Dig It Up Again

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in the garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!’
 
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The Burial of the Dead, or Pop

On Tuesday, January 5, 1965, Bob Dylan was in Greenwich Village. In just over a week, he would head into Columbia Studios on Seventh Avenue to record his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, sparking an extraordinary year-and-a-half creative explosion that transformed him from a prominent figure in an American musical subculture into a global superstar. No one knows whether, passing one of the newsstands on Bleecker or MacDougal, he stopped to peruse the front page of the New York Times, where he would have seen, below the fold, the headline: “T.S. Eliot, the Poet, Is Dead in London at 76.” But six months later, having put a tour of England behind him, having whittled down “twenty pages of vomit” into a single that was climbing the Billboard charts, having alienated his fanbase by plugging in a sunburst Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival, and having sat for one of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests at the Factory, he recorded an electric version of what would be the final song on his next album, Highway 61 Revisited, which includes the following octet:

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune,
The Titanic sails at dawn;
Everybody’s shouting,
“Which side are you on?”
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower,
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers.

With these lines from the penultimate stanza of “Desolation Row,” Dylan announced a change of the guard. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot—the two men whose collaboration produced The Waste Land, the most important English-language poem of the 20th century, and, by extension, the era of high Modernism they “captained”—were about to go under in spectacular fashion. In Dylan’s telling, the occasion is cause not for mourning but for schadenfreude: their imminent drowning is accompanied by the sound of bemusement and steel drums.

It's perhaps ironic then that “Desolation Row” should be so obviously indebted to The Waste Land. The two toponymic titles contain cognate adjectives (waste, desolation), both are structured with a metadiegetic narrative frame (Eliot’s newspaper police blotter, Dylan’s epistolary correspondence), and, at 433 lines and 120 lines respectively, both were their authors’ longest compositions to date. Despite guitarist Charlie McCoy’s ranchera-style fingerpicking on the album version, Dylan considered “Desolation Row” a “city song,” a song of New York, just as The Waste Land was a song of London (“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”). Much like The Waste Land, “Desolation Row” characters are drawn from history (Einstein, Casanova, Nero), literature (Romeo, Ophelia, the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame), myth and legend (Neptune, Robin Hood, Cinderella, Cain and Abel, Noah), popular culture (Bette Davis), and the macabre imagination of its author (Dr. Filth and his assistant, for example).

There are even direct references to Eliot’s poem in Dylan’s ballad: Madame Sosostris with her “wicked pack of cards” reappears in “Desolation Row” as “the fortune telling lady”; “blind” Tiresias “throbbing between two lives” reappears as the “blind commissioner … with one hand … tied to the tightrope walker / The other… in his pants.” The “hordes swarming / Over endless plains” reappear as a riot squad and a “superhuman crew” of homicidal “agents”; the fishermen listening to the “pleasant whining of a mandoline” in a pub on Lower Thames Street reappears as the fishermen listening to calypso music (a genre whose name is not derived from the Greek goddess, yet one can’t help but hear the Homeric resonance anyway). And, of course, amid “falling towers,” the dead Phoenician sailor, a man no longer concerned with “profit and loss,” reappears as Eliot himself. Reviewing Highway 61 Revisited for the Daily Telegraph, jobbing jazz critic Philip Larkin summed up “Desolation Row” as an “enchanting tune” with “mysterious, possibly half-baked words.” This wouldn’t make for a bad description of “The Waste Land either: “Weialala leia, Wallala leialala.”

Far from consigning Eliot to history, Dylan, rather than any living poet, is his rightful, perhaps only, heir. If this claim seems contrarian at first, it probably has less to do with the understanding of Dylan’s current status as a cultural figure—the only living artist, in any genre, whose work is appreciated by the young and the old, audiences and critics, academics and consecrating awards committees alike—than the understanding of Eliot’s status more than 50 years after his death. Eliot’s public image—which he had a hand in cultivating—as a stuffed shirt, contemptuous of the tastes and political aspirations of the masses; overly fond of order; sexually priggish; and, in his less guarded moments, a bigot, has not aged well. That is why it is sometimes difficult for people to recapture how he might have appeared to a young writer coming of age in the shadow of his enormous presence in public life, pedagogical institutions, and poetic groups—a poet such as Sylvia Plath, say, or a novelist such as Cynthia Ozick, who both settled on the same descriptor: “God.”  

Like any significant artist, Eliot was a complex, contradictory person: his views changed with time and circumstance, and his public persona was not always in accord with his private life. The persona gave rise to the widespread critical view that Eliot was not so much avant-garde as arrière-garde. He was a Modernist but a Modernist against modernity, “to the point,” in the words of scholar Tony Pinkney, “where [he] sees in his secretary’s supper of baked beans in ‘The Waste Land’ … a terminal threat to a Great Tradition that has come down to us from Homer.” Pinkney unfavorably compares Eliot’s inclusion of the typist’s tins in the textual museum of The Waste Land to Andy Warhol’s cans of Campbell’s soup: “the antiseptic, elitist, directive high-cultural impulse of Modernism” versus “the warmer, more creaturely world of the mass culture where most of us actually live most of the time.” Yet, at least where Eliot was concerned, this is a myth, one of many that will have to be buried if readers want to understand the significance of The Waste Land today, 100 years after its publication.

