LBST 402: Lecture on T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land
January 1997
[The following paragraphs are the text of a lecture
delivered, in part, to the Liberal Studies 402 class on
January 16, 1997]
Ian Johnston, Malaspina University-College
A. Introduction
This week we are paying close attention to two very short
works of poetry, probably the two most famous and
influential works of verse in the past one hundred years,
not only very fine in themselves but also of major
significance in the history of poetic styles, since these
are the best examples of the early work of the writer who,
more than anyone else, transformed the way poetry in English
was written in modern times. It is almost impossible to
overestimate T. S. Eliot's effect on our understanding of
how we read and write poetry.
Today I would like to address two issues. First, I would
like to say something about the context of Eliot's work,
because these two poems are deliberately experimental, and
they launch something very new, of importance to the
understanding not only of poetry but also of our modernist
culture (I'll have more to say about that term modernist
later on). This contextual review will be necessarily brief
and inadequate, but it should help us to understand why
these two poem are so different and to read them more
fluently. The second purpose of this lecture will be to
read together a few sections of The Waste Land so that we
can explore how we come to grips with this new style.
I take it that many of you in this room find the poetic
style in these poems odd and difficult easily to grasp,
especially in comparison to poetry we have read earlier.
This verse doesn't seem to make sense readily-just as a lot
of modern art seems, at first glance, often
incomprehensible. How are we supposed to get any sense of
unity or continuity when we have no geographical or
argumentative or metaphorical thread to guide our reading,
especially when the form of the verse seems to change in
bewildering ways for apparently no reason? What I want to
do here is to encourage you to discover that this style is
not nearly so difficult as it may appear, once we have
grasped the point that reading this style requires us to
drop some of the conventional expectations we bring to
poetry and to let this style do its work in a new way.
To achieve this introduction to a new way of reading poetry,
I first have to present some contextual background into the
launching of the experimental movement which has come to
define so much of modern poetry.
B. The Imagist Movement
The modern movement in poetry, the transformation of the
tradition into something startlingly new, antedates Eliot
somewhat. A common and convenient date is 1910, when a
small group of practising poets met in London under the name
of their new "movement"-Imagism.
The moving spirit of this group was a young and very brash
American, Ezra Pound, a student of European literature and a
college teacher who had come to Europe in 1908 after being
fired from his job as a college teacher in Indiana for
having a girl in his room overnight. Pound, whose energy
and flamboyance were notorious (or legendary) immediately
set upon a very aggressive campaign demanding reforms in the
writing of poetry, and he gathered together a few fellow
spirits.
Literary movements, like political, religious, and artistic
movements, generally arise as a reaction against the
immediate tradition. So if we want to understand the nature
of Imagism's demands, we need to consider for a moment what
they disliked about the poetry considered at the time
acceptable. I am going to use a very misleading term for
this tradition, but I want to link our study of Imagism to
the poetry we have already studied in this program. So I'm
going to use the label "Wordsworthian Decadence" to
characterize the kind of poetry from the immediate tradition
which the Imagists despised. With this label I do not mean
to impugn Wordsworth, who had died about sixty years earlier
(although the Imagists held no particularly high opinion of
his style); I refer instead to the tradition inspired
largely by his lyric emphasis on the meditative reflections
of a solitary speaker.
For the Imagists the Wordsworthian style had become
decadent-mushy, rhythmically inert, predictable in its
imagery, and emotionally dishonest-it had turned poetry from
something vital into something merely decorative. However
passionate and innovative Wordsworth's own best poetry had
been, by the end of the century the tradition of meditative
lyric had lost its vitality, degenerating into subjective
posturing often wrapped in the cloudiness of nostalgia or
dreams and presented in a flaccid language. Even the best
of them, Yeats, Pound characterized as "already a sort of
great dim figure with its associations set in the past"
(Letter to Harriet Monroe, 30 March 1913).
To illustrate this point, let me consider for a moment the
following example from a particularly popular poet then and
for many years later (Pound does not use this example and
it is not part of his immediate tradition, but it will serve
to illustrate what his movement objected to):
Sea Magic
My heart faints in me for the distant sea.
The roar of London is the roar of ire
The lion utters in his old desire
For Libya out of dim captivity.
The long bright silver of Cheapside I see,
Her gilded weathercocks on roof and spire
Exulting eastward in the western fire;
All things recall one heart-sick memory:--
Ever the rustle of the advancing foam,
The surges' desolate thunder, and the cry
As of some lone babe in the whispering sky;
Ever I peer into the restless gloom
To where a ship clad dim and loftily
Looms steadfast in the wonder of her home.
Walter de la Mare
What's wrong with this? It seems a relatively pleasant
poem, the evocation of a mood we can respond to presented in
a style we are immediately familiar with. Well, for a
start, the Imagists would insist, the poem is emotional
fakery, in the sense that there is nothing sharp, focused,
passionate about it. Everything about it is fuzzy and
predictable: the imprecise imagery (relying upon a
conventional vocabulary designed to evoke an "atmosphere" of
significance but with no clarity--"faints," "dim," "heart-
sick," "desolate," "lone," "whispering," and so on), the
iambic regularity, the predicable rhymes-in short, the
overwhelming conventionality. For them, this style is the
equivalent of Muzak.
A poem like this is not necessarily easy to write, and it is
often (for reasons I'll mention in a moment) quite popular.
But it offers no revelation, no surprise, no sense of the
sharp particularity of experience. And its effect depends
upon our closing down parts of our critical apparatus and
surrendering to the conventional associations. For example,
consider the lines "The roar of London is the roar of ire/
The lion utters in his old desire/ For Libya out of dim
captivity." What does this mean? It has iambic regularity
and a clear rhyme, so we know we're dealing with poetry.
But how is my understanding of the emotions being exploring
at all illuminated by the comparison of London to the lion?
Apart from that, look at the language. Is this English?
Does anyone actually talk in phrases like "roar of ire."
