T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect

Satire on Modern Misunderstandings

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137375742
• eBook ISBN: 9781137364692
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nella poesia

Here, G. Douglas Atkins offers a fresh new reading of the past century's most famous poem in English, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Using a comparatist approach that is both intra-textual and inter-textual, this book is a bold analysis of satire of modern forms of misunderstanding.

1

The Vanity of Human Wishes

Abstract: Reading is always the issue in confronting T.S. Eliot’s difficult poetry, The Waste Land being a prime example. The matter may resolve itself into a question of the movement of the poet’s imagination. In this regard, assisted by both statements in his essays and the example of his poetic practice, we may not locate a road map to his intentions, but likely to help is a focus attentive to verbal details, engaging in active comparison of words, images, and passages, and leading to prolonged “meditation.” Shown here to be a satire, Eliot’s most famous and probably most influential poem itself connects with several of his essays written around the same time in seeking to “associate” the separated, to “amalgamate disparate experience,” and to make such connections as the wastelanders are unable to or will not make.

Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect: Satire and Modern Misunderstandings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364692.

Thankfully, Ezra Pound got hold of Eliot’s lengthy, rambling verses, applied his sharp critical scissors, and transformed what was, frankly, a hodgepodge into a poem. Otherwise, we would not even be speaking today of a 1922 poem, which Old Possum wanted to call “He Do the Police in Different Voices.”¹ Eliot acknowledged his debt—eventually, three years later: “il fabbro miglior.” The dedication is elegant, being an allusion bearing significance for both poets. The words are Dante’s, addressed to Pound’s favorite, the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel, words Ole Ez had himself used as the title of a chapter in his 1910 book The Spirit of Romance; Pound also used the words to repeat Dante’s praise of Daniel: “the best fashioner of songs in the Provencal,” he wrote at the beginning of an essay on the twelfth-century poet in 1920.² Different voices, different registers mark the great poem, accounting for much of its complexity, and not a little of the misunderstanding that still surrounds it as we approach its centennial.

Pound was fresh from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a worthy competitor with The Waste Land for the top spot among twentieth-century poems in English. In these works, both satires, voice plays a crucial role, tonal shifts actually lying at the heart of the difficulty in reading Pound’s poem. Such issues are familiar in satire, even if the works are not so complex (though see Swift’s A Tale of a Tub); accounting for much of the difficulty is, as frequently in Swift, the unreliability of the speaker (Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal”)—or, to take but one relevant example, of the central consciousness (Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Eliot knew and admired).

As critical as is voice (and the concomitant matter of tone), there are other issues that face Eliot’s readers in The Waste Land. Some are so well-known as to require no more than passing reference here, including the apparent fragmentariness of sections and even of verses, both the frequent allusions to a wide variety of texts and the use of foreign words and phrases, the abrupt shifts in “coverage,” and the part played by the notes that Eliot added, identifying “sources” and background. The matter of structure, which Eliot found a problem in Dr. Johnson’s poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, of which (along with London) he published an edition with introductory essay in 1930, does not, in The Waste Land, quite seem responsible for the reader’s difficulties so much as movement does.³

It may, in fact, be the lack of authorial direction concerning the poem’s essential movement, a reliable indication of the relation and connection of part to part and part to whole, that troubles us most. It is something to which Eliot alluded in 1923 in praising Joyce’s “mythical method” in Ulysses and that he returned to, at greater length, in introducing his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabasis (1930).⁴ About the latter, he wrote that “any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain’, of explanatory and connecting matter,” rather than to “incoherence.” He proceeds to distinguish between “a logic of concepts” and “a logic of the imagination.” The latter is that followed by Perse and may be that followed by Eliot himself in such a poem as The Waste Land. The “logic of the imagination” abbreviates, and condenses, but also

the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, the total effect is produced.⁵

The details that Eliot describes here may, in the event, be of less importance than his fundamental concerns with “arrangement” and with the reader’s responsibility for figuring out the entailed relation. About the reader’s role, he soon adds, in fact:

And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.⁶

We do not often think of Eliot as being so concerned with the reader or, specifically, as placing such responsibility on the reader. We have to make connections that the wastelanders fail to make, perhaps cannot make. For the reader at least, connecting is not the end, but the beginning. For comparing and contrasting follow, the reader required to see similarities and differences alike, relating one thing to the other and measuring each by the other.