Eliot was often sharply critical of the effects of “worm-eaten liberalism” and the technologies and products of the Second Industrial Revolution on the entity he over-grandly called “Civilisation,” but he was, in fact, an avid consumer of the mass culture to which these gave rise. When he was young, he took boxing lessons and enjoyed attending matches at Royal Albert Hall. He and his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, with whom he otherwise had little in common, loved to go dancing, and Eliot knew all the latest crazes: he offered to teach his friend Virginia Woolf the Grizzly Bear, the Chicken Strut, and the Memphis Shake. Before marital troubles and illnesses made Eliot wary of entertaining at home, he and Vivien hosted cocktail parties because, in Woolf’s words, he thought them “modern” and “chic.”

He rarely turned down a drink—he liked gin—and when drunk tended to make admittedly bad, but nonetheless ribald, jokes. He happily accompanied his patron Lady Rothermere, the wife of the owner of the Daily Mail, to a séance held by the Russian occultist P.D. Ouspensky. Eliot read popular literature and was fond of detective fiction, especially Arthur Conan Doyle and Georges Simenon. He liked the Little Tramp and sent fan mail to Groucho Marx; he gushed over Sean Connery’s performances as James Bond. Throughout his life, he loved popular music—from the ragtime of his St. Louis childhood to jazz and Frank Sinatra—and the popular stage—from vaudeville and Broadway musicals to the English music hall.

“One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song,” the critic Clement Greenberg wrote in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Eliot, who generally had kinder things to say about the latter than the former, would have found the difference exaggerated. His mass cultural enthusiasms—along with a number of other features of capitalist modernity between the wars—did not fail to make their way into his poetry, even if they didn’t always make it into the published versions. Everyone remembers the “elegant” “intelligent” “Shakespeherian Rag”—a reference to a 1912 hit by Gene Buck, David Stamper, and Herman Ruby—the “record on the gramophone,” and the nursery rhyme about London Bridge from The Waste Land, but few know that the poem’s original version, with the working title “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” opened with this account of a drunken visit to a vaudeville show in Boston:           

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,
There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind
(Don’t you remember that time after a dance,
Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry,
And old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz,
With old Jane, Tom’s wife; and we got Joe to sing
“I’m proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me,
There’s not a man can say a word agin me”).
Then we had dinner in good form, and a couple of Bengal lights.
When we got up into the show, up in Row A,
I tried to put my foot in the drum, and didn’t the girl squeal,
She never did take to me, a nice guy—but rough;
The next thing we were out in the street, Oh was it cold!
When will you be good? Blew in to the Opera Exchange,
Sopped up some gin, sat in to the cork game,
Mr. Fay was there, singing “The Maid of the Mill”;
Then we thought we’d breeze along and take a walk.
Then we lost Steve.

Fewer still will know that the original title of Eliot’s liturgical 1930 poem “Ash Wednesday” was “All Aboard for Natchez Cairo and St. Louis,” a line from a song by the popular vaudeville comedy duo Two Black Crows about a steamboat traveling up the Mississippi. Eliot’s more perceptive contemporary critics, such as The Dial's jazz critic Gilbert Seldes, grouped him not only with Picasso, Stravinsky, and Joyce but also with George Gershwin and Cole Porter.

In October 1922, the same month The Waste Land was published in The Criterion in London, Eliot wrote an obituary for the English music-hall legend Marie Lloyd. “I have always admired the genius of Marie Lloyd,” he wrote. “I certainly did not realize that her death would strike me as the important event that it was.” Eliot admired Lloyd, not despite her immense popularity among her largely working-class audience but because of it: “no other comedian succeeded so well in giving expression to the life of that audience, in raising it to a kind of art … it was her understanding of the people and sympathy for them, and the people’s recognition of the fact that she embodied the virtues which they most respected in private life, that raised her to the position she occupied at her death.” When writing criticism, Eliot later admitted, “the poet, at the back of his mind … is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate, the kind that he wants to write.” It is not far-fetched to surmise that the combination of artistic “superiority” Lloyd demonstrated and the “great popularity” she enjoyed was what Eliot hoped to achieve with his own lyrical and dramatic efforts.

He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It is difficult to imagine a less popular form than the verse play, but Eliot’s first one, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), sold out in its first four weeks and was performed for 225 nights before it toured throughout the UK and then appeared on the BBC. Three and a half million people tuned in to watch his Tony Award–winning The Cocktail Party when it was broadcast on television in 1957, and the script for his play The Confidential Clerk was a bestseller. Even his literary and social criticism reached wide audiences: his pamphlet The Idea of a Christian Society sold more than 200 copies a week when it came out in 1939. The first print run of his Selected Prose was 40,000 copies; in 1956, more than 13,500 people packed into a basketball arena on the grounds of the University of Minnesota to hear his lecture “The Frontiers of Criticism.” None of that remotely compares to the success of his most popular work, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the collection of light verse he wrote to amuse his godson. It later furnished the libretto for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster musical. To date, Cats has grossed more than $4 billion.

As for The Waste Land, the view that it could be enjoyed by only a small coterie of literary connoisseurs who had the erudition—and by implication wealth, education, and leisure—to appreciate it has always been false. According to the literary historian Franco Moretti, precisely what made The Waste Land a landmark is twofold. First, it was “all-inclusive”—putting “common speech” from across the entire class spectrum, from the gossip of chambermaids and the last calls of bartenders to the childhood memories of an archduke’s cousin, side-by-side. Second, it was “synthetic," combining all the artistic currents of the day, from post-Wagnerian symbolism, Imagist condensation, and Cubist collage to Joycean mythography, Futurist layout, Dadaist echolalia, Duchampian found art, and pop musical syncopation into a single revolutionary poem. The populist critique obscures the hold The Waste Land had on the public imagination from the beginning. Virginia Woolf was far from the only early reader who had “not yet tackled the sense” of the poem but liked “the sound.” A young Ralph Ellison, to give another example, was “moved and intrigued” enough by The Waste Land when he encountered it (though at first "it defied [his] analysis”) to do what any curious person would do: read the books referenced in the Notes. For Eliot, understanding poetry was overrated. He knew from his reading of Dante that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” The Waste Land communicated to its audience as poetry always has: through the enchanting music and striking images of its lines.