To clarify the point let me give you a more contemporary
example. Popular song writing is full of examples of this
sort of writing. Many popular artists tap this vein and
become rich selling the public this form of shallow
emotionalism delivered in a conventional package: Barry
Manilow, Englebert Humperdink, Tom Jones, a great deal of
Country Music. When we express dissatisfaction with some of
these "poets" I think what we most object to is their
emotional flaccidity and artistic conventionality. They are
gesturing towards an emotion presented in a non-disturbing
way, so that we can wallow for a moment without engaging our
full imaginations with any serious awareness in anything
important. It's a style that reaches its natural
culmination in the Coutt's Hallmark Greeting Card.
There's a name for this sort of style. We call it
sentimentality, and it is, in the words of Wallace Stevens,
"a failure of feeling." The failure stems from the
inability or the refusal to put the emotions one is
exploring into a sharp focus in a vital language so that
they can register as particular experiences grappled with
honestly. Sentiment is, and always has been, very
popular-there's more immediate cash to be won from sentiment
than from its alternatives (as Walt Disney knows so well).
That I would suggest stems from the fact that we all like to
bathe in warm treacle now and then, without having to come
to terms with anything very challenging. To hear, say,
Tammy Wynette singing about Divorce gives me the sense of an
emotionally important time without requiring me to reshape
my perceptions or understanding of what it really means.
One might note here, in passing, that it's quite common for
a revolutionary artistic movement to arise as a reaction
against the decadent sentimentality of the immediate
tradition. If the new movement succeeds, it will often
revolutionize the style of the art form, only in turn to
become a new convention which, in the hands of lesser
artists, becomes the new sentimentality. It's worth
remembering that Wordsworth sees himself as rejecting the
conventional sentimentality of outworn eighteenth century
traditions and as introducing new poetic reforms to
revitalize English poetry. The Imagists saw themselves with
something of the same mission: the Romantic tradition
initiated by Wordsworth had lost its energy, its power to
move, and had become conventional sentiment (just as Bob
Dylan saw himself as bringing to an end an outworn tradition
of song writing when he announced "Tin Pan Alley is dead. I
killed it").
C. The Imagist Program
What did Pound and his fellow imagists have to offer by way
of a reform program? In its main artistic credo, Imagism
proselytized a few firm recommendations, as follows:
The first important artistic tenet of Imagism was that the
poet must get rid of the omnipresent voice of the poet, the
Wordsworthian "I." Whatever poetry was about it must eschew
the wallowing in subjective emotionalism, the peeling away
of the layers of skin surrounding the poet's psyche. This
simply created a sentimental personal emotionalism of the
sort exemplified above.
The second tenet, from which the movement derives its name,
is that whatever the poet has to communicate, he or she must
do so in terms of objective images: clear, objective,
precise, concentrated, and fresh symbols which capture, in
the way they are presented the emotional qualities under
exploration. "The image is itself the speech," proclaimed
Pound. Poets should not be telling us how they feel-they
should be presenting us with impersonal images which capture
the feeling, so that we, as readers, can react to the image
without the meddlesome interference of the poetical
personality (the "I"). Poems, in other words, should not be
interpreting the experience for us; they should provide the
objective means by which we can ourselves, as readers,
discover what matters.
Poems thus did not need rational frameworks or conventional
logic or meditating poet-narrators to coordinate the
meaning. Pound argued that the rationality of speech, both
in science and in art, did not come from rational logic but
from the combination or juxtaposition of two clear,
objective images:
. . . the serious artist is scientific. . . . That is
to say, a good biologist will make a reasonable number
of observations of any given phenomenon before he draws
a conclusion. . . . The result of each observation
must be precise and no single observation must in
itself be taken as determining a general law. . . .
[T]he serious artist is scientific in that he presents
the image of his desire, or his hate, of his
indifference as precisely as the image of his own
desire, hate or indifference. The more precise his
record the more lasting and unassailable his work of
art. (Pound, Literary Essays 46)
Imagist poets were very fond of using scientific analogies
for what they were doing: Eliot's "platinum catalyst, "non-
Euclidean geometry," Fenollos'a "transference of power,"
Williams's "field of force, and Pound's "sort of inspired
mathematics." The habit is, I think, a means above all of
emphasising the importance of the particular and the
concrete in contrast to the discursive, so that their poetry
could elicit the reader's intuitive response to something
specific, unmediated by the personality of the poet.
The most famous statement of this principle came in later
years from Eliot himself, who in his essay on Hamlet
introduced a key critical terms in modern discussions of art
and poetry, the objective correlative:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art
is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other
words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula of that particular emotion;
such that when the external facts, which must terminate
in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked. ("Hamlet and His Problems")
What Eliot means here is that the job of the artist is to
find a fictional equivalent to the emotion he wishes to
explore, something adequate to the complexity of the feeling
which is at issue--the images must be adequate to the
emotions, the source of our understanding of them, so that
our response arises inevitably out of them, and not from
being told directly by the poet what is at stake (Eliot's
argument here is that the problems of Hamlet stem, in large
part, from Shakespeare's failure to create an appropriate
objective correlative for his own work--the emotional
quality of the work, he claims, is in excess of the facts
presented in it).
[This, incidentally, is an principle well worth considering
in your own creative writing and critical interpretation:
How successfully has the represented fiction (story,
character, symbol, and so on) captured the emotionally
complexities of the issue at hand? To what extent is the
image only a gesture towards something serious? To what
extent does the image only illustrate, rather than
illuminate, experience]
Thus, a poem should not concern itself with a traditional
connective (like a firm narrative line or a developing
argumentative framework or an interpreting narrator) which
interfere with the reader's most important experience, the
direct contact with the image:
[Poetry] is not a counter language, but a visual
concrete one. It is compromise for a language of
intuition which would hand over sensation bodily. It
always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you
continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you
gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh
epithets and fresh metaphors not so much because they
are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the
old cease to convey a physical thing and become
abstract counters. . . . Images in verse are not mere
decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive
language.
