[Poems I 23–24 · Textual History II 332]
One of the earliest reviews of TSE’s verse commented on this poem’s “dull data concerning one Miss Nancy Ellicott”, and accused Poetry of publishing “Imagism and plagiarism”: “The old-fashioned reader to whom poetry is something more than capitalized lines of irregular length, if he finds sufficient entertainment in following this society item to the end, will be struck at once by the closing line,—a phrase whose genuine poetic quality stands out in vivid contrast with the prose wish-wash that precedes it. ‘The army of unalterable law,’—there is a familiar ring to that; and the old-fashioned reader will probably not be long in identifying it as the closing line, also, of Meredith’s fine sonnet, Lucifer in Starlight. It would be edifying to have Meredith’s own comment on this incident, and his opinion of the company into which his fastidious muse had been forcibly introduced”, unsigned Casual Comment in Dial 25 Nov 1915. (Meredith had died in 1909.) The poet Arthur Davison Ficke wrote to the editor: “Plagiarism is the corrupt attempt to pass off as one’s own the work of another writer; there is no possible relation between it and Mr. Eliot’s employment of a great and world-famous phrase in a position where the reader’s recognition of it as a quotation is precisely the effect aimed at”, Dial 9 Dec 1915. An editor’s note was appended, stating that “quotations must be enclosed in quotation marks or otherwise plainly acknowledged”, and that the phrase could not be regarded as common currency because not included in Bartlett’s Dictionary of Quotations (although Meredith’s poem was in Oxf Bk of English Verse). In his essays, it was characteristic of TSE not to attribute quotations. To William Jeffrey, 7 May 1937, on classical references: “The trouble with these is that when they are well known, like most of yours, they appear trite and hackneyed, and when they are fresh they are obscure.”
Clive Bell noted TSE’s “disconcerting habit of omitting inverted commas · · · The other day a rather intemperate admirer quoted at me the line, ‘The army of unalterable law,’ and declared that no modern could match it. You know it is by Meredith”, Nation & Athenæum 22 Sept 1923. TSE: “In one of my early poems I used, without quotation marks, the line ‘the army of unalterable law …’ from a poem by George Meredith, and this critic accused me of having shamelessly plagiarised, pinched, pilfered, that line. Whereas, of course, the whole point was that the reader should recognise where it came from and contrast it with the spirit and meaning of my own poem”, Talking Freely, interview (1961). “our education indeed is so chaotic that no two persons in the same company can be assumed to have their minds stocked with the same furniture; you cannot make a quotation or an allusion to which the whole of any company can respond”, Views and Reviews in NEW 20 June 1935. For failure to appreciate allusiveness in TSE, see headnote to Macavity: The Mystery Cat. For the distinction between borrowings that are and are not allusive, see letter to Warner Allen in note to Ash-Wednesday I 1. TSE quoted Meredith again, within quotation marks, in A Valedictory Forbidding Mourning: to the Lady of the House (see note to 45; also notes to Goldfish III 7, Entretien dans un parc 34 and WLComposite 50–51).
In Baker’s The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907), the observation that in the 1590s “what was re-presented, if skilfully done, was as good as new” (12–13) is scored in TSE’s copy. TSE: “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest”, Philip Massinger (1920).
To Robert Gathorne-Hardy, 12 Dec 1929: “‘Veteris vestigia flammae’ is the same, and yet utterly different from the segni etc.—partly the difference between veteris and antica: the context does it for both Dante and Virgil, and they both emerge triumphant from the borrowing. The moral seems to be that one test of a man’s originality is the success of his borrowing; for to borrow a phrase and make a right use of it in a context utterly different from the original, is as original as originality.” (Dante’s words to Virgil “conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma” [I recognise the tokens of the ancient flame], Purg. XXX 48, recall Aeneid IV 23, “agnosco veteris vestigia flammae” [I recognise the traces of the olden flame]. See note in Letters 4.) TSE in his Preface to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse: “There were, however, literary influences in the background.” TSE included Kipling’s When ’Omer Smote ’Is Blooming Lyre:
When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what ’e thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took—the same as me!
[Poem I 24 · Textual History II 332]
For TSE’s hesitation over attributing a phrase from Vaughan, see Textual History, Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 24.