Eliot was always self-conscious about the slenderness of his output. His Collected Poems total a paltry 240 pages, as compared to 596 pages for Stevens, 784 pages for Dickinson, 896 pages for Whitman, and considerably more than 1,000 for Pound. But Eliot was extremely efficient. Only five of his poems entered the canon—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men,” and Four Quartets—but few poets have a higher ratio of memorable lines to total lines than he. Fill in the blanks:

1. In the room the women come and go /
2. Do I dare to
3. After such knowledge
4. Thoughts of a dry brain in
5. April is
6. HURRY UP PLEASE
7. One of the low on whom assurance sits /
8. Consider Phlebas, who
9. These fragments I have
10. Between the motion / And the act /
11. This is the way the world ends /
12. Humankind / Cannot bear 
13. In my end is
14. Not fare well, / But
15. The communication / Of the dead is

Quotability has been the defining characteristic of poetry, in the West at least, since its origins in the oral performances of the Homeric bards in Dark Age Greece. It is the means by which a poem enters the unconscious life of a culture and how it survives there. Eliot pays his respects to this function by inserting dozens of quotations from the Upanishads and the Bible to Dante and Shakespeare to Baudelaire and Wagner in The Waste Land. Since Eliot’s death, however, the poets who carried on the legacy of formal innovation associated with Modernism largely eschewed quotability and conceived of poetry as a form to interface with visually and conceptually: one thinks of Charles Olson, John Ashbery, and Susan Howe in the United States and J.H. Prynne in Britain. But that does not mean quotability disappeared; rather, it was subsumed by a different genre: pop music. The Swedish Academy recognized this when, in 2016, it controversially awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature. His citation—“for having created new poetic expressions within the American song tradition”—could have been Eliot’s when he won the Nobel in 1948. If it takes a comparison of The Waste Land and “Desolation Row” to see why this is true, such are the vagaries of Tradition and the Individual Talent.

 

A Game of Chess, or Ruin Value

The Waste Land was Pound’s poem—in more ways than one. The manuscript Eliot delivered to Pound in Paris in early January 1922 bore the working title “He Do the Police in Different Voices” and an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was the culmination of a year of effort weaving together between 48 and 55 drafts, incorporating materials from unpublished poetry written as far back as his student days, and totaling more than 35 pages. For Eliot, 1921 was four seasons in hell: overwork at Lloyds Bank, where he managed foreign accounts; marital discord; a stressful visit from his mother; and trips to physicians and psychiatrists—all against the backdrop of labor agitation and a state of emergency in Britain, revolution in Ireland, war in Eastern Europe, and financial chaos in Germany. (Reading the results a year later, one Parisian wag named him “Tears Eliot,” and a rumor circulated that he had attempted suicide. In fact, only one Eliot spent long stretches of 1921 wanting to die: Vivien.)

Pound and his blue pencil cut the poem in half, making changes major and minor with, as Hannah Sullivan puts it, “the confidence of a master exciser at the top of his game.” He removed a 54-line section describing a drunken night on the town in Boston, inspired by a reading of the Circe episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, from “The Burial of the Dead” so the poem would begin with the word April. He put nine diagonal slashes through 35 couplets about the socialite Fresca that Eliot conceived of as the beginning of “The Fire Sermon” with a tart remark in the margins: “if you mean this as a burlesque you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope—and you can’t.” Then Pound compressed the quatrains of the central episode with the typist, the “young man carbuncular,” and Tiresias into two verse paragraphs. He reduced four episodes about sailors that comprised “Death by Water,” which included a dramatic account of a shipwreck in the Dry Salvages off the coast of Massachusetts, into 10 lines about Phlebas the Phoenician. Later, Pound nixed Eliot’s suggestion to get rid of “Death by Water” entirely, thus ensuring the poem had a five- rather than four-part structure. Along with dozens of more local substitutions and cuts to individual words and lines, he also sent Eliot in search of a new epigraph, which he found in Petronius’s Satyricon, and perhaps even a new title, which Eliot claimed to have found in Jessie Weston’s 1920 study of the Grail quest in Arthurian legend, From Ritual to Romance.   

In his 1959 Paris Review interview, Eliot told Donald Hall that what made Pound a fine critic and editor was that “he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do.” But the fact is that Pound’s edits were motivated by his own aesthetic preoccupations rather than Eliot’s. For better or worse, they radically altered the poem’s meaning and, collaterally, the way it and its author were received. Ever since Pound’s 1914 essay “Vortex,” in which he elaborated, in his typically scattershot way, on the centrality of image rather than idea in poetry, first proposed in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” the year before, he had wondered whether it would be possible to write “a long Imagiste or vorticist poem.” With the manuscript of “He Do the Police” in hand, he got the chance to apply (on a much larger scale) the editing technique he had discovered in the tearoom of the British Library when he cut the “excess adjectives” out of H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways.” 