The man who wrote the above words, T. E. Hulme, was the
closest thing the early Imagists had to a philosophical
spirit, and he was, interestingly enough spurred on in his
speculations about imagery by the experience of living and
working on the Canadian prairies. There he experienced
clearly and repeatedly the way in which a very mundane
object, like, say, a grain silo, could stand out as a clear
single image at a distance and define an emotional complex
in a very objective manner.
Thirdly, Imagist practice demanded a break with the old
conventions of writing verse, especially with a standard
rhythm and rhyme. They declared inappropriate the
traditional war horse of English poetry, the iambic
pentameter-the medium for virtually all the major poets
since Chaucer (Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and so
on). Modern verse should emancipate itself from the notion
that the language had to fit some preconceived pattern-the
pattern should emerge from what was demanded by the language
at that particular moment.
Hence, Imagism promoted what came to be called "free verse,"
liberating the poet from traditional conventions of set
rhythms and rhyme and insisting that the formal properties
of the poem were to take shape flexibly in the ways best
suited to the achievement of the appropriate form of
language. Hence, centuries of formalist restrictions were
done away with, and a new characteristic of modern poetry
emerged--the constantly shifting rhythmic patterns, changing
with the particular sections of the work. The Waste Land is
one of the finest examples of this, moving from blank verse,
to song, to prose, to music all speech, in short, to
whatever the requirements of the particular lines. Gone is
the traditional regularity which for so long had defined
poetry (and which, for many, still does).
Imagists insisted that free verse does not mean that
anything goes. No verse is free for the poet who really
wants to do a good job Pound claimed. And he grew
frustrated at the ways in which, under the banner of
Imagism, all sorts of ineffectual experiments justified
themselves (see Letter to Harriet Monroe, 1 August 1914 and
January 1915). What Pound wanted was a new form of poetic
discipline.
One can sum up many of these points in one injunction.
Modern poetry must address the modern world with modern
language and images appropriate to the modern experience,
unfettered by the conventions which had grown up over the
centuries. This demand was all part of a much wider
movement (which Hughes discusses in The Shock of the New) to
bring all cultural effort into an age far removed from the
pastoral conventions of so much art and poetry. If poetry
was to matter-and Pound insisted that poetry must matter-
then it must reform itself so that it could communicate
intelligently and clearly top a modern urban readership.
What Pound was seeking he found in an odd place, in Japanese
haiku-the very short presentation of images juxtaposed
without comment:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Alba
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
The poems make no argumentative statements, tell no story,
make no links to the feelings of the poet. They simply,
clearly, and directly present images-and it is up to us to
intuit for ourselves what they might "mean" or "say."
Pound himself explained the attraction of this form borrowed
from the Japanese tradition:
. . . it seemed to offer dry, hard concrete imagery
and, without losing any of the essential force of
symbolist poetry, avoided direct lyricism. It was the
basic unit of the imagiste poem, juxtaposing two
images, often in contrast, and containing them within a
brief epigrammatic form, omitting all moral and
intellectual comment and allowing images to form a
"visual chord" in the mind--a third image that unites
them--so that a "thing outward and objective transforms
itself or darts into a thing inward and subjective."
Here is another sample (from 1915), one highly admired by
the Imagists themselves (the writer is Hilda Dolittle, or
HD, one of the "founders" of the movement):
Oread
Whirl up, sea--
Whirl our pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.
Now, these examples illustrate, I think, clearly enough what
the Imagists meant by the importance of the imagery, the
absence of any dominating Wordsworthian narrative or
descriptive "I," and the linguistic variety. Notice, too,
especially in comparison with the other poem quoted already,
how clean the language is. We have here none of that
rhetorical appeal to emotional but vague adjectives or
images.
But these two examples also illustrate a very important
problem with this new style-the fact that it seems curiously
empty of content. This point is worth dwelling upon. How
can a style which takes away the traditional organizing
principles of a poem-either the feelings of the narrator or
a geographic setting or a coordinating argument or even
certain formal elements-and which stresses that the image
alone is the crux of the matter, how can such a poem do any
more than what these examples appear to do, depict an image
or two and then cease? Perhaps they provide intuition, but
where is the thought which enables us stay in touch with
some coordinating theme or developing meaning? This
characteristic was a common point of criticism of the new
style ("They've got the bridle and the bit all right/ But
where's the bloody horse?").
[It] was the fault of imagism never to let its devotees
draw clear conclusions about life and to force the poet
to state too much and to deduce rather too little--to
lead its disciples too often into a barren aestheticism
which was, and is, empty of content. . . . Poetry
merely descriptive of nature as such, however vivid, no
longer seems to me enough; there has to be added to it
the human judgement, the human evaluation. (J. G.
Fletcher)
The poetry of Pound himself seems to exemplify this problem.
Pound's style displays a remarkable command of language,
imagery, rhythm, and other formal skills. But too often he
appears to have little to say, and his longer poems often
come across as merely a collection of images, which do not
add up to what he was after, some form of intuitive
revelation. Hence he emerges, in some respects, as a
consummate poet's poet--someone who (like Spenser, perhaps)
opened up to his contemporaries all sorts of important new
possibilities with poetic style, without being able in the
process to produce a work which might triumphantly justify
the movement. He himself was well aware of this problem
with his own work.
In fact, it seems clear that Imagism would have been little
more than a footnote to the early history of modern culture,
but for another American, one who developed his modern
poetry style largely on his own, apart from the developing
Imagist movement, but whose style, especially with the help
of Ezra Pound, created its finest achievements. T. S.
Eliot's early poetry provided exactly what Pound saw as the
essential ingredients of the modern style. Eliot resolved
(for reasons I will mention later) the problems of Imagism I
mentioned above and in his early poetry, particularly in The
Waste Land, established a transformation of modern poetry
that very much redefined how poets write. Eliot's poem,
Pound proclaimed, was "the justification of our 'movement,'
of our modern experiment."
D. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
The association between T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound began
around 1912 in England. The two men, whose personalities
and family backgrounds were very different, had much in
common. They were both from the West or mid-West-Eliot from
St. Louis and Pound from Idaho, and both, as young men
(Pound was 27 and Eliot 25 at the time their association
began) had come to Europe as means of getting more in touch
with what they felt unavailable in America. And both ended
up staying in Europe for the rest of their lives (with some
interruptions).
Pound immediately recognized in "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" the quality of the new style, and it was largely
through Pound's efforts that the poem appeared in print.
Their association remained close, and Pound played a huge
effort in the production of The Waste Land, acting as an
editor and reducing the poem into something significantly
shorter than the work Eliot wrote:
It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the
manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem called The Waste
Land which left his hands, reduced to about half its
size, in the form in which it appears in print. I
should like to think hat the manuscript, with the
suppressed passages, had disappeared irrevocably; yet,
on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling to
be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's
critical genius. (T. S. Eliot)
The manuscript with Pound's emendations has survived and was
printed after Eliot's death. It is, in my view, the most
fascinating example of a critical intelligence working
closely on an inspired poetic work, and it should be
required reading for all those interested in modern poetry
and editing. And it remains, as Eliot hoped it would, an
extraordinary testament to Pound's critical genius.
Parenthetically, it is worth noting that Pound was
throughout his life an tireless supporter of other poets,
helping them with manuscripts, badgering publishers to use
their work, seeking out patrons for needy artists, always
ready to talk to those interested enough to seek him out. I
personally know of this from an academic acquaintance, a
graduate student, who visited "Uncle Ezra" in Italy in the
mid-1960's after his release from incarceration in the
mental home by the US government and who received as cordial
a welcome as he could wish.
Three of the great masterpieces of early modernist English
literature--Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's Waste Land, and Yeats's
The Tower--featured in one way or another the assistance of
Ezra Pound. He recognized early on the talent of Robert
Frost and many other young poets. There is no doubt that
his efforts on behalf of other artists were tireless,
unselfish, and often, especially in the case of The Waste
Land, decisive.
All of this makes part of Ezra Pound's life particularly
sad. And I'd like to take a moment to refer to one of the
great literary scandals of the century. In the 1920's,
after Pound left England, he finally settled in Rapallo in
Italy. There we worked on his major work of poetry, The
Cantos, off and on for the rest of his life. During the war
he became preoccupied with strange economic theories,
especially Social Credit, and with anti-Semitism, both of
which prompted him to make some radio broadcasts on behalf
of Mussolini's Fascist government.
In 1945, he surrendered to the American Army, and was put in
an iron cage out in the heat of the Italian summer sun in
Pisa. As a result of that experience he wrote his finest
sequence of poems, The Pisan Cantos, for which he was
awarded one of the most prestigious literary awards
available in America.
This placed the American government in a dilemma.
Technically, Pound was a traitor and should be tried and
sent off for a long prison term. On the other hand, he was
a leading figure of modern American poetry (the recent prize
had confirmed this) and had a huge number of supporters,
many of whom he had in the past provided valuable help to
(including T. S. Eliot). The government resolved its
difficulties by declaring Pound unfit for trial and shipping
him off to a mental home. Over the years, there were
repeated calls for Pound's release-How could America so
unfairly incarcerate without trial one of its most important
cultural figures of the past fifty years? Eventually,
Robert Frost, who by that time was clearly America's leading
poet and who had, to his great discredit, refused to come to
Pound's assistance, joined in, and President Eisenhower
permitted Pound to leave America in 1961. He returned to
Rapallo, where he died in 1972.
E. Comments on Eliot's Style
What was it about the early poems of T. S. Eliot which so
immediately caught Pound's attention and transformed the
writing of modern English poetry? It is hard to select a
single quality, other than to say that Eliot was simply a
better poet than his Imagist contemporaries. He has an
uncanny genius, characteristic of only the greatest writers,
of writing lines which stick in one's mind. But, in
addition to that key quality, let me focus on some of the
ways in which "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The
Waste Land exemplify the reforms of poetic language which
the Imagists insisted upon, while at the same time resolving
the difficulties the style imposes (which I referred to
earlier). I don't mean this to represent a complete
discussion of Eliot's style by any means, but it should give
some assistance to those who find the style puzzling at
first.
The Coordinating Consciousness of the Speaker(s)
The first, and one of the most important contribution Eliot
made was a technical one. I mentioned above, in the
discussion of sample Imagist poems, the problem of content:
How can a collection of images add up to anything more than
simply a list of images? What is going to unify a style
which assembles a series of haiku-like fragments? Eliot
resolved this problem with a technique he learned from the
one Victorian poet for whom the Imagists had a high regard,
Robert Browning.
The technique is deceptively simple. Eliot makes his poem
dramatic utterances, spoken by an invented persona like
Prufrock, so that the images, as we encounter them, are all
linked, no matter how discrete they may appear, because they
are expressions of a single personality. In terms of the
language discussed already, the speaking personality
operates as an objective correlative, something apart and
different from the poet (for Prufrock is clearly not Eliot,
and one habit we have to discard immediately in reading this
poetry is any tendency, very strong in the Wordsworthian
tradition, immediately to identify the speaking voice of the
poem, the "I," with the poet writing the piece), towards the
clarification of which all the images in the poem
contribute. The speaking persona, in other words, is a way
of escaping the omnipresence of the poet's personality while
at the same time linking the poem to a coordinating
consciousness.
Thus, a key technique in reading Eliot is to stop looking
for conventional means of coordinating a long poem (a story,
a developing description, an argument) and to focus instead
on what each apparently discontinuous part of the poem
reveals about the consciousness of the speaking voice, for
the definition of the consciousness is the main purpose of
the poem. We may, for example, puzzle over what could
possibly be the logical connection between, say, the fog,
the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo, a
crustacean, coffee, Lazarus, Hamlet, and the sea girls. The
connection is clear enough, however: they are all
expressions of and therefore images illuminating Prufrock
himself.
