweeney Agonistes, for which ‘Doris’s Dream Songs’ were at some stage presumably intended. The fact that these songs ended up forming part of ‘The Hollow Men’ points up an important but underexplored link between that poem and Sweeney Agonistes. This critically neglected dramatic work survives as just two scenes which were published in the Criterion in October 1926 and January 1927, and then in book form in 1932. The first scene of Sweeney Agonistes, ‘Fragment of a Prologue’, shows two women, Doris and Dusty, preparing to receive male guests

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in their furnished flat. The implication is that they are prostitutes; this inference is strengthened by the fact that ‘Doris’ had previously appeared in one of Eliot’s quatrain poems, ‘Sweeney Erect’, where she works in a brothel. ‘Fragment of a Prologue’ shares many features with Eliot’s earlier poetry, particularly The Waste Land: the drawing of Tarot cards, the hinted world of squalid sexual encounters, the preoccupation with death in the midst of life and, of course, the character of Sweeney. Doris draws the ‘coffin’ card, denoting someone’s death; she interprets this as foretelling her own.25 The second of the two surviving scenes, ‘Fragment of an Agon’, features Sweeney himself, talking to Doris and Dusty as well as their American guests. The talk turns to cannibalism as practised by the inhabitants of remote exotic islands, and then to murder: Sweeney tells the guests, and his hostesses, that he ‘knew a man once did a girl in’ (124). The scene ends with a knocking, but in the surviving scene we do not find out who has arrived at the door – it could be Death himself, who has come for Doris. In any case, this final ominous knocking clearly takes us back to The Waste Land, and the man who tells his wife that they will play chess, ‘Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door’ (l. 138). If Eliot read Hope Mirrlees’s Paris when it was published in 1920, one could argue that her influence would be most clearly visible not in The Waste Land but in Sweeney Agonistes, with its jazz syncopations, use of jarring repetitions, greater experimentation with verse and line spacing and darkly comic tone. Eliot subtitled this modernist drama ‘Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama’, summoning the comic playwright who is present in Mirrlees’s poem. But in terms of their themes and tropes, the two scenes of Eliot’s unfinished verse-drama take us back to The Waste Land. Numerous local details of Sweeney Agonistes, such as the Tarot reading, prostitution and Doris’s ‘terrible chill’ (116; recalling Madame Sosostris’ ‘bad cold’ from The Waste Land), also recall Eliot’s earlier poem. In an echo of the Australian prostitutes who wash their feet in soda water in The Waste Land (l. 201), Doris is treating her chill by bathing her ‘feet in mustard and water’ (116). When Sweeney declares that ‘Life is death’ (124), he reminds us what the Sibyl in the epigraph of The Waste Land had also signified: Eliot views modern living as a form of death-in-life, a deadened process of existence. But at the same time as it echoes or revisits certain tropes and details from The Waste Land, Sweeney Agonistes also shows Eliot attempting to move forward – not just from poetry into drama but also from the landscapes of his 1922 poem to new territory, in both an artistic and geographical sense. When Sweeney tells Doris about life on ‘a crocodile isle’, his description represents a conscious move away from The Waste Land:

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There’s no telephones There’s no gramophones There’s no motor cars (121)

In emphasizing the removal of such modern trappings from this world of atavistic primitivism, Sweeney mentions two modern inventions which had featured prominently in The Waste Land: the gramophone belonging to the typist and the motorcar which brings none other than Sweeney himself ‘to Mrs. Porter in the spring’ (l. 198). Mrs Porter is also mentioned by name in Sweeney Agonistes (117). Both ‘Fragment of a Prologue’ and ‘Fragment of an Agon’ also make use of the homorhyme which Eliot had utilized in The Waste Land to underscore the deadened sense of stasis that affected many modern Londoners in their daily lives. But here, too, especially in ‘Fragment of an Agon’ where Sweeney makes his appearance, Eliot pushes this verse innovation to new levels: Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all, Birth, and copulation, and death. (122) I knew a man once did a girl in Any man might do a girl in (124) Well he kept her there in a bath With a gallon of lysol in a bath (124)

SWARTS: These fellows always get pinched in the end. SNOW: Excuse me, they don’t all get pinched in the end. (124) He didn’t know if he was alive       and the girl was  dead He didn’t know if the girl was alive       and he was  dead He didn’t know if they were both alive       or both were  dead (125) Death or life or life or death Death is life and life is death (126)

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Such instances of repetition and homorhyme are designed to convey the deadened state of modern life, but that is not all. They also serve a dramatic function, building a sense of menace and threat, as Sweeney’s speech addresses the dark themes of cannibalism and the murder of women. In The Waste Land, we are invited to see the fact that life has become a form of living death as a tragedy. For Sweeney, life and death are interchangeable but, rather than bemoan such a state of affairs, his response is matter-of-fact, even nihilistic: ‘That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.’ Sweeney Agonistes, like The Waste Land but especially like ‘The Hollow Men’, is marked by repetition: repetition as rhythm, as a metrical means of conveying the characters’ sense of impedance and inertia. The second scene ends with the word ‘knock’ repeated nine times (127); when Eliot recorded these scenes, he read out ‘KNOCK’ in a very flat monotone, in striking contrast to the songlike chanting he had adopted for the Chorus’ lines that directly precede the knocking. The characters that populate The Waste Land are all stuck: Tiresias ‘throbbing between two lives’, the typist in her world of canned food and unsatisfying sex with the young house agent’s clerk, Albert and Lil, the Fisher King himself. Doris and Dusty are stuck in their furnished flat, with Sweeney’s talk of cannibalism and murder the only thing that can shake them out of their sleepwalk. The repetitive drum beats Eliot wanted to accompany the dialogue reinforce the sense of regularity, but also menace. The hollow men themselves, of course, are trapped in their between-world. But all of these trapped figures become loaded with extra meaning in ‘The Hollow Men’:  Eliot has become almost parodic, verging on sending himself up, of coyly drawing attention to his own state of artistic stasis. ‘Understanding involves an area more extensive than that of which one can be conscious’, Eliot would write in Notes towards the Definition of Culture in 1948; ‘one cannot be outside and inside at the same time’. He goes on: What we ordinarily mean by understanding of another people, of course, is an approximation towards understanding which stops short at the point at which the student would begin to lose some essential of his own culture. The man who, in order to understand the inner world of a cannibal tribe, has partaken of the practice of cannibalism, has probably gone too far: he can never quite be one of his own folk again.26

To this assessment, Eliot appends a footnote:  ‘Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gives a hint of something similar’. Cannibalism is what unites Sweeney Agonistes with Heart of Darkness, and Heart of Darkness links the (would-be)

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epigraphs of both The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’. Eliot’s interest in the trope of cannibalism is yet to be fully explored, but what is clear is that his preoccupation with the themes and horrors of Conrad’s text appears to have been particularly strong in the early to mid-1920s, when he selected the dying words of Kurtz, and then the report of Kurtz’s death, as original epigraphs for his two major poems of that period, and when he explored the idea of cannibalism in the ‘Fragment of an Agon’ scene from the abandoned Sweeney play. Sweeney, of course, reminds us of Sweeney Todd, that nineteenth-century demon barber of Fleet Street who murdered his customers, whose bodies were then chopped up and sold by Mrs Loveit as meat pies; whether the origin of the name of Eliot’s Sweeney owes anything to this character is difficult to establish, but the association is implied within the name of Eliot’s character and is in the environment of the character (such as when, in ‘Sweeney Erect’, we find Sweeney brandishing a razor and shaving while the prostitute appears to suffer an epileptic seizure on the bed). Cannibalism is often viewed as a sign of a decadent civilization, as attested by the numerous dystopian narratives which show the human race resorting to cannibalism in order to survive. Sweeney, that modern man who combines the civilized with the primitive, represents a similar dissolution of any clear boundary between the cultured and the barbarous, as Kurtz does in Conrad’s novella. But the use of a quotation from Heart of Darkness as epigraph to ‘The Hollow Men’ suggests that the poem that follows will, in some sense, be about such a collapse of binary oppositions. Eliot’s own interest in cannibalism appears to be self-reflexive in both Sweeney Agonistes and ‘The Hollow Men’: as well as implying a broader breakdown of civilization and a concern over a reversion to barbarity, the trope of cannibalism also neatly reinforces the cannibalistic nature of Eliot’s work at this time, which feeds on some of his other poems, especially The Waste Land. Eliot’s poetry, as has long been acknowledged, feeds off other texts, with its densely allusive quality and Eliot’s famous pronouncements on the relation between tradition and modernity. But if ‘The Hollow Men’ signals a development in his art, it is one that is marked by a concern about failure to develop – about the decadence of his own poetry, falling into cannibalistic feasting upon previous texts, as it increasingly had been since ‘Prufrock’ until the culmination of this technique in The Waste Land. The allusions in the poems of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) required no notes, but what Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land reveal is the increasing allusiveness of Eliot’s style. By 1925, though, Eliot has started to feed upon his own words and images: ‘The Hollow

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Men’ has cannibalistically begun to eat away at the words of The Waste Land. Anthropophagy, we might say, has given way to autophagy. In biology, the term ‘autophagy’ has two meanings. It can describe the ‘metabolic consumption of the body’s own tissue, as in starvation or certain diseases’ or ‘the breaking down or consumption of cellular constituents’ (OED). The first of these denotes the wasting and decay of a body’s tissue, while the second sense of the word (from cell biology) is concerned with healthy regulation of cells within that body. This form of self-consumption can be observed, in metaphorical terms, within ‘The Hollow Men’. It is an autophagous poem, in both senses of the word:  that is, it uses images of decay and sickness (like The Waste Land before it) but uses these in order to rejuvenate Eliot’s poetry. Only by acknowledging his lack of original ideas after The Waste Land could he move beyond The Waste Land; it is only after he has acknowledged and fixed this problem of stasis and decay that he can find a way to progress. In Sweeney Agonistes we can see these ideas coming to the surface: the metaphor of cannibalism suggests that such artistic self-feeding was already eating away at Eliot in 1923–4, before ‘The Hollow Men’ emerged as a concept for a long poem. The theme of cannibalism in ‘Fragment of an Agon’ highlights this, as does the presence of many themes which the Sweeney fragments share with The Waste Land. But Sweeney Agonistes failed to cohere. ‘The Hollow Men’ succeeded, not by denying its fragmentariness, but by making a virtue of this fact: it became a completed poem of fragments, by acknowledging its very inability to come together. Fragments and stasis are, paradoxically, the themes which bring the various sections of the poem together and lend it a sense of progression and unity. There is no guiding mythology to integrate the various images and scenes of the poem, as was tentatively offered in The Waste Land with the Fisher King story. The poem is, we might say, more comfortable about acknowledging its lack of cohesion than The Waste Land had been, and, ironically, this is what makes it a cohesive work. ‘The Hollow Men’ is self-consciously a ‘short long poem’, in the same way that The Waste Land is a failed epic shrunk down to a smaller size. This reading of ‘The Hollow Men’ as an autophagic text goes against the widely held view that it was Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927 and subsequent writing of Ash-Wednesday, published in its entirety in 1930, that helped to resuscitate his own dying art of poetry. Such a neat and simplistic biographical interpretation of Eliot’s work of the 1920s neglects, for one, the overwhelmingly Christian language of ‘The Hollow Men’, published two years prior to Eliot’s conversion. In addition to the nod to the ProtestantCatholic divide in that second epigraph, ‘A penny for the Old Guy’ (a divide

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that Eliot’s own conversion to Anglo-Catholicism would help to dissolve), and the quotation from the Lord’s Prayer in the fifth section of the poem, there are Dantean references, among other allusions to Christian liturgy and dogma. If Eliot’s subsequent conversion to Christianity would help to reinvigorate his poetry, by providing him with a new worldview that would enable him to move beyond the spiritless despair of The Waste Land, then the centrality of ‘The Hollow Men’ in allowing him to draw a line under the Waste Land period of his career must be acknowledged. We might even see ‘The Hollow Men’ as Eliot’s first sustained experiment in self-allusion, which he would go on to use most successfully in Four Quartets, where he uses the allusion to Ecclesiastes, which he had previously used in ‘Prufrock’, in the first section of ‘East Coker’.27 But in Four Quartets he alludes to his own previous lines partly in an attempt to lend a unity and cohesion to his life’s work: to quote from ‘Little Gidding’, his purpose is to ‘set a crown upon [his] lifetime’s effort’.28 ‘The Hollow Men’ autophagically feeds on Eliot’s own work, specifically The Waste Land, for a different reason: to draw attention to the very problem of poetic development which the poem enacts. It is only by risking self-consumption, by eating away at the diseased body of Eliot’s poetry, that his poetic imagination can grow and become capable of composing something different, just as the speaker of Ash-Wednesday will have to have his liver, heart, limbs and brain eaten away by white leopards in order for him to be spiritually reborn. An anxiety over childbearing can be found in both The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’. In the former poem we have the Fisher King’s wounded groin and consequent impotence, Lil’s imprisonment within the animal cycle of impregnation and childbirth and the veiled reference to sex and conception found in the ‘awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract’ (ll. 403–4). ‘The Hollow Men’ closes with a section that circles around the theme of conception, making reference to ‘the conception’ and ‘the creation’, concluding, ‘Life is very long’ (84). Having children is not something to be entered into lightly, not least because life is very long, and having another life to nurture and care for can so easily feel like a negation of one’s own. But here we should also bear in mind the double meaning of ‘conception’, as both the making of a new life and the creation of a work of art, such as a poem. The poet experiences the emotion, and has a response in the form of a poem, but the ‘Shadow’ falls between the two, making the writing of poetry impossible, or at least extremely difficult. Like The Waste Land, which displays an uneasiness around the idea of conception and copulation, ‘The Hollow Men’ is haunted by

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an anxiety about different kinds of creation, not just physical creation of new life but the poet’s creation of a new work of art. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot had used the word ‘emotion’ in relation to poetic creation but had sought to distance himself from the Romantic notion of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: For it is not the ‘greatness’, the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion:  the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses.29

Once again, it is to that archetypal war veteran of Western literature, Odysseus/ Ulysses, that Eliot turns as his final example. Richard Aldington decried the death worship of ‘The Hollow Men’:  ‘The poet’s genius is not in question, but I  hate this exhibitionism of a perpetual suicidal mania which never, never, comes to the point.’ For him, the poem embodied ‘the War despair which involved so many of us and from which the healthy-minded have been struggling to escape, not yearning to wallow in’.30 But was Eliot yearning to wallow in his sense of despair, or was he, like Aldington, struggling but failing to escape it? Both poets would publish poems in 1925 that explored their attempts to move their poetry forward from the moment of The Waste Land. Both approached this task in very different ways, but both were united by their desire to leave behind the waste land of 1922. How Aldington endeavoured to do this will be explored in the next chapter.