Pound’s impulses were to cut the ligaments out of Eliot’s narratives and denature his use of regular forms and meters in favor of passages that resembled “a heap of broken images” and “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” They conformed to his idea of the “vortex” as “the point of maximum energy” and to the collagist practices that were hallmarks of the Modernist avant-garde. Deleting the Boston and the shipwreck narratives, however, meant that the poem was firmly centered in Europe rather than the United States, much to the chagrin of William Carlos Williams. Lost along with those sections was much of the vernacular language and engagement with popular culture that would have tempered the impression that the poem was elitist. Deleting the Fresca passages made the poem more tonally coherent but also obscured Eliot’s sardonic humor and his gifts as a satirist. The four-part symphonic structure Eliot had initially envisioned would have, according to Marshall McLuhan, given the poem a symmetrical, thus more balanced, form. Such a structure may have made Eliot’s later comments about the aesthetic value of classical order less out of the blue.

On the other hand, the five-part structure Pound ensured by retaining “Death by Water” turned it into a small Elizabethan or Jacobean drama, the form Eliot considered the apex of cultural production. “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” an allusion to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, would have given readers the clue that what they were reading was something like a newspaper police blotter with its litany of atrocities and crimes, but it’s difficult to imagine a poem of that title grasping readers’ imaginations the way The Waste Land has. Whether Pound’s edits made the poem better is a matter of debate—the consensus, as Sullivan reports, is that he successfully “cut the waste out of The Waste Land”—but, inarguably, they made it more modern. The percussive rhythm of the gerunds in what were now its opening seven lines recall not only those of the Eb dominant 7 chords in Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps but also those of the internal combustion engines that had become standard features of the soundscape of metropolitan London. The poem’s abrupt switches between unidentified voices recalls the experience of using a telephone when calls were still largely connected by switchboard operators.

Pound, in any event, was pleased with the results of what he called his “caesarean operation.” “Eliot’s Waste Land is the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” he wrote to a former teacher. To use another metaphor, Pound’s edited version represents the “ruins” of Eliot’s draft—and, 100 years later, readers have not lost the taste for ruins. What is amazing, in retrospect, is that Eliot let Pound and his blue pencil get away with it.

No one will ever know what impact The Waste Land would have had if the public had been introduced to it in something like the form of the January 1922 manuscript, but we can be all but certain that it would not have become an epoch-making cultural event without Pound’s efforts as an impresario and a hype man. Gertrude Stein recalled that “Ezra talked about T.S. Eliot. It was the first time anyone had talked about T.S. at the house. Pretty soon everybody talked about T.S.” The day after he received the manuscript, Pound convened a dinner with Eliot, Joyce, and the publisher Horace Liveright of the firm Boni & Liveright. Liveright pledged Eliot a $150 advance against 15 percent royalties. When Liveright finally received a copy of what he had purchased, he had one serious objection: at 19 manuscript pages, The Waste Land was too short to publish in a commercial edition. Eliot’s ad hoc solution—to pad out the edition with 50 endnotes elucidating the sources of many of the poem’s citations—had fateful consequences for the poem’s reception.

Two weeks later, Pound told Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial, that “Eliot’s poem is important, almost enough to make everyone else shut up shop.” Thayer was intrigued. His initial offer of $130 for simultaneous US publication with Eliot’s new magazine The Criterion was rejected by Eliot as too little for a year’s work. Tense negotiations between Eliot and Thayer continued throughout the spring and into summer with Pound acting as a mediator. Between March and June, Eliot toyed with the idea of placing the poem, now titled The Waste Land, with the small-circulation Little Review. It would have been the natural choice: since 1914, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s magazine, whose motto was “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste,” had been the home of avant-garde literature. Its roster included Emma Goldman, Amy Lowell, Baroness Freytag von Freytag-Loringhoven, Yeats, Pound, and Eliot himself. Most recently, Anderson and Heap had serialized Ulysses, for which they were dragged into court on obscenity charges.

But Pound had higher hopes for the baby he had delivered. In Eliot, Pound had not merely the author of an exemplary Modernist poem but also a palatable representative for a more mainstream public. “[Eliot] is not an alarming revolutionary,” he explained to Thayer, “and he don’t, as I at moments, get mistaken for a labour-leader or bolshy bomb-thrower.” (To Eliot, he counseled, “You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back door and take the swag.”) In May, Pound reached out to John Peale Bishop, the outgoing managing editor of Vanity Fair, to ask in the bluntest terms possible: “What wd. Vanity Fair pay Eliot for ‘Waste Land’?” In August, Bishop, who would soon be replaced by Edmund Wilson, passed through Paris on his honeymoon and called on Pound, who talked his ear off about the poem.

The threat of losing out to the magazine they perceived as their nearest competitor proved decisive to Thayer and his coeditor, James Sibley Watson Jr. At an emergency meeting in Berlin, they promised to give Eliot the second annual Dial Award, with its $2,000 purse in recognition of “service to letters” made by contributors to the magazine, along with the sum they had originally offered him, meaning that Eliot’s total payout exceeded his yearly salary at Lloyds. They also agreed to buy 350 discounted copies from Liveright, giving the American publisher an early sales boost. What is perhaps more "curious" and "bizarre," in the words of scholar and critic Lawrence Rainey, than the fact that a publication such as “Vanity Fair was considered a serious contender to publish the poem” in the first place was the “spectacle” of “two editors of a major review offering a figure three times the national income per capita … for a poem that neither had seen nor read.”