And there's a second point to this technique. The
discontinuity between the images defining the consciousness
of the speaker serves to indicate what for Eliot is a major
manifestation of modern life, the loss of the integrated
personality. Eliot does this quite deliberately as part of
his sense that a fractured world and an inchoate response to
it defines what we have become:
The life of a soul does not consist in the
contemplation of one consistent world but in the
painful task of unifying (to a greater and less extent)
jarring and incompatible ones.
In The Waste Land the technique, although more complex, is
essentially the same. There we have a multiplicity of
voices, male and female, young and old, in a variety of
languages and styles, and the shifts are unannounced, so
that often we do not even know who is speaking, simply that
it is someone who sounds different from the voice
immediately before. But the unity of the poem emerges from
the fact that these all merge into a single personality,
something we might call the voice of the modern
consciousness. The fact that this modern consciousness
cannot settle into a fixed perception of things or even into
a consistent language helps to convey a good deal of the
sense of the strain of modern living, an important point of
the poem.
I think at first reading many students worry unnecessarily
about being able clearly to distinguish the different
"personalities," sometimes to the extent that the process
works to the detriment of their appreciating the key point:
the ways in which all these voice are part of the all-
inclusive "personality" of the poem. Eliot reminds us of
this in the only one of his notes to the poem which is of
direct interpretative help to the reader:
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. What
Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.
(Note to line 218)
We need, therefore, in reading Eliot's style to attend to
how the images serve to illuminate a distinctive personality
at once modern, fractured, multilingual, urban, and
emotionally uncertain. The personality is by no means
unified; in fact, what emerges from both poems as a
principal concern is the inability of the modern
consciousness either to see unity in the world outside or to
bring to a disordered world any sense of inner integrity.
What unity the poems possess comes from what is revealed to
us about this new conception of the modern self.
Part of this sense of the totality of the modern self adding
up to a fractured variety emerges, not just from the
shifting sense of the images and the speaking voice, but
also from the variety in the verse style. It's as if in the
modern age, there cannot be a single authoritative way of
expressing how one feels (as there was once in the past);
there is not enough confidence in the forms of language
itself. Just as the traditional community has become the
unreal city, a vision of a modern inferno, so the
traditional language of the community in the modern
personality has become a multiplicity of contrasting styles.
Eliot's Irony
A second important feature of Eliot's technique, something
which gives his style an urbanity and resonance lacking in
much other imagist writing, is his constant use of a certain
form of irony, a style known as Romantic irony or, what
might be called, the irony of instant deflation.
Romantic irony consists of creating what appears to be a
firm assertion or picture of something, only to reveal that
what was promised in the original is, in fact, quite
different. A good example is something like the following:
a stage show presents a beautiful woman who sings a tender,
seductive song, celebrating feminine beauty and then, at the
end, abruptly the performer rips off her hair to reveal that
she is, in fact, a man, and that the audience is a bunch of
idiots to have fallen for the illusion.
The irony, in other words, consists of creating something of
apparent value and solidity--an affirmation that matters--
only to reveal that the value was illusory. This technique
is absolutely fundamental to understanding Eliot's poetry.
His skill with this technique is responsible, as much as
anything, for the sardonic and often pessimistic tone of the
poem.
Eliot will use Romantic irony within a single line, where
the growing energy of what looks like the start of a
confident or at least important statement will be denied by
the end of the line. The most famous example of this is the
line from "Prufrock": "I have measured out my life in coffee
spoons." The first six words lead us to expect, at last,
some significant insight into something--the rhetorical
build up in the language promises something significant; the
prosaic last three words indicate an immediate deflation.
Notice some other examples of this technique:
In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions
which a minute will reverse.
He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the
winter.
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water.
Often, as in the last example above, the rising first part
of the ironic structure in these poems is linked to a
hypothetical (to an if or a would clause), so that rising
hope, as it rises, is conditional and is quickly cancelled
by any reflection on the reality. The effect is the
constant sense of a consciousness which realizes
intelligently enough that something is wrong and that a
particular quality is necessary to transform the barrenness
of life but which even before the thought is clearly
formulated runs out of energy and collapses upon itself.
The ironic technique also, to some degree, governs the
structure of the entire "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
The poem starts on a note of energy ("Let us go. . ."), and
for all the rising and falling of the ironic passages seems
in places to gather a significant energy. But as soon as we
reach "No, I am not Prince Hamlet" whatever energies
Prufrock may have generated by his intense dissatisfaction
with life dissipate immediately, and we are left with an
intelligent, sympathetic, character confronting the
realities of his own failure-seeing the emotional sterility
of his future but incapable of breaking out, even though at
the start of the poem (where the tone is most resolute and
imperative) that is what he had set his mind on. He is
settling for a life which he knows is empty and meaningless,
without music, beauty, movement, except in his dreams.
Eliot's Rhythmic and Tonal Variety
An essential ingredient in Eliot's Romantic irony and in his
definition of the consciousness of the speaker(s) is his
astonishing command of rhythmic variety. His emancipation
from the traditional commitment to a regular verse pattern
manifests itself in the juxtaposition of often totally
contrasting styles.
This serves a number of important purposes. The first I
have already alluded to: the sudden unannounced shift in the
rhythm is an important part of the deflationary technique of
Eliot's irony, which enables him to moves us through some
complex emotional shifts very quickly and effectively:
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag -
It's so elegant
So intelligent
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'
Here the urgency of an attempt to reach some one else is
interrupted by the syncopated rhythms of the popular tune,
only to collapse into the prosaic inner self-questioning
which we know will lead no where. One might multiply
examples like this many times.