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Arden to Ardennes: Richard Aldington, A Fool i’ the Forest

A Fool i’ the Forest was published in 1925. In 1930, Glenn Hughes described the poem as ‘Aldington’s finest poetic achievement’, yet critical analyses of Aldington’s poetry have tended to focus on his earlier imagist work.1 A Fool i’ the Forest represented a distinctive new phase in Aldington’s poetic career. Aldington himself described it as ‘jazz poetry’, an epithet which calls to mind the jazz-inspired style and references of The Waste Land.2 The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature calls the ‘debt’ which A Fool i’ the Forest owes to The Waste Land ‘excessive’.3 But what kind of debt does Aldington owe Eliot in this poem, and how does Aldington use what he learnt from Eliot’s own piece of ‘jazz poetry’, The Waste Land? I would argue that in A Fool i’ the Forest, Aldington deliberately summons Eliot in order to reject him; why he wished to reject Eliot at this time raises further questions about Aldington’s own idea of modernism and his artistic and cultural beliefs. Aldington himself liked to play down the debt A Fool i’ the Forest owed to The Waste Land, but in downplaying it he also risked arousing suspicion, especially given his links with Eliot, his increasing hostility towards the more successful poet and the internal echoes of Eliot’s poem in A Fool i’ the Forest. But it is clear that Aldington did object to Eliot’s poetry, and the dim view of humanity that Eliot’s poetry increasingly projected. As Aldington’s biographer, Charles Doyle, has observed, reviews which compared A Fool i’ the Forest to The Waste Land ‘must have galled Aldington for, as he several times assured [Herbert] Read, he was attempting to evade the “costiveness” of Eliot’s kind of poetry and “write for all men of good will” ’.4 Aldington nevertheless clearly saw that the long poem had potential as a vehicle for the modernist enterprise, and The Waste Land had shown that it was possible to offer a more totalizing view of modernity through drawing on features of the epic as well as on contemporary music and snatches of poetic styles from previous eras. What Aldington objected to was the emphasis

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on death-worship, which he detected in Eliot’s vision of post-war modernity. Aldington himself sidelined Eliot as the inspiration for A Fool i’ the Forest in favour of May Sinclair, who in 1924 had published a decidedly un-Eliotic poem, a novel in unrhymed verse, The Dark Night.5 This claim is worth examining more closely, given Sinclair’s own championing of imagism a decade earlier, and the fact that The Dark Night might be considered an imagist verse-novel. Aldington’s poem is caught somewhere between the fragmented jazz poetry of The Waste Land and the more cohesive narrative structure, the verse-novel form, of Sinclair’s poem. The Dark Night is narrated by Elizabeth, a young woman who falls in love with a poet named Victor, whom she subsequently marries. The poem charts her troubled marriage to him (he has an affair, and a baby, with Monica, Elizabeth’s young ward) and her worries over her religious faith as well as her doubt. Parts of The Dark Night seem to echo the free-verse imagist poems of Aldington and F. S. Flint from ten years earlier: London: The small house stands In a wide street of small houses, White and clean, So low that above them You can see all the sky, Blue over purple roofs And green tree-tops; Shallow roofs dropping broad eaves Above the black windows. Round my garden a low white wall, Topped by a screen of espalier limes, Black boughs stretched out, laced and knotted, Carrying round bunches of green leaves, Making a black and green pattern Against the white house.6

But other sections of the poem recall the imagism of H.  D.  in, for instance, ‘Oread’ or ‘Sea Rose’: Oh hold me up, Keep me within your walls of light, Oh crystal soul, oh hard and clear, Unbreakable, Swinging your light in darkness,



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Shine through me, Shine through me lest I lose the sight of God.7

Sinclair, who had written a powerful defence of the imagist method in a 1915 issue of The Egoist, here puts imagist principles – free verse, and a focus on hard, clear language and imagery – into practice in a longer work.8 Elsewhere, though, we can clearly see how the style of The Dark Night influenced Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest: I am here and Victor is in Rome. The postcard came to-day. ‘These are the steps of the Trinita, Above the Piazza di Spagna, Where I lodge, Close to the house that Keats died in – Think of me here, In Rome.’ And I think of him there, Lodging Close to the house that Keats died in, In the Piazza di Spagna, By the steps of the Trinita. I think: He loves Rome so well That he’ll never come back to England. I shall not see him again.9

The looser form of Sinclair’s free verse here is echoed by Aldington’s freer style in his long poem, an antidote to what Aldington had detected in The Waste Land: ‘I am rebelling against a poetry which I  think too self-conscious’, he wrote to Herbert Read in 1925, ‘too intellectual, too elliptic and alembique’.10 Such poetry, and Aldington clearly had Eliot in mind, was distinguished by ‘a costiveness of production’.11 Nevertheless, while Sinclair’s poem clearly showed Aldington how such a poem – what we might call an imagist narrative poem – might work using the looser form of free verse, it is obvious that Aldington is also engaging with the music and style of The Waste Land:  its sudden shift in setting, its medley of different forms and traditions, its allusiveness. So we cannot say that he simply side-stepped Eliot’s influence altogether in favour of Sinclair: in naming Sinclair’s poem as his model, he is engaging in a typical act of modernist revisionism.

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What A Fool i’ the Forest reveals is Aldington’s far more complex attitude to Eliot’s poem and a more profound engagement with it than outright rejection. Writing to Herbert Read on 23 December 1924, a month before the poem’s publication, Aldington defended his approach: If the Fool strikes you as loose in structure, texture and idea, I reply that you call ‘loose’ what I call ease, fluidity, clarity. … Ten years, five years ago, I should have said Amen to your denunciation. Now I take it as a compliment. I abandon, cast off, utterly deny the virtue of ‘extreme compression and essential significance of every word’. I say it is the narrow path that leadeth to sterility. It makes a desert and you call it art.12

Aldington’s references to ‘sterility’ and a ‘desert’ strongly suggest that he was thinking of The Waste Land even before reviewers leapt to make that comparison. Humbert Wolfe saw what Aldington’s different approach meant for modernism: ‘Aldington … could only see life darkly in T. S. Eliot’s looking-glass [but] that half-glimpse was worth the whole of the Imagist philanderings with verse which was only free in the sense that a bolting horse is free.’13 Vivien Whelpton has observed that, despite the obvious similarities with Eliot’s poetry, chiefly The Waste Land, ‘the presence of autobiographical content indicates that Aldington’s poem is an account of a personal journey’.14 It is this emphasis on the personal, on the ‘I’ of Aldington’s poem, that provides a key to Aldington’s approach in this poem. For in creating a personal narrative that is not only autobiographical in nature (many aspects of The Waste Land are, after all, echoes of aspects of Eliot’s own life) but also deeply concerned with the individual self, Aldington offers what might be called a neo-romantic response to Eliot’s theory of impersonality, set out in his 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Nevertheless, the method he employs in A Fool i’ the Forest is fairly close to that used by Eliot in The Waste Land, to imply an ironic contrast between the present and the past: Jupiter was jailed last year for bigamy And Helen’s married to a Guggenheim. (Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.)15

Ostensibly this presents us with a degraded world in which Helen of Troy, whose beauty led to the outbreak of a vast war, is not abducted for love but married off for money. But as with many of Eliot’s ironic contrasts between past and present, Aldington’s allusion to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus troubles such a reading, for Helen’s appearance in Marlowe’s play represents the latest stage in the tragic hero’s downfall, as his greed for riches and power clouds his judgement. Faustus



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and the Guggenheims, when viewed this way, are not so very different, just as Eliot’s supposed contrasts between Elizabethan London and the modern city served to highlight the likeness between these two periods as much as they underscored their difference. The allusion to Doctor Faustus is also relevant on a secondary level because Faustus was seduced by Mephistopheles into making a pact with the devil, much as Mezzetin and the Conjuror, in Aldington’s poem, try to persuade his narrator to come over to their ‘side’. Furthermore, Aldington’s narrator shares with Mephistopeles a belief, or at least a hunch, that the real world may be hell after all: ‘Perhaps Hell is the only reality / And we are its parasites?’ (29) wonders Aldington’s narrator, while Marlowe’s Mephistopheles famously asserted, ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’16 Although it has not been observed before by the few critics who have given Aldington’s poem sustained critical attention, the Faustian influence on the poem is significant, since it suggests a similarity with – but also a divergence from – Eliot’s use of Elizabethan drama: a similarity because The Waste Land is steeped in the rhythms and language of Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare and others, but a divergence because Aldington picks up not on fragmentary snatches of these plays but rather the heart of Marlowe’s drama. The very structure of Aldington’s poem serves to echo the journey undertaken by Faustus and Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s play, which takes them to various locations, including a nominal hell: Marlowe’s influence is at the level of character and narrative, rather than mere quotation or in the summoning of the rhythms of Elizabethan verse-drama. The narrator’s struggle in A Fool i’ the Forest is, like ‘The Hollow Men’, a sort of inner drama, in which an Elizabethan-style tragedy takes place on a phantasmagorical plane. But, crucially, the tragic end we might expect, in which the narrator-hero dies, is averted. The same is not true of Aldington’s novel exploring his war experiences, Death of a Hero, which he wrote four years later. The conclusion of A Fool i’ the Forest may not be tragic, but it is nevertheless pessimistic, with its narrator settling down into a mundane existence as a family man and worker in the city, although Aldington goes about expressing his postwar pessimism in a very different way from Eliot. Early in A Fool i’ the Forest, Aldington makes it clear that he intends to evoke Eliot only to critique him. Some of the images of Aldington’s poem appear to echo those of The Waste Land: O tread upon the violet and the rose, Lay waste the hyacinths among the rocks; He will not come again. (17)

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Eliot’s poem has ‘the violet hour’ (ll. 215, 220), ‘the violet air’ (l. 372) and ‘the violet light’ (l. 379); ‘You gave me Hyacinths’ (l. 35); and ‘among the rock’ (l. 351); and this in a poem whose title signals that it is about a land laid ‘waste’. What is more, The Waste Land’s borrowing from mad Ophelia, a shorthand for romantic excess (too much of the romantic spirit leads to madness), finds itself reworked in Aldington’s poem. But the difference is that Aldington’s poem is prepared to embrace such romanticism: those farewell words of Ophelia become transmuted in the closing words of Aldington’s poem: Farewell, mysterious earth, Farewell, impregnable sea, Farewell, Farewell. (62)

The cadence of this recalls Eliot’s borrowing of Ophelia’s mad farewell: ‘Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.’ But it refuses to countenance the ‘suicidal mania’ which Eliot’s allusion to these lines had evoked at the end of ‘A Game of Chess’, in an echo of the Sibyl’s plea (‘I want to die’).17 For the closing words of Aldington’s poem conclude a poem in which the protagonist decides not to die but to live, even if that entails embracing a life of compromise. It is notable that, unlike Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway or Eliot’s various speakers, the narrator of A Fool i’ the Forest does not allow despair to get the better of him and instead ends up working in an office in the city and settling down with a wife and family. Yet there is madness, or at least the threat of mental decay, in Aldington’s poem. A Fool i’ the Forest and The Waste Land do share one important biographical fact: both poets wrote them under considerable mental stress, with nervous breakdowns arguably accompanying the completion of both. As Doyle notes in his biography of Aldington, working on the poem ‘taxed his health’ and his subsequent ‘collapse may have been in part a reaction to his tapping of subconsciousness which fed A Fool i’ the Forest’.18 Aldington was examined by a London specialist who diagnosed ‘rapid nervous exhaustion’, which, like Eliot’s collapse four years earlier, was not deferred shell shock (although Aldington, unlike Eliot, had been a combatant in the war) but nevertheless recalled the symptoms of PTSD.19 So both The Waste Land and A Fool i’ the Forest reflect, in one sense, a malaise that was both personal and widespread in the years following the end



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of the war. The section describing the narrator’s journey across the desert with Mezzetin and the Conjuror bears close resemblances to the concluding section of The Waste Land, with Aldington’s reference to the ‘White-veiled women’ who ‘walked beside me’ (41), the ‘sounds of distant singing’ (41) and the ‘vast and murmuring crowd’ and ‘twisted columns’ (41–2). But it is significant that in Aldington’s poem the evening hour brings the ‘tired business man / Back to his tired spouse’ (21): a subtle reworking of the typist’s homeward journey after work prior to her extramarital coupling with the ‘young man carbuncular’ (l. 231) in The Waste Land. Reviewing A Fool i’ the Forest in The Criterion, Humbert Wolfe singled out the distinctive style of Aldington’s poem: A man is playing on a sort of saxophone fiddle outside my window. Sometimes I  hear the tune, sometimes the roar of the buses, sometimes voices suddenly raised, and as suddenly quiet; sometimes I  catch a glimpse of his odd ruined face, sometimes of a group of guardsmen in bright uniforms lounging against a coffee-stall, and now people, in sombre clothes, are flocking out of the dull great church, that looks like the remains of a railway accident. And that, after all, is life as it happens. Why shouldn’t poetry happen in the same way, with a snatch of tune running through, and binding together buses, voices, fiddling beggars, guardsmen, churchgoers and their church? Why not, indeed, asks Mr. Aldington, and proceeds to prove in A Fool i’ the Forest that it can be done. More than that, he reminds us that it is the only way in which it has ever been done.20

Both ‘The Hollow Men’ and A Fool i’ the Forest are not just responses to The Waste Land and the long shadow that it had cast over the modernist poem; they are also about Pound’s departure from London, which Pound himself had commemorated in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Vivien Whelpton wonders ‘what Pound would have done with A Fool i’ the Forest’.21 But Pound would not act as miglior fabbro to Aldington’s vision of the waste land, as he had done with Eliot’s. By 1924, when Aldington wrote the poem, he had become estranged from Pound, and although he sent Eliot a copy of A Fool i’ the Forest  – Eliot wrote back to say he enjoyed the poem – his opinion of Eliot, and Eliot’s poetry, had cooled since the publication of The Waste Land.22 Aldington later said of The Waste Land that it was full of ‘anti-sexual perversion’; as Charles Doyle observes, Aldington saw the poem as ‘manifesting Eliot’s central motivation, the deathwish’.23 Aldington’s poem would seek to replace death with life. Like Freud’s understanding of dream images as examples of ‘condensation’, ‘The Hollow Men’ and A Fool i’ the Forest represent a complex mixture of

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responses to the First World War but also its literary and cultural aftermath, which to Aldington as well as to Eliot meant The Waste Land but also the loss of Pound’s dominating presence from London. Indeed, both Aldington’s poem – which is subtitled A Phantasmagoria – and Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ are suffused with dream imagery. But whereas The Waste Land had presented a world stripped of spiritual meaning and filled with despair, A Fool i’ the Forest explores the destruction of the individual’s creative spirit in the wake of the war, as two competing but complementary forces – embodied in the poem by Mezzetin and the Conjuror – are eventually killed, leaving the ‘I’ who narrates the poem to take up a regular life with an office job, a wife and children. He is left utterly devoid of any real feeling, with his ‘spirit’ imprisoned in a ‘meek and regular’ cage (61). This is not the cage of the Cumaean Sibyl, nor the prison of ‘What the Thunder Said’, but it is a prison, nevertheless. The poem’s conclusion recalls the description of modern life glimpsed in a long poem that had been dedicated to Aldington, F. S. Flint’s ‘Otherworld’ (1920), which depicts the poet as a worker with a family, who gives ‘a hurried kiss to wife and children’ before leaving for ‘the miserable street’ along with the other ‘respectable’ members of his class, who are ‘urged by the same demon’, hunger, to keep working at their steady job so they can provide for their families.24 After the war, as The Waste Land also shows, more than despair awaits:  the boredom of everyday routine, too, is another prison waiting to ensnare those, like Flint and Aldington, returning from the front. The Times Literary Supplement described A Fool i’ the Forest as a ‘suggestive allegory’ that was ‘at once ribald and poignant’.25 It was described in The Calendar of Modern Letters in March 1925 as follows: A very vigorous expression of the disorder and unease of the modern mind, in which imaginative gaiety has been killed by savage experiences and the intellect discredited by its naïve credulity towards scientific mumbo-jumbo. Mr. Aldington makes his free-verse a trenchant instrument for satire, but it is hardly organised sufficiently to express the loss of harmony poetically.26

Mick Imlah described the poem as ‘an unstable amalgam of dream, allusion, and Poundian satirical rant at the capitalist system’.27 Yet Aldington did not entirely subscribe to Pound’s views, or his way of writing poetry, either: in 1925, shortly after the publication of A Fool i’ the Forest, he even wrote a letter to This Quarter which implied that Pound had lost his way and was no longer as relevant in England as he had been, pointing out that although he had benefited from Pound’s ‘personality and talk in the years 1911–12’, since then ‘we have gone



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very different ways and for me at least much of the old magic has gone’.28 As well as offering a corrective to Eliot’s post-war vision in The Waste Land, we might view A Fool i’ the Forest as a revision of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, with its portrait of a failed poet ill at ease in the modern world. Here, Aldington’s likening of the rising moon to ‘Anadyomene [rising] from the sea’ (21) is significant, since it alludes to Pound’s closing section of Mauberley, which had used the same image.29

Romanticism or classicism? In his prefatory note to the poem, Aldington establishes the relationship between its three principal ‘characters’, who are ‘one person split into three’: ‘ “I” is intended to be typical of a man of our own time, one who is by temperament more fitted for an art than a scientific civilization’ (7). Meanwhile, Mezzetin, from the Commedia dell’ Arte tradition, ‘symbolizes here the imaginative faculties  – art, youth, satire, irresponsible gaiety, liberty’ (7). Conversely, ‘the Conjuror symbolizes the intellectual faculties  – age, science, righteous cant, solemnity, authority – which is why I make him so malicious’ (7). It is possible to interpret Mezzetin (representing, in Aldington’s own words, ‘irresponsible gaiety’) and the Conjuror (representing ‘solemnity, authority’) as symbols of the Freudian id and superego respectively, with the ‘I’ of the poem being the ego. Freud’s The Ego and the Id was published in 1923, and Aldington’s subtitle A Phantasmagoria and the dreamlike movement of the poem imply that Aldington is attempting to present what Freud had described in psychoanalysis: the delicate balance between chaos and order, exuberance and restraint, which the id and the superego represent in Freud’s work. For Caroline Zilboorg, the ‘I’ of the poem ‘becomes transparently Aldington-the-survivor, the post-war poet who is only a shattered remnant of his former integral self ’.30 What is more, the links between the various movements or sections of A Fool i’ the Forest, like those of Paris and The Waste Land, are reminiscent of the tenuous links between the various stages of a dream: just as the ‘breasts’ in Mirrlees’s Paris seem to call to mind the milk advertisement, and the music on the typist’s gramophone in Eliot’s poem summons the music on the waters in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, so the snatch of an old song summons Venice to the narrator’s mind in Aldington’s poem, and the mention of a sergeant-major transports the narrator’s mind back to the trenches of the First World War. The action of the poem takes place within the narrator’s memory, on a separate plane from the real.

