by T. S. Eliot
poets, including Pound, H.D., and Richard Aldington. Eliot was conspicuous
by his absence. Monro tried to adopt a moderate, catholic position in the
period’s debates about poetry, but was criticized for not taking sides.
6. The phrase “general reading public” is Eliot’s invention, not that of Monro
or his publishers. The text on the dust jacket of the volume reads: “The book
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n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 13 6 – 13 7
should be of service to students and to foreigners who are in need of intro-
duction to the branch of modern English literature.” Matthew Arnold, in
Culture and Anarchy (1869), had applied the term “Philistines” (the name for warlike people in biblical Palestine who attacked the Israelites many times)
to the newer middle classes who were generally nonconformist in religion
and averse to the cultural activities which they associated with aristocratic
decadence, including poetry, music, or the fine arts. By 1920 the term had
lost its original specificity and come to mean someone commonplace in
ideas and tastes and indi¤erent toward the arts.
7. Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) was the most influential critic of his day. He
worked in the British Library from 1865 to 1875, lectured on English litera-
ture at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1885 to 1890, and was librarian
to the House of Lords from 1904 to 1915. In 1922 he became literary editor
of the Sunday Times. He translated three of Ibsen’s plays, notably Hedda Gabler and, with William Archer, The Master Builder. He wrote many books, including biographies of Thomas Gray (1884) and Ibsen (1907). Eliot met
him at a reading in December 1917, where Gosse publicly reproved him for
arriving a few minutes late from his work at the bank. (See Osbert Sitwell,
Laughter in the Next Room [London: Macmillan, 1949], 32–33.)
Agnes Repplier (1855–1950) was a prolific American essayist and biog-
rapher whose essays, after 1886, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Appleton’s
Magazine, the New Republic, McClure’s, Harper’s, and many others. She also wrote more than forty books, many of them collections of her essays issued
under such titles as Essays in Idleness (1893), Essays in Miniature (1892), or Books and Men (1890).
The Rev. Samuel McChord Crothers (1857–1927) was a Unitarian
minister as well as a prolific essayist and author. He lived in Boston and was
highly esteemed during the period when Eliot was a student at Harvard.
He wrote more than a hundred books, both literary and religious in subject
matter, with such titles as The Gentle Reader (1910), The Wisdom of Experience (1911), or Drawing Near to God (1920).
8. Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950), comprises a series of poetic epitaphs for residents of a fictional American small town. It appeared at the moment when the small town was fading into history, increas-
ingly viewed through a haze of nostalgia, and the volume enjoyed enormous
critical and popular success. None of Masters’s other books did as well, and
in later years he turned to biography, including one of Vachel Lindsay.
Lindsay (1879–1931) was a mystical and religious poet who achieved
notoriety when his poem “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” was
published in Poetry in January 1913, followed by a book of poems of the same title that autumn. The poem, a tribute to the founder of the Salvation Army,
employs hectic rhythms derived from the hymn “The Blood of the Lamb.”
Lindsay continued to give histrionic and very popular readings of his poems
throughout the rest of his life.
9. There were recurrent reports in the British press from 1915 to 1923 that
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 13 7
2 0 5
Turks were massacring Armenians, together with calls for the government
to intervene.
10. Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken” was pub-
lished in the Chapbook 2.11 (May 1920): 38–39. “I was appalled by Lindsay”
—i.e., by his poem—Eliot wrote to John Gould Fletcher on 14 September
1920 ( LOTSE, 410).
11. Eliot is referring to the view that the American president Woodrow Wilson
(1856–1924), during the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles in
1919, had been manipulated by the British prime minister Lloyd George
(1865–1943; prime minister 1916–1922) and the French premier Georges
Clemenceau (1841–1929; premier 1917–1920) into abandoning the idealistic
principles which he had earlier said were to govern discussions about the
political shape of Europe after the First World War. Instead, the Treaty of
Versailles enabled Britain to achieve large territorial gains (under the guise
of “mandates”) and France to realize its goal of imposing punitive repara-
tions on Germany. Eliot was a firm believer in the thesis articulated by
Maynard Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), that the
punitive reparations would have disastrous consequences; he recommended
Keynes’s book warmly to his brother Henry in early 1920 (see LOTSE, 353).
12. Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846–1916) was a prolific essayist and author who
wrote more than sixty books, each with a platitudinous didactic note.
13. David Graham Phillips (1867–1911) was a journalist and author of fiction.
He worked as an investigative journalist for the Cincinnati Times-Star, the New York Sun, and the New York World. But his first novel, The Great God Success (1901), proved so popular that Phillips left journalism to concentrate
on fiction. He wrote sixteen novels, many employing journalistic techniques
to explore social problems. Eliot may have known his novel A Grain of Dust
(New York: D. Appleton, 1911), which traces the life of Dorothy Hallowell,
a stenographer or typist who becomes an object of obsessive fascination
for her boss, Fred Norman, an up-and-coming corporation lawyer. But in
this passage Eliot is referring to Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (New York: D. Appleton, 1917), a posthumously published novel which recounts the
heroine’s plunge to prostitution and her rise as a Broadway star.