A second contribution of Eliot's apparently freewheeling
rhythmic and tonal shifts is to reinforce the sense of the
loss of a coordinating formal public speech. There are
constant echoes in the Waste Land, for example, of all sorts
of traditional forms of discourse--Biblical utterance, blank
verse, formal lyric grace. But these can never sustain
themselves in the face of the radical anxieties and
fractured outer world of the modern age. So the apparently
formal presentation of the lady in "A Game of Chess,"
deliberately reminiscent of Shakespeare's magnificent
description of Cleopatra cannot sustain emotional stability
and breaks into the neurotic conversation of an anxious pair
fighting off images of rats eating up the dead.
Thus, an important sense of what we have lost from the past
emerges from the constant reminders of past forms of
expression up against the modern realities. And this helps
to contribute in a decisive way to the definition of the
modern consciousness by stressing the lack of a common
idiom, any shared and shaping way to interpret experience.
We experience, not a common language or a formal set of ways
to express our feelings. We are a babble of voice,
languages, slangs, desperately seeking significant
communication with others and anxiously dreading making such
connections.
The world, this style is insisting upon, is in some respects
a collection of refugees (and notice the frequency of
displaced persons in the poem)--like our cultural past, our
languages, and therefore our thoughts exists as fragments.
The modern world thus not only features the muddle of
collapsing and intermingling and displaced cultures but also
brings about a similar situation within the discourse of the
self.
Eliot's Use of the Past
Of course, Eliot's use of the past involves a good deal more
than simply an evocation of traditional styles. For one
immediately noticeable feature of Eliot's style which can
cause some difficulties for new readers is his constant use
of the past in more explicit ways. Typically Eliot's style
will invoke the past directly in one of three ways:
The first is a direct reference to a well known literary or
historical or cultural figure (Coriolanus, Hamlet,
Michelangelo, Tiresias, and so on). The second is a more or
less explicit allusion to the works-often to something
immediately reminiscent of a famous passage (like the
opening of The Waste Land, which is clearly based on the
opening of Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury
Tales, or the opening of the Second Section of the same
poem, "A Game of Chess," which is equally clearly based on
Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra sailing into
Alexandria). The third is a direct quote from some famous
source (like Tristan and Isolde or The Spanish Tragedy or
Augustine's Confessions).
What is one to make of these constant references? How is
one to integrate them into one's understanding of the poem?
Well, I want to begin by suggesting that one needs to
appreciate their importance but (a very important caveat)
without giving them an importance incommensurate with their
function.
Some readers feel, for example, that this constant and often
very esoteric reference to the past makes the poem simply
too inaccessible or incomprehensible, "a piece that passeth
all understanding," or whatever, and they give up in despair
or disgust at what they perceive as wilfully elitist and
obscurantist: "piece that passeth all understanding," "the
agonized outcry of a sensitive romanticism drowning in a sea
of jazz" (J. M. May); "to all but anthropologists so much
waste paper" (Charles Powell, Manchester Guardian). Such a
response was by no means uncommon in the first critical
reviews of the work.
:
. . . a pompous parade of erudition, a lengthy
extension of the deadlier disillusion, a kaleidoscopic
movement in which the bright coloured pieces fail to
atone for the absence of an integrated design. . . .
[a] mingling of wilful obscurity and weak vaudeville
(Louis Untermeyer)
This response to the poem is understandable-the style does
rely upon a cultural background that can be easily
interpreted as unnecessarily academic and elitist (a charge
that is commonly levelled against a good deal of Modernist
culture), and the feature does indeed repel many readers. I
have considerable sympathy with the view, especially since,
as you may have gathered by now, I am suspicious of any
artistic style which self-consciously and deliberately
isolates itself from a wide general readership.
Pound somewhere observes, by way of justification for this
technique, that one doesn't stop writing just because the
common people don't know Latin. Well, maybe not. But if
your poetry demands a knowledge of Latin and of a great many
rather obscure classical references, then you should not
expect many of the folk to care very much for or to benefit
from your efforts. Put more simply, if you turn your back
on the general readers, you should not be surprised if they
turn their backs on you.
On the other hand, before making a decision one way or the
other, perhaps we should explore a little more into how
these references function, because it may well be that
having a firm grasp on all these references is less
important than it may at first appear. Yes, the style is
unnecessarily erudite and allusive, but we don't have to
throw it all away because of that. So let me try to ease
the difficulty in a moment.
It is not uncommon for some readers to feel that in order to
appreciate Eliot's style one has to have as full a command
of the tradition he is using as he does. This impression is
strongly reinforced by the notes Eliot adds to the poem.
There is wide agreement that these notes are unfortunate,
because they really reinforce the impression I have been
describing, which can seriously interfere with a direct
experience of the sort Imagism wished to make central to the
reading of poetry.
On this point I do not wish to be misunderstood. Obviously,
if one can recognize and respond significantly to the
reference Eliot is making, then the poem becomes all the
richer. However, it is also clear that understanding all
those often very esoteric references is not a necessary
condition for responding intelligently to the poem. For if
one concentrates on what the language is actually doing,
then one can usually derive a clear sense of what is going
on, an interpretative response adequate to formulating a
coherent approach to the poem.
Take, for example, the very opening, the famous lines about
April being the cruellest month. This imagery functions to
summon up a particular (and startling) image of spring as a
fearful time, something hostile to life because it rouses us
from our winter torpor. Eliot is doing here something very
common in modernist writing generally, and especially in his
early poems: reversing the traditional associations with a
conventional poetic image. Just as the opening lines of
"Prufrock" provide, in that image of a city anaesthetized, a
startlingly new and severe image of early evening (often
celebrated in poetry as a time of quiet and calm
reflection), so the opening of The Waste Land wrenches apart
our conventional poetic associations with an invocation of
spring. All that is clear enough from a reading of the
words without any knowledge of Chaucer's lines. If we do
recognize Chaucer's original under that text (and many of us
will), then the passage becomes all the richer for us,
because we see an important point Eliot is making in drawing
our attention to The Canterbury Tales, the extent to which
the healthy union of erotic and religious sensibilities
which Chaucer's great work celebrates has been lost in the
modern age.