What did they think they were doing? Rainey argued that The Dial’s strategy was not as irrational as it seemed. “By 1922,” he wrote, “modernist literature desperately required a financial-critical success that would seem comparable to the stunning achievement of modernist painting,” such as the breakthroughs of The Armory Show in New York and the Salon d’Antin in Paris. Because of the nature of the two media, however, the economy of painting could be sustained indefinitely by a class of wealthy patrons whose ownership of rare commodities drove up their value. Literature, with its division of ownership between the copyright holder and the purchaser of a printed book, meant that patronage had to yield to sales. Thayer, from a family that enjoyed a Massachusetts mill fortune, was an avid investor in the modern art market and was not above using The Dial’s advertising and editorial pages to draw attention to galleries that exhibited the work he owned. He had been present at the Little Review trial and had seen the newspaper coverage it generated. In buying The Waste Land sight unseen, Rainey believes, Thayer was not so much acquiring the right to print a poem as shares in a new, potentially profitable, “idiom” in a market where products were becoming increasingly differentiated on the basis of innovations in form.

The gamble paid off. The October issue of The Dial, in which The Waste Land appeared, without the Notes, announced the arrival of an important new journal on the literary scene, a role The Dial maintained until it folded right before the 1929 Wall Street crash. Liveright, who placed the notice of the Dial Award on the dust jacket of the first edition of The Waste Land when it hit shelves in December, reported two months later that it had sold “1000 copies to date, and who knows, it may go up to 2000 or 3000.” Liveright’s biographer estimates that the number was closer to 5,000. On the inside flap was a lengthy blurb from Burton Rascoe, who had covered the Dial Award in his weekly literary gossip column for the New York Tribune, calling The Waste Land “perhaps the finest poem of this generation.” The poem received more than 50 reviews in the US, evenly split between glowing and uncomprehending. The latter, as Thayer had hoped, generated further coverage of the poem, which became a newsworthy event.

History furnishes a nice control case here. Eliot, rather than Pound, oversaw the poem’s publication in Britain, where the critical response was more muted: three reviews after its appearance in The Criterion and another six after it was published in a limited, rather than commercial, edition by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in September 1923. All the reviews but one were hostile. The Hogarth Press edition earned Eliot a fanbase among the disaffected “Bright Young Things”—one was writer Harold Acton, who recited The Waste Land through a megaphone at Christ Church, Oxford, an incident Evelyn Waugh immortalized in Brideshead Revisited (1945). (Perhaps more surprisingly, Britain’s young Leftists also gravitated toward the poem; according to Stephen Spender, The Waste Land persuaded more than one to join the Communist Party.) In Britain, Eliot followed a more familiar path from enfante terrible to eminence grise; his breakthrough to mainstream success there came only after he became a British citizen and converted to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927. Judging by the respective obituaries in the New York Times and The Times of London, The Waste Land was always more central to American than British readers, for whom his masterpiece is the more formally conservative Four Quartets.

In 1922 and 1923, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and Edward Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion, two early public relations primers, were also published. Many of The Waste Land's initial readers wondered whether it was a publicity stunt. Given that Thayer and Watson essentially rigged the Dial Award to obtain the poem in the first place, such suspicions were not unfounded. The most famous of these charges appeared in the inaugural issue of Time magazine, which reported that it was “rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax.” As Edmund Wilson summed it up for the readers of Vanity Fair in 1923, “Since the publication of The Waste Land, Mr. T.S. Eliot has become the most hotly contested issue in American poetry.” Perhaps the most telling sign that The Waste Land had penetrated public consciousness was that, like Marcel Duchamp’s Modernist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), it swiftly generated parodies—such as Allen Tate's “The Chaste Land,” Samuel Hoffenstein's “The Moist Land,” Christopher Ward's “The Dry Land,” and Louis Zukofsky's “Poem Beginning ‘The’”—and became what today would be called a meme.

Although Eliot was prone to dismissing his work in general and The Waste Land in particular—calling it “a wholly insignificant grouse against life” and “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”—he nonetheless took steps to protect the rights to what he later acknowledged was his “longest and most profitable poem.” All in all, il miglior fabrro—“the better craftsman,” as Eliot called Pound in the poem’s now-famous dedication—had achieved everything he set out to do when he took out his blue pencil and set to work on "He Do The Police in Different Voices" in January 1922. Everything, that is, except convince Eliot to quit his day job.

 

The Fire Sermon, or Political Economy

By the early 1920s, Pound’s ambitions had broadened beyond writing poetry, talent scouting for little magazines, and acting as impresario for a series of literary avant-gardes. He had immersed himself in the Social Credit theories of the heterodox economist C.H. Douglas, which anticipated today’s Universal Basic Income movement, and he wanted to do nothing less than “restart civilization.” In March 1922, Pound published “Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application” in The New Age, a British weekly with origins in the Christian socialist movement. “[T]here is no functioning co-ordinated civilization in Europe,” Pound complained.

Democracy has signally failed to provide for its best writers; aristocratic patronage exists neither in noun nor in adjective; illiterate motor-owners are incapable of that function. The rewards of writers are in inverse order of merit. That is to say, the worst work usually brings the greatest financial reward.

Writers, he argued, need leisure to create. If they were not born to it, time and energy spent securing their subsistence was time away from their civilization-benefiting art. Since the democratic states and aristocratic classes of Europe would not contribute to financially providing for the leisure of writers he deemed deserving, Pound would take the matter into his own hands. He announced the inauguration of the Bel Esprit funding program, inviting readers of The New Age to donate. The aim, as scholar Beci Carver explained, was to turn writers into something like what today would be called LLCs. The test subject for this experiment in Social Credit would be a then-obscure poet named T.S. Eliot, one of the 7,400 employees of Lloyds Bank in the City of London.

