by T. S. Eliot
music halls. He starred in Lilac Time (1922), Me and My Girl (1937), and the many revivals of The Merry Widow. In his obituary the Times noted,
“Gravesisms cannot survive print; and some of them indeed were scarcely
printable.”
Robert Hale (1876–1940) was a comic actor and music hall performer.
His first success came in the musical comedy Floradora at the Lyric Theatre in 1898, which ran for 455 performances. Thereafter he alternated between
musical comedy productions and runs at various music halls. In the 1930s
he turned to films, acting in fourteen of them.
11. For Volpone, see Eliot’s London Letter, March 1921, n. 28, 210.
12. Maida Vale is the name of a road, running northwest from London, which
has also been given to the surrounding area. The name has become synony-
mous with prosperous suburbia, though metropolitan London has long
since extended beyond it. Miles Gloriosus (Latin for Swaggering Soldier) is
the title of a play by the Roman author Plautus.
The Lesson of Baudelaire
1. The essay was presumably composed the weekend of 26–27 March 1921. It
was published in the first issue of the Tyro (see “The Romantic Englishman,”
n. 1, 210).
2. [Eliot’s note:] Not without qualification. M. Valéry is a mathematician;
M. Benda is a mathematician and a musician. These, however, are men of
exceptional intelligence. [Editor’s note:] Paul Valéry (1871–1945) was perhaps
the greatest French poet of the twentieth century. Eliot wrote several essays
on him in the years after The Waste Land, and Eliot’s journal, the Criterion, was the first to publish his work in English translation. (See Donald Gallup,
T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969], s.v. “Valéry.”) Julien Benda (1867–1956) was a French writer and philosopher, an anti-Romantic thinker who defended reason against the philosophical intuition-
ism of Henri Bergson. In 1919 he had published, to acclaim and controversy,
Belphégor: Essai sur l’esthétique de la société française dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (Belphegor: An essay on the esthetics of French society in the
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 14 4 – 14 5
2 1 5
first half of the twentieth century), a probing attack on contemporary intel-
lectual fashions.
3. On Dadaism, see “The Romantic Englishman,” n. 6, 211–212.
4. Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, translator, and literary
and art critic. His reputation as a poet rests on Les Fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil, 1857), the most influential poetry collection published in Europe in
the nineteenth century, and on Le Spleen de Paris (1869), a collection of prose poems which virtually created this genre or mode. He translated nearly all of
Edgar Allan Poe into French, and his critical essays on art and literature have
had an enduring influence.
5. “Il y a du Dante, en e¤et, dans l’auteur des Fleurs du mal, mais c’est du Dante d’une époque déchue, c’est du Dante athée et moderne, du Dante
venu après Voltaire, dans un temps qui n’aura point de saint Thomas.”
Or in English: “There is something of Dante, in e¤ect, in the author of
Flowers of Evil, but it is a Dante of a fallen age, it is of a modern and atheist Dante, a Dante who has come after Voltaire, who lives in an age that has
no Saint Thomas Aquinas.” The passage comes from an essay titled “Les
Fleurs du Mal, par M. Charles Baudelaire,” by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
(1808–1889). The essay was first printed as one of four Articles justicatifs
(Essays in defense) which Baudelaire published as an independent volume
in an edition of one hundred copies in 1857 after he was charged with public
immorality over the publication of Les Fleurs du mal. The four essays have
frequently been reprinted with editions of Baudelaire’s poems, and the text I
cite from is Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975), vol. 1, 1191–1196, here 1195.
6. Vom Haus aus, a German expression meaning “beginning with the house
and going out from there,” or idiomatically, “thoroughly.”
7. The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) was the longest and most important
poem of Robert Browning (1812–1889). It recounts a sensational murder
and trial which took place in 1698, and to do so it uses in a new way a multi-
monologue form of narrative, in which the story is told from a series of
personal standpoints, each of which modifies fact and motive with shadings
of significance and uncertainty.
Hyperion (1818–1819) is an incomplete poem in three books by John
Keats (1795–1821). In it he attempts to recount the legend of the overthrow
of the Titans by the Olympian gods. Keats undertook a revised version of
the poem later in 1819, now known as The Fall of Hyperion, but abandoned
it after three months’ work.
8. This sentence probably refers to Aldous Huxley, who had studied Laforgue,
but whose propensity for light, satirical humor struck Eliot as a concession
to popular tastes. See London Letter, March 1921, 139. Bengal lights and the
other things listed here are all types of fireworks.
9. “You, hypocrite reader . . .” The last two words are the beginning of the last
line in “Au Lecteur” (To the reader); see the annotation to The Waste Land,
l. 76.
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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 14 6
Andrew Marvell
1. “Andrew Marvell” was first published in the Times Literary Supplement, no.
1002 (31 March 1921): 201–202. At the time, the TLS had a circulation of
twenty-four thousand, and its editor was Bruce Richmond (1871–1960), who
had filled this role since the journal’s inception in 1902 and who had had
his attention called to Eliot’s writings in the Athenaeum by Richard Aldington. It is diªcult to state with precision when Eliot wrote “Andrew Marvell.”
We know, for example, that Eliot finished writing his essay “The Metaphysi-
cal Poets” on 16 September 1921, and that it was published in the TLS on
20 October, more than a month later. If a similar production schedule was
applied to “Andrew Marvell,” then we might guess that it was written in late
February 1921. Eliot’s essay was published anonymously, as were all contri-
butions to the TLS at this time.
2. Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) was born at Winestead-in-Holderness, York-
shire, on 31 March. He moved with his family to Hull in 1624. He took his
B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1639, moved to London, traveled
abroad, and then became a tutor in the house of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the for-
mer Lord General of the parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. By
early 1653 he was back in London, where he befriended Milton, and later
the same year was serving as a private tutor to a protégé of Oliver Cromwell.
In 1657 he was appointed Milton’s assistant in his oªce of Latin Secretary
for the Commonwealth. Starting in 1659 he was elected a Member of Parlia-
ment for his hometown of Hull, which he represented until his death. Virtu-
ally all of the sixty or so poems that he wrote were published posthumously
in a volume called Miscellaneous Poems, issued in 1681. (In all quotations
from
his poems, I cite from Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Andrew Marvell:
The Complete Poems [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972].) The tercentenary of
his birth in 1921 was marked by having the bishop of Durham conduct a
special service in Hull in the presence of the mayor, the corporation, and
various civic representatives. Later, Augustine Birrell (1850–1933), who had
written a critical study of Marvell in 1905 ( Andrew Marvell [London: Macmil-
lan]), gave a speech about Marvell at a public meeting. For these events, see
“Andrew Marvell: Character and Poetry,” Times, 1 April 1921, 5, col. 3. For Birrell’s speech see William H. Bagguley, ed., Andrew Marvell, 1621–1678:
Tercentenary Tributes by Augustine Birrell [and others] , with an Oªcial Record of the Tercentenary Celebrations and Kingston-upon-Hull and in London (London: Oxford University Press, 1922).
3. Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) edited The Golden Treasury of the Best
Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (London: Macmillan, 1861),
a much cherished and widely reprinted anthology. Arthur Quiller-Couch
(1863–1944) edited The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1900). The books shared four poems by Marvell: “Horation Ode,
Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” “The Picture of Little T.C. in a
Prospect of Flowers,” “Thoughts in a Garden,” and “Bermudas.” The Golden
Treasury was alone in containing “The Girl Describes Her Fawn,” the Oxford
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 14 7
2 1 7
Book alone in including “A Garden: Written after the Civil Wars” and “To His Coy Mistress.”
4. John Donne (1573–1631) is considered the most important lyrical poet of the
early seventeenth century. For Baudelaire, see “The Lesson of Baudelaire,”
n. 4, 215; for Laforgue, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 21, 208, and the
Introduction, 4.
5. Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), an Elizabethan dramatist, wrote Tam-
burlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus. Eliot wrote an essay on him in 1919, “Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe,”
Arts and Letters, 2.4 (Autumn 1919): 194–199; reprinted in Eliot’s Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 100–106. Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was a
prolific poet and dramatist, best remembered for his great comedies Volpone
(1606), Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614).
Eliot saw the first and last of these in 1921. He also wrote an essay, “Ben
Jonson,” his first publication in the Times Literary Supplement, no. 930
(13 November 1919): 637–638, also reprinted in Selected Essays, 127–139.
6. Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) is often characterized as the last of the Meta-
physical poets, and he is often remembered solely for the damning essay on
him which Dr. Johnson wrote for his Lives of the Poets; see “The Metaphysical Poets,” n. 12, 247.
7. Caroline poets are those who wrote under the reigns of Charles I (1625–1640)
or Charles II (1660–1685). For Dryden, see “John Dryden,” n. 2, 234–235.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was the greatest poet of the eighteenth century,
known for his complete development of the possibilities of the rhyming
couplet. Eliot meditated on him often in the course of 1921, and he wrote
a pastiche of Pope’s style in the Fresca episode, a passage of some eighty
lines which originally stood at the beginning to part III of The Waste Land,
but was removed at the suggestion of Ezra Pound in January 1922. (See
The Waste Land: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Valerie Eliot, 22–23, 26–29.)
8. “Cowley’s Anacreontics” refers to poems which Abraham Cowley (see above,
n. 6) wrote in imitation of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon (see “Prose and
Verse,” n. 6, 222–223) in a 1656 collection titled Anacreontiques.
9. Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) was a poet, classicist, and essayist. He
went to Rugby School then on to Trinity College, Oxford, but was sent down
in 1794. The following year he published his first collection, Poems (1795).
He lived abroad from 1814, not returning to England until 1835. He left again
in 1858 and spent the remainder of his life on the Continent, particularly in
Florence. He is now remembered for his prose more than for his poetry, his
best-known work being Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and States-
men (1824–1829), a series of dramatic dialogues.
10. Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) is famous for his twelve books of Fables
(1668–1694), often cited as a work typical of French classicism. Théophile
Gautier (1811–1872) was a French writer and poet; he combined a taste for
the macabre and exotic with carefully chiseled form and severe detachment.
Émaux and camées (Enamels and cameos, 1852) was his best book of poems;
2 1 8
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 14 8 – 14 9
Ezra Pound encountered it in 1917 and brought it to the attention of Eliot,
who used its quatrain form in his poems of the period 1917–1920.
11. Rabbi Zeal-of-the-land Busy is a comic type of the zealous Puritan in Ben
Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair. The United Grand Junction Ebenezer Tem-
perance Association is a creation of Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers,
chapter 33, which details a comical meeting of its Brick Lane Branch in the
East End of London.
12. “It is such a King as no chisel can mend” is line 56 from “The Statue in
Stocks-Market.” The poem is one of three by Marvell (the others are “The
Statue at Charing Cross” and “A Dialogue between the Two Horses”), all
satirical, which treat statues of Charles I and Charles II that were erected
after the Restoration in 1660. In The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), Marvell
looked back on the Civil Wars and commented: “Whether it were a War of
Religion, or of Liberty, is not worth the labour to enquire. Which-soever was
at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think
the Cause was too good to have been fought for. Men ought to have trusted
God; they ought and might have trusted the King with that whole matter.
The Arms of the Church are Prayers and Tears, the Arms of the Subjects are
Patience and Petitions” ( The Rehearsal Transpros’d and the Rehearsal Trans-
pros’d the Second Part, ed. D. I. B. Smith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971], 135).
13. Eliot is citing poems that are in the tradition of “carpe diem,” a Latin phrase
meaning “seize the day.” In such works the speaker urges a beloved to enjoy
sexual pleasure now, while she is still young. “O Mistress mine” is the open-
ing line of the first of two songs sung by the Clown in Shakespeare’s play
Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1601). The two were put together to make a
single poem and given the title “Carpe Diem” by Palgrave in his Golden Trea-
sury. “Gather ye rosebuds” is the opening phrase of a poem by Robert Her-
rick (1591–1674), “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” “Go lovely rose”
is the opening line and the title of a poem by Edmund Waller (1606–1687),
another work in the carpe diem tradition.
14. Lucretius (94–55 b.c.), a Roman poet who wrote De Rerum natura, a didactic poem in six books which expound the theor
ies of Epicurean philosophy.
Catullus (84–54 b.c.), a Roman lyrical poet noted for his learned, intricate,
allusive style.
15. The first line of this passage is partly quoted and altered at lines 185 and 196
in The Waste Land.
16. Eliot is quoting from the three books of Odes left by the Roman poet Horace (65 b.c.–a.d. 8). His satires, epistles, and odes were important models for
English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Eliot cites book I,
ode IV, lines 13–14: “Pallid Death kicks, with equal strength, at the door / of
the poor or the towers of the rich.” He also cites from book II, ode XIV, lines
1–2: “Ah, how they glide by, Postumus, Postumus, / The years, the swift
years!” And he cites book III, ode I, line 40: “At the horseman’s back sits
black Worry.”
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 14 9 – 15 1
2 1 9
17. Eliot cites from Catullus, poem no. 5, “Viuamus, mea Lesbia, atque
amemus” (Let us live and love, my Lesbia), lines 5–6, a poem that stands at
the head of the carpe diem tradition. The sense of these two lines depends
on the preceding line 4: “Suns are able to die and to return; / But once our
brief light has been extinguished, / Night is a perpetual sleeping.”
18. Cowley, see above, nn. 6, 8; John Cleveland (1613–1658) was a Metaphysical
poet who is forgotten by all but specialists in seventeenth-century lyric.
19. “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are two contrasting lyrics (“The Happy Man”
and “The Thoughtful Man”) written by John Milton in his youth.
20. Eliot quotes the first two lines of “Buchers et tombeaux” (Wooden pyres
and tombs), a poem by Théophile Gautier (see above, n. 10). It was first pub-
lished in a journal called L’Artiste (24 January 1848), then included in his collection Émaux et camées (1852). The lines can be translated: “The skeleton was invisible / In the happy ages of pagan art!”
21. Eliot is quoting lines 11–12 and 15–18 from Ben Jonson, “Song: to Celia,” an-
other poem in the carpe diem tradition, first published in 1640. He may be
quoting from memory, since he substitutes “deceive” for “delude” in line 11,
and “sweet sin” for “Sweet theft” in line 16.