Many of the references to the past works in a similar way.
They force us, as readers, if we recognize them (or some of
them) constantly to juxtapose the sensibilities expressive
of the modern consciousness of the speaker(s) with the very
different visions of the past, when people brought to the
complexities of life things we seem to have lost: courage,
erotic confidence, a love of nature, a sense of the divine.
There was a time, these references constantly say, when
human beings were capable of spiritually intense experience,
when people were willing to suffer, to celebrate, to express
themselves heroically. References to, for example,
Cleopatra, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Augustine, Queen Elizabeth,
Tristan and Isolde, like the reminders of the great artists
of the past-Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Chaucer, and so on
serve to create and sustain an ironic sense of loss.
This element brings out one of the essential features of
what has come to be called Modernist art-the attempt to sort
out some adequate relationship to the past, an issue that is
a foremost concern among writers, painter, poets, sculptors,
and philosophers. Where does one go after Nietzsche? What
faith can one place in a tradition which led to the Great
War of 1914-1918? Is there something worth salvaging, or
should we junk the entire tradition? In one way or another,
most artists for the first half of the twentieth century
wrestled with this question in a way that had not happened
before.
Eliot's early poetic style, especially in The Waste Land,
really brings out the sense of the collapse of the past, a
pile of fragments shored up against ruins, and he
deliberately invokes the past to insist upon this point.
What once had meaning no longer does. These ancient visions
of a life so much more passionately full and coherent than
the present age are gone. They remain only as isolated
bits, reminders of the inadequacy of our own times: eros has
become a tired mechanical ritual, the beautiful aspects of
nature have filled up with cigarette butts and garbage or
turned threatening, faith has become empty, the centres of
the ancient civilization (Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria,
Vienna, London) are being destroyed in the universal
technological chaos of war, and the world is filling up with
refugees (and important element in the characters of the
poem).
One thing you might like to consider in exploring these
reference to the past is the presence in them of any
patterns, especially those which coincide with the patterns
established in the imagery. One feature that immediately
strikes me is how many of these past reference are to famous
lovers, those passionately committed to someone else and
ready to sacrifice a great deal for a powerfully achieved
faith and trust in eros: Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and
Isolde, Elizabeth and Leicester, Ferdinand, Dante. I'm
tempted to see in this pattern and the insistence on the
aridity of the Waste Land some important source of the
malaise of the modern world. This seems to me a much more
promising approach than to rush off to read that modest
volume From Ritual to Romance, a familiarity with which (in
my experience) does little to assist with a close
understanding of Eliot's poem.
The point I'm trying to insist upon here, to get back to the
Imagist manifesto with which we started, is that the best
way to read The Waste Land and "Prufrock" is simply to read
the text, slowly and repeatedly, without getting too worried
about all the external apparatus you think you need to bring
to the poem. Let Eliot's images, rhythms, ironies-all of
which are so extraordinary-do their work unmediated. You
will, I think, fairly soon come to realize the uniquely
great quality of this style.
If we read the poem in this way, however, we have to
confess, I think, that it is not always easy or even
possible to make coherent connections between the images and
someone coordinating meaning. That is, many of the images
clearly point beyond themselves and create pressure on us to
make connections with something that might help to create an
overarching meaning. But again and again we are unable to
do this is a satisfactory manner. A common experience of
reading this poem is a sharpened desire to make sense of it
together with a sense of defeat-if there is a total
coherence to be found, it eludes us.
This particular feature of the poem is yet another common
characteristic of much modernist art-nowhere more eloquent
and disturbing than in the writer we are going to encounter
in two weeks, Franz Kafka. One does not have to be an
expert in a great deal of modernist painting to recognize
that there, too, the technique of the symbol or the image
directing us somewhere that we can never attain is a common
stylistic ingredient.
This, in fact, becomes a commonplace of modernism. It's as
if in the modern world we are surrounded by reminders and
promises of meaning but, unlike earlier artists, we have no
means of coordinating these into an integrated world picture
(in the way that, say, Dante or Hildegard could) or into an
integrated sense of the self (in what that, say, Wordsworth
does).
Postscript
Since I began by putting these two poems in something of a
historical context, I would like to conclude with a few
remarks on a few details of the effect of these poem and of
the later career of T. S. Eliot himself. These remarks will
necessarily be somewhat cursory, but they may help to arouse
interest in an important and intriguing part of the history
of modern English literature.
I have already made passing reference to some of the hostile
comments made in the press about The Waste Land, and I can
remember from my childhood BBC radio reports on funding to
the arts in which hostile critics quoted a chunk of
"Prufrock" ("I grow old . . . I grow old . . ./ I shall wear
the bottom of my trousers rolled") as examples of the idiocy
of governmental support for the arts.
However, the effect of The Waste Land on young poets was
immediate and decisive:
"To us . . . [The Waste Land] very definitely made a
pronouncement. It pronounced doom" (Stephen Spender)
Then out of the blue the Dial brought out the Waste
Land and all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our
world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and
our brave sallies into the unknown were turn to dust.
To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet.
I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years,
and I'm sure it did. Critically Eliot returned us to
the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we
were on the point of an escape to matters much closer
to the essence of the new art form itself-rooted in the
locality which should give it fruit. I knew that in
certain ways I was defeated. (William Carlos Williams)
The style that Eliot launched transformed the writing of
poetry. It also contributed to shifting the centre of
gravity for English poetry from England to North America,
largely because so many young Englishmen died in the war
(including, for example, Rosenberg, Owen, Brooke, and
countless others). And the reforms the Imagists insisted
upon and the style of poetry they favoured became and have
remained one of the mainstreams of modern English poetry.
That is not to say that all elements of Eliot's style
immediately became the standard. Not all poets agreed with
Eliot's extensive concentration upon the use of the European
past, which to some, like the American William Carlos
Williams indicated "men content with the connotations of
their masters" (Prologue to Kora in Hell).