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Yet the binary suggested by Mezzetin and the Conjuror is irreducible to a Freudian cipher which could adequately explain these two figures as symbols. Glenn Hughes interprets Mezzetin and the Conjuror as representing the poet and the scholar, respectively, two phases of Aldington’s career:  he had started out as an idealistic imagist poet in his early twenties but ten years later had taken to journalism in an attempt to earn a living from writing.31 In this reading, Mezzetin’s death during the war would represent the death of the idealistic young poet that Aldington was when he left for the Western Front. But Aldington the poet did not die in the war, and he continued to mature and evolve as a poet in the years immediately following the conflict. Vivien Whelpton interprets the figures more broadly, observing of Aldington’s poem that it ‘revealed the extent to which he knew that he had lost his way and the importance of him regaining that equilibrium of head and heart that Lawrence himself preached’.32 Whelpton also remarks, with the Shakespearean allusion of the poem’s title firmly in mind, that Mezzetin the ‘Fool’ and the Conjuror figure call to mind Touchstone and Jaques from As You Like It.33 Whereas Touchstone is the fool or jester of the play, Jaques is a cynic and prone to a melancholy disposition. Both Touchstone and Jaques, the fool and the philosopher, advise Duke Senior, much as Mezzetin and the Conjuror, the equivalent figures in Aldington’s poem, guide and advise Aldington’s narrator. But Touchstone and Jaques provide the intertextual models for Aldington’s characters: they are not exact equivalents. And the personality clash embodied by Mezzetin and the Conjuror can also be seen as a response to the debate about romanticism and classicism instigated by T. E. Hulme in his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, which, although it had been written over a decade earlier before the outbreak of war, only came to a wider readership when it was reprinted in the posthumous volume Speculations, published in 1924 when Aldington was at work on A Fool i’ the Forest. Aldington may, however, have encountered Hulme’s ideas before this, chiefly through his friendship with Pound during the early years of imagism. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Hulme argues that after several centuries of romanticism, modern art is due a classical revival, with artists and poets acknowledging humanity’s limitations, rejecting boundlessness and excess in favour of a more scientifically informed notion of restraint.34 These competing forces of romantic excess and classical restraint are revisited again and again throughout A Fool i’ the Forest. At one point the narrator declares, ‘The renouncing of all limit is itself a truth’ and states that this ‘boundless orgy, this release of the senses’ is ‘but a type and figure of human life, / The sensual needs that hold us to the earth’ (39). This sounds like romanticism, specifically romanticism as



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Hulme viewed it, yet at the same time the addition of the words ‘that hold us to the earth’ echoes Hulme’s words about classicism, that philosophical worldview which reminds man that he is ‘mixed up with earth’, suggesting that the narrator is torn between the two.35 The ‘I’ of A Fool i’ the Forest expresses both romantic and classicist views, making it difficult to determine where his true allegiance lies. But after the taut classicism that had been advocated by Hulme, and then by Ezra Pound as the ringleader for the imagists, even this tempered and rather muted romanticism represents a departure from modernist poetry as Pound, Eliot and Hulme had practised it. Aldington is careful to balance romanticism and classicism in his poem, but right from the opening pages he is providing clues that this is one of the key dichotomies his poem is exploring. ‘Sappho and Shelley you no longer bring’, the narrator announces, addressing the ‘Evening Star’ (21): the post-war nightmare world which the narrator inhabits is devoid of poetry of all kinds, whether classical (the taut fragments of Sappho, which may well have influenced Aldington’s early Greek-inspired imagist lyrics) or romantic (the idealism of Shelley). The first song, with its title ‘Lament for Lord Byron’ can be seen as a farewell to romanticism, with Byron chosen as the emblematic Romantic figure because of his role in fighting for Greek independence, dying in the very country that had given the world ‘classicism’. The second song, in which the narrator declares that he has ‘worn all servitudes’ and ‘drunk all shames’ (35), sounds like an acknowledgement of a debased world in which Hulmean classicism is the governing philosophy. The phrase ‘drunk all shames’ echoes the line from Villon about having drunk up all his shame in his thirtieth year, also alluded to by both Pound (in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) and Eliot (in the epigraph to ‘A Cooking Egg’).36 Villon’s line refers to a man in his thirtieth year; Aldington turned 30 in 1922, the year of The Waste Land. Ultimately, Aldington’s narrator has more in common with Mezzetin than with the Conjuror; it is significant that he throws the latter off the Waterloo Bridge. The narrator is clearly angered by Mezzetin’s death, and the Conjuror’s role in it: he is, in a sense, angered by classicism’s banishing of romanticism from modern poetry. The narrator tells us that, while he cannot take part in ‘those mad orgies’, being ‘barred from them / By iron habits of race and training’ (40), he does not condemn them, but simply observes. Thus he is somebody who has sympathies with romanticism, even though he does not give himself fully to the romantic impulse; his ‘training’ means that romanticism is not a mode that comes naturally to him now. A Fool i’ the Forest can be read as a condemnation, not of romanticism or classicism in themselves, but of the modern habit of using

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classicism to repress romanticism which, ultimately, has led to the repression of all true poetry in the modern age. Shortly after they arrive in wartime France, the narrator launches into an angry tirade at the Conjuror, asking: How can we live like Greeks when we’re not Greeks? What’s the use of trying to write like Virgil? We can’t create his sort of beauty As well as he could, and I hate pastiches; (44)

This attacks classicism in both the literal sense (the focus on ancient Greek and Roman writers) and the Hulmean and Eliotic sense (Virgil would later be held up by Eliot as the supreme example of the national poet). After this, the Conjuror tells the narrator that he must choose one of them, adding, ‘You know what we stand for’ (45). But this is precisely what is lacking from Aldington’s account of the figures: what they are supposed to represent. The narrator asks of the Greeks, ‘Why do we romanticize about them?’ (25), going on to lament, ‘We have beauty that’s diseased and wanton’ (26). Aldington’s disillusionment with classicism has been summarized by David Ayers: Although Aldington criticised Joyce for lack of form, his own poetry had moved away from the ideal economy of Imagism to a more loosely framed prose poetry or vers libre, which culminated in the ‘jazz poetry’ of A Fool i’ the Forest (1924). In the years immediately following the war, Aldington seems to have remained a committed classicist, but by the end of the 1920s, by which time he was resident in Paris, any claim to classicism, or indeed to any variety of programmatic Modernism is gone. … However, his abandonment of classicism was not simply the result of commercial motives, but stemmed from the desire to create an expressive literature that would be free from the evasions, preciosity and irony of Modernism.37

A Fool i’ the Forest, then, marks Aldington’s departure from his former imagist self and the dictums for imagism laid out by Ezra Pound in his 1913 essay ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, including the emphasis on classical restraint which Pound had derived from Hulme.38 Whereas Eliot’s The Waste Land is classical in terms of its language, imagery and outlook, Aldington had a more ambivalent attitude to the modernist long poem: his poem combines a classical worldview with a more ‘romantic’ or expansive language, a looser form and a lament for a lost world of romanticism. As I argued in Chapter 4, even when Eliot appears to be romanticizing the past, such as when he quotes from Spenser



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to summon Elizabethan England, his network of allusions is so knotted and complex as to make it difficult to read the poem as romantically nostalgic in any straightforward sense. But while to some extent Mezzetin and the Conjuror are meant to symbolize respectively the id versus the superego, and romanticism versus classicism, they do not wholly represent either these Freudian or Hulmean dichotomies. One other pair of complementary terms does help explain them and also takes us back to Aldington’s use of Marlovian tragedy:  the Apollonian and Dionysian. Mezzetin, from the Commedia dell’ Arte tradition, ‘symbolizes here the imaginative faculties – art, youth, satire, irresponsible gaiety, liberty’ (7) – and thus might be interpreted as Dionysian in spirit. Conversely, ‘the Conjuror symbolizes the intellectual faculties  – age, science, righteous cant, solemnity, authority  – which is why I  make him so malicious’ (7), and so represents on one level the Apollonian attitude. Although such a dichotomy implies the tragic mode which pits the Dionysian against the Apollonian, as Nietzsche’s use of these terms in his 1878 work The Birth of Tragedy highlights, Aldington’s poem is precariously poised between tragedy and comedy. His note concludes by pointing out that one of the longest quotations to feature in the poem is from Aristophanes, the classical comic playwright who provides Paris with several of its most significant references. The end of the poem, furthermore, ends not with the narrator’s death but with him settling down into a life of bourgeois tedium and conformity: hardly a happy ending, but nor is it the tragic death of the would-be hero we get at the end of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, nor the cry of despair or empty hope we can detect at the end of The Waste Land. Mezzetin’s name is derived from Mezzetino, whose name means ‘half-measure (of alcohol)’, thus pointing up his kinship with the god of wine, Dionysus. Just after the narrator of A Fool i’ the Forest has declared himself a romanticist, embracing the idea of the ‘boundless orgy, this release of the senses’, he goes on to describe it favourably as ‘wine-drenched ecstasy’ and ‘Priapic’ (39). Priapus, we should keep in mind, was the son of Dionysus, and associated with the same worship of fertility, wine and hedonism. Aldington’s letters demonstrate that he was familiar with Nietzsche’s work, while his imagist poetry is steeped in classical mythology, containing references to numerous ancient deities. There is a link between this Apollonian/Dionysian tension in the poem and the development of Freudian psychoanalysis after the war, but there is also a link with Aldington’s rejection of Eliot around this time. If the Dionysian represents Eros and life, then the Apollonian stands for Thanatos and the death drive, what Freud had identified with the compulsion to repeat in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

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And there is also an implicit rejection of the cult of death or ‘suicidal mania’ which Aldington detected in Eliot. By the end of the 1920s, Aldington had moved away from poetry and was concentrating more on fiction. Even his poetry had taken a narrative turn: five years after A Fool i’ the Forest, he would publish A Dream in the Luxembourg, a long romantic narrative poem. A poet and novelist he much admired was D. H. Lawrence, whom he had first met in 1914 and who remained his friend until Lawrence’s death in 1930; in 1950 Aldington wrote a study of Lawrence’s work. I would argue that the tempering influence on Aldington’s poetry in A Fool i’ the Forest, which enabled him to draw on Eliot’s framework for the long poem but to escape Eliot’s shadow, was provided by D. H. Lawrence. Not only this, but one other aspect of the Dionysian/Apollonian or romantic/classical dichotomy of Mezzetin/the Conjuror in Aldington’s poem is provided by the contrast between D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, at least as Aldington viewed them in the mid1920s. In 1926, the year after A Fool i’ the Forest was published, Aldington wrote a review of Lawrence’s poetry for the Saturday Review of Literature, observing that Lawrence ‘does not accept a ready-made existence’ and ‘scorns futile social laws, amusements, behaviour, all herd-suggestions, and tastes the dangerous voluptuousness of living’.39 For Aldington, Lawrence’s poems demonstrate ‘how absolutely free his mind and body are’; in contrast to ‘our tame intellectuals and arrivistes’, Lawrence offers ‘sensual richness’ and ‘emotional variety’, his poetry full of ‘pangs of intolerable pleasure’ and ‘ecstasies for the love of beauty’.40 We should contrast such emotive terms – ‘free’, ‘richness’, ‘ecstasies’ – with Aldington’s word, ‘costiveness’, to describe Eliot’s poetry, especially The Waste Land. Lawrence’s free-verse poems are less austere and ‘classical’ than Eliot’s poetry. The Times Literary Supplement review of A Fool i’ the Forest noted its ‘apparent formlessness’,41 using the same phrase that Lawrence would use to describe his own writing: ‘As a matter of fact, we need more looseness. We need an apparent formlessness, definite mood is mechanical. We need more easy transition from mood to mood and from deed to deed. A good deal of the meaning of life and of art lies in the apparently dull spaces, the pauses, the unimportant passages.’42 By the mid-1920s, Aldington saw Lawrence as his natural literary kin, rather than Eliot. Vivien Whelpton’s reference, in her discussion of A Fool i’ the Forest, to ‘regaining that equilibrium of head and heart that Lawrence himself preached’ points up an important influence on the poem, which tempers Eliot’s overbearing influence, positive and negative, on the modernist long poem.43 The tension between the Lawrentian and Eliotic modes in A Fool i’ the Forest is clearly seen



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when Aldington uses the homorhyme Eliot had used to such great effect in The Waste Land: O miserable condition of humanity, Coming from nothing, into nothing going, Striving with princes and with powers for nothing, Who indeed would sweat and fardels bear for nothing? What’s a man? (46)

The allusion to the ‘fardels bear’ and ‘What’s a man?’ of Hamlet sounds an almost existential note, but the repetition of ‘for nothing’ at the end of two consecutive lines is nihilistic, the use of homorhyme underscoring the nothingness. It takes the Eliotic unheroic couplet and empties it further, reducing it to ‘nothing’. Aldington’s poem may diverge from Eliot’s in many ways, but it shares his pessimistic view of heroism. Tellingly, Aldington’s first novel, published in 1929, would be called Death of a Hero. The death of heroism, too. But the looser and more discursive phrasing of Aldington’s lines recalls Lawrence’s homorhymes more than Eliot’s, and his allusion to Hamlet picks up on Lawrence’s Hamlet allusions in ‘The Ship of Death’: ‘And can a man his own quietus make / with a bare bodkin?’44 Mezzetin and the Conjuror, then, may be understood as respectively representing, among other things, the differing poetic styles of D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot. By 1925, Aldington’s allegiances clearly lay with Lawrence rather than Eliot, but he realized that some of the techniques Eliot had employed in The Waste Land could be co-opted and then reinvented for his own long poem. This is what makes A Fool i’ the Forest a poem that has affinities with Eliot, even while Aldington sought to reject the more classical aspects of Eliot’s style and outlook: for Aldington, an unromantic age calls not for an unromantic poetry but for a poetry alive to the memories of romanticism in all its forms.

