by T. S. Eliot
in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with
the result that they became the remarkable exposition of
bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day. I have sometimes
thought of getting rid of these notes; but now they can never
be unstuck. They have had almost greater popularity than
the poem itself—anyone who bought my book of poems, and
found that the notes to The Waste Land were not in it, would
demand his money back. . . . No, it is not because of my bad
example to other poets that I am penitent; it is because my
notes stimulated the wrong kind of interest among the seekers
of sources. It was just, no doubt, that I should pay my tribute
to the work of Miss Jessie Weston; but I regret having sent
so many enquirers o¤ on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards
and the Holy Grail.55
When one interviewer, three years later, asked Eliot whether Pound’s
excisions had changed “the intellectual structure of the poem,” Eliot an-
swered: “No. I think it was just as structureless, only in a more futile way,
in the longer version.” The implicit acknowledgment that the “shorter ver-
sion,” or the published text of The Waste Land, was “structureless,” was a
long way from the claim that it was governed by a “plan.” “In The Waste
Land, ” Eliot went on in the same interview, “I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.” But that hardly mattered, he now thought.
“These things, however, become easier to people with time. You get used
to having The Waste Land, or Ulysses, about.”56
By the early 1970s the dominance of the New Criticism, which had
been epitomized by Cleanth Brooks, was drawing to a close, and already
one could detect beginnings of the turn to structuralism that was to be
signaled by the publication of Jonathan Culler’s book Structuralist Poetics
(1975).57 In the late 1970s and the 1980s structuralism was rapidly displaced
i n t r o d u c t i o n
3 9
by poststructuralism and deconstruction, then by various kinds of feminism
and the rise of New Historicism, critical paradigms that stressed not the
wholeness and unity of the text but its dividedness, the contradictory im-
pulses at work beneath the surface of all language. By 1989 one critic
could characterize The Waste Land as a poem “riddled with absences” and
everywhere marked by “ruptures” and “discontinuities.”58 Nothing could
have been farther from the “unified whole” which Cleanth Brooks had
postulated. At the same time, however, the New Critical reading of the poem
has never entirely vanished and continues to hold sway over the imagi-
nation of many critics. One sees its tenacious hold at work in the writing
of one recent scholar who repeatedly notes “the poem’s marmoreal re-
serve” and “monumental impregnability.”59 The notion of the neoclassical
monument, so alien to the experience of the poem which its earliest readers
described, still exerts its power over such accounts.
The reader who is about to encounter the poem for the first time,
then, faces a range of critical questions awaiting him or her. Does a single
or unified consciousness preside over the poem, an identifiable speaker
or protagonist, or is the attempt to discern one a means of skirting the
poem’s fabulous, even fantastic dimensions? Is the poem prodded forward
by a narrative which is fitfully glimpsed but nevertheless readily discerned,
or are the many shards of narrative that plainly appear and reappear only
a way of insinuating that the poem is guided by some other, more arcane
logic? And is that logic the outcome of a plan or program that governed
the poem’s construction, or is it only that of a wild, irredeemable pathos?
And why is the poem so insistent about its topicality, its embeddedness
in the streets, the buildings, even the bodies that occupy London’s financial
district? Do the economies of finance and sexuality meet and blur, as if
linked by some nameless yet powerful currency? And what authority should
a reader ascribe to the notes? The demise of critical consensus about the
poem means that today, more than ever before, those questions are open
to fresh interrogation.
Of course those are only a few of the countless questions that arise
from reading the poem, and it would be presumptuous to sketch the an-
swers to them here. To a reader approaching the poem for the first time,
one can only suggest what lies ahead by invoking the terms that John
Peale Bishop used when he first read the poem so long ago in 1922: “im-
mense. magnificent. terrible.” Perhaps the ultimate testimony to the
4 0
i n t r o d u c t i o n
poem’s wild power is the fact that it has, for so long, survived the attention
of its warmest admirers.
Notes
1. Donald Hall, Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions (New York:
Harper and Row, 1978), 78, 91–92.
2. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 24.
I have relied on Ackroyd’s life of Eliot throughout this account of Eliot’s early
years, and on Lyndal Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York:
Vintage, 1998).
3. T. S. Eliot, “The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet,” Daedalus: Journal
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 89, no. 2 (Spring 1960):
420–422.
4. For an account of Eliot’s lifelong engagement with vernacular and popular
culture, see David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003).
5. T. S. Eliot, Preface to John Davidson: A Selection of His Poems, ed. Maurice Lindsay (London: Hutchinson, 1961), xi–xii.
6. T. S. Eliot, Review, “Baudelaire and the Symbolists: Five Essays, by Peter Quennell,” Criterion 9, no. 2 (January 1930): 357.
7. T. S. Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me” (1950), in To Criticize the Critic
(New York: Farrar, Straus, 1965), 125.