Eliot himself took many of the elements of his style and
applied to the critical understanding of poetry, becoming
one of the major and most influential literary critics of
the century. There is no time here to explore his enormous
contribution our transformed understanding of poetry,
although we might note in passing that the renewed interest
in the lyrics of John Donne, in the poetry of Dante, the New
Critical approach to literature, in the reassessment of
Milton, in Renaissance drama, all these and other
significant trends in the study of English literature were
decisively influenced by T. S. Eliot.
Eliot himself seems to have been somewhat surprised by the
success of The Waste Land-especially the praise from those
who celebrated it as a modernist epic of sorts. And he
steadfastly refused (with occasional exceptions) to offer
his own commentary upon it.
Various critics have done me the honour to interpret
the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary
world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit
of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a
personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.
It is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.
This comment seems rather disingenuous. Eliot was indeed
going through a particularly difficult time in his marriage,
and it may well be that the pain the poem expresses has
strong roots in his emotional pain about his relationship
with is wife (at her insistence some lines were removed from
the poem: "And we shall play a game of chess;/ The ivory men
make company between us/ Pressing lidless eyes and waiting
for a knock upon the door"; Eliot restored the lines in
1960, after his wife's death).
Shortly after completing The Waste Land, Eliot sought refuge
from the distress of his perceptions of modern life by
converting to Christianity, adopting the High Anglican
faith, and by becoming an outspoken defender of certain
elements of the tradition. He became a leading figure in
the attempts to revive verse drama (producing his best known
play Murder in the Cathedral and a modern adaptation of
Aeschylus's Eumenides-The Family Reunion). He established
himself as the leading literary and cultural critic of the
time, and it is (I think) fair to claim that no American has
ever wielded such power over the official cultural
establishment in England as T. S. Eliot.
The major emphasis of T. S. Eliot's poetry changed
correspondingly. The centre of attention moves from the
sense of the apocalypse, which so many people saw in the
early poems, to redemption, to a revitalization of faith.
Once this happened, critics went back to The Waste Land and
discovered that the seeds of this change are, indeed, there.
I don't see that myself-the response appears to me too
biased by the gift of hindsight. But the later poems,
particularly The Four Quartets are significantly different
in tone from the earlier pessimism.
Few writers have played a more decisive role in my own
education than T. S. Eliot. He shaped the approach to
poetry of most of those who taught me, and I cut my teeth as
a critic by reading his essays, still among the finest works
of concise and decisive evaluation one can read. When he
died in 1965, there was a spontaneous outpouring of tributes
in London, where I was then living, and I attended a special
reading of his work which the theatrical community instantly
organized.
As to the long-term influence of his early style on the
writing of poetry, there is disagreement. That it had an
enormous influence, few critics will dispute. What one
might like to debate is the value of that influence. I have
already mentioned the deliberately "elitist" tendency of
Eliot (and Pound's) views of poetry. The extraordinary
quality of Eliot's early poems, one might argue, encouraged
a style that helped to remove modern "high" poetry further
and further from the reach of the average reader. I'm not
prepared to defend this accusation at the moment, except
perhaps to observe that, if that is the case, it is part of
the widespread tendency in many areas of modernist art to
promote styles guaranteed to minimize readership, simply
because the language becomes too obscure, private, and
inaccessible.
That this tendency is an important feature of much modern
poetry, fiction, and art, few will deny. And the effect is
a denial of what many an Enlightenment writer or artist
(including Wordsworth) saw as a major responsibility: to
address the widest possible audience. Thus, however
eloquent and sophisticated the style Imagism (and Eliot)
encouraged, it tended to drive further a wedge between
"serious" art and the public consciousness. Or,
alternatively put, it removed art further and further from
the realm of public discourse, thus marginalizing art from
the most immediate questions confronting the citizen.
I have no time to go into this complex question here. But
it may be worth noting that there is potentially a fertile
connection between avant garde styles in art and poetry and
oppressive regimes, simply because the more remote an
artistic style is from public discourse, the less impact it
is going to have. And it is relatively easy for a
politically tyranny to foster such art, as opposed to
promoting the forms of art most congenial to the
Enlightenment temper-a widely accessible medium addressing
questions of urgent public concern. There may be thus a
certain irony in seeing The Waste Land as the triumph of the
Imagists' modernist aesthetic. Yes, it did indeed
demonstrate that poetry could address wide social issues and
confront the immediate issues of contemporary culture. On
the other hand, the price was high, for the style would seem
severely to limit the readership for this new style and thus
the public importance of serious poetry.
More than one critic has observed that Eliot, in setting
himself so strongly against the immediate Romantic tradition
of his time, may have exacerbated some of the inner problem
of Romanticism, so as to enormously weaken the accessibility
of poetry:
The subjective personal content of the Romantic poem
has become private, esoteric, at times an almost
impenetrable secret; the Romantic interest in image and
symbol has become an obsession: poems have been written
in what can only be called code; Romantic 'sensibility'
is now expressed in its purest possible form, free from
all the distortions of conventional communication: the
vestigial rhetoric the Romantics allowed themselves has
finally been dispensed with-not even the laws of
grammar and syntax need now apply. . . . Poetry seems
not to be developing, but disintegrating. (P. Stone)
Apart from that, of course, there is the still controversial
question about the nature of the relationship between a self-
consciously "elitist" and esoteric style and various forms
of tyranny, a question constantly brought to the forefront
by new facts about the connections between many of the
leading figures in modernist art and, for example, anti-
Semitism and Fascism. This raises the complex (perhaps
impossible) question about the extent to which a refusal to
endorse any instinctively creative urge from within as the
direct subject for poetry, the insistence on the externality
of the object, may limit the creative possibilities of the
poem-a lack of contact with aspects of human nature which
require more consideration before being dismissed.
I see your words wrung out in pain, but never
The true compassion for creatures with you, That Dante
Knew in his nine hells.
(H. Plutzic, "For T.S.E. Only")