Pound wasn’t the only person scheming to relieve Eliot from office duty at the time: Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, and Lytton Strachey also urged him to quit. I.A. Richards tried find him a job at Cambridge; later, the economist John Maynard Keynes convinced the board of The Nation to offer Eliot a position as the magazine’s literary editor. When Eliot turned down the gig, he gave Keynes the same excuse he gave a half-dozen other well-wishers: because of Vivien’s medical expenses, he could not take a job that paid him less and offered less security than Lloyds did.

Yet Eliot’s personal finances were never as dire as he made them out to be. Between his salary at the bank, the stocks he inherited from his father, his father-in-law’s real estate holdings in what would soon become the Free State of Ireland, the interest-free loan Bertrand Russell gave him, the wages he received from Lady Rothermere to edit The Criterion, and the supplemental income he earned from the literary journalism he found time to churn out, Eliot had more resources at his disposal than Pound, who had started the Bel Esprit program; the Woolfs, who offered to contribute to it; or Wyndham Lewis, who could not afford to. After winning the Dial Award, which gave Eliot enough financial buffer to focus exclusively on writing, he stayed at the bank for another three years. He left, not to become a freelance poet and critic or even an academic but for another salaried position—editor of the new publishing venture Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber). He remained employed there for the rest of his life. When Bel Esprit came to the attention of the gossip columnists at the Liverpool Daily Express, Eliot, who possessed a “certain self-advancing ruthlessness” (Virginia Woolf) and who could be an “operator” (Edmund Wilson), scuttled the idea once and for all. Most likely, as the professor Matt Seybold surmises, Eliot was embarrassed by “a campaign to raise money so the son of a CEO, the grandson of the founder of Washington University, and the son-in-law of an English real estate mogul could more avidly pursue his poetic career.” In the end, Pound was forced to conclude, as Lady Rothermere already had, that the reason Eliot did not quit his day job was because he liked it.

And why wouldn’t he? Aside from ensuring a stable income for himself and Vivien, he was respected by his colleagues and superiors, who recognized his talents and offered him numerous opportunities for career growth. Two months after he was hired in 1917, through a connection of his father-in-law, to work in the Colonial and Foreign Department, he was promoted. Two years later, he was transferred to the Information Department, where he reported to the bank’s board of directors. In late 1922, a position as head of intelligence was created specifically for him. On top of that, his work was intellectually stimulating. His tasks included writing the “Foreign Exchanges” column for Lloyds Bank Monthly and, later, overseeing another publication, Extracts from the Foreign Press, which condensed financial information from between 10 to 20 newspapers in seven different languages into a daily briefing. His focus on currency exchanges, particularly in Germany, meant that he faced one of the most pressing problems of the postwar period: “elucid[idating] knotty points in that appalling document” the Treaty of Versailles. In the Information Department, Seybold wrote, “Eliot found a seat of cultural influence that was equal to any editorship. … Resigning [would have meant] … renouncing his most direct and tangible access to political power.”

Eliot kept a grueling schedule. Between working at the office, filing reviews, getting The Criterion off the ground, and tending to his ill wife, he mentally and physically stretched himself beyond the breaking point. Between October and December 1921, the bank granted him a medical leave of absence. He and Vivien traveled to a seaside resort in southeastern England (“On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing”) and then to a sanitorium on the northern shore of Lake Geneva (“By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept”), funded by Lady Ottoline Morrell, to seek treatment for neurasthenia, a sociopsychological illness that primarily afflicted white-collar office workers with nervous exhaustion, similar to today’s “burnout.” There, among the “banks and chocolate shops” of Lausanne, he finished, in a fugue-like state, the last section of “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” Although Pound argued that the “waste” of “time and energy in banking” diminished Eliot’s output, the evidence points in the other direction: the eight years Eliot worked at Lloyds were the most productive of his career.

His experience there was integral to The Waste Land. At Lloyds, he was part of a new kind of office culture, whose most notable feature was the presence of a sizable female labor force. Women clerks first appeared in England during the war, especially in white collar settings such as those in the banking and insurance sectors, where they were tasked with facilitating and managing an immense network of communication flows: typing correspondence and memoranda, taking dictation, filing documents, making carbon copies, indexing information cards. The figure of the typist, or “typewriter,” as she was sometimes called, metonymically identified with her machine, was a staple of popular fiction at the time. Eliot used the tropes of this genre for the assignation scene in “The Fire Sermon,” which many subsequent commentators have taken as the centerpiece of the poem. That scene, in which a “small house agent’s clerk” seduces an unenthusiastic typist after coming home from work, is witnessed by the blind prophet Tiresias, whose experience as both a male and a female gives him epistemic access to the thoughts of both the “young man carbuncular” and his victim, a “human engine.”

Starting with Pound, it has been common to identify Tiresias with Eliot as the poem’s narrating persona. Like Tiresias, whose "eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk," Eliot synthesizes both the male clerk and the female typist: the former in his work at the bank, the latter in his use of a typewriter—an appliance that was coded, according to the gender norms of the time, female—to produce his poem. “[T]hrobbing between" these “two lives” in his work as a banker and a poet, Eliot found himself in a unique position to “perceive the scene”—not just the one being enacted on a “divan or bed” in a rented room in London but also across the unreal cities of Europe—and “foretell the rest.”