Finding Telemachus A Fool i’ the Forest is another post-war poem that references Odysseus, the hero of Western literature’s first post-war poem. But what has been overlooked is the fact that, although Aldington’s title alludes to Shakespeare’s As You Like It, it does so via another allusion, in James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘C’est vendredi saint! Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i’ the forest.’45 Like the other

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modernist long poems this book has considered, A Fool i’ the Forest owes a debt to Joyce’s novel and the way it had shown how modern writers could engage with contemporary themes and events using myth. Like Joyce’s novel, Aldington’s poem draws on the characters of Ulysses and Telemachus; like Ulysses, notably that novel’s opening sentences, Aldington’s poem utilizes the dactylic hexameter of Homeric verse; like Joyce’s novel, A Fool i’ the Forest incorporates snatches of popular song. In his 1921 essay ‘The Influence of Mr James Joyce’, Aldington had decried Joyce’s depiction of the ‘sordid’ aspects of humanity but had praised the form and style of the book and the way it enabled Joyce to reveal Bloom’s psychology: Ulysses is a gigantic soliloquy. Bloom is a kind of rags and tatters Hamlet, a proletarian Lear, ‘mirroring’ life and showing it to be hideous. Mr. Joyce has pushed the intimate detailed analysis of character to a point further than any writer I  know. His faithful reproduction of Bloom’s thoughts, with their inconsequence, their staccato breaks, their returns to an obsession, is an astonishing psychological document. The telegraphic method is there apt and justified. And there is also a good artistic reason for the abandonment of all unity of prose tone, a unity always observed by the French Naturalistes. Sometimes Mr. Joyce writes journalese; sometimes a kind of prose poetry; sometimes a rapid narrative; often the telegraphic prose of Bloom’s thoughts; occasionally he is deliberately obscene; too often he is incoherent. Yet in nearly every case he achieves his ‘effect’.46

Such a method might equally be used to describe Aldington’s own for A Fool i’ the Forest. A  remark Aldington makes later in the same essay helps clarify the relationship between Aldington’s poem and The Waste Land: ‘Imitations of Shakespeare are always repulsive and absurd, but it is certain that because of Shakespeare the greatest English poets have a verbal richness and imagination almost unknown in French poetry.’47 Imitation is not art, but all great art bears the stamp, the influence, of other art. In a review of Eliot’s The Sacred Wood published in Poetry a month before Aldington’s article on Joyce appeared, Aldington had identified Eliot’s concept of poetic tradition in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ as an important and original contribution to literary criticism, even while he would later take issue with Eliot’s concept of impersonality expressed in the same essay.48 With his remark about Shakespeare in his Joyce article, Aldington appears to be incorporating Eliot’s concept of literary influence into his own thinking about modern literature. Shortly after mentioning Tennyson, the Conjuror in A Fool i’ the Forest offers a meditation which takes Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and extends its implications.



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Tennyson’s poem mused upon the fate of Odysseus after he had returned home from the Trojan War and sought to content himself with life on Ithaca, governing his island kingdom and leaving his days of warfare behind as he comes to terms with approaching old age. Aldington thinks about what befell Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, in his old age: Telemachus grew old and drooled by the fire in the evening, Paddling with palsied hands in the open breasts of his women And wetting his oily beard in the wine-up bossy and golden; Red embers fell to grey as he mused of the ending of mortals, The dying groans and the stillness, the funeral fire and the ash. And he thought how his father Odysseus fared ship-borne far to the Westward And came to the dwelling of ghosts and spake with the heroes of Troy. Now fain would Telemachus meet with the ghost of his father Odysseus To learn the state of the dead, if at last the soul be at peace. (18)

Charles Doyle observes that ‘Aldington in retrospect saw the 1920s as a period in which he slowly recovered from psychological damage inflicted by the war’.49 Unlike Eliot, he had experienced fighting first-hand, and the passage from A Fool i’ the Forest quoted above, in which Telemachus yearns to communicate with his dead father, can be regarded as Aldington’s attempt to connect with the young man who had returned from the Western Front. Unlike Pound’s Odysseus, who communicates with Tiresias in the Underworld in his revised opening canto, and unlike Eliot’s Tiresias who connects past with present, Aldington casts himself as Telemachus, the young man affected by the war who must make sense of what the war has done. After A Fool I’ the Forest, Aldington would take the narrative technique he had developed in that poem and apply it to a full-length prose novel, Death of a Hero. ‘The technique of this book’, Aldington wrote in his preface to the novel, ‘if it can be said to have one, is that which I  evolved for myself in writing a longish modern poem … called “A Fool i’ th’ Forest.” Some people said that was “jazz poetry”; so I suppose this is a jazz novel.’50 A Fool i’ the Forest lies between The Waste Land and Death of a Hero in moving away from the compressed poetic technique of Eliot’s poem, and towards the narrative scope of the novel. Like The Waste Land, the poem had rejected the idea of heroism, but as the title of Aldington’s novel demonstrates, his war experiences had created a more conflicted attitude towards the war he had lived through.

7

Nancy Cunard’s Parallax and the ‘Emotions of Aftermath’

In the Epilogue to his New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), F.  R. Leavis considered the issue of ‘getting beyond Mr Eliot’: And looking round at the scene of young intellectuals dividing their admiration between Mr Eliot and Mr E. E. Cummings (though it must be admitted that one need hardly, any longer, add ‘and the Sitwells’), being laboriously and eclectically parasitic upon the various phases of Mr Eliot’s poetry, and getting beyond Mr Eliot, one feels some embarrassment. Since Miss Nancy Cunard produced in Parallax, her simple imitation of The Waste Land, Mr Eliot has suffered a great deal of discipleship of varying degrees of naïveté and subtlety.1

Cunard’s poem was generally viewed in such terms, as ‘parasitic’ and a mere ‘imitation’ of Eliot. In 1928, Laura Riding described it as one of the ‘imitations’ of Eliot’s poem; she and Robert Graves had described it as ‘an imitation of T. S. Eliot’ in their Survey of Modernist Poetry published a year earlier.2 The reviewer of Parallax in the Times Literary Supplement wrote: ‘The conclusion is unavoidable that Miss Cunard’s poem would never have been conceived in its present shape without the example of Mr. Eliot; and the parallelism even extends to verbal reminiscences in certain passages.’3 ‘Parallelism’, ‘parasitical’:  such para-words gather around the poem (itself aptly named Parallax), as if pointing up its sense of being beside something else, rather than being a poem in its own right. But is ‘parallelism’ simply a sign of parasitic borrowing? And could The Waste Land itself have been ‘conceived in its present shape’ without the example set by previous poets such as Baudelaire, Dante and the metaphysical poets? Such a blanket dismissal of the original aspects to Cunard’s poem assumes that his borrowings from Eliot’s work do not constitute creative allusion (as is the case with Eliot’s innovative use of Shakespeare, Verlaine, Marvell, Spenser and many others) but are rather merely

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imitative echoes which fail to reinvent or recast the poetry Cunard draws upon. Nor, such judgements seem to imply, can Cunard’s debts to Eliot be described as an imaginative reworking of ideas and themes found in previous poets, such as Eliot does with those poets whose work provided a precedent for aspects of The Waste Land. The problem with such judgements of Cunard’s poem is that few critics have subjected Parallax to the close scrutiny which it appears to require in order for us to understand what Cunard is doing. Because it was clearly influenced by Eliot, and written by a woman known – both then and now – more as a socialite and friend to famous poets than as a poet herself, Parallax has been written off for nearly a century as the work of a poet manqué, who probably even served as the inspiration for Eliot’s barbed mockery of mediocre women poets in the original drafts of The Waste Land, in lines eventually excised from the final poem.4 But it would be a mistake to read the self-conscious poeticism of Parallax as evidence of Cunard’s own poetic naïveté, because such an interpretation overlooks the fact that Parallax is told from the perspective of an invented persona, the romantic male poet who undertakes the wanderings described in the poem. Even those reviewers who dismissed Parallax as unoriginal saw merit in the poem. Indeed, what is surprising about the poem’s critical neglect is the way in which original reviewers noted the poem’s worth even while they cast it as derivative, a sub-Waste Land. The review in the Times Literary Supplement goes on to say: But, even when this is recognized, Miss Cunard’s poem shows the individuality of its author; she transcribes the emotions of aftermath with remarkable subtlety. It seems to be the creation of a resilient mind, it has a complexity and grasp of reality which is so frequently lacking from women’s poetry. ‘Parallax’, though not itself truly original, may well be the prelude to a poem of free inspiration.5

This is faint praise, with even that final compliment containing a gentle nod to Cunard’s indebtedness to Eliot (‘prelude’ playing off ‘Preludes’, one of a number of Eliot’s poems with which Parallax engages). The dismissal of the majority of women’s poetry as lacking ‘complexity’ and a ‘grasp of reality’, moreover, is sweepingly general. But the most significant question raised by the review is what constitutes originality in the context of the densely allusive and frequently collaborative practice of creating modernist poetry:  for instance, Pound’s editing of The Waste Land or Mirrlees’s use of Jane Harrison’s work. This is an especially pertinent question to ask about Parallax, since the reviewer’s charge of unoriginality is used alongside such positive terms as ‘individuality’, ‘subtlety’,



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‘creation’, ‘resilient’ and ‘complexity’. Can one be individual yet not original? This is partly what this chapter will explore, using the phrase ‘emotions of aftermath’ (picked up by the TLS reviewer) as a focal point. Aftermath of what? Not just the First World War, I  would suggest, but that first wave of modernist poetic responses to the war, particularly The Waste Land and Eliot’s other great postwar poem ‘Gerontion’. Like ‘The Hollow Men’ and A Fool i’ the Forest, Cunard’s poem is as much a response to Eliot’s response to the war as it is a response to the war itself. Engagement with history has become mediated through the poetry that has already been produced, poetry which itself engages with that history. But as I argued in the chapter on The Waste Land, this is something Eliot’s poem had also done, through its engagement with ‘post-war poems’ such as Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. The difference is that Cunard’s poem takes its points of reference from contemporaneous poetry, rather than the poetry of previous ages. Of course, this is in itself a poetic statement. Eliot’s allusions to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems which were written in the context of ongoing or recent wars, as well as the influence of Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey – directly or indirectly – on his poem, made The Waste Land a war poem or postwar poem not merely in chronological but thematic terms. Part of the point of these allusions was to draw a parallel between the past and present  – war and its effects have been a continual fact of life throughout human history  – but also to suggest some degree of contrast between the past and the present. Many of the negative visions of modernity in Eliot’s poem are juxtaposed with more idyllic views of a bygone era depicted by poets from the ‘Golden Age’ of English literature:  witness the modern-day oil- and tar-ridden Thames, which is juxtaposed with the Elizabethan ‘Sweet Thames’ of Edmund Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’. If this is the role performed by Eliot’s allusions to the work of previous poets, what similar role might Cunard’s borrowings from Eliot’s work play in her evocation of a post-war landscape? Before we move closer to Cunard’s poem, it is worth pointing out that not all reviewers considered Cunard to be a mere imitator of Eliot. The reviewer in Outlook, for instance, observed that ‘T. S. Eliot is the first who heard the new music in its full harmony. Miss Cunard has caught strains of it too. She is not piping over again Mr Eliot’s tune [but] adding her own motifs and orchestration to the general theme.’6 More recently, as David Ayers and Tory Young have both argued, Cunard’s indebtedness to The Waste Land can be seen not as simple imitation but as a form of literary allusion.7 In the years immediately following the publication of Eliot’s poem, numerous writers would produce

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long poems that were to some degree a response to it: as well as Parallax and Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest there was Vita Sackville-West’s poem The Land (1926), a long pastoral piece about the four seasons and the countryside in the south of England. Sackville-West followed up The Land 20 years later with The Garden, containing a pointed rejection of Eliot’s bleak message of destruction and devastation. Having quoted the first four lines of ‘The Burial of the Dead’, Sackville-West continues: Would that my pen like a blue bayonet Might skewer all such cats’-meat of defeat; No buttoned foil, but killing blade in hand. The land and not the waste land celebrate, The rich and hopeful land, the solvent land, Not some poor desert strewn with nibbled bones, A land of death, sterility, and stones. We know that the ultimate vex is the same for all: The discrepancy Between the vision and the reality.8

Sackville-West’s last line here seems to look back not only to The Waste Land but also to Eliot’s other great 1920s poem of despair and sterility, ‘The Hollow Men’. Cunard’s poem is performing a similar revision of The Waste Land and its message of helpless despair in the wake of the First World War, but unlike Sackville-West’s poem of largely traditional verse, Parallax challenges The Waste Land on its own terms: those of literary allusion and fragmentation, free verse and experimental typography. Peter Stockwell has recently read Cunard’s poem as a ‘surrealist work’ or, at least, as ‘a work heavily influenced by and associated with surrealism’.9 It is also worth noting that influence need not imply imitation, as Aldington’s remark about Shakespeare, from his article on James Joyce quoted in the previous chapter, demonstrates. Sandeep Parmar, Cunard’s editor, observes that Parallax and Cunard’s other mature poems contain ‘traces of high modernist and avant-garde lineation, attention to high and low forms of diction, polyvocality, itinerancy and intertextual allusion’; these details ‘point most convincingly to echoes of Eliot’s The Waste Land’ but also ‘to the influence of French Surrealism and the political, temporal inflections of some modernist poetry’.10 If Parallax is an imitation of The Waste Land, it is a more complex one than many of the poem’s initial critics acknowledged. Yet what remains to be thought is how Cunard alludes to Eliot’s work and what the precise purpose of such allusion might be. ‘The best criticism of any



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work’, Ezra Pound wrote in his notice on Ulysses in 1922, ‘to my mind the only criticism of any work of art that is of any permanent or even moderately durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job’.11 Cunard’s Parallax may be regarded as one such ‘criticism’ of another landmark work of 1922, The Waste Land. Eliot may have modelled the empty-headed would-be poet Fresca from the excised sections of The Waste Land on Cunard, who was – in the early 1920s when Eliot composed these lines – writing somewhat more conventional poetry. Ironically, it would be The Waste Land, the very poem whose original drafts are thought to make fun of Cunard’s poetic attempts, that would turn her into a modernist poet and help her to find her distinctive poetic voice. Rai Peterson has even argued that Parallax was Cunard’s way of taking ‘subtle revenge’ for the Fresca passages, which Cunard may have got sight of through a mutual acquaintance.12 This reading, however, reduces Cunard’s engagement with Eliot’s work to the level of the personal and biographical, rather than encapsulating the broader cultural, political and literary readings which Parallax invites. Samuel Beckett admired several fine passages in Parallax, a copy of which Cunard presented him with in 1930, the year Cunard’s publishing company, the Hours Press, published Beckett’s Whoroscope. In 1956, Beckett was still recalling the poem and wrote to Cunard:  ‘I want to read your Parallax again and the Battersea or thereabouts gulls skewered to the wind.’13 The suffragette and journalist Janet Flanner called Parallax superior to The Waste Land.14 Cunard herself was described by William Carlos Williams as ‘one of the major phenomena of history’.15 But many contemporary responses to Cunard’s poetry in the popular press focused less on her poetry than on her appearance, as Lois Gordon has highlighted.16 Even now, when critics including Ayers and Young have begun to rescue Parallax from obscurity, the poem has not been subjected to much close analysis  – analysis which is crucial in order to examine how Cunard presents her response to The Waste Land and Eliot’s post-war vision of London and Europe. Jane Goldman has observed that the title of Cunard’s poem recalls the ‘parallax’ from Joyce’s Ulysses,17 the ‘parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars’, although the word ‘parallax’ appears in Joyce’s novel seven times in total.18 Yet again, we have a modernist long poem that has affinities with Joyce’s novel. As Goldman goes on to remark, ‘Parallax records changes of vision induced by the shifting position or perspective of observers; involving, in literary terms, juxtaposing, distancing, or cutting between diverse texts, histories, realities.’19 As Lois Gordon has observed of the similarities between Parallax and The Waste