14. John Drinkwater (1882–1937) grew up in Oxfordshire, left school at fifteen,
and became an insurance clerk in Nottingham. When his firm moved to
Birmingham in 1901, he followed. He published his first book, Poems
(Birmingham: C. Cambridge) in 1903, followed by many others. In 1911 he
joined an amateur theater company, the Pilgrim Players, which proved so
successful that in 1913 it constructed a purpose-built theater, the Birming-
ham Repertory Theatre, which Drinkwater managed. His first full-length
play was Rebellion (1914), his first real success Abraham Lincoln (1918).
Meanwhile he poured out volume after volume of poetry and prose, eventu-
ally writing more than 150 books. In Some Contemporary Poets: 1920, Monro
damns his “derivative and commonplace” poetry (180), condescends to no-
tice his “simple and benevolent mind” (182), yet hopes that Abraham Lincoln
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n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 13 7 – 13 8
marks a new beginning in his work. Drinkwater’s work had been published
in New Numbers, a journal that lasted through four quarterly numbers in
1914, financed in part by Edward Marsh (see nex
t note).
15. “Georgian Anthology” was a familiar term for Georgian Poetry (1912), a collection of contemporary poems edited by Edward Marsh, which had proved
an unexpected success and sold more than eight thousand copies. Marsh
went on to edit four more collections of Georgian Poetry (1913–1915, 1916–
1917, 1918–1919, and 1920–1922), all published by Harold Monro, but the
series increasingly acquired a reputation for tameness and insincerity.
16. John Collings Squire (1884–1958) was a highly influential journalist and
essayist, as well as a minor poet. His opportunity came in 1913 when the
New Statesman was founded, with the blessings of George Bernard Shaw and
the Fabian Society, to provide an alternative to the New Age, edited by A. R.
Orage. Squire, formerly a reviewer and writer for the New Age, was literary editor of the New Statesman from 1913 to 1919. He then founded and became
editor of the London Mercury (1919–1939), and was also the chief literary
critic of the Observer, an influential Sunday newspaper (circulation 200,000).
Though Eliot wrote eighteen reviews (1916–1918) for the New Statesman
when Squire was literary editor, his views of Squire changed as he grew
closer to the Bloomsbury group and the Sitwells, who strongly opposed the
circle they dismissed as the “Squirearchy,” and its hold over contemporary
literary opinion. To John Quinn, Eliot wrote in 1920: “The London Mercury,
which started with a great deal of advertisement, will I hope, fail in a few
years’ time. It is run by a small clique of bad writers. J. C. Squire, the editor,
knows nothing about poetry; but he is the cleverest journalist in London.
If he succeeds, it will be impossible to get anything good published. His
influence controls or a¤ects the literary contents and criticism of five or six
periodicals already” ( LOTSE, 358). Squire also published poems in two of
the Georgian Poetry collections published by Harold Monro, 1916–1917 and
1918–1919.
Mr. Podsnap is a character in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), a novel
by Charles Dickens. He first appears in book one, chapter 11 (“Podsnap-
pery”), introduced with these words: “Mr. Podsnap was well to do, and stood
very high in Mr. Podsnap’s opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance,
he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the
Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out
why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a
brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things,
and, above all other things, with himself.” An early working title (May 1921)
for The Waste Land was He Do the Police in Di¤erent Voices, a phrase also taken from Our Mutual Friend.
17. England entered World War I with the Liberal Party leading the government,
headed by H. H. Asquith as prime minister. But by late 1916 the press and
public opinion agreed that the war was not being prosecuted with suªcient
vigor. Lloyd George, a Liberal member of the cabinet, had earned a repu-
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 13 8 – 13 9
2 0 7
tation for supporting a more vigorous war e¤ort by advocating conscription
and calling for a single, centralized war cabinet. When Asquith resigned in
December 1916, Lloyd George formed a “coalition government” with the
support of the Conservatives and so became prime minister. In 1918, only
one month after the Armistice, he called for general elections, ran on a
promise to continue the coalition, and won a resounding victory. But because
his own Liberal Party won fewer parliamentary seats than it had before, the
coalition became more dependent on Conservative support, and his position
became more precarious. The Conservatives withdrew their support in late
1922, and Lloyd George fell from power. The Liberal Party was now reduced
to third place in Parliament, while the Labour Party had become the viable
alternative to the Tories.
The years 1919 to 1922 were dominated by talk of a threatened strike
by the Triple Alliance, the trade unions of railwaymen, miners, and dock-
workers. This threat augmented middle-class anxiety already aroused by
the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and the creation of the Soviet Union. Lloyd
George gave the railwaymen a substantial increase in wages, which e¤ec-
tively separated them from the other two unions, and he persuaded the
miners to delay their strike. But a coal strike began on 1 April 1921 and lasted
for four months.
The costs of the war and the high rate of public expenditures in its
aftermath required repeated escalations in British income tax rates. Direct
income tax was still a relatively new idea, having been introduced only in
1909 with the “people’s Budget” drafted by Lloyd George (then chancellor
of the Exchequer) to help pay for old-age pensions, introduced at the same
time.
18. For “elegant anguish,” see n. 4 above. It is not known whether any critic ever
called Eliot a “dusty face.” The critic Robert Lynd (see London Letter, May
1921, n. 21), however, in a damning review of The Sacred Wood, wrote: “[Eliot]
has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he worships them in the dark spirit
of the sectarian, and his interest in them is theological rather than religious
in kind. He is like the traditional Plymouth Brother whose belief in God is
hardly so strong as his belief that there are ‘only a few of us’—perhaps ‘only
one of us’—saved. We see the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference
to ‘the few people who talk intelligently about Stendahl and Flaubert and
James.’ This expresses an attitude which is intolerable in a critic of litera-
ture, and should be left to précieuses ridicules” (Robert Lynd, “Buried Alive:
[Review of ] The Sacred Wood, ” Nation 28, no. 10 [4 December 1920], supplement, 359).
A “precieux ridicule” is a “laughably precious man” in French. The term
is Eliot’s variant of Les Précieuses ridicules (1659), the title of a play by Molière which satirized hyperaesthetic literary ladies of the nobility and their imita-tors among the bourgeoisie and the countryside. Lynd charges Eliot with
being just such a person.
19. Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) was a prolific American poet whose
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n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 13 9 – 14 0
works often appeared in newspapers. She was undoubtedly the most popular
American poet of the period between 1890 and her death in 1919.
20. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols (1893–1944) was a poet and served as profes-
sor of English at Imperial University, Tokyo, from 1921 to 1924. He had pub-
lished three books of verse by 1921, Invocation (1915), Ardours and Endurances (1917), and Aurelia (1920). Harold Monro thought that he had “made certain
poems so promising that one may hope that he will outgrow his derivative-
ness and his megalomaniac poses” (172).
21. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) became a famous essayist and novelist. By early
1921 he had published three volumes of poetry, The Burning Wheel (1916),
The Defeat of Youth (1918), and Leda (1920). Harold Monro thought that
“Leda” was �
�the most finished poem that Huxley has yet written; a sensual
and brightly coloured representation of the episode from mythology” (128).
In November 1921 Huxley published his witty first novel, Crome Yellow,
to critical acclaim and success. Jules Laforgue (1860–1887) was the French
poet who profoundly influenced Eliot’s early poetry; see the Introduction, 4.
22. Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) was a poet who edited an annual anthology of
new verse titled Wheels. She first met Eliot in 1920 and was rather taken with him. But writing to Wyndham Lewis in April 1921, Eliot said: “Would I think
of contributing to Wheels? And so give the S[itwells] a lift and the right to
sneer at me?” ( LOTSE, 446).
23. Herbert Read (1893–1968) became a distinguished literary and art critic. He
met Eliot in 1917 and theirs became a lifelong friendship. He had published
one book of poems, Naked Warriors (1919). Monro wrote that Read “showed
promise” (106).
Richard Aldington (1892–1962) became a poet, novelist, critic, and
translator. He had been associated with the Imagist poets in prewar London,
especially the American poet H.D., whom he married and then divorced.
He had published two volumes of poems before 1921, Images of War and
Images of Desire. He was a good friend of Eliot’s in 1921, but Eliot ended their friendship in 1931 when Aldington published Stepping Heavenward: A Record,
which satirized Eliot and his wife Vivien.
24. Robert Bridges (1844–1930) was the poet laureate at the time Eliot was writ-
ing in 1921, having been appointed in 1913. His poems were admired for
metrical refinement and formal perfection. He was responsible for publish-
ing the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1918, bringing it to public atten-
tion for the first time. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was the leading
elder poet of the day in 1921. He was to receive the Nobel prize for literature
in 1924. Ezra Pound (1888–1992), Eliot’s controversial contemporary, had
left England for good eight months before Eliot wrote this essay. He settled
in Paris in April 1920, staying there until late 1924, when he moved to Italy.
25. The journalist who predicted a revival of criticism has not been identified.
26. The Palladium, now the London Palladium, was an opulent, neoclassical
music hall designed in 1910 by the architect Frank Matcham (1854–1920),