The year after The Waste Land, Eliot predicted, or warned us about, or defended and prepared the way for Modernist poetry such as he and St.-John Perse would make. I refer to his famous statement in the essay “The Metaphysical Poets”:

[I]t appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.⁷

This forthright declaration stresses the necessity that the poet be not only “catholic” of sensibility and learning but also something not sufficiently accounted for, even today. I mean “indirect”: the poet must not tell but show, and show in a particular way. It is not, pace Heraclitus, that “the way up is the way down,” but, rather, that the way up is in, through, and by means of the way down: no identity of opposites, in other words, but a sort of mediation, even detour (which is not “detour” at all since there is no other way). Opened up, therefore, is a whole slew of effects, not least among them place and prominence of the via negativa and, with it, satire, the indirect genre supreme.

Eliot’s early poems are, most of them, satirical. The earliest appear in Prufrock and Other Observations, whose very title points to the satirical character of these works, including the longest and most famous: “observation” stands, as a matter of fact, in immediate contrast with “reflection,” the Montaignian and Romantic separation from experience that is the object of Eliot’s rejection and repudiation in his first collection of critical essays The Sacred Wood (1920); observation reveals, holds up to exposure, and thus figures as complementary to satire. Crucial, and central to the way satire works—and the way The Waste Land works—is indirectness: you get to the writer’s thesis in, through, and by means of its antithesis. Although their satirical qualities have long been recognized, the poems of roughly the same time period have received scant treatment as satires. I shall perhaps treat them as such elsewhere, only pointing here to a continuity, through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” to The Waste Land. We can no more trust the voice of the latter poem than we can rely on the inimitable voice of the great dramatic monologue.

And yet to grasp the satirical character of The Waste Land, including the qualities of that sometimes-whining but oft-mistaken voice, we have to return to the plaguing matter of the poem’s movement, “the logic of the imagination” that governs it. A hint from outside helps.

I refer again to “The Metaphysical Poets,” published two years after The Waste Land in the Hogarth Essays volume Homage to John Dryden. Here, among others, a statement jumps off the page, offering itself as an insight with far-reaching implications and application. Note the following, resonant, rich, and ever-so-suggestive:

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.⁸

The mention, alone, of the “fragmentary” experience of “the ordinary man” is enough to recall The Waste Land, frequently said to record the fragmentariness of modern life in the waste land and containing direct statements concerning “fragments . . . shored against [one’s] ruins.” The binary opposition poet / ordinary man leaves me unsatisfied, and wondering whether the latter cannot somehow emulate the former and thus transcend the “chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.” Once attentive to Eliot’s words, moreover, you do not fail to notice the whole forming from the apparently disparate experiences the poet has selected; they have to do with reading and writing, themselves attended (at best) with love and providing vital sustenance. Eliot’s own structure thus mimics his claim, form and meaning themselves blended, mixed, amalgamated.

The later prose passage, I am suggesting, points to an essential feature of Eliot’s poem, composed, as it is, of “disparate” experiences, which it is the reader’s responsibility to see as amalgamated. The reader does not, though, as in recent reader-response theories, make meaning unavailable without him; rather, the poet has done the work of writing the meaning, having, before writing the poem, himself amalgamated such experiences. The reader (simply) mimics, antiphonally, the poet’s work, following at one remove the poet’s lead, with the aim of arriving where the poet did before her or him. The burden on the reader is thus considerable—just as it is, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Joyce asks the reader to become the hero (and certainly not Stephen Dedalus, his semi-autobiographical an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Vanity of Human Wishes
• 2  Two and two, necessarye coniunction: Toward Amalgamating the Disparate
• 3  He Do the [Poet] in Different Voices: Eyes, You, and I in The Hollow Men
• 4  The End of All Our Exploring: The Gift Half Understood and Four Quartets
• 5  Voices Hollow and Plaintive, Unattended and Peregrine: Hints and Guesses in The Waste Land
• 6  Tradition as (Disembodied) Voice: The word within the word in Gerontion
• 7  From Hints to Guesses: Eliot B.C. and After Conversion
• Bibliography
• Index