From his office on 75 Lombard Street, within earshot of the “dead sound” of the bells of St. Mary Woolnoth, Eliot had a window on the “vast panorama of futility and anarchy, that is contemporary history” enjoyed by no other writer of his day—except for perhaps a certain Herr Kafka, who was then a little-known lawyer for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. The standard account of The Waste Land attributes its dirge-like tone and fragmented form to the experience of modern warfare in the trenches of the Western Front. But the Great War, as it was then known, figures little in the poem compared to its direct treatment by, say, Pound in “Hugh Selywyn Mauberley” as well as in poetry by Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, and others who actually served. If anything, the war did more to prepare the ground for the poem’s reception than its production—especially among young Brits, for whom World War I delegitimated the genteel culture The Waste Land indicts and who had a political alternative in the Bolshevik Revolution and, to a lesser extent, among young Americans, who, thanks to a strong dollar, flocked to Europe in droves. Of more indelible impact on The Waste Land itself were more recent events, such as the “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless [originally Polish] plains,” a reference to the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, or the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, which sends Mr. Eugenides, “Smyrna merchant,” to London or—most important of all—the Paris Peace Conference that Eliot’s Bloomsbury acquaintance Keynes had attended as the official representative of the British Treasury in 1919. The sighting of the bank clerk Stetson, with whom one of the poem’s unattributable voices served in “the ships of Mylae,” the decisive battle of the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage, does double duty as a reference to World War I and to the reparations the victors of both conflicts imposed on the vanquished.

Economic historians are divided on Keynes’s claim that Germany was in no position to pay the war reparations demanded of it and that the “Carthaginian Peace,” as he called it, would lead to inflation and, in turn, destabilize Europe. Eliot agreed with Keynes—and both men were vindicated. Germany successfully made its first reparations payment in June 1921; almost immediately thereafter, the mark began rapidly depreciating in value. By December 1922, when The Waste Land was published in book form, inflation had turned into hyperinflation, and the mark was worth less than the paper it was printed on. The next month, the French military occupied the Ruhr to extract reparations payments in coal and timber rather than currency. By the end of 1923, a loaf of bread in Berlin cost 200 billion marks.

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, his influential, sharply critical analysis of the Treaty of Versailles, Keynes observes

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency…Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose…A system of compelling the exchange of commodities at what is not their real relative value not only relaxes production, but leads finally to the waste and inefficiency of barter…Economic privation proceeds by easy stages…until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. The man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed.

The phrase Keynes attributes to Lenin—“debauch the currency”—and the connection he makes between the stability of currency and custom have an ancient pedigree, one that Keynes, with his classical education, would have known. Sometime in the early fourth century BCE, a man named Diogenes fled his native Sinope with his minter father after the pair were accused of adulterating the local coins with less valuable metals. En route to Athens, he visited the Oracle of Delphi, who advised him to continue to "debase" or “deface the currency,” which he interpreted to mean the prevailing customs and traditions (nomoi) rather than coins (nomismata) through the distinctive style of philosophy that became known as Cynicism.

Customs and traditions include the canons and idioms of artistic production. Writing about the inflation that overtook Lenin’s Soviet Union during the “War Communism” period between June 1918 and March 1921, when “It seemed a short step to abolish money outright as the medium for basic goods and services," art historian T.J. Clark remarked that "Money is the root form of representation in bourgeois society. Threats to monetary value are threats to signification in general." In the Soviet Union, the “general collapse in the ‘confidence of the sign’” that followed the collapse of the ruble manifested in Kazimir Malevich’s and El Lissitzky’s radical negations of existing pictorial idioms and Velimir Khlebnikov’s and Aleksei Kruchenykh's final experiments in “transrational poetry,” or Zaum, which the latter described as an attempt to re-create the language of the birds, gods, and stars. In the hyperinflation years of the Weimar Republic, it manifested in the collage pieces of Berlin Dada, perhaps the most politically radical of the movement’s many branches, and the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters’s 1922 Ursonate, composed exclusively of nonsense syllables.

If anything, Lenin’s formulation, with its sexual connotations, is closer in spirit to The Waste Land than Diogenes’. Echoing Keynes’s pronouncement that the “process” of debauching the currency “engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction…in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose,” Eliot, who closely monitored the economic conditions Keynes had predicted, wrote 

We can only say that it 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 and more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

A few weeks later, in Margate, Eliot pounded out these various and complex results on a typewriter on loan from Lloyds:

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu

He followed a few weeks after, in Lausanne, with

                                               I sat upon the shore
            Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
            Shall I set my lands in order?
            London bridge is falling down falling down falling down
            Poi s’acose nel foco che gli affina
            Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow
            Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
            These fragments I have shored against my ruins
            Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
            Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
                                    Shantih  shantih  shantih

The “mythical method,” which, in 1923, Eliot credited to Joyce as the means of “controlling,” “ordering,” and “giving a shape and a significance to the vast panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” has always been regarded with suspicion by his left-wing critics. They see in it a convergence of anti-Enlightenment obscurantism with a dubious fondness for a hierarchical social order (revealed, in Eliot’s case, when he borrowed a phrase from Charles Maurras, the founder of the far-Right Action Française, to describe himself as “a classicist in art, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.”). Yet if myth is taken here in its original sense, simply as “mythos” or “story,” it is not fundamentally different from “contradictions in the mode of production” as a means of finding a coherent explanation for complex and heterogeneous social phenomena. (Not that Eliot would not have objected to this Marxist explanation: when he wanted to account for changes in literary styles in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he pointed to “a complication in economics and machinery.”)