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Land, Cunard’s poem ‘addressed the same subject as Eliot’s: the disintegration of values in the modern world’.20 This disintegration is enacted, in The Waste Land, through Eliot’s juxtaposition of scenes from modern life and quotations from writers of bygone eras, creating a ‘quantum’ effect simultaneously suggesting both continuum and contrast: in other words, that the modern world is both worse than the past and, somehow, the same. One of the defining stylistic features of Eliot’s poem was his incorporation of the work of previous poets from bygone ages and traditions into his own, new poem. We might extend Ayers’s and Young’s readings of Parallax, then, and argue that Cunard’s creative appropriation and reinvention of Eliot’s poem should be seen in a similar light to Eliot’s own appropriation of other poets’ words in The Waste Land. Given its allusions to Eliot’s work, and its similar length, it is understandable that initial critics of Parallax interpreted it as mere imitation of Eliot’s work. The Waste Land had attracted popular and critical acclaim, with the poem being discussed as epoch-defining very soon after its publication. A poem that was published just three years after it, written by a far less acclaimed poet and appearing to borrow images, themes and phrases from it as well as from Eliot’s other work, may have appeared to be a simple pastiche or homage. But it is this very assumption that I want to question here. What if Cunard is not performing a simple act of appropriation or imitation of Eliot’s work, but engaging critically with its ideas and themes, and using them to create a new poem? Parallax, then, is not an unimaginative homage but a critical response to Eliot’s poem  – and the long shadow it had already cast over modernist poetry – using Eliot’s own tropes and words in order to examine and question them. It is, in Pound’s words, an example of the ‘next job’ which Pound believed constitutes the ‘best criticism’ of a poem. Given that there are good grounds for thinking this is indeed what Cunard’s poem is doing, it is singularly ironic that Cunard’s critique of Eliot’s work (and his status as representative, even definitive embodiment, of the modern poet) has been neglected, and that her attempt to problematize and interrogate the emerging canon of modernist poetry has led to her being left out of the canon altogether. One way to approach the nature of the relationship between Parallax and The Waste Land is through a consideration of another ‘par-’ word: parody. The Waste Land is itself partly an act of parody, beginning as a pastiche (that close relative of the parodic) of the work of the eighteenth-century satirists Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift; the drafts include parodies of Shakespeare, such as the infamous ‘Dirge’, beginning ‘Full Fathom Five thy Bleistein lies’, which Pound marked as ‘doubtful’.21 As John Crowe Ransom observed, the ‘inequality of



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material’ in The Waste Land is ‘not fundamentally different from parody’, since to parody ‘is to borrow a phrase whose meaning lies on one plane of intelligence and to insert it into the context of a lower plane; an attempt to compound two incommensurable imaginative creations’.22 One prominent example, mentioned by Ransom, is the moment when Eliot borrows from, and subverts, Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’ from The Vicar of Wakefield. And if Cunard’s poem reminds us of anything more than The Waste Land, it is James Joyce’s parody of Eliot’s poem: Rouen is the rainiest place, getting Inside all impermeables, wetting Damp marrow in drenched bones. Midwinter soused us coming over Le Mans Our inn at Niort was the Grape of Burgundy But the winepress of the Lord thundered over that grape of Burgundy And we left it in a hurgundy.       (Hurry up, Joyce, it’s  time!) I heard mosquitoes swarm in old Bordeaux So many! I had not thought the earth contained so many       (Hurry up, Joyce, it’s  time) Mr Anthologos, the local gardener, Greycapped, with politeness full of cunning Has made wine these fifty years And told me in his southern French Le petit vin is the surest drink to buy For if ’tis bad Vous ne l’avez pas payé        (Hurry up, hurry up, now, now, now!) But we shall have great times, When we return to Clinic, that waste land O Esculapios!       (Shan’t we? Shan’t we? Shan’t  we?)23

This parody of Eliot’s poem, which Joyce wrote in a letter to their mutual friend Harriet Shaw Weaver in August 1925, chimes with Cunard’s response to The Waste Land in several curious ways:  relocating Eliot’s vision of post-war modernity to provincial France, the emphasis on wine and vineyards, and the rain-sodden landscape. It is unlikely that Joyce was aware of Cunard’s poem

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when he penned this short parody, just as it is equally unlikely that Cunard had read Joyce’s lines. The fact that they both composed poems which interpreted Eliot’s poem in strikingly similar ways points to the strong response Eliot’s poem generated from other modernist writers and reviewers, and how easily it lent itself to parodic recasting. Joyce also, crucially if tacitly, highlights the centrality of homorhyme to Eliot’s poem, as he uses ‘Burgundy’ and ‘Burgundy’, and ‘so many’ and ‘so many’, to sum up the distinctive form of Eliot’s versification. As this chapter will show, Cunard, too, seizes upon this signature feature of Eliot’s poem as a way of signalling what she is doing with the tropes and messages she finds in The Waste Land. But can we call Parallax one long parody, like an extended version of Joyce’s piece of gentle mockery? The joke would quickly wear thin across some 20 pages of experimental verse, and the extended length would dilute any parodic force the poetry might have carried. But nor do I  think that viewing Parallax as mere imitation of Eliot is a very accurate, or helpful, way of discovering what Cunard is trying to do in her poem. Instead, some combination of parody, imitation, pastiche and critical evaluation – offered in the form of creative reinvention – may help to establish the precise relationship between Parallax and The Waste Land, not to mention Eliot’s other poems such as ‘Gerontion’. Ayers and Young have both suggested that Cunard is deliberately critiquing Eliot’s poem, but the precise strategies utilized by Cunard to achieve this critique remain to be explored. Ayers sees Parallax as a poem depicting a dual identity, a split self, like Tiresias from Eliot’s poem (we might add the narrator of Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest too). For Ayers, the allusions in Cunard’s poem not only ‘mirror Eliot’ but also ‘reflect concerns introduced by Cunard’.24 Ayers’ argument is worth quoting in full: Cunard has created a new rhetorical form, over which she has suspended the name ‘parallax’, in which a systematic reworking and re-presentation of the existing material of a contemporary is used to create a new work. The purpose of this work is to create a kind of third person who is the product of Cunard’s reading of Eliot in terms of herself.25

Who is the third who walks always beside you? For what needs to be added to this is an acknowledgement that, in alluding to Eliot, Cunard is raising a further question about literary allusion: what do her allusions signify in light of the fact that the poet she is alluding to is himself a master of allusion? Allusion is what Eliot himself uses so powerfully in The Waste Land, in order not only to critique the present but also, as I argued in the fourth chapter, to offer a commentary on the past. It is a way not



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only of contrasting the past with the present but also of critiquing the past and its values, of suggesting that some things – war, spiritual crisis, doomed relationships – may be eternal and timeless. Cunard, in order to critique Eliot’s poetry and its meaning, alludes to tropes from various poems by Eliot: Dry bones turfed over by reiterant seasons, Dry graves filled in, stifled, built upon with new customs.26

Is Cunard’s poem attempting to build upon the dry graves of Eliot’s poetry? ‘Dry bones’ is The Waste Land (‘Dry bones can harm no one’, l.  390), but ‘seasons’, given the pressure from those dry bones and dry graves, summons up ‘Gerontion’: ‘Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.’27 Cunard’s ‘reiterant seasons’ seem to be hinting at her poem’s conscious revisiting of Eliot’s themes and symbols. Tellingly, when Eliot gave Cunard a commonplace book in the 1920s, it included the whole of ‘Gerontion’ written in Eliot’s hand.28 The graves of old poets have been built upon by ‘new customs’ of modernity: Eliot’s poem is, as he argued in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, building upon the work of earlier long-dead poets. Parallax is filled with moments of reiteration: it is not only ‘reiterant’ but also ‘reitererative’,29 a word that is not to be found in our dictionaries because the word appears in Cunard’s poem alone, a hapax legomenon, the er syllable quite literally (and, one presumes, erroneously) reiterated (in her edition of Cunard’s Selected Poems, Sandeep Parmar corrects this probable error in the Hogarth Press printing to ‘reiterative’). For Cunard’s allusive use of Eliot’s work is no straightforward act of borrowing. Eliot’s lines about the metamorphosed form of the raped Philomel tell us that ‘the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice’ (ll. 100–1). Cunard has: ‘meridian calms / Fill these still classic shores with unaccountable voice’ (112). The song of the nightingale, the female symbol of poetry itself, fills Eliot’s waste land; Cunard’s lines question the narrative of gender and violence encoded within Eliot’s poem. The sands of the desert are replaced by sandy shores, suggesting water rather than sterility; the melancholy of the wronged nightingale, with its connotations of night rather than daytime, brightens into the ‘meridian calms’ of midday, quietly negating the violent chaos of Eliot’s line. It is easy to identify some of the more explicit allusions to Eliot’s work in Parallax, but decoding their significance in the context of the whole poem is less straightforward. ‘Gerontion’, for instance, clearly informs the section in which ‘an empty house / Waits, that has once been mine’, with ‘a flowering tree’ and ‘lonely house’ that is ‘Spider-filled’ (107). This is recognizably the ‘rented house’ in which Gerontion sits and waits – a house is a microcosm for England in the

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wake of the First World War.30 ‘Spider-filled’, this deserted house recalls the ‘spider’ which might ‘suspend its operations’ in ‘Gerontion’.31 But the ‘flowering judas’ of Eliot’s poem finds itself softened into the ‘flowering tree’; unlike Gerontion, the ‘anonymous traveller’ can leave the house and pass on ‘without gesture’ (107).32 What Cunard’s rewriting of the images of ‘Gerontion’ suggests is that while she shares the bleak sense of post-war life that Eliot’s poem offers, she rejects the terms in which such a feeling is offered to the reader. This house may have ‘once been mine’ and is now ‘lost’, but the natural world has bloomed and flowered again: spring has sprung. The modern world has gains as well as losses. Like Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and A Fool i’ the Forest, Parallax uses the figure of Odysseus to explore notions of heroism in the aftermath of war: ‘The sirens’ call, we are told, and ‘singing raise their arms’ while ‘Nepenthe rises at the prison door’ (108). Nepenthe, a medicine used to cure sorrow, is first mentioned in the Odyssey. The fact that this classical anti-depressant is rising ‘at the prison door’ reminds us of the images of imprisonment and paralysis found throughout Cunard’s poem, as in The Waste Land. But what is equally revealing is the form Cunard deploys here:  iambic pentameter with a clear rhyme scheme, including the use of the abab quatrain form. It is hard not to recall the section from ‘The Fire Sermon’ where Tiresias (another figure from the Odyssey co-opted into a modern setting) watches the typist and the ‘young man carbuncular’ engaged in sexual intercourse. Even Cunard’s ellipsis recalls the memorable trailing off at the end of Eliot’s verse paragraph: ‘And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit …’ (l. 248). Following the young man’s departure, the typist ‘puts a record on the gramophone’ (l. 256), a mechanical act which gives way to the allusion to The Tempest: ‘This music crept by me upon the waters’ (l. 257). Cunard’s next verse paragraph has: But in what hour, what age Are siren voices heard across the water? (108)

The casting of this sentiment as a question refuses to set up a straightforward contrast between old and new, as may have been the case with Eliot’s pointed juxtaposition of the enchanted music of The Tempest with the typist’s gramophone. Cunard’s employment of the same metre and rhyme scheme at this point in Parallax, though, does point up a clear contrast between Eliot’s tropes and methods and her appropriation of them. Indeed, the overall structure and movement of Cunard’s poem mirror Eliot’s in suggestive ways. This section in Parallax appears at roughly the same point at which Eliot’s section involving the typist appears in The Waste Land. At the



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point in Parallax roughly corresponding to the moment where the ‘Death by Water’ section appears in The Waste Land, there is a long section about the sea; the final few pages of Cunard’s poem, like Eliot’s ‘What the Thunder Said’, are concerned with imagery centred on deserts, bones, mountains and thunder. The final line of Parallax reads: ‘In doubt, in shame, in silence’ (115), echoing the triple-pattern that concludes Eliot’s poem: ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (l. 434). That Cunard’s poem loosely follows the structure of Eliot’s implies that she is taking the general husk or framework of The Waste Land and using it to redirect Eliot’s meaning and outlook, to construct a very different narrative of post-war life and its relation to art, whether music, painting, architecture or poetry. With such parallels in mind, Ayers’s suggestion that Cunard deliberately changes tack in the section of her poem that begins ‘Well, instead’ draws too sharp a line between Eliot’s voice and Cunard’s voice in the poem, and how Cunard signals her departure from Eliot’s message of pessimism, although Ayers judiciously draws our attention to the fact that it is with these two words, ‘Well, instead’, that Cunard signals her shift from post-war London to Provence.33 The differences of opinion in Parallax are too subtle and local, and to divide the poem into two halves in this way risks losing sight of this. The vision of Provence which follows this change of setting is not exclusively positive either, with the ‘terrible’ forest and the ‘mournful islands’, and this land, ‘timeless and hot’ with its ‘sun-dust’ (105), sounds too close to Eliot’s nightmarish desert land in ‘What the Thunder Said’ to be considered as Cunard’s attempt to counter Eliot’s bleak London vision. Sure enough, the next verse paragraph mentions ‘grass in ruins / Without water’ (101), calling up the voice of longing from Eliot’s poem: ‘If there were water’ (l. 345). ‘Unlike Eliot’s personae’, as Lois Gordon puts it, ‘Nancy’s figures illustrated the inability to maintain a moral and spiritual value system due to the relative nature of individual perception and reality itself. In this, Nancy anticipated the metaphysical-ontological relativism that marked much of the twentieth century’s turn from traditional values to a plural secularism.’34 But such relativism may not be so far removed from Eliot’s view of London in The Waste Land, even if Cunard’s poem presents this loss of objective values in a markedly different way from Eliot. The same goes for the use of specific locales in London. One of Eliot speakers confesses that ‘Richmond and Kew Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’ (ll. 292–5)

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Cunard’s speaker tells us: By the Embankment I counted the grey gulls Nailed to the wind above a distorted tide. On discreet waters In Battersea I drifted, acquiescent. (104)

Both speakers acquiesce, but the difference between them is that the tacit consent of Eliot’s speaker leads to her undoing, whereas the acquiescence of Cunard’s speaker is placid acceptance and calm. Parallax takes numerous local features from The Waste Land and then critiques and twists them. Like Eliot’s poem, Parallax uses homorhyme – more than can comfortably or confidently be ascribed to coincidence. Consider the following lines from Parallax: London –       youth and heart-break Growing from ashes. The war’s dirges Burning, reverberate – burning Now far away, sea-echoed, now in the sense, Taste, mind, uneasy quest of what I am – London, the hideous wall, the jail of what I am (103–4)

The locking together of ‘what I am’/‘what I am’ reinforces that ‘jail’. Cunard has ‘reverberate’ and then, three lines later, a ‘jail’; Eliot’s poem had talked of ‘Prison and palace and reverberation’ (l. 326)  as well as ‘Burning burning burning burning’ (l. 208). Parallax, like The Waste Land, is full of such prisons: One for another I have changed my prisons; Held fast, as the flame stands, locked in the prism – (114)

But not locked so securely that there is no hope of escape: ‘prisons’/‘prism’ offers a way out, albeit only a door left slightly ajar. This is not exactly rhyme but nor is it, by the same token, the strict paralysis of homorhyme. What Cunard is doing with such homorhyme – or, rather, a swerving away from homorhyme – is taking the sentiment of Eliot’s poem and then critiquing it by reinventing it. For this way out is made possible by way of an allusion to The Waste Land:



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We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison (ll. 413–14)

Cunard’s lines neither confirm nor deny Eliot’s ‘prison’/‘prison’. This is what marks Cunard’s divergence from Eliot: where he could find little reason to dream of escape from the torturing repetitiveness of the modern world, Cunard could and did find such a reason to dare to dream of escape, although it was nonetheless a tentative dream rather than a lived reality: Closed doors, where are your keys? Closed hearts, does your embitteredness endure forever? (103)

This summons Eliot’s key (‘We think of the key’), and the enclosure enacted by his ‘prison’, but by shifting the repetition from the end to the beginning of the line, Cunard offers a sort of inverted couplet, a homorhyme-in-reverse, where the repetition of ‘Closed’ opens rather than closes the lines in which it features. The question marks reinforce this sense of openness (‘But in what hour, what age / Are siren voices heard across the water?’): whether these ‘Closed hearts’ can be freed remains an open question. Elsewhere, the unheroic couplet of the homorhyme is used to ponder the ways in which one can move forward following ‘disaster’: But now we are three together – How is it when we three are together … Life blooms against disaster,        Pressing its new immortal shoots against disaster. …        the new cannot put out the old – Though I clutch on the new I shall not shuffle off the old’ (110)

These homorhymes (three instances within a dozen lines) enact Cunard’s need to look back to Eliot’s poem in order to move forward: to produce her own long poem on a similar theme, which would mark its debt to The Waste Land but in such a way as to make the debt redound to Cunard’s, as well as Eliot’s, credit. Eliot’s was not, after all, the only way to write a post-war modernist long poem, as Mirrlees had already shown. ‘I shall not shuffle off the old’ not only alludes

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to Hamlet’s ‘mortal coil’ (Cunard, more hopeful of an afterlife, had written ‘immortal’ five lines earlier) but, given the ‘old’/‘old’ homorhyme, also picks up on Eliot’s use of such repetition, not only the homorhymes found in The Waste Land but also Prufrock’s ‘I grow old … I  grow old …’35 The ménage à trois which Cunard’s lines describe allude to the literary threesome – Cunard, Eliot and Shakespeare – as much as they refer to the love triangle being discussed. ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?’ Life blooms against disaster,        Pressing its new immortal shoots against disaster.

