by T. S. Eliot
the real cause of the war was that mounting wealth throughout Europe had
2 4 6
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 19 0 – 19 2
not been matched by a more equitable distribution of it. While citizens
would have to fight, they also had to question their belligerent governments
as to what they were fighting about. The work aroused enormous contro-
versy at a time when bellicose jingoism was the norm. The members of the
Dramatists Club signified their unwillingness to meet him at their lunches,
and Shaw was forced to withdraw from the Society of Authors.
11. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), English novelist and poet, was eighty-one years
old when Eliot was writing in 1921.
12. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was a philosopher, satirist, dramatist, novelist,
and a literary and art critic, perhaps the most versatile thinker of his times.
13. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright and novelist, was generally
thought of as a witty but minor writer at this time.
14. “As Far as Thought Can Reach” is the title of the final part of Shaw’s play
Back to Methuselah.
15. This sentence does not appear in any of F. H. Bradley’s published works;
instead it is Eliot’s cogent summary of Bradley’s philosophical outlook.
16. When the curtain opens on part five of Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah, the audience sees “a dance of youths and maidens . . . in progress.” See George
Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (New York and London: Penguin, 1990),
250. Margaret Morris (1891–1980) founded Margaret Morris Movement, a
system of exercise and modern dance which was popular in the 1920s and
1930s. She also wrote many books about it. Raymond Duncan (1874–1966)
was the brother of the famed dancer Isadora Duncan. He founded the
Akademia Raymond Duncan in Paris, which taught children dance, gym-
nastics, and systems of physical culture allegedly based on ancient Greek
models. The children, dressed in Greek robes, were notorious, the subject
of much media interest. Duncan also espoused a philosophy of Actionalism
(the idea that actional or physical labor was a necessary complement to
intellectual life), wrote poems, and ran a printing establishment within his
Akademia, which dutifully published his lectures and poems.
The Metaphysical Poets
1. The essay was first published in the Times Literary Supplement, no. 1031
(20 October 1921): 669–670. Eliot wrote to Richard Aldington on 16
September 1921: “I have just finished an article, unsatisfactory to myself,
on the metaphysical poets” ( LOTSE, 469–479). Presumably he worked on
it for at least a week during his evening hours, and perhaps the weekend
before, or 10–16 September. On the Times Literary Supplement, see “Andrew
Marvell,” n. 1.
2. [Eliot’s note:] Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century:
Donne to Butler, selected and edited, with an essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon; London: Milford), 6s. net. [Editor’s note:] Sir Herbert
J. C. Grierson (1866–1960) was a distinguished scholar who wrote and
edited more than fifty books. He was professor of English at Aberdeen Uni-
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 19 2 – 19 4
2 4 7
versity, and in 1915 he took up the chair of English at the University of
Edinburgh.
3. Aurelian Townshend (c. 1583–c. 1651) was a minor Metaphysical poet;
Grierson included two lyrics by him, “Love’s Victory” and “Upon kinde and
true Love.” Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648) was the oldest brother
of the religious poet George Herbert; Grierson included two poems by him,
“Elegy over a Tomb” and “An Ode upon a Question Moved.”
4. George Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905–1921). For the Oxford Book of English Verse, see “Andrew
Marvell,” n. 3, 216.
5. On Donne, see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 4, 217; on Marvell, see the same essay,
n. 2, 216; and on Bishop King, see “Prose and Verse,” n. 13, 223. George
Chapman (c. 1559–1634) translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey into English, for many the greatest poetic translations in the language.
6. For Ben Jonson, see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 5, 217. Matthew Prior (1664–1721)
was a minor poet.
7. George Herbert (1593–1633) was the greatest religious poet of the seven-
teenth century; Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) wrote religious lyrics deeply
influenced by George Herbert; and Richard Crashaw (1612–1649) was a
Catholic devotional poet. Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was also a religious
poet who published her first book in 1850 and is best known for “Goblin
Market” and “Monna Innominata.” Francis Thompson (1859–1907) was
another religious poet, whose “City of Dreadful Night” is often cited as
a source for The Waste Land; see note to ll. 7, 76.
8. For Cowley, see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 6, 217.
9. John Donne, “A Valediction: Of Mourning,” ll. 10–18.
10. John Donne, “The Relique,” l. 6.
11. Thomas Middleton (c. 1580–1627), John Webster (c. 1580–1634), and Cyril
Tourneur (c. 1580–1626) were dramatists active in the early seventeenth
century. Lines from Webster are quoted in The Waste Land at lines 74–75,
118, and 408.
12. On Johnson’s “Life of Cowley,” see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 27, 220. The “Life”
contains Johnson’s discussion of the metaphysical poets, on whom he was
severe. The sentence from which Eliot quotes reads in full: “The most het-
erogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ran-
sacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs,
and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improve-
ment dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased”
(Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill [Oxford: Clarendon, 1905], 20). The metaphysical poets had largely disappeared from the
canon by the early twentieth century, and Eliot played a key role in restoring
them to a central place in the history of English poetry.
13. For Cleveland, see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 18, 219.
14. From Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage,” l. 33, the poem which concludes
Les Fleurs du mal. “Our soul is a three-mast ship searching for its Circeii,”
2 4 8
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 19 4 – 19 9
this last the name of the promontory in Lazio, in Italy, which was identified
with the fabulous island of Aeaea, where the goddess Circe lived. Odysseus’s
adventure with her is recounted in book X of the Odyssey.
15. Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” ll. 219–221. Eliot mis-
quotes slightly: the first line begins “His fall . . . ” and the third “He left
the name . . .”
16. On Henry King, bishop of Chichester, see “Prose and Verse,” n. 13, 223;
Eliot quotes ll. 89–100 and 111–114 of his “Exequy for His Wife.”
17. Edgar Allan Poe cites ll. 71–72 from Henry King’s “Exequy for His Wife”
as an epigraph to his tale “The Assignation.”
18. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, “Ode Upon a Question Moved: W
hether Love
should Continue for ever?” st. 33–35.
19. For Thomas Gray, see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 23, 219.
20. Richard Crashaw, “Saint Teresa,” ll. 1–2.
21. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, “Life of Cowley,” paragraph 58, 21. “Their attempts were always analytick: they broke every image
into fragments, and could no more represent by their slender conceits and
laboured particularities the prospects of nature or the scenes of life, than he,
who dissects a sun-beam with a prism can exhibit the wide e¤ulgence of a
summer noon.”
22. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the famous French essayist, published
the three-volume edition of his essays in 1588.
23. Eliot is citing from the 1641 text of George Chapman’s play The Revenge of
Bussy D’Ambois, IV.1.150–159.
24. Robert Browning, “Bishop Brougham’s Apology,” ll. 693–697.
25. Alfred Tennyson, “The Two Voices,” ll. 412–423. An unnamed speaker is in
dialogue with the voice of his own despair, which urges him to suicide. But
he sees a family on its way to church (the lines quoted by Eliot) and resolves
to “be of better cheer.”
26. Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632–1677), the Dutch philosopher.
27. Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1260–1301), Guido Guinizelli (1240–1276), and Cino da
Pistoia (c. 1270–1336) were all poets who helped shape the dolce stil nuovo, a style of lyrical poetry also adopted by the early Dante, characterized by musicality, sincerity of feeling, and a philosophical and often metaphysical bent.
28. For Collins see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 23, 219.
29. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is by Thomas Gray; for him see
“Andrew Marvell,” n. 23, 219.
30. The “Triumph of Life” is a major philosophical poem that Shelley was at
work on when he died, one of few attempts to take up Dante’s terza rima into English. On Keats and “Hyperion,” see “The Lesson of Baudelaire,” n. 7, 215.
31. Jean Epstein, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui, un nouvel état d’intelligence (Poetry of today: A new state of mind [Paris, Éditions de la sirène, 1921]). Jean Epstein
(1897–1953) was an avant-garde intellectual and filmmaker. His first book,
Bonjour cinéma, appeared in early 1921. His second, the one cited by Eliot, was accompanied by a letter in which the French poet Blaise Cendrars
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 19 9 – 2 0 0
2 4 9
praised Epstein for being “the first to have said a number of precise and
passionate things about today’s poetry.” Epstein argues that “modern writing,
despite schematization and approximation, is in no way characterized by
simplicity. Despite their use of schematization, in order to be understood
modern writers require an important complementary e¤ort on the part of
readers, and will not be pleasing except to a certain category of erudite read-
ers who will be, at the same time, a neuropsychiatric aristocracy” (57). The
aesthetics of modern writing are similar to that of film, Epstein urges, and
he goes on to specify their similarities. In 1923 Epstein made his first film,
L’Auberge rouge, and later he made another thirteen films. He also wrote
several important books of film criticism and theory, as well as one novel.
In France he is still regarded as an important early avant-garde filmmaker.
32. Jules Laforgue, Derniers Vers (Last poems) X, ll. 1–10:
Diaphanous geraniums, warlike spells,
Monomaniac sacrileges!
Wrappings, debauchery, showers! Oh! Wine-press
Of parties’ harvesting!
Layettes at bay,
Thyrsés deep in the woods!
Transfusions, reprisals,
Churchings, bandages and the eternal potion.
Angelus! Ah! to be exhausted
From these nuptial stampedes! these nuptial stampedes . . .
From The Last Poems of Jules Laforgue, ed. and trans. Madleine Bettes
(Ilfracombe, Devon: Stockwell, 1973), 35.
33. Jules Laforgue, “Sur une defunte” (On a dead woman), Derniers Vers,
ll. 57–58: “She is far away, she is crying, / The great wind is also lamenting.”
34. On Jules Laforgue, see the Introduction, 4. Tristan Corbière (1845–1875)
was a French symbolist poet.
35. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage,” ll. 1–4:
For the child, entranced by charts and engravings,
The world is equal to his vast desire.
Ah! How immense the world seems in the brightness of lamps!
To the eyes of memory, the world seems so small!
s e l e c t e d b i b l i o g r a p h y
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