8. T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion 26, no. 65 (July 1937): 667.
9. Conrad Aiken, “King Bolo and Others,” in Tambimuttu and David March,
eds., T. S. Eliot: A Symposium (London: Frank and Cass, 1965; orig. pub.
1948), 20–23, quotation p. 21.
10. See T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1996).
11. Charlotte Eliot to T. S. Eliot, 3 April 1910: “I cannot bear to think of your
being alone in Paris, the very words give me a chill,” in Valerie Eliot, ed.,
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898–1922, 10. Hereafter references to this edition are given with the abbreviation LOTSE and placed in parentheses
within the text.
12. T. S. Eliot, “Rencontre,” Nouvelle Revue Française 12, no. 139 (1 April 1925): 657–658.
13. Alfred Dreyfus (1853–1914), a Jew who was a captain in the French army,
was falsely accused and convicted of treason in 1894. After various intel-
lectuals called for a new trial, Dreyfus was again found guilty and sentenced
in 1899, but then pardoned by the president of the French Republic. In
1904 he applied for a revision of the 1899 verdict, and in July 1906, it was
definitively quashed. The twelve-year a¤air revealed a virulent strain of anti-
Semitism in French society, and Maurras was often charged with pandering
to it. During World War II he collaborated with the Vichy government and
afterward he was condemned to prison for life. Eliot gave a lecture on Maur-
i n t r o d u c t i o n
4 1
ras in late 1916, in which he gave an overview of Maurras’s “protest against
all the conditions in art and society which seemed to be due to the [French]
Revolution.” Maurras’s reaction was “fundamentally sound, but marked by
extreme violence and intolerance.” In February 1934, Maurras’s followers
were involved in violent street protests, and Eliot deprecated the violence
but also seemed to excuse it. (See T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion 13, no. 52 [April 1934]: 451–454.) Scholars disagree about the extent of Eliot’s
interest in Maurras. For the argument that already by 1916 Eliot had devel-
oped a “classical, royalist, and religious point of view” derived from Maurras,
see Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 25–69, which reprints the synopsis of Eliot’s 1916 lecture on Maurras
(from which I have quoted in the text [quotation p. 29]), and uses the phrase
I have quoted within this note (52). I disagree with this view. On Eliot and
anti-Semitism, see below, n. 31.
14. T. S. Eliot, A Sermon, Preached in Magdalene College Chapel, 7 March 1948
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 5.
15. See Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, 48–51, 68–70.
16. T. S. Eliot, “The Art of Poetry, I: T. S. Eliot,” Paris Review 21 (Spring–Summer, 1959), rpt. in George Plimpton, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 99.
17. See Grover Smith, ed., Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913–1914: As Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry Todd Costello (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1963).
18. Conrad Aiken to Joy Grant, 31 August 1962, quoted in Joy Grant, Harold
Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1967), 101.
19. Eliot, “Art of Poetry, I,” 95.
20. Aldous Huxley, letter to Ottoline Morrell, 21 June 1917, quoted in Robert
Gathorne-Hardy, ed., Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell,
1915–1918 (New York: Knopf, 1975), 207.
21. In the following account of Lloyds, and Eliot at Lloyds, I am indebted to J. R.
Winton, Lloyds Bank, 1918–1969 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
1982), 1–43.
22. Examples include T. W. H. (Thomas William Hodgson) Crosland (1865–
1924), “To the American Invader,” in his Outlook Odes (London: At the Uni-
corn, 1902), 30–32; Enoch Miner [pseud.: Topsy Typist], Our Phonographic
Poets. Written by Stenographers and Typists upon Subjects Pertaining to Their
Arts. Compiled by “Topsy Typist” (New York: Popular Publishing, 1904);
Samuel Ellsworth Kiser, Love Sonnets of an Oªce Boy (Chicago: Forbes,
1907), twenty-eight sonnets addressed to the oªce typewriter girl; Andrew
Lang, “Matrimony,” in The Poetical Works of Andrew Lang, ed. Leonora
Blanche Lang (London: Longmans, 1923), 3: 179–180.
23. Quoted in Winton, Lloyds Bank, 40.
24. Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin Viking,
2002), 9.
4 2
i n t r o d u c t i o n
25. Quoted ibid., 12; my remarks throughout this paragraph and the next derive
from White.
26. Unsigned Review, Literary World 83, no. 107 (5 July 1917), rpt. in Michael Grant, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1982), 1: 74.
27. May Sinclair, “Prufrock and Other Observations: A Criticism,” Little Review 4
(December 1917), rpt. ibid., 1: 83–88.
28. Edgar Jepson, “Recent United States Poetry,” English Review 27 (May 1918), rpt. ibid., 1: 91–92.
29. Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver,
1876–1961 (New York: Viking, 1970), 256.
30. Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 25 (A3).