Hope springs eternal, as one of Eliot’s great guides for his long poem, Alexander Pope, had put it; but there is little hope in the waste land. In Cunard’s post-war world, however, there are glimmers of hope, even if they are only glimmers. Where Stetson in Eliot’s poem had planted a corpse in his garden (ll. 71–2), it is life that blooms and sprouts in Cunard’s poem, not death. Cunard’s poem is continually seeking to brush off the sense of imprisonment and paralysis which Eliot considered such a stultifying feature of modern living. Even when lines of the poem are shutting themselves off from the rest (incarcerating themselves in very Eliotic parentheses, for instance) there are signs of escape, albeit only faint ones: (God grant us appetite for all illusions, God grant us ever, as now, the sweet delusions.) (107)

‘God grant us’ heads the two lines, which threaten also to end or book-end themselves within ‘illusions’/‘illusions’, thus becoming trebly locked (they are also caught within the brackets). Instead, as with ‘prisons’/‘prism’, there is a glimmer of escape. But ‘illusions’/‘delusions’ is not quite complete escape either, since the rhyme brings two semantically similar words together, too closely for comfort: if one is having illusions, one is probably also suffering from delusions. We may tell ourselves that we are happy to be deluded, but this is simply another form of protection from the realities of the world: another form of imprisonment, albeit self-inflicted. Yet as Woolf highlights, through juxtaposing the madness of Septimus Smith with so-called sane characters in Mrs Dalloway, published in the same year as Parallax, such delusions may offer moments of happiness that are indistinguishable from a sane person’s ‘moments of being’: So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough,



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this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon them, in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.36

The breathless exhilaration of this means we cannot see it merely as a pitiable example of how madness can lead to delusion. Unlike the desperate and doomed attempts to make meaning from the thunderclap in The Waste Land (variously interpreted as ‘datta’, ‘dayadhvam’ and ‘damyata’: ‘give’, ‘sympathise’ and ‘control’), Septimus’s misinterpretation of the letters appearing in the sky, while a result of his delusion, is nevertheless a transcendent experience for him. Although the language may be faltering – the very word, ‘language’, melts away or subsides into ‘languishing’  – this is because Septimus is experiencing a moment of delirious bliss that transcends language, even though it is ultimately a result of his mistaken belief that the words are personally meant for him. Cunard’s use of the homorhyme, then, is one of the ways in which she cannily picks up on a defining stylistic feature of The Waste Land but then innovates with it, taking Eliot’s message of despair and stasis (Parallax threatens to spill over into that other Joycean word, ‘paralysis’) and instilling it with faint hints of hope and freedom. Keen, resurrected, very clear – – And at one side The symbol of the vacant crossroads, Then the veiled figure waiting at the crossroads (114)

Given the mention of ‘resurrected’ two lines earlier, ‘crossroads’ resonates with a suggestion of Christian redemption. As well as the pun on ‘cross’, the ‘crossroads’ are symbolic because they do not mark a dead end, no matter how much the stalemate of the homorhyme might want to make us think so; rather, a crossroads offers several possible paths forward (or, indeed, sideways), forcing the traveller to choose. What Eliot found, and what his poetry could accept only after his conversion to Christianity in 1927, Cunard’s poem already tacitly endorses. But it would be incorrect to say that Parallax is entirely positive:  in many ways, it shares Eliot’s bleak vision of post-war Europe. Cunard’s references to ‘spring / That opening blinds let in no more’ (110) now the ‘War’s over’, and the ‘grey / Habit of days’ (110), which chimes with the narrator’s defeated retreat into

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white-collar mediocrity in A Fool i’ the Forest, sound an unpromising note for the future. What the parallactic (not quite paratactic) shifts of the poem enable Cunard to suggest, however, is a fundamental divide between the cityscape of London and the rural landscapes of southern France, between the urban and the pastoral. If Parallax is a great city-poem, it is one that is conscious of the average city-dweller’s yearning to experience the natural world, to leave the metropolis behind whether it is through Cezanne’s art or through poetry. Jane Goldman has argued that the title of Cunard’s poem ‘suggests in one way an avant-garde experimentalism matching the work of a sworn enemy of Bloomsbury, and of Roger Fry in particular  – the novelist, painter and essayist Wyndham Lewis, whose “Vortex” movement had flourished briefly in London just before the First World War’.37 For Goldman, ‘Cunard’s poem communicates modernism’s restlessness and its refusal to settle, performing a modernist “parallaxis” in which both London and Provence offer necessary, illuminating “distance” on each other’.38 Another less than positive aspect of Cunard’s worldview in Parallax is the suspicion of false love which haunts its lines:             carouse Then, cytherean, with the cursory false love That has his bed Gold-lined, and robs you, host that are too fond –    Cold,  cold, Mind’s acid gales arouse the sated old Fool that was gulled by love and paid his bond (101)

But the very language of this is unstable, with the drunken abandon of ‘carouse’ thinning to the barely erotic ‘arouse’ of the ‘old Fool’ just five lines later, just as the appealing ‘Gold’ of ‘Gold-lined’ has faded to ‘Cold’ by the next line, and diminished to ‘old’ by the next, with the deception of ‘gulled’ twisting that ‘Gold’ into a new shape, revealing the emptiness of having been duped by love into paying a bond. (The word ‘cytherean’, relating to Venus, also summons the venereal, and the idea of prostitution.) The first voice that speaks in Parallax, which announces itself as the voice of one buried in the present, calls upon the protagonist to accept all things, and to understand that no choice is granted, not ‘the prudent craving’, but ‘the unalterable deed’ stands ‘monumental’ (101). This is a recasting of the first voice heard in the thunder in Eliot’s ‘What the Thunder Said’, where ‘DA’ is interpreted



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as ‘Datta’, which Eliot translates as ‘give’. The thunder’s voice prompts the speaker to reflect upon the ‘awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract’ (ll. 403–4). So far I have focused on what Cunard’s poem takes from Eliot’s, and what Cunard does with what she takes, transforming it through acts of creative allusion. But I would like to conclude by examining the ways in which Cunard’s poem also picks up, and engages with, several key elements of Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. That there might be a creative relationship between the two poems has gone unremarked by critics, yet Cunard’s and Pound’s involvement with one another, and the internal echoes of Mauberley which Parallax betrays, deserve to be explored. Both poems are about a struggling male poet manqué, haunted by the belated romanticism of the late nineteenth century, including French ideas of beauty; both poems address the threat to artistic integrity posed by commercialism and capitalist appropriation of works of art; both poems make reference to the works of Homer and Dante, specifically the Siena and Maremma passage from Dante’s Purgatorio; both poems even, more grimly, contain references to more local, gruesome details, such as bottled foetuses or embryos (it is worth noting that Cunard had undergone a hysterectomy in 1922). Lois Gordon has commented on Cunard’s relationship with Pound: ‘Nancy reveled in his intellectual prowess and became one of the earliest scholars of his work, tracing the origins of his subject matter.’39 Pound, for his part, called Nancy a ‘siren’, in an epithet inspired by a literary work that would be important to both of their post-war poems, Homer’s Odyssey.40 ‘Sirens’ are mentioned numerous times in Parallax. Cunard admired Pound’s devotion to ‘better literature’, as Gordon notes. ‘It is remarkable’, she observes, ‘that when he sent Harriet Monroe poems by Yeats, Eliot, and Rabindranath Tagore, he was passing on the early work of three future Nobel Prize laureates’.41 After the end of the war, Pound and Cunard embarked on a five-year affair. This is the time during which Pound was at work on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Although Parallax clearly bears the stamp of Eliot’s influence, especially ‘Prufrock’, ‘Gerontion’ and The Waste Land, another overlooked aspect of Cunard’s poem is the way in which she picks up on the themes and tropes of Pound’s poem and reworks them. Indeed, like ‘The Hollow Men’ and A Fool i’ the Forest, Parallax needs to be seen partly in light of Pound’s departure, although in Cunard’s case – she and Pound both lived in France together after the war  – it is not Pound’s departure from London, but rather the end of their affair.

Afterword: Towards the Epic

M. C. Bradbrook suggested in 1972 that ‘Pound in exile set about revising the first Cantos in much the way The Waste Land had been revised; when the first thirty came out in 1925, the previously published sections had been cut by about a third’.1 Furthermore, ‘much of the Cantos reads like a parody of the structural method of The Waste Land’.2 There is some reason to think that The Waste Land prompted Pound to abandon his original opening canto for his vast epic and replace it with the new opener – a revised version of the original third canto – which, like Eliot’s poem, would feature Tiresias the seer and would engage the reader immediately in questions concerning the ancient and the modern, the importance of literary tradition for the modernist poet and the symbolic potential of the idea of communion with the dead, which Eliot’s poem, with its cast of Sibyls and clairvoyants and optimistic corpse-planters, had put to such effective use. The overall structure of The Cantos can be observed in the poem which opens the volume, Canto I, which is an English rendering of a Latin translation of an ancient Greek poem, Homer’s Odyssey: specifically, that section which involves Odysseus and his crew travelling down to Hades, the Underworld. In The Waste Land, Tiresias had commented, from the typist’s home in ‘The Fire Sermon’, that he had walked ‘among the lowest of the dead’ (l. 246). In Pound’s opening canto, Tiresias is found among the dead, in a poem which self-consciously draws attention to the fact that the poet, as well as Odysseus, is engaged in such an act of necromancy, and that such poetic divination or spiritualism is multilayered and complex: Pound is not producing an English translation of Homer’s original but an English translation of a Latin translation of that original. The specific form of this opening canto is then highly significant, because it is an English translation of a Latin translation (produced by the sixteenth-century scholar Andreas Divus) of a Greek poem; what is more, Pound borrowed the metre of Canto I from his earlier version of an Anglo-Saxon poem, an elegy titled

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‘The Seafarer’. In this way, the epic and the elegy, English and Latin renderings, Greek and Anglo-Saxon originals, all meet and are transformed into something new in Pound’s Canto I. It is, in one sense, an exemplary demonstration of T. S. Eliot’s concept of poetic tradition, as set out in his 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. And in being, essentially, a translation of a translation, Canto I calls into question any notion of true originality in art, suggesting that all literature is built upon what has gone before, engaging with established tropes and devices. The echoes of Anglo-Saxon verse in a poem retelling a story from Greek literary tradition also implies that these different nations and cultures have certain shared values and ideas (for what else was Odysseus if not a ‘seafarer’?), a notion that we find writ large in The Cantos as a whole, where Pound is often paratactically juxtaposing different time periods and parts of the world, encouraging us to observe the similarities between, for instance, ancient Homeric epic and the twentieth century, or between John Adams and Mussolini. Canto I is also self-aware: it ‘breaks the fourth wall’, as we say of theatre, film and television. Just as we may be settling into his English translation of the poem, and starting to feel at home among the dead with Odysseus and Tiresias, Pound decides to tell Andreas Divus, the Latin translator whose translation of Homer he is following, to be quiet. Suddenly, with that reference, Pound reminds us of what we are reading, that it is nothing more than a translation of a translation, and he reminds us of his status as the modern poet trying to follow these writers of the past. The modern epic is plagued by its own impossibility: it is haunted by the fact that the epic may not be an achievable artistic endeavour in the age of globalization, world wars and modernism’s suspicion of heroes and heroism. If the modernist long poem of the early 1920s had built upon the impressionism and transience of the imagists, it had also stopped short of the full epic, instead incorporating various elements of the classical epic into an extended but nevertheless fractured narrative. Pound’s Cantos would not be the only notable modernist attempt to move beyond the long poem and to attempt a full-scale epic for the twentieth century:  H. D., who had begun her literary career as one of Pound’s fellow imagists, would publish Helen in Egypt in 1961, a long, ambitious work that swapped Pound’s Odysseus for a prominent female figure from the myth of the Trojan War, exploring the alternative theory – first dramatized in Euripides’ Helen – that Helen was never abducted by Paris and that the ensuing war was fought over a phantom. Both Pound’s and H. D.’s epics would find their ultimate historical significance in the Second World War: it would take the conflict of another global war to bring these modern epics to fruition. How far each of them succeeds has been debated by critics, with Pound’s

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Cantos alternately dismissed as a failure and celebrated as the culmination of Pound’s life’s work. But while Pound and H. D. moved towards the epic, the interwar years saw a number of new poets seeking to expand on the achievement of The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem cast a long shadow over the 1920s and 1930s in Anglophone poetry, and poets who came afterwards sought to learn from its example without simply repeating its methods. One of the boldest experiments was produced by someone who is not generally considered a modernist at all: W. H. Auden’s The Orators. This experimental combination of prose and poetry, which runs to over 100 pages, was published in 1932 by Faber and Faber, under Eliot’s direction. Stan Smith notes that, when Auden had first encountered The Waste Land in 1926, he ‘was immediately impatient to take Eliot’s poetic revolution further’, reading the poem as ‘a literal account of contemporary Britain’.3 While a very different piece of writing, The Orators bears the influence of The Waste Land in that Auden conceived his poem as, similarly, a response to his time, utilizing new and experimental techniques of juxtaposition and a combination of different literary forms and styles to comment on the affairs of the day. An even more ambitious work, which Auden and Eliot both admired, was David Jones’s long work, In Parenthesis, which is similarly a combination of poetry and prose. Eliot’s introduction to the book, which was published by Eliot’s publisher Faber and Faber in 1937, describes the book as ‘about War, and about many other things also, such as Roman Britain, the Arthurian Legend, and divers matters which are given association by the mind of the writer’.4 If this could almost be a description of Eliot’s own The Waste Land, summoning not only its echoes of the war but also the Fisher King myth, then this only shows the extent to which Eliot’s poem had a far-reaching influence on the poetry that came after the 1920s. While the poetry of Auden, Jones and others would take the modernist long poem in new directions, and the epics of Pound and H. D. would move away from the confines of the long poem, The Waste Land would remain the defining poem of the modernist movement. As this study has attempted to show, its radical new techniques and methods did not arise from nowhere, and other poets contributed to the development of modernism. Just as other poets would learn from Eliot and take his experiment in very different directions, so others helped to create a new kind of poetry, even a new language for poetry, out of the wreckage of the First World War.

Notes Introduction 1 Stephen Spender, Eliot (London: Fontana, 1975), 117–18. 2 Margaret Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 4. 3 Walter Sutton, ‘Mauberley, The Waste Land, and the Problem of Unified Form’, Contemporary Literature 9, no. 1 (1968): 15. 4 Tory Young, ‘Myths of Passage: Paris and Parallax’, in The History of British Women’s Writing: Volume Eight, 1920–1945, ed. Maroula Joannou (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 288.

1  Towards the Long Poem 1 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 115. 2 Martin Dubois, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 83. 3 F. R. Leavis, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins – Reflections after Fifty Years’, in The Critic as Anti-Philosopher: Essays and Papers by F. R. Leavis, ed. G. Singh (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), 76–97 (p. 79). 4 Gerald Roberts, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 285. 5 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918), 106. 6 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (New York: Haskell House, 1969), 90. 7 Humphry House, All in Due Time: The Collected Essays and Broadcast Talks of Humphry House (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), 163. 8 Gillian Beer, ‘Helmhotz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination’, Comparative Criticism: Literature and Science 13 (1991): 117. 9 Spender, Eliot, 108. 10 J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 254.

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11 Hopkins, Poems, n. p.; John Schad, Victorians in Theory: From Derrida to Browning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 131. 12 T. S. Eliot, ‘London Letter’, The Dial LXXIII, no. 1 (July, 1922): 94. 13 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael North (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 113. 14 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 108. 15 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 113. 16 T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 344, 351. 17 Ezra Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 248. 18 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, 236, 251. 19 T. E. Hulme, Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003), 68–83. 20 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 124. 21 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 19. 22 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 20. 23 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 18. 24 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 6. 25 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 6. 26 T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, The Egoist 4, no. 10 (1917): 151. 27 Peter Robinson, ‘ “Written at least as well as prose”: Ford, Pound, and Poetry’, in Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing, ed. Jason Harding (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 110. 28 Ford Madox Hueffer, On Heaven and Poems Written on Active Service (London: John Lane, 1916), 22. 29 Ford Madox Ford, Selected Poems, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003), 83. 30 W. B. Yeats, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85. 31 Ford, Selected Poems, 84–5. 32 Ezra Pound, ‘This Hulme Business’. Townsman 5, no. 2 (1939): 15. 33 Lola Ridge, The Ghetto and Other Poems (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1918), 4. 34 Conrad Aiken, The Charnel Rose, Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems (Boston, MA: The Four Seas Company, 1918), 19. 35 Bernard Gilbert, Old England: A God’s Eye View of a Village (London: W. Collins, 1921). 36 Marjorie Perloff, Poetry on and off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 194–5.

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3 7 F. S. Flint, Otherworld: Cadences (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1920), v. 38 Flint, Otherworld, 7. 39 Flint, Otherworld, 15. 40 Cited in Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 134. 41 Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, 135. 42 Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, 136. 43 Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, 137. 44 D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1964), 257–8. 45 Yeats, The Major Works, 91. 46 Yeats, The Major Works, 92. 47 Marina McKay, Modernism, War and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 7. 48 Hulme, Selected Writings, 12. 49 Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 65. 50 Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme, 65. 51 Hulme, Selected Writings, 1. 52 Wilfred Owen, Poems Selected by Jon Stallworthy (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 63. 53 Hulme, Selected Writings, 71. 54 T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922: revised edition, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Yale University Press, 2009), 204. 55 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 205. 56 T. S. Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), 276. 57 Eliot, Poems, 276. 58 Richard Aldington, The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington (London: Allan Wingate, 1948), 80. 59 Owen, Poems, 32. 60 Owen, Poems, 30. 61 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 73–4. 62 Owen, Poems, 27. 63 F. V. Branford, Titans and Gods (London: Christophers, 1922), 11. 64 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 128. 65 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 129. 66 Robert H. Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1970), vol. 1, 188.

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67 Richard Aldington, ‘The Influence of Mr. James Joyce’, English Review 32 (April 1921): 337–8. 68 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 130. 69 Ian F. A. Bell, ‘Mauberley’s Barrier of Style’, in Ezra Pound, the London Years: 1908– 1920, ed. Philip Grover (New York: AMS Press, 1976), 91; cited in Charles Doyle, Richard Aldington: A Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 87. 70 Michael Grant (ed.), T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), vol. 1, 177; Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126; Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 25. 71 Branford, Titans and Gods, 25. 72 Sacheverell Sitwell, ‘Laughing Lions Will Come’, Wheels, fifth cycle 5 (1920), 60–6. 73 H. R. Barbor, ‘Subjective Odyssey, Wheels, sixth cycle (1921), 19. 74 Daniel Hipp, The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon (London: McFarland & Company, 2005), 8. 75 Hipp, Poetry of Shell Shock, 8. 76 Grant, T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, 242. 77 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 78 Eliot, Poems, 31. 79 Eliot, Poems, 33. 80 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 7. 81 Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 182. 82 MacMillan, Paris 1919, 183.

2  Writing the Mother-City: Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem 1 Hope Mirrlees, Collected Poems, ed. Sandeep Parmar (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), 85. 2 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), 385; Julia Briggs, ‘Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism’, in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 261. 3 Nancy Gish, ‘Modifying Modernism: Hope Mirrlees and “The Really New Work of Art” ’, Time Present: The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society 74/75 (2011): 1.

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4 Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem, in Collected Poems, 1–18. Subsequent references to the poem will take the form of line numbers, given in parentheses following the quotation. 5 Cyrena Pondrom, ‘Mirrlees, Modernism, and the Holophrase’, Time Present: The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society 74/75 (2011): 4. 6 Oliver Tearle, T. E. Hulme and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 98–106. 7 Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 138. 8 Young, ‘Myths of Passage’, 281. 9 Briggs, ‘Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism’, 262. 10 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 130. 11 James Cannon, The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944 (London: Routledge, 2016), 114. 12 Cannon, Paris Zone, 112. 13 Jane Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 473–4. 14 Harrison, Themis, 474. 15 Pondrom, ‘Mirrlees, Modernism, and the Holophrase’, 6. 16 Beard, Invention of Jane Harrison, 139. 17 Beard, Invention of Jane Harrison, 139–40. 18 Pondrom, ‘Mirrlees, Modernism, and the Holophrase’, 5; Peter Jones (ed.), Imagist Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 130. 19 Jones, Imagist Poetry, 130. 20 Michael Bishop, ‘Pierre Reverdy’s Conception of the Image’, Forum for Modern Language Studies XII, no. 1 (1976): 25. 21 Bishop, ‘Pierre Reverdy’s Conception of the Image’, 30. 22 Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 25. 23 Briggs, ‘Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism’, 265. 24 Young, ‘Myths of Passage’, 283. 25 Peter Howarth, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 21. 26 Briggs, ‘Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism’, 33. 27 Zoe Skoulding, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 12. 28 Howarth, Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry, 3. 29 Nina Enemark, ‘Antiquarian Magic: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Theory and Hope Mirrlees’s Antiquarianism in Paris’, in Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness, ed. Andrew Radford, Heather Walton and Elizabeth Anderson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 115.

180

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30 Mirrlees, Collected Poems, 100–1. 31 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. A. O. Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 47. 32 Enemark, ‘Antiquarian Magic’, 123.

3  Battered Books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 1 Lyndall Gordon, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot (London: Virago, 2012), 170. 2 Gordon, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot, 170. 3 Pound, Letters, 80. 4 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, 151. 5 Pound, Letters, 248. 6 Pound, Letters, 234. 7 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 44. 8 John Espey, Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: A Study in Composition (London: University of California Press, 1974), 88. 9 Vincent Miller, ‘Mauberley and His Critics’, ELH 57, no. 4 (1990): 962. 10 Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in Personae (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 185. Subsequent references to the poem will be given in parentheses (page numbers) immediately following the quotation. 11 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957), viii. 12 Pound, Letters, 364. 13 F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1979), 110. 14 Leah Culligan Flack, ‘ “The News in the Odyssey Is Still News”: Ezra Pound, W. H. D. Rouse, and a Modern Odyssey’, Modernism/Modernity 22, no. 1 (2015): 105. 15 Ezra Pound, The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 86. 16 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 44. 17 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 103. 18 Pound, Letters, 237. 19 Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 9. 20 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Pimlico, 1991), 44–5. 21 Kenner, The Pound Era, 45. 22 Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, 105. 23 Michael Coyle, ‘Ezra Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 435. 24 Ezra Pound, ‘ “Dubliners” and Mr James Joyce’, The Egoist 1, no. 14 (1914): 267.

Notes

181

2 5 Jones, Imagist Poetry, 130–4. 26 Pound, Literary Essays, 406. 27 Kenner, Poetry of Ezra Pound, 165. 28 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 29 Kenner, Poetry of Ezra Pound, 181. 30 Pound, Letters, 234. 31 Pound, Letters, 234. 32 Pound, Letters, 248.

4  A Poem without a Hero: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 1 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 32–3. 2 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 164. 3 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 164. 4 Eliot, Selected Essays, 368. 5 T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 184–5. 6 Mirrlees, Collected Poems, 121. 7 William Empson, Using Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 191. 8 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 161–2. 9 Eliot, Poems, 76. 10 Spender, Eliot, 116. 11 Spender, Eliot, 116. 12 Empson, Using Biography, 191. 13 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 75. 14 Eleanor Cook, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23. 15 Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War, 161. 16 Helen Gardner, The Waste Land 1972: The Adamson Lecture, 3rd May 1972 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 6. 17 Gardner, The Waste Land 1972, 6. 18 Ian Higgins, ‘The Waste Land and Dracula’, Notes and Queries 55, no. 4 (2008): 499. 19 Cited in Lawrence Rainey (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, 2nd edition (London: Yale University Press, 2006), 118. 20 Cited in Cook, Against Coercion, 17. 21 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, 504.

182

Notes

22 Cited in Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1977), 126. 23 Cited in Eliot, Poems, 1051. 24 Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, 129. 25 Eliot, Selected Essays, 247. 26 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 353. 27 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, xviii. 28 Cook, Against Coercion, 13. 29 Cook, Against Coercion, 11–12. 30 Cook, Against Coercion, 18, 21. 31 Eliot, Selected Essays, 144. 32 Hugh Kenner, ‘The Urban Apocalypse’, in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of ‘The Waste Land’, ed. A. Walton Litz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 39–40. 33 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 57. 34 Kenner, The Invisible Poet, 143–4. 35 Gardner, The Waste Land 1972, 12. 36 Eliot, Poems, 74. 37 Keynes, Economic Consequences, 4. 38 Keynes, Economic Consequences, 8. 39 David Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 128. 40 Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies, 128. 41 Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies, 128. 42 Cited in Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies, 120. 43 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 130. 44 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 79. 45 Leah Culligan Flack, Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H. D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 42. 46 Eliot, Poems, 74. 47 Eliot, Selected Essays, 14. 48 Carol Dougherty, The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111. 49 T. E. Hulme, Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 63. 50 Gardner, The Waste Land 1972, 10. 51 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 9–10. 52 Pound, Personae, 185. 53 Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Bath: Chivers Press, 1920), 54–5.

Notes

183

54 Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (London: Duke University Press, 1991), 37. 55 Pound, Letters, 234. 56 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 499. 57 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 35. 58 Cited in Eliot, Poems, 1089. 59 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 23. 60 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 23. 61 James Joyce, Ulysses, with an Introduction by Declan Kiberd (London: Penguin, 1992), 47. 62 Eliot, Poems, 273. 63 Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27. 64 Lyndall Gordon, ‘Eliot and Women’, in T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 16. 65 Gardner, The Waste Land 1972, 13. 66 Eliot, Poems, 49. 67 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 3.1.120-23. 68 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 43. 69 Christina R. Victor, Old Age in Modern Society: A Textbook of Social Gerontology, 2nd edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1994), 91. 70 Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 172. 71 Keynes, Economic Consequences, 25–6. 72 Eliot, Poems, 21, 15. 73 Aimee Armande Wilson, Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 62. 74 Wilson, Conceived in Modernism, 59. 75 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 16. 76 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 299. 77 McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire, 77. 78 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 5. 79 Pound, Letters, 234. 80 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 484. 81 Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘Dialectical Collaboration: Editing The Waste Land’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, ed. Gabrielle McIntire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 106. 82 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 15.

184

Notes

83 McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire, 77. 84 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 23. 85 Hipp, The Poetry of Shell Shock, 2. 86 Ivor Gurney, Collected Poems, ed. P. J. Kavanagh (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), 197. 87 Cited in Eliot, Poems, 641. 88 Eliot, Poems, 641. 89 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 11. 90 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 11. 91 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 95. 92 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 97. 93 Brooker, ‘Dialectical Collaboration’,108 94 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 105. 95 Kenner, ‘The Urban Apocalypse’, 35. 96 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 36–7. 97 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 199. 98 Andrew Marvell, The Oxford Poetry Library: Andrew Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode and Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 22. 99 Eliot, Selected Essays, 296. 100 Pound, Letters, 237. 101 Pound, Letters, 237. 102 Owen, Poems Selected by Jon Stallworthy, 13. 103 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 31–2. 104 Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 109. 105 Eliot, Selected Essays, 15. 106 Donald J. Childs, T. S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12. 107 Eliot, Selected Essays, 405. 108 Spender, Eliot, 112. 109 Cited in Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, 38. 110 Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, 122–3. 111 Childs, T. S. Eliot, 12. 112 Childs, T. S. Eliot, 12. 113 Eliot The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 480 n. 1. 114 Gordon, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot, 168. 115 Gordon, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot, 168–9. 116 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, 480 n. 1. 117 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 210. 118 Roger Vittoz, Treatment of Neurasthenia by Means of Brain Control, trans. H. B. Brooke (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), 123.

Notes

185

1 19 Vittoz, Treatment of Neurasthenia, 96. 120 Hulme, Selected Writings, 66. 121 Eliot, Poems, 5. 122 Vittoz, Treatment of Neurasthenia, 88. 123 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, 573. 124 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922, 574. 125 Vittoz, Treatment of Neurasthenia, 27.

5  Machine: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’ 1 T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 566. 2 Pound, Letters, 268. 3 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, 758. 4 M. C. Bradbrook, T. S. Eliot: The Making of ‘The Waste Land’, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harlow: Longman, 1972), 26. 5 Gardner, The Waste Land 1972, 105. 6 Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, 216. 7 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, in Eliot, Poems, 79. All subsequent references to the poem will be given in parentheses (page numbers) immediately following the quotation. 8 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 165. 9 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 3. 10 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 178. 11 Pound, Letters, 234. 12 Eliot, Poems, 591. 13 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1998), 2.1.63–5. 14 Eliot, Poems, 717. 15 Eliot, Poems, 39. 16 Gardner, The Waste Land 1972, 111. 17 Oliver Tearle, ‘Hamlet and T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”.’ The Explicator 70, no. 2 (2012): 92–5. 18 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.4.76–7. 19 Eliot, Selected Essays, 145. 20 Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands, ed. J. H. Stape and Hans van Marle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35. 21 Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem, 29.

186

Notes

22 Gardner, The Waste Land 1972, 105. 23 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, 627. 24 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, 627. 25 T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes, in Eliot, Poems, 117. All subsequent references will be given in parentheses (page numbers) immediately after the quotation. 26 T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 41. 27 Eliot, Poems, 185. 28 Eliot, Poems, 205. 29 Eliot, Selected Essays, 19. 30 Cited in Doyle, Richard Aldington, 149.

6  Arden to Ardennes: Richard Aldington, A Fool i’ the Forest 1 Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (New York: Humanities Press, 1960), 101. 2 Vivien Whelpton, Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier, and Lover, 1911–1929 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2013), 332. 3 The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10. 4 Doyle, Richard Aldington, 86. 5 Doyle, Richard Aldington, 86. 6 May Sinclair, The Dark Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 50. 7 Sinclair, The Dark Night, 17–18. 8 May Sinclair, ‘Two Notes – II: On Imagism’, The Egoist 2, no. 6 (1915): 88–9. 9 Sinclair, The Dark Night, 62–3. 10 Norman T. Gates, The Poetry of Richard Aldington: A Critical Evaluation and An Anthology of Uncollected Poems (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), 122. 11 Gates, The Poetry of Richard Aldington, 122. 12 Cited in Alister Kershaw and Frederic-Jacques Temple (eds.), Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 125. 13 Cited in Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, 100–1. 14 Whelpton, Richard Aldington, 267. 15 Richard Aldington, A Fool i’ the Forest: A Phantasmagoria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1925), 12. All subsequent references will be given in parentheses (page numbers) immediately after the quotation.

Notes

187

16 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus Based on the A Text, ed. Roma Gill (London: Methuen, 2008), 21. 17 Cited in Doyle, Richard Aldington, 149. 18 Doyle, Richard Aldington, 86–7. 19 Doyle, Richard Aldington, 87. 20 Humbert Wolfe, ‘A Fool i’ the Forest’ (review), The Criterion 3.2 (April 1925), 459– 63 (459). 21 Whelpton, Richard Aldington, 267. 22 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, 541. 23 Doyle, Richard Aldington, 148. 24 Flint, Otherworld, 6 25 Cited in Doyle, Richard Aldington, 85. 26 Edgell Rickword and Douglas Garman (eds.), The Calendar of Modern Letters (London: Routledge, 1925), 87. 27 Mick Imlah, ‘Richard Aldington’, in The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English, ed. Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel-Tod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8. 28 Cited in Doyle, Richard Aldington, 88. 29 Ezra Pound, Personae (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 202. 30 Caroline Zilboorg, ‘ “What Part Have I Now That You Have Come Together?”: Richard Aldington on War, Gender and Textual Representation’, in Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Textual Representations, ed. Angela K. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 30. 31 Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, 101. 32 Whelpton, Richard Aldington, 302. 33 Whelpton, Richard Aldington, 265. 34 Hulme, Selected Writings, 68–83. 35 Hulme, Selected Writings, 71. 36 Francois Villon, The Poems of Francois Villon: New Edition, translated with an introduction and notes by Galway Kinnell (London: University Press of New England, 1977), 27. 37 David Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 21. 38 Jones, Imagist Poetry, 130–4. 39 R. P. Draper, D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1997), 273. 40 Draper, D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, 273–4. 41 Doyle, Richard Aldington, 85. 42 D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1967), 289. 43 Whelpton, Richard Aldington, 302.

188

Notes

44 Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 717. 45 Joyce, Ulysses, 256. 46 Aldington, ‘The Influence of Mr. James Joyce’, 338–9. 47 Aldington, ‘The Influence of Mr. James Joyce’, 340. 48 Richard Aldington, ‘A Critic of Poetry’, Poetry XVII, no. VI (1921): 346. 49 Doyle, Richard Aldington, 149. 50 Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero, introduction by James H. Meredith (London: Penguin, 2013), xxii.

7  Nancy Cunard’s Parallax and the ‘Emotions of Aftermath’ 1 Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, 145. 2 Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, ed. Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 13; Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (New York: Haskell House, 1969), 165. 3 Cited in Young, ‘Myths of Passage’, 286. 4 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 19. 5 Cited in Young, ‘Myths of Passage’, 286. 6 Cited in Lois Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 122. 7 David Ayers, Modernism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 32–3; Young, ‘Myths of Passage’, 275–90. 8 Vita Sackville-West, The Garden (London: Michael Joseph, 1946), 63. 9 Peter Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism (London: Palgrave, 2017), 164. 10 Nancy Cunard, Selected Poems, ed. Sandeep Parmar (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016), xviii. 11 Pound, Literary Essays, 406. 12 Rai Peterson, ‘Parallax: Nancy Cunard’s Knowing Response to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’, Studies in the Humanities 41, no.1 (2015): 104. 13 Cited in Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41. 14 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 118. 15 Cited in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, xiii. 16 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 120. 17 Jane Goldman, ‘1925, London, New York, Paris: Metropolitan Modernisms – Parallax and Palimpsest’, in The Edinburgh Companion to TwentiethCentury Literatures in English, ed. Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2006), 66.

Notes

189

1 8 Joyce, Ulysses, 819. 19 Goldman, ‘1925, London, New York, Paris’, 66. 20 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 121. 21 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 119–23. 22 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition, 168. 23 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 231. 24 Ayers, Modernism, 33. 25 Ayers, Modernism, 32. 26 Nancy Cunard, Parallax, in Selected Poems, ed. Sandeep Parmar (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016), 104–5. All subsequent references to the poem will be given in parentheses (page numbers) immediately following the quotation. 27 Eliot, Poems, 33. 28 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 37. 29 Nancy Cunard, Parallax (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 7. 30 Eliot, Poems, 32. 31 Eliot, Poems, 33. 32 Eliot, Poems, 31. 33 Ayers, Modernism, 33. 34 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 121. 35 Eliot, Poems, 9. 36 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 18–19. 37 Goldman, ‘1925, London, New York, Paris’, 66. 38 Goldman, ‘1925, London, New York, Paris’, 67. 39 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 32. 40 Cited in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 33. 41 Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 33.

Afterword: Towards the Epic 1 Bradbrook, T. S. Eliot, 31. 2 Bradbrook, T. S. Eliot, 31. 3 Stan Smith, ‘Remembering Bryden’s Bill: Modernism from Eliot to Auden’, in Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After, ed. Keith Williams and Steven Matthews (London: Routledge, 2014), 53. 4 David Jones, In Parenthesis, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), vii.

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Index Adams, John 172 Aiken, Conrad 22 Aldington, Richard Death of a Hero 139, 149, 151 A Dream in the Luxembourg 148 A Fool i’ the Forest 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 15, 16, 23, 135–​51, 155, 156, 160, 162, 168, 169 Andreas Divus 172 Apollinaire, Guillaume 42, 45, 49, 77 Zone 45–​6 Aristophanes 44, 53, 54–​5, 57, 127, 147 Auden, W. H. 173 Augustine 82 Ayers, David 146, 155, 157, 158, 160, 163 Barbor, H. R. 37–​8 Baudelaire, Charles 38, 45, 153 Bazalgette, Joseph 95 Beard, Mary 47 Beckett, Samuel 157 Beer, Gillian 13 Bell, Ian 35 Bennett, Arnold 5 Bishop, Michael 48–​9 Bonaparte, Napoleon 53 Bradbrook, M. C. 118, 171 Branford, Frederick Victor 33, 36 Bridges, Robert 11, 13, 14 Briggs, Julia 3, 4, 41, 45, 50, 52, 80 Brooke, Rupert 22 Brooker, Jewel Spears 101, 104 Brooks, Cleanth 106 Browning, Robert, 13 Caesar, Julius 53, 120–​1 Cannon, James 46 Cendrars, Blaise 45, 77 Cezanne, Paul 168 Chaucer, Geoffrey 79–​80 Chesterton, G. K. 92 Childs, Donald J. 110

Cocteau, Jean 42, 45 Conrad, Joseph 120, 123–​4 Heart of Darkness 52, 83–​4, 89–​90, 105, 119–​20, 123–​4, 130 Cook, Eleanor 82, 85–​6 Corbière, Tristan 45 Cowley, Michael 78 Crane, Hart 17, 18 Cubism 22, 77 Cummings, E. E. 153 Cunard, Nancy 1, 2 Parallax 3, 5, 6, 8, 15, 20, 43, 153–​69 Dadaism 49 Dante 44, 68, 69, 77, 82, 84–​5, 87, 90, 92, 111, 125, 132, 133, 153, 169 Dickie, Margaret 2–​3, 17–​19, 35, 62, 105, 125 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.) 17, 21, 172–​3 Dougherty, Carol 92 Douglas, C. H. 64 Doyle, Charles 135, 140, 141, 151 Dubois, Martin 12 Eliot, T. S. Ash-​Wednesday 118, 132 ‘Gerontion’ 38–​9, 61, 62, 107, 116, 155, 161–​2, 169 ‘Hamlet’ 122–​3 ‘The Hollow Men’ 5, 6, 8, 102, 117–​33, 139, 141, 142, 155, 156, 169 Inventions of the March Hare 2 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 15, 16, 22, 44, 59–​61, 69, 71, 113, 114, 117, 130, 132, 166 Notes towards the Definition of Culture 129 ‘Portrait of a Lady’ 15, 37, 60 ‘Preludes’ 2 ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ 2, 37 Sweeney Agonistes 8, 126–​31 ‘Sweeney Erect’ 127, 130

198

Index

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 6, 91–​2, 109, 114, 133, 138, 150, 161, 172 ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ 34, 35, 90 The Waste Land 77–​116 and passim Eliot, Valerie 85, 119 Eliot, Vivienne 98, 100–​1, 115 Ellmann, Maud 109 Empson, William 81, 82 Enemark, Nina 55, 56–​7 Espey, John 63 Euripides 55, 57, 172 Fawkes, Guy 120–​1 Flack, Leah Culligan 65, 90 Flanner, Janet 157 Flaubert, Gustave 67, 69, 71–​2 Flint, F. S. 23–​4, 136, 142 Foch, Ferdinand 81 Ford, Ford Madox 19–​21, 102 Frazer, James 91 Freud, Sigmund 44, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56–​7, 141, 143–​4, 147 Fry, Roger 168 Fussell, Paul 38 Gardner, Helen 83, 87–​8, 90, 92–​3, 97, 118, 121, 126 Gardner, Mrs Jack 16 Gautier, Théophile 60–​1, 70, 71, 117 Gilbert, Bernard 22 Gish, Nancy 42 Goldman, Jane 157, 168 Goldsmith, Oliver 97, 159 Gordon, Lois 157–​8, 163, 169 Gordon, Lyndall 59, 96, 111 Graves, Robert 13, 153 Gurney, Ivor 27, 102 Harrison, Jane 46–​8, 154 Higgins, Ian 83 Hipp, Daniel 38 Homer 66, 69, 77, 92, 150, 169 The Iliad 17, 84 The Odyssey 17, 46, 64, 65–​7, 70, 84–​94, 155, 169, 171–​2 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 11–​14 House, Humphry 13 Howarth, Peter 52, 54–​5 Hughes, Glenn 135, 144 Hugo, Victor 44

Hulme, T. E. 16, 21, 28–​33, 60, 92, 113, 144 ‘Autumn’ 28–​9 ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ 144–​7 ‘Trenches: St Eloi’ 28–​30 imagism 2, 16, 21, 23, 24, 28–​9, 31, 36, 48, 60, 64, 65, 67, 72, 77, 92, 135–​8, 144–​ 6, 147, 172 Imlah, Mick 142 James, Henry 15, 25, 60, 71–​3 Janet, Pierre 110 Jones, David 173 Joyce, James 71 Ulysses 5, 6, 15–​17, 33–​5, 44, 45–​6, 50, 65, 71–​2, 84, 90, 94, 95, 149, 157 Keats, John 110, 137 Kenner, Hugh 3, 63, 66, 70, 72, 74, 87, 105 Keynes, John Maynard 39, 85, 88, 99 Kipling, Rudyard 110, 119 Kokoschka, Oskar 82 Kollwitz, Kathe 82 Kyd, Thomas 77, 123, 139 The Spanish Tragedy 5, 125 Laforgue, Jules 45 Larkin, Philip 97 Lawrence, D. H. 26–​7, 102, 144, 148–​9 ‘New Heaven and Earth’ 26–​7 Leavis, F. R. 12, 13, 64, 70, 153 Lewis, Wyndham 96, 168 Liveright, Horace 14 Loy, Mina 22–​3 MacMillan, Margaret 39 Marlowe, Christopher 138–​9, 147 Marvell, Andrew 77 McIntire, Gabrielle 100, 101 McKay, Maria, 28 Miller, J. Hillis 13 Miller, Vincent 63 Mirrlees, Hope 1 ‘Gothic Dreams’ 55–​6 ‘Listening in to the Past’ 41, 55 Lud-​in-​the-​Mist 47 Paris: A Poem 1–​2, 3, 4, 5, 6–​7, 8, 12, 15, 18, 22, 23, 24, 41–​58, 77–​80, 81, 82, 105, 109, 115–​16, 127, 143, 147

Index Moliere 44 Monroe, Harriet 169 Moore, Marianne 23 Morris, William 119 Murry, John Middleton 126 Musgrave, David 89 Mussolini, Benito 172 Nietzsche, Friedrich 37, 100, 147 Ovid 77, 82, 88 Owen, Wilfred 27, 29, 32–3, 37, 38, 108 Parmar, Sandeep, 3, 156, 161 Pasteur, Louis 53 Perloff, Marjorie 23 Peterson, Rai 157 Petronius 84, 89, 90, 105, 112, 119 Pondrom, Cyrena 43, 47–8 Pope, Alexander 14, 90, 95, 101–2, 104, 158, 166 Pound, Ezra 1, 2 The Cantos 3, 7, 17, 19, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 77, 85, 87, 101, 171–2 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 33, 35, 43, 59–75, 77, 83, 84, 90–1, 93, 141, 143, 145, 147, 162, 169 Propertius 74 Quinn, John 15, 94, 114 Rainey, Lawrence 14 Ransom, John Crowe 35, 158–9 Read, Herbert 135, 137, 138 Relihan, Joel 89 Reverdy, Pierre 48–9, 55 Richards, I. A. 13 Ricks, Christopher 25 Ridge, Lola 21–2, 24 Riding, Laura 13, 153 Robinson, Peter 20 Rodker, John 62 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 68, 69 Rouse, W. H. D. 64 Sackville-​West, Vita 156 Sappho 145 Sassoon, Siegfried 38 Schad, John 14

199

Schelling, Felix 60, 75 Schiff, Sydney 100 Schuchard, Ronald 35 Severini, Gino 49 Shakespeare, William 25 Antony and Cleopatra 5, 67, 80, 86, 95 As You Like It 144, 149 Coriolanus 86 Hamlet 5, 44, 60, 86, 98, 122–3, 124, 140, 149, 150, 166 Julius Caesar 120–1 The Tempest 91, 109, 115, 162 Shelley, Percy 145 ‘Ozymandias’ 108 Sinclair, May 136–7 Sitwell, Sacheverell 37 Skoulding, Zoe 52 Smith, Stan 173 Sophocles 87–8 Spender, Stephen 1, 13, 81–2 Spenser, Edmund 77, 106–7, 112, 146–7, 153, 155 Stendhal 71 Stevens, Wallace 23 Stockwell, Peter 156 Stoker, Bram 83 Stopes, Marie 99 Strachey, Lytton 100 Swift, Jonathan 158 Tagore, Rabindranath 169 Tate, Allen 38 Tate, Trudi 81, 82–3 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 13, 19, 53, 150–1 Thayer, Scofield 16 Tolstoy, Leo 44 Verdenal, Jean 14 Verlaine, Paul 44, 153 Victor, Christina R. 99 Villon, François 66–7, 145 Vines, Sherard 37 Virgil 17, 66, 77, 84, 86–7, 91, 92, 110, 146, 155 Vittoz, Roger 111–15 Voltaire 44 Vorticism 67, 80 Wagner, Richard 115 Waller, Edmund 71

200 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 159 Weston, Jessie 45, 93 Whelpton, Vivien 138, 141, 144, 148 Wilde, Oscar 73 Williams, William Carlos 17, 18, 23, 157 Wilson, Aimee Armande 99–100 Wilson, Woodrow 58 Wolfe, Humbert 138, 141 Woolf, Virginia 5–7, 41, 42, 44, 56, 85

Index Jacob’s Room 5, 6 Mrs Dalloway 5, 6, 33, 97, 140, 166–7 ‘Street Haunting’ 50 Yeats, W. B. 19–20, 27, 102, 110, 169 Young, Tory 4, 44, 51, 155 Zilboorg, Caroline 143