TSE to L. W. Payne, 7 Nov 1927, concerning Payne’s Selections from Later American Writers (1927): “I must express a slight regret that you have thought fit to select as representative of my work a rather insignificant poem like Cousin Nancy. In this connection I can correct you on one point. The niece was not called ‘Cousin Nancy’ by her aunts; indeed in New England it is uncommon for an aunt to address a niece as ‘Cousin’. My reference was to the extensive consanguinity in New England where everybody, if not nearly related, is at least a cousin of everybody else. ‘Cousin Nancy’ is therefore an imaginary cousin of the author of the lines; but I must add emphatically that you must understand that the lady in the verses is an entirely imaginary character and in no way a portrait of any of my female relations.”
1 Ellicott: “Hawthorne had even the minor token of literary genius, the genius for titles, as Endicott and the Red Cross”, American Literature (1919). After reading a proof of Herbert Read’s Selected Writings, TSE wrote to him on 1 Aug 1963, pointing out the error “Cousin Nancy Ellicot” in the Foreword by Allen Tate: “The only thing wrong that I can find is that Ellicott is spelt with only one t (the name is a conflation of Eliot and Endicott).” On forms of TSE’s own name see headnotes to Prufrock and Other Observations and The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs.
2 Strode across the hills: W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez: “Across the hills I see her stride with offerings in her hand”, Song of the Sap 8 in The Argonaut 11 June 1910. TSE described Tinckom-Fernandez as “a crony of mine”, Paris Review (1959).
2–3 Strode across the hills and broke them, | Rode across the hills and broke them: Kipling: “You’ve done something that Kings and Knights and Scholars in old days would have given their crowns and spurs and books to find out · · · You’ve broken the Hills—you’ve broken the Hills! It hasn’t happened in a thousand years”, Weland’s Sword in Puck of Pook’s Hill. OED “break” 14: “To · · · tame, train (horses or other animals, also human beings)”.
5 Riding to hounds: on George Wyndham: “We can criticize his writings only as the expression of this peculiar English type, the aristocrat, the Imperialist, the Romantic, riding to hounds across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland”, A Romantic Aristocrat (1919) (Bush 23).
8–10 danced all the modern dances · · · modern: to John W. Nance, 19 Dec 1929: “I must record my disgust with the foul word modernist. It is, unhappily, necessary in theology; but it could easily be avoided in poetry. It implies a desire to be ‘modern’; and no poet should care whether his work is ‘modern’ or not.”
10, 12 But they knew that it was modern · · · Matthew and Waldo: although dead since 1888 and 1882 respectively, Arnold and Emerson had been listed as “Modern Writers” (as opposed to “Standard English Classics”), as recently as an advertisement for the Eversley Series from Macmillan, Athenæum 30 Aug 1913.
11 glazen shelves kept watch: OED “glassen, glaze
n”: “Obs. exc. dial. and arch. 1. Made of glass · · · 2. Resembling glass. Of eyes: Glassy, glazed”, with 1605 Jonson: “Old glazen-eyes”, Volpone V i (Mermaid ed.; commonly V iii), wearing glasses to read.
[Poem I 24 · Textual History II 332]
11–12 kept watch · · · guardians of the faith: Carlyle on Novalis: “observe how these Common-sense Philosophers, men who brag chiefly of their irrefragable logic, and keep watch and ward · · · against ‘Mysticism’ and ‘Visionary Theories,’ are themselves obliged to base their whole system on · · · Faith”, Novalis (1829).
12 Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith: TSE: “Arnold’s prose writings fall into two parts · · · and the books about Christianity seem only to say again and again · · · that the Christian faith is of course impossible to the man of culture”, Arnold and Pater (1930). To A. L. Rowse, 18 Apr 1931: “I have the greatest respect for Culture and Anarchy—at one time I could almost repeat passages by heart; but the weakness of his political or rather social views, I have come to believe, is due to the flimsiness of his religious views.” (In another letter to Rowse, 17 Mar 1945, TSE wrote of “Matthew”, to distinguish him from his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold.) To John Hayward, 29 May 1943: “In my youth I was a fervent admirer of Culture and Anarchy, and latterly I have come to regard Matt as one of the Enemies: there is a smug superiority in all he writes which marks him as a plebeian.” For Arnold, religion and poetry, see note to Whispers of Immortality 10–12. “When Emerson as a young man stood in his pulpit and made clear to his congregation that he could no longer administer the Communion, he impressed upon them that he had no prejudice and passed no judgment upon those who continued in the practice, but that he could take no part himself—because (in his own words) it did not interest him. That is an instance of the point of view of several thousands of well-bred people in a provincial American town”, A Sceptical Patrician (1919). For TSE on Emerson (who was known as Waldo rather than Ralph), see note to Sweeney Erect 25–26. “there is a ‘something’ there, a dignity, about Emerson · · · which persists after we have perceived the taint of commonness about some English contemporary, as for instance, the more intelligent, better educated, more alert Matthew Arnold”, The Hawthorne Aspect (1918). The Harvard course on Florentine painting taken by TSE in 1910 was given by Emerson’s grandson, Edward Waldo Forbes. Matthew and Waldo: Edgar Lee Masters: “friend of the great, and lover of letters, | And host to Matthew Arnold and to Emerson”, John Horace Burleson in Spoon River Anthology. Masters’s volume was in Pound’s hands by 16 May 1915, when he wrote to his father: “Be sure and get Edgar Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, it is the best home grown product America has seen for SOME time.” TSE probably read the book shortly afterwards, and he mentioned it in Mr. Lee Masters (1916).
13 The army of unalterable law: Meredith, Lucifer in Starlight, concluding the sonnet:
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
For the controversy over TSE’s appropriation, and for Meredith, see headnote. Temple Classics Dante: “‘Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same shall he be punished’ · · · is the unalterable law which Dante sees written”, Inf. XXXIII, Argument. TSE: “whether in Argos or England | There are certain inflexible laws | Unalterable”, The Family Reunion II i chorus.
[Poem I 24 · Textual History II 332]
Mr. Apollinax
Published as the third of four Observations in Poetry Sept 1916, then 1917+.
No recording known.
Undated in drafts. Dated Oxford, 1915 by TSE in Hayward’s 1925; and in Poèmes and Isaacs’s US 1920. Dated “1915 S.S. St. Paul” by TSE in Morley’s US 1920. TSE to Edward J. H. Greene, 18 Oct 1939: “Mr Apollinax is late 1915.” Gordon 1974 claimed the poem must have been written by Jan 1915, but see headnote to The Death of Saint Narcissus. Assigned to Apr 1915 by Rainey 198.
Following his sudden marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood on 26 June 1915, TSE wrote to his father on 23 July, “the night before I sail”. To Conrad Aiken, 5 Aug, from Gloucester, Massachusetts: “I hear you have plunged into the Atlantic” (by publishing a poem in Atlantic Monthly). To Scofield Thayer, 4 Sept: “I have just returned to England · · · My address (anyhow till Christmas) will be care of Bertie Russell, 34 Russell Chambers, Bury Street, W.C. He is lending us his flat for a time.” Vivien had declined to accompany TSE to the US, for fear of submarines (Russell, Autobiography II 54). The Lusitania had been sunk by a German submarine in May, and the danger continued throughout the war. TSE to his father, 14 Jan 1916: “There are some signs of war even in this remote western country—a torpedo boat from time to time, and a naval officer at the hotel who goes out in a motor boat, looking for submarines.” TSE’s mother to Bertrand Russell, 23 May 1916, eight weeks after a cross-Channel steamer was torpedoed: “It was natural you should feel as you did with the awful tragedy of the Sussex · · · I am sure your influence in every way will confirm my son in his choice of Philosophy as a life work · · · I have absolute faith in his Philosophy but not in the vers libres. Tom is very grateful to you for your sympathy and kindness.” TSE to J. H. Woods, 23 Mar 1917, concerning his doctoral dissertation: “I do not quite like to trust the fruit of so much labour to the submarines in the Channel, but perhaps I can offer it as an inducement to you to come and fetch it, until I can transcribe it.” To his father, 13 June 1917: “I like to think of you at Gloucester soon. The submarines won’t go there!” The only typescript of Pound’s Arnaut was sent in January 1918 to a printer in Ohio but never arrived and was presumed “submarined” (Pound 2010 411–12).
TSE’s dating note in Morley’s US 1920 suggests that he wrote this poem aboard the SS St. Paul. His crossings in 1915 were, however, on the USMS St. Louis (Liverpool to NY, 24 July–1 Aug) and on the New York (NY to Liverpool, arr. 29 Aug). The St. Paul plied the same route for the US Shipping Board in 1917–18, but capsized in the North River, NY, in Apr 1918. On his outward voyage TSE drafted The Engine (see headnote), which he did not publish (although another prose poem of 1915, Hysteria, has followed Mr. Apollinax since 1917). A further crossing, to complete his doctorate at Harvard, was booked for 1 Apr 1916 but cancelled at the last minute (Reid 253). His next crossing was not until his visit to Harvard for nine months in 1932–33. To John Hayward, [29 Sept] 1932, thanking him for a telegram found aboard: “it was the only missive of the sort which I received, and helped to raise my already sinking spirits”.
[Poem I 25 · Textual History II 332–34]
Vivien Eliot died in January 1947, and later that year TSE made a trip to the US during which his brother Henry also died. A letter to Frank Morley, 5 July 1947, recalls TSE’s state of mind at the time of his marriage and of Mr. Apollinax: “It has all been very strange. I don’t think that I have been through such a bad patch since 1915.”
In 1967 Russell recalled his year as a professor of philosophy at Harvard: “I had a post-graduate class of twelve, who used to come to tea with me once a week. One of them was T. S. Eliot, who subsequently wrote a poem about it, called Mr Appolinax” (Autobiography I 212). Russell to Ottoline Morrell, 27 Mar 1914, about TSE and another Harvard pupil: “I found they were not nearly so well grounded as I had thought. They were absolutely candid and quite intelligent, but obviously had not been taught with the minute thoroughness that we practise in England”.
In May 1914 Russell described to Morrell a visit to the Massachusetts house of Prof. B. A. G. Fuller, author of The Problem of Evil in Plotinus: “I have been spending the week-end in the country at the house of Fuller (of Plotinus). It was beautiful there, weather like mid-summer and the trees like early spring. He has a lake and woods and various agreeable things and by all the rules he ought to be agreeable himself, being good-natured and cultivated, but for some reason I am always saying t
o myself, ‘After all, you are an ass’ · · · My pupil Eliot was there—the only one who is civilized, and he is ultra-civilized, knows his classics very well, is familiar with all French literature from Villon to Vildrach, and is altogether impeccable in his taste but has no vigour or life—or enthusiasm. He is going to Oxford where I expect he will be very happy” (Morrell 1963 257, with her comment: “I imagine it was during this week-end visit or in consequence of it that T. S. Eliot wrote Mr. Apollinax”). Charles Vildrac’s prose poems, Découvertes [Discoveries] had appeared in 1912 and TSE mentioned him among the “more important men” in a letter to Aiken, 14 Feb 1920; see March Hare 297. For Russell, Villon and Morrell, see headnote to A Cooking Egg. TSE’s Before Morning had been criticised by Fuller in the Harvard Crimson, 20 Nov 1908. Presumably TSE gave Fuller an introduction to the pension near the Sorbonne where he had stayed, for Jean Verdenal reported on 22 Apr 1912 that Fuller was there. For Fuller’s book on Plotinus, see notes to A Cooking Egg 24 and Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service 6.
TSE took notes on Russell’s courses in Advanced Logic and Theory of Knowledge (Houghton). Russell’s Mysticism and Logic, and other Essays occasioned TSE’s only review for the Nation before it merged with the Athenæum: “literary standards help us to perceive just those moments when a writer is scrupulously and sincerely attending to his vision; help us to dissociate the social and the histrionic from the unique”, Style and Thought (1918).
Herbert Read, in notes for what became his essay The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry (Criterion Apr 1923): “A particular sphere for which a sustained metaphysical poetry is appropriate: the summary of the discrete phenomena of science and assimilation of them into an emotional unity.” Below this TSE wrote: “Philosophical poetry can be digestion of one or more sciences, but of all? Some philosophies in themselves incoherent emotional (e.g. B. Russell) and therefore useless for poetry. Bradley more useful than Russell. Influence e.g. Frazer, Fabré, Freud, Einstein, Poincaré” (Herbert Read papers, U. Victoria).
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 43