31. The most recent installment of the debate concerning Eliot and anti-
Semitism is found in Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 1 (January 2003): 1–70.
This includes an important essay by Ronald Schuchard, “Burbank with
a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and
the Idea of Culture” (1–26), six responses to it by other scholars (27–56),
and a reply by Schuchard (57–70). See also Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-
Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
and Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), chapter 2, “Anti-Semitism,” 25–76.
32. Valerie Eliot, ed., The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971).
33. See Hugh Kenner, “The Urban Apocalypse,” in A. Walton Litz, ed., Eliot in
His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 23–49, and Grover Smith,
“The Making of The Waste Land, ” Mosaic 6, no. 1 (1972): 127–141.
34. See Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting “The Waste Land” (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2005), chapter 1, “With Automatic Hand: Writing The Waste
Land, ” 1–70, 153–201.
35. Unpublished letter from T. S. Eliot to Mary Hutchinson, [15 June 1921;
postmark 16 June 1921], University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center.
36. Unpublished letter from Ezra Pound to Dorothy Pound, 14 [October 1921],
Indiana University, Lilly Library, Pound Mss. III.
37. Valerie Eliot assigns the letter to [4? November 1921]; for arguments urging
that it be assigned to [11 November 1921], see Rainey, Revisiting “The Waste
Land,” 26.
38. Valerie Eliot assigns Eliot’s departure from Paris to “22? November” ( LOTSE, xxxvi). But a diªculty for this date is posed by Eliot’s letter to the editor of
the Times Literary Supplement, which was datelined Lausanne and published
on 24 November. Surely it had to have been set in type by 23 November at
the latest, and it must have been posted at least one day earlier, on 22 No-
vember. It is too much to suppose that Eliot could have taken the train from
i n t r o d u c t i o n
4 3
Paris to Lausanne, arrived, and then written and posted a letter the same
afternoon. More likely he left Paris on 21 November, perhaps even 20 No-
vember. Pound’s letter to Scofield Thayer (quoted later in the text) indicates
that Eliot was simply “on his way through Paris,” not staying for an extended
period.
39. Unpublished letter from Ezra Pound to Scofield Thayer, 5 December 1921,
Beinecke Library, Dial Papers.
40. Unpublished letters from Ezra Pound to his father, Homer Pound, 3 Decem-
ber [1921] and 25[–26] December 1921; Beinecke Library, YCAL Mss. 43.
41. For details of the poem’s publication I draw on my account in Revisiting
“The Waste Land,” chapter 2, “The Price of Modernism: Publishing The
Waste Land, ” 71–101, where all quotations and claims are annotated. To
&nb
sp; repeat them here would be superfluous.
42. The letter is dated “24 Saturnus” by Pound, who follows an arcane calendar
(“The Little Review Calendar”) that he published in the Little Review 7, no. 2
(Spring 1922): 2. The month Saturnus was meant to correspond with was
January. Mrs. Eliot, in her edition of LOTSE, mistakenly assigns the letter to December 1921, following D. D. Paige, the editor of Ezra Pound, Selected
Letters, 1907–1941 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 169. Though Paige’s
error was first noticed back in 1972 by Hugh Kenner in “The Urban Apoca-
lypse,” 44, n. 7, it evidently had not come to Mrs. Eliot’s attention before
she published her edition of the letters in 1988.
43. For details regarding the publication of Ulysses, here and below, I draw on my earlier account, “Consuming Investments: Joyce’s Ulysses, ” in Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 42–76 and 186–194, where all these claims are footnoted.
44. Unpublished letter from John Peale Bishop to Edmund Wilson, 3 November
1922, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Edmund Wilson Papers.
45. Unsigned review of the first issue of the Criterion and review of The Waste Land, Times Literary Supplement, no. 1084 (26 October 1922), 690; rpt. in
Grant, T. S. Eliot, 1: 134–135.
46. Burton Rascoe, “A Bookman’s Day Book,” New York Tribune, 5 November
1922, section V, p. 8.
47. Conrad Aiken, “An Anatomy of Melancholy,” New Republic 33 (7 February
1923): 294–295, rpt. in Grant, T. S. Eliot, 1: 156–161, quotation p. 161.
48. The twelve English reviews are listed in the Bibliography of this volume,
pages 256–257; forty-eight American reviews are listed on pages 257–259,
and these reviews mention four others which have not been identified.
49. Letter from Horace Liveright to Ezra Pound, 5 February 1923, Bloomington,
Indiana University, Pound Manuscripts. The figure of five thousand copies
is given by Tom Dardis, Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright (New York:
Random House, 1995), 97.
50. The Hogarth Press figures were given by Leonard Woolf to I. M. Parsons,
who reports them in “T. S. Eliot’s Reputation,” Critical Quarterly 8 (1966): 180.
4 4
i n t r o d u c t i o n
51. T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), ix.
52. On the misdating of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in the first edition