That said, Eliot also knew, from the readings of the Cambridge Ritualists, a group of classicists whose work he cited in the Notes, that myth was originally invented to accompany and help explain ritual. In societies in which poetry is primarily written and read rather than spoken and heard, ritual cannot be embodied in poetry—or in any other artistic form. The possible exceptions are dance, which is why Eliot was such an admirer of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, which he first saw during the year he was working on The Waste Land, and the stage, which is perhaps why Eliot began to write drama later in his career. Ritual and liturgy drew him to Anglo-Catholicism, which is why he proposed it as a cultural ideal in his later Idea of a Christian Society.

Just as The Waste Land was something of an anomaly in his career, Eliot was something of an anomaly within the Modernist avant-garde, which tended to match anti-bourgeois aesthetics with anti-bourgeois politics, whether of the far Left or—more frequently, in the case of English-speaking Modernists—the far Right. Though he was, at times, tempted, like Pound, Yeats, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and André Breton, by the lure of turning his aesthetic ideas into political power, he did not succumb to the relative political novelties of fascism or communism; less, as one would think, because he objected to their economic views and more because he regarded them as competitor religions. The institution Eliot ultimately had the greatest hand in shaping was not a state, but the academy.

 

Death by Water, or Academia

The Wall Street crash of October 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression put the nail in the coffin of high Modernism. The Little Review and The Dial were shuttered mere months before. Vanity Fair, with its larger financial cushion, held on until 1936, when Condé Nast folded it back into Vogue, where it lay dormant until its revival in the early 1980s as the film-and-fashion glossy readers know today. Nonplussed by Eliot’s editorial choices, Lady Rothermere sold The Criterion to his new employer, Geoffrey Faber, in 1926, where it limped on as a kind of house magazine until the beginning of World War II. Following his conversion, Eliot started to take commissions from the Anglican Church; around the same time, Pound sought an audience with the man who became his future employer, Benito Mussolini, whom he finally met on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The circuit between author, patron, market, and reader that had launched the Modernist idiom into public consciousness was definitively broken, and Modernism needed a new institutional home to help it shelter from the storm. Though it may seem inevitable in retrospect, Eliot was to find shelter in the most unlikely of places.

Eliot was unusual among the poets of his generation, both for holding down a day job at a bank and for having completed most of the requirements for a PhD. (Because of submarine warfare in the Atlantic during World War I, he did not return to Harvard to sit for his viva and officially collect his degree.) Although it was in philosophy rather than English literature—he studied under Josiah Royce and Bertrand Russell, attended Henri Bergson’s lectures at the Sorbonne, and wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of the British idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley—his disciplinary training and wide range of intellectual interests informed his poetry and gave his public criticism particular rigor and authority. If Eliot, in the words of critic Terry Eagleton, “acted as a link between modernism and criticism” in the late teens and early 1920s, he was also in a unique position to effect an alliance between criticism and the academy in the early 1930s.

His critical pronouncements—such as the ones about “difficulty,” “tradition,” “imitation,” the “dissociation of sensibility,” and the “objective correlative”—were as memorably formulated as any line from his poetry. But it was a few paragraphs from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” about the “relation of the poem to its author” that were to have the most impact on the academic study of literature. The so-called “impersonal theory of poetry” held that “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but the poetry” because “the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium” and because “poetry is not a turning loose of an emotion, but an escape from emotion…not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It had a long and strange afterlife as it moved from the pages of the Egoist, the trailblazing British literary magazine, to Cambridge University and from there to the English departments of universities in the United States.

In addition to Pound and Woolf, one of Eliot’s earliest admirers was the young academic I.A. Richards, who befriended the poet after enthusiastically reading his 1920 collection Ara Vos Prec. Although Eliot declined to take the teaching job at Cambridge that Richards offered him, he acted as an “informal consultant” to Richards and became something like the godfather of the Cambridge School of literary critics, which went on to include William Empson, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, and one of the inventors of cultural studies, Raymond Williams. Richards, like Eliot, was trained in philosophy (or the Moral Sciences as it was called at Cambridge) and, again like Eliot, brought his interests in semantics, semiotics, and linguistics to the study of poetry, drama, and fiction. A few months after The Waste Land appeared, Richards published The Meaning of Meaning with his coauthor C.K. Ogden, who had recently finished translating the first book by Russell’s star pupil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, into English. The Meaning of Meaning is a crucial moment in the emergence of what might be called a “scientific” rather than a “humanistic” approach to the interpretation of literature.

Richards published Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment in 1929. The book was based on an experiment conducted with his students, in which he passed out the texts of poems with the names of the authors and the dates of composition removed, and asked students to analyze and evaluate them. The results, in his view, were disheartening: the students were frequently unable to “make out the plain sense” of the poems or understand their “imagery” and brought to their readings a number of preconceived notions drawn from the “irrelevant intrusions” of their own experiences or “stock responses” drawn mostly from received wisdom about what poetry and poets are supposed to be. Having taxonomized what he called the “ten difficulties of criticism” and given an account of the cultural, pedagogical, and ideological conditions he believed were responsible for them, Richards went on to propose a series of “practical suggestions” for teaching the reading of any text. Although he did not invent it, Richards’s preferred technique, which Empson later elaborated upon in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), was a minute attendance to the “words on the page” and their formal features: diction, tone, figurative language, paradox, ambiguity, irony, and so on. To this day, these techniques remