[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
To Thomas McGreevy [14 Feb] 1931, concerning his T. S. Eliot: A Study: “Your explication de texte of The Waste Land interested me very much. I can say without irony that it is extremely acute; but I must add that the author was not nearly so acute or learned as the critic. You have told me, in fact, much that I did not know; and I feel that I understand the poem much better after reading your explanation of it. Well! I supposed that I was merely working off a grouch against life while passing the time in a Swiss sanatorium; but apparently I meant something by it.” TSE may have had McGreevy in mind in Thoughts After Lambeth, published on 5 Mar 1931: “when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed ‘the disillusion of a generation’, which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” To A. L. Rowse, 18 Apr 1931: “Disillusion is balls—the only people who are really disillusioned are good catholics, and very few of them. The great illusion of young people—or rather of the people who in the press express what they think young people think—is the illusion of being ‘disillusioned’ · · · to be really disillusioned about anything one must believe in something. I should call myself ‘disillusioned’ in the only sense possible to me, that is, that I have ceased to care about some things, and ceased to respect some things, and ceased to accept some things, and ceased to believe some, and ceased to expect many, merely in the process of acquiring certain of what most people would call ‘illusions’—and I don’t mean narrowly theological illusions either” (see note to Ash-Wednesday I 1, 12, 38, and for “the Catholic philosophy of disillusion”, see headnote to Ash-Wednesday, 3. AFTER PUBLICATION). On the Vita Nuova: “There is also a practical sense of realities behind it, which is antiromantic: not to expect more from life than it can give or more from human beings than they can give; to look to death for what life cannot give. The Vita Nuova belongs to ‘vision literature’; but its philosophy is the Catholic philosophy of disillusion”, Dante (1929) III. (Irving Babbitt: “We not only find in Sainte-Beuve the false illusion of decadence, we also find in him · · · its false disilllusion”, The Masters of Modern French Criticism, 1912, 119.) TSE: “Nor is disillusion possible as an end in itself; for when it becomes an end, it is paraded, and that again is childish and ill bred”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1933. To Sean O’Faolain, 21 Feb 1944, of Gerontion: “it can only be said to have been the expression of a mood · · · I wasn’t thinking about declining civilisations when I wrote it” (see headnote to Gerontion). “It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from that of his generation. This is not a question of insincerity: there is an amalgam of yielding and opposition below the level of consciousness”, In Memoriam (1936). For “a generation which has lost faith in lost causes”, see note to East Coker V 11–17.
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
In his essay Mr. Eliot’s Return (1932), Paul Elmer More wrote: “The writer of The Waste Land and other poems of that period appeals to us as one struck to the heart by the confusion and purposelessness and wastefulness of the world about him.” In More’s typescript TSE circled “as”, with “You should say as if. I may not have been aware of anything but my own private grouse.” Where More asked “And what is the young rebel who rejoices in the disillusion of The Waste Land to do with the Bishops of the Church · · ·?”, TSE circled “disillusion”, with “I believe only in particular personal disillusion. A self-styled ‘disillusioned age’ seems to me merely one whose illusion is that it has no illusions—and we are producing plenty. I am sorry to have contributed (unintentionally) to the spread of this illusion” (More papers, Princeton). To More, 20 July 1934: “I think the poem was, at the time, and to some extent still, misjudged. I was not aware, and am not aware now, of having drawn a contrast between a contemporary world of slums, hysterics and riverside promiscuity etc. with any visibly more romantically lovely earlier world. I mean there is no nostalgia for the trappings of the past, so far as I can see, and no illusion about the world ever having been a pleasanter place to live in than it is now. There is no time sense there, in that literal way; the glories and the sordors are both aspects of futility.”
After E. M. Forster’s remark on The Waste Land: “It is just a personal comment on the universe” (Life and Letters June 1929; see note to unadopted epigraph), TSE spoke in the same terms in America: “Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–1933 documented by Henry Eliot, who adds: “(Goes on to say that the poet’s own interpretation may not necessarily be the only satisfactory one.)” Three days after a reading by TSE on 7 May 1933, Vassar Miscellany News reported the same remarks. WLFacs printed them with the subscription “Quoted by the late Professor Theodore Spencer during a lecture at Harvard University, and recorded by the late Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., the poet’s brother”. Described by the Contents page as “TSE on The Waste Land”, they constitute page 1 of WLFacs. (For TSE’s next poem as the expression of “a subjective dissatisfaction with the pettiness of life”, see note to The Hollow Men V 28–31.)
TSE to Marianne Moore, 31 Oct 1934: “Whenever I am disposed to be vainglorious, I should remind myself of a remark my mother once made to Sally Bruce Kinsolving of Baltimore. ‘Mrs. Kinsolving, I like your poetry, because I can understand it and I don’t understand my son’s’. There is something in that.” To Eudo C. Mason, 21 Feb 1936: “It is curious to learn that Professor Schücking considers my work unintelligible.” To J. Bramwell, 11 July 1945: “The first question about a poem is not whether it is intelligible but whether it is readable.” Asked about obscurity in modern poetry, TSE replied that it was sometimes “a matter of pretence”, but at other times it was caused by “the difficulty of expressing something genuinely felt. There is a little of this obscurity in The Waste Land. Things had to be said that way or not at all. A poet becomes less obscure as he masters his craft”, T. S. Eliot Answers Questions (1949). For obscurity “due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain’”, see TSE’s Preface to Anabasis (in headnote).
On Charles Whibley’s Musings: “Critics sometimes comment upon the sudden transitions and juxtapositions of modern poetry: that is, when right and successful, an application of somewhat the same method without method. Whether the transition is cogent or not, is merely a question of whether the mind is serré [compact] or délié [loose], whether the whole personality is involved”, Charles Whibley (1931).
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
“It is not true that the ideas of a great poet are in any sense arbitrary: certainly in the sense in which imagination is capricious, the ideas of a lunatic or an imbecile are more ‘imaginative’ than those of a poet. In really great imaginative work the connections are felt to be bound by as logical necessity as any connections to be found anywhere; the apparent irrelevance is due to the fact that the terms are used with more or other than their normal meaning, and to those who do not thoroughly penetrate their significance the relation between the aesthetic expansion and the objects expressed is not visible”, Knowledge and Experience 75. Recalling the reception of A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, TSE wrote: “it aroused considerable astonishment in the world of letters, that Kipling should be championed not only as a prose writer but as a writer of verse, by a poet whose verse was generally considered to be at the opposite pole from Kipling’s. Whereas my poems had appeared too obscure and recondite to win popular approval, Kipling’s had long been considered too simple, too crude, too popular, indeed too near the doggerel of the music hall song”,
“The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling” (1959).
Asked about including prose quotations in poems: “if the poet merely puts these things together, a sort of collage of bits, without contributing anything himself, which I was accused of doing in some of my early works because of quotations and references, then there is nothing new, there is nothing original. Nothing to hold the thing together”, Talking Freely (1961).
On New Year’s Day 1936, in reply to a long and censorious letter from his brother Henry, TSE described his state of mind in the early 1920s: “I was of course too much engrossed in the horrors of my private life to notice much outside; and I was suffering from (1) a feeling of guilt in having married a woman I detested, and consequently a feeling that I must put up with anything (2) perpetually being told, in the most plausible way, that I was a clodhopper and a dunce. Gradually, through making friends, I came to find that English people of the sort that I found congenial were prepared to take me quite as an ordinary human being, and that I had merely married into a rather common suburban family with a streak of abnormality which in the case of my wife had reached the point of liking to give people pain. I shall always be grateful to a few people like the Woolfs who unconsciously helped me to regain my balance and self-respect.”
To Geoffrey Faber, 15 Apr 1936: “As for our literary reputation, remember that people like Joyce and myself may help to keep the temperature level, but we can’t send it any higher. There is something an author does once (if at all) in his generation that he can’t ever do again. We can go on writing stuff that nobody else could write, if you like, but the Waste Land and Ulysses remain the historic points.” Distinguishing himself from Pound: “what is wanted is an ad interim book which will give more attention to what the authors are trying to do now. This does not matter so much with Pound, whose Cantos just go on; but it matters with me and the juniors · · · so far as this book has to deal with me, I might just as well have stopped writing in 1923”, “Skeleton for a book on Contemporary Poetry” by Martin Gilkes, a report (1938). Spender 115: “Eliot—who tended to take a historic view of his work—once said to me that The Waste Land could not have been written at any moment except when it was written.”
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
In the course of writing about The Hollow Men (see Commentary), A. S. T. Fisher claimed that The Waste Land was the first important poem to reflect recent advances in psychology. In his reply, 19 Jan 1943, TSE wrote: “I would not contest your point about the influence of recent advances in psychology but if it is true the connection was unconscious and not deliberate.” (On Freud, to the Rev. Father Superior General, Society of St. John the Evangelist, 15 May 1935, of a book by Dr. Jovetz-Tereschchenko: “I speak · · · as one who has read the works of Freud with alarm, and who feels that the Freudian view of sex is wrong and anti-Christian, and who therefore welcomes any book which, like this, controverts that view.” To Warner Allen, 13 Mar 1945: “I am little read in the works of these people (because of a fear that too much psychology might be bad for poetry – I have seen it happen to one poet) but I imagine that I should find Jung the most to my taste.”)
To Eudo C. Mason, 19 Apr 1945: “It seems to me so far as I am competent to judge that you are justified in your interpretation of The Waste Land but I am surprised to think that any indications of Christian tradition were present in Prufrock. I was certainly quite ignorant and unconscious of them myself, and at the time, or at least before the poem was finished, was entirely a Bergsonian; but as I always say, an author’s knowledge of certain facts has value, whereas his interpretation or understanding of his own poem, and especially many years after writing it, may be no more authoritative and may for special reasons be less reliable than that of anyone else.” (To John Lehmann, 5 Feb 1958: “It certainly was not consciously a Christian poem, though it may perhaps be taken as foreshadowing conversion, but I was certainly not conscious of this at the time.”)
To Bonamy Dobrée, 9 Mar 1948: “I am quite sure that The Prelude is not an epic and that epic does not mean simply a long poem · · · Some Spaniard called The Waste Land an epopeya.”
Undated draft letter to John Peter [Nov? 1952], in response to his article A New Interpretation of “The Waste Land” (EinC July 1952):
had your article been nothing more than absurd I should have ignored it. I am obliged, however, to take notice of an “interpretation” of any poem of mine the purpose of which is to demonstrate that the poem is essentially concerned with homosexual passion. This is not merely wholly mistaken, but highly offensive.
Nor is this the end of the matter. Some readers may infer that the author of a poem on an homosexual theme must himself be a person of homosexual temperament, if not actually of homosexual practices.
Replying to Alice Quinn, a schoolchild, 19 Feb 1952: “The Waste Land is my most famous work, and therefore perhaps will prove the most important, but it is not my favourite.”
10. ELIOT, POUND AND THE WASTE LAND
Pound: “It is nearly impossible to make the right suggestion for emending another man’s work. Even if you do, he never quite thinks it remains his own”, reviewing Dante’s Inferno translated into English Triple Rhyme by Laurence Binyon in Criterion Apr 1934. TSE to Ronald Bottrall, 12 Feb 1948, on his collection of poems The Palisades of Fear (1948): “I believe that marginal comment is the most useful form of criticism of unpublished verse.”
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
On 20 Nov 1952, TSE’s Harvard friend W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez wrote to Harford Powel: “I like to recall that I introduced him to the poetry of Ezra Pound in College.” TSE’s recollection in On a Recent Piece of Criticism (1938) confirms that he came across Pound’s work at that time:
Mr. [G. W.] Stonier is mistaken, both about my relations with Pound in the past, and about my valuation of the different periods of Pound’s poetry—if, that is, I have understood Mr. Stonier. (I have the impression that Mr. Stonier’s knowledge of literary events before 1918 or so is at secondhand, since he speaks of The Egoist as having succeeded Blast.) I was introduced to Personae and Exultations in 1910, while still an undergraduate at Harvard. The poems did not then excite me, any more than did the poetry of Yeats: I was too much engrossed in working out the implications of Laforgue. I considered them, however, the only interesting poems by a contemporary that I had found. My indebtedness to Pound is of two kinds: first, in my literary criticism (this debt has been pointed out by Mr. [Hugh Gordon] Porteus and Mr. Mario Praz); and second, in his criticism of my poetry in our talk, and his indications of desirable territories to explore. This indebtedness extends from 1915 to 1922, after which period Mr. Pound left England, and our meetings became infrequent. My greatest debt was for his improvement of The Waste Land. But as for the poetry of “the early Pound,” there are only three or four original pieces that have made any deep impression upon me; and the Pound whom I find congenial is the author of Mauberley, Propertius, and the Cantos.
The extent of Pound’s editorial work on The Waste Land had been made public when part of a letter from TSE to Ford Madox Ford (1 Dec 1932) appeared in a pamphlet, The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Some Testimonies, which Farrar & Rinehart used in 1933 as publicity for their American edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos: “I owe too much to Ezra to be a critic. (I wish that the manuscript of THE WASTELAND with Ezra’s criticisms and still more important, his excisions, thank God he reduced a mess of some eight hundred lines to about half its size, might some day be exhumed. John Quinn had it. As a masterpiece of critical literature.)” Pound to TSE, 24 Apr [1933]: “Mussur Rinehaprs pamphlepp dun com, and I see it fur deh furs’ time TOOday Ah see you done got it off you’ ancestral chest, bout my habin gnawed off deh rind// (ob. W. Lnd) Ah dunno, as you had orter done it. Mebbe you right, enny rate you iz at las’ relieved you’self. And probably now it is to th’greater glory and not too soon. I mean it dont interfere with much / I know you dun been rarin fer to say so / ever since 1921. At any rate
it wdnt. Have done any good, if ‘released sooner’.”
TSE to Masuru Otaké, 6 Apr 1934: “I had no deliberate intention of dividing the poems according to the divisions of Elizabethan drama. There may, of course, be some analogy but it formed no part of my conscious purpose. What similarity there is between The Waste Land and Mr. Pound’s Cantos lies I think in versification, in the use of allusion and in a similar kind of concentration. There is no similarity in form.”
To Miss E. A. Madge, 16 Oct 1943: “I cannot imagine what means of support she [Dorothy Pound] and her husband have; he was a vehement supporter of the fascist regime and is an outcast from his own country; and their situation, whatever it may be, is a cause for great anxiety to all those who were ever their friends. Her husband is an honest though a very silly man; I owe him much gratitude for kindness in the past: I remain as much admiring [of] his poetry and literary criticism, as exasperated by his political opinions.”
In tribute: “It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem called The Waste Land which left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print. I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably: yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound’s critical genius”, Ezra Pound (1946).
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 70