by T. S. Eliot
22. Propertius (c. 50–2 b.c.) was a Roman lyrical poet noted for his elegance,
grace, and wit, one who has often been compared with John Donne. Ovid
(43 b.c.–a.d. 17) is the most famous Roman poet after Virgil. His Metamor-
phoses, in fifteen books, collects stories from classical mythology.
23. Thomas Gray (1716–1771) is best known today as the author of “Ode on the
Death of a Favorite Cat” and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Wil-
liam Collins (1721–1759) was a lyric poet who is remembered today for only a
handful of poems, chiefly “Ode on the Poetical Character” and “Ode Written
in the Beginning of the Year 1746.”
24. Bouvard and Pécuchet is the last novel that Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) worked on during his lifetime, but failed to complete. It recounts the story
of two clerks who, liberated from an economically dependent existence,
make ill-fated sorties into vast areas of experience and knowledge. They
found a school for orphans, but their plans go awry partly because of their
own obsessions, partly because of the dishonesty and selfishness of leading
figures in the town. The novel terminates abruptly at chapter 10, but most
editions of it include Flaubert’s “Plan” for the end of the book, which would
see the mayor seizing all the orphans on the ground that they have not
been adopted, so putting an end to the utopian schemes of Bouvard and
Pécuchet. Flaubert summarizes: Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main, or
“So everything has come to pieces in their hands” (Gustave Flaubert,
Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer [Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1976], 288).
25. The distinction between fancy and imagination is drawn by Coleridge in
his Biographia Literaria, chapter 4.
26. Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax,” ll. 49–52
and 769–772.
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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 15 1 – 15 3
27. Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Cowley” is the first chapter in his Lives of the
English Poets, written between 1778 and 1781 and originally a series of fifty-two short “lives” or prefaces to a collection of works by major poets which
a group of booksellers had proposed. The lives were then reassembled as a
separate work by Johnson, published in 1781 and 1783.
28. Coleridge’s famous definition of the imagination is given at the end of book
XIV of Biographia Literaria: “This power, first put in action by the will and understanding and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and un-noticed, control (*laxis e¤ertur habenis* [it is carried onward with loose
reins; Virgil, Georgics II.364]) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with di¤erence; of the general,
with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the repre-
sentative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects;
a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement
ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling pro-
found or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the
artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our
admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.”
29. Eliot is still quoting from Marvell’s poem “Upon Appleton House,” a long
work (776 lines) which belongs to a tradition of poems which celebrate the
house of an eminent man. Eliot cites from stanza 49, ll. 385–392, and from
stanza 79, ll. 625–632.
30. Eliot is quoting from Marvell’s forty-line poem “Bermudas.” The “he” in
these verses is Providence.
31. Eliot is quoting from Marvell’s poem “The Garden,” stanza 6, ll. 47–48.
32. Eliot is quoting from Marvell’s poem “The Nymph Complaining for the Death
of Her Fawn,” ll. 91–92; the poem combines pastoral complaint and lament
for the death of a pet. The title Eliot gives for the poem in the next sentence,
“The Nymph and the Fawn,” was invented by Palgrave (see n. 3, 216).
33. Andrew Marvell, “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn,”
ll. 71–76.
34. Eliot is quoting from William Morris (1834–1896), The Life and Death of
Jason, book IV, The Quest Begun: The Loss of Hylas and Hercules, ll. 577–581, which contains a lament by a nymph over the death of Hylas. The nymph
begins by singing these lines.
35. Eliot is quoting from the same poem by Morris, ll. 602–608, the conclusion
of the nymph’s lament.
36. A further quotation from “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her
Fawn,” ll. 97–100, from a passage near the end where the nymph recalls
how her fawn was killed by “wanton troopers riding by,” and how the animal
wept. The Heliades were the sisters of Phaeton, son of Helios (the sun). He
asked his father if he could drive his chariot across the sky, and was killed
when he could not control the horses. Disconsolate, the sisters were turned
into poplars, their tears into amber.
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 15 4 – 15 7
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37. Eliot is quoting from lines 13–16 of Marvell’s “Clorinda and Damon,” a pas-
toral poem in which Clorinda, a shepherdess, makes advances to an unre-
sponsive shepherd, Damon. The carpe diem motif is invoked with reversed
roles, and the poem modulates into a meditation on the competing claims
of hedonism and moralism.
38. Eliot is quoting from “Le Testament,” a poem by François Villon (1431–1463),
stanza 21, ll. 169–170: “Necessity makes people err / And hunger drives the
wolf from the woods.”
39. Poe actually gives little attention to “surprise,” and the term occurs almost
nowhere in his critical writings. The key term for Poe is “e¤ect”: “I prefer
commencing with the consideration of an e¤ect. Keeping originality always in view—for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious
and so easily attainable a source of interest—I say to myself, in the first
place ‘Of all the innumerable e¤ects, or impressions, of which the heart,
the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I,
on the present occasion, select?’ Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly
a vivid e¤ect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone
—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by
peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterward looking about me (or rather
within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the
construction of the e¤ect” (Edgar Allan Poe, “Philosophy of Composition,”
Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson [New York: Library of America,
1984], 13–14).
40. Eliot quotes two passages from Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, the first from part II, ll. 477–478, the second from part I, 529–530.
41. Eliot is quoting from the final chorus of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), ll. 1749–1754. The pronoun “he” refers back to “highest wisdom,” which
may seem to turn his face away from the suppliant Israelites, but then
returns.
42. Eliot is quoting from Marvell’s “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return
from
Ireland,” ll. 29–36 and 105–108. Marvell uses the Latin word “Pict” for Scot
as if it were derived from the Latin picti, meaning painted or tattooed, in order to play on the words “parti-coloured” and “plaid.”
43. Eliot is quoting from the opening stanza of “Ode: Of Wit” by Abraham
Cowley (see above, n. 6, 217).
44. “Ode: Of Wit,” ll. 57–64.
45. Eliot quotes the entirety of Shelley’s poem “To the Moon,” which was
included in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (see n. 3, 216–217).
46. “It was a beautiful soul, such as one no longer finds in London,” in French.
Perhaps Eliot is adapting the phrasing of the last stanza in the “Complainte
du pauvre jeune homme,” by Jules Laforgue: “Ils virent qu’ c’était un’ belle
âme, / Comme on n’en fait plus aujourd’hui!” Or: “They saw that it was a
beautiful soul, / such as one no longer finds today.”
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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 15 8 – 15 9
Prose and Verse
1. “Prose and Verse” appeared in the Chapbook 22 (April 1921): 3–10. This
issue had a special title page, Poetry in Prose, and contained two other essays which followed Eliot’s, by Frederick Manning (“Poetry in Prose,” 11–15) and
Richard Aldington (“A Note on Poetry in Prose,” 16–24). On the Chapbook
and its editor, Harold Monro, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 5, 203. The
Chapbook had about one thousand subscribers, all but a handful of them
English and resident in London. But even with that circulation the Chapbook
showed a monthly deficit of £25, a shortage that was met by occasional dona-
tions from well-to-do patrons or, more typically, by a monthly contribution
from Monro’s own (by no means wealthy) purse.
2. Aldington, “A Note on Poetry in Prose,” 18.
3. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was a physician and author who is most
noted for Religio Medici (The creed of a doctor) (1642) and Hydriotaphia (Urn burial, 1658), both admired as examples of an ornate style in English.
Sir John Denham (1615–1669) was a poet who is remembered almost en-
tirely for one work, Cooper’s Hill (1642), a long poem in couplets which have a massive plainness and economy, the opposite of Thomas Browne’s style.
4. François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1758) was a prolific philosopher,
essayist, and occasional writer of fiction. His style has always been noted
for its plain lucidity. Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), author of The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, is also noted for the clarity of his style, though it is considerably more orotund than that of Voltaire. Jacques-Louis-Napoléon
Bertrand (1807–1841), who used the pen name Aloysius Bertrand, was the
author of Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot
(Gaspard de la nuit: Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot),
which was published in 1842, a year after his death. Baudelaire, in his
famous preface to Le Spleen de Paris, called it the “mysterious and brilliant model” for his own prose poems, and it is usually deemed the first prose
poem in modern literature. The style is resolutely ornate. Thomas De
Quincey (1785–1859) was the author of “Suspiria de profundis” (Sighs from
the depths), an incomplete work that was intended to be a sequel to his
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It was classified by him as “prose-
phantasy,” a work of lyrical prose pieces, much like the prose poem being
developed contemporaneously in France. The text is found in The Collected
Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London: A. and C. Black,
1897), vol. 13, Tales and Prose Phantasies, 331–369.
5. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American author noted for his exuber-
ant, sensationalist prose style, the antithesis of the sobriety found in the
style of John Dryden (see “John Dryden,” n. 2, 234–235). For Baudelaire, see
“The Lesson of Baudelaire,” n. 4, 215. His Romantic style is in contrast to
the classical calm of Nicholas Boileau-Dexpréaux (1636–1711), whose L’Art
poétique codified the precepts of French versification.
6. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) published the Apologia pro vita sua (A
defense of his life) in 1864. Anacreon (born c. 570 b.c.) was a Greek poet
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 16 0 – 16 2
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whose short lyrics, some sixty of them, are chiefly about wine, love, and song
—graceful and charming, but also shallow.
7. “Poe’s law,” that a poem should not exceed one hundred lines, appears in his
essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 39, 221).
8. Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) was an essayist and critic who found his
inspiration in Walter Pater. His work consists typically of epigrams.
9. John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681–1682) is a long satire on the
intrigues behind Charles II and his son James, the duke of York, during the
period 1678–1681. Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1734) is a
satirical defense of himself, with rapid alterations of feeling as the poem
moves from anger to indi¤erence, distress to amusement.
10. For Thomas Browne, see n. 3; Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) was an ecclesiastic
whose ornate style has been highly esteemed. Perhaps his best-known works
are Holy Living (1650), Holy Dying (1651), and XXVIII Sermons (1651).
11. Eliot is paraphrasing any one of several sentences from the concluding
chapter of a book by the French critic Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915), Le
Problème du style (The problem of style), in which he takes up the perennial debate between form and content: “En littérature, le fond des choses a une
importance absolue; aucune des variétés de littérature ne peut se soustraire
à la nécessité de creuser des fondations et de les maçonner solidement. . . .
Décidément, et en tout, c’es le fond qui importe. Un fait nouveau, une idée
nouvelle, cela vaut plus qu’une belle phrase. . . . La forme sans le fond, le
style sans la pensée, quelle misère! . . . Si rien, en littérature, ne vit que par
le style, c’est que les oeuvres bien pensées sont toujour des oeuvres bien
écrites” (Remy de Gourmont, Le Problème du style, 17th ed. [Paris: Mercure
de France, 1938; 1st ed. 1902], 151, 153–154). (In literature, the content of
things has an absolute importance; none of the various kinds of literature
can withdraw from the necessity of digging out and building solid founda-
tions. . . . Decisively, and in everything, it is content which counts. A new
fact, a new idea, each is worth more than a beautiful phrase. . . . Form with-
out content, style without thought, what impoverishment! . . . If nothing
in literature lives except by virtue of its style, it is because works that are well conceived are always works well written.)
12. Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, the first sentence of chapter 5. The Latin phrase in the passage means “Might not I prefer to be transformed into such
bones?”
13. Henry King (1592–1669) was an ecclesiastic who became bishop of Chich-
ester. He is known to most readers for a single poem, “Exequy for His Wife,”
which was included in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as well as the Oxford Book of Verse.
bridge, and became bishop of Chichester, of Ely, and of Winchester. His
XCVI Sermons were published after his death, in 1629. The style is often
condensed, jerky, and diªcult, matching a severe intellectualism. Critics
typically contrast it with the fiery extravagance of Donne’s sermons.
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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 16 2 – 16 3
15. See Logan Pearsall Smith, ed., Donne’s Sermons: Selected Passages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919).
16. Walter Pater (1839–1894) was educated at Oxford and became a Fellow of
Brasenose College, Oxford. His first book, The Renaissance (1873), was a
collection of essays on various artists and writers of the Italian Renaissance.
Its essay on Leonardo da Vinci included a famous description of his painting
La Gioconda (popularly known as the Mona Lisa), which has been much
admired (see Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed.
Donald Hill [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980], 97–99). The
volume was also controversial for its advocacy of hedonism. Pater also wrote
one novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), and two other books of essays. He
was seen as forerunner of the aesthetic or decadent movement of the 1890s.
Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) was a poet and prose writer who
published thirty-six books in his lifetime. His is an extremely ornate style
in which sound takes precedence over sense.
17. For La Gioconda, see the preceding note. Ecclesiastes, chapter 12; Eliot quotes from this chapter in line 23 of The Waste Land.
18. A Sportsman’s Sketches was the first work of the Russian writer Ivan Serge-evich Turgenev (1818–1883), which was translated into English in 1895 by
the prolific translator Constance Garnett (1861–1946). It is typically consid-
ered a light work which bears the same relationship to Turgenev’s mature
work as Sketches by Boz does to that of Dickens.
19. John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an art critic and a social critic who dominated
Victorian letters. He published the first of five volumes on Modern Painters
in 1843, the Stones of Venice (1851, 1853), and his late autobiography Praeterita (1888).
20. “Dream Fugue” (1849) is the title given to the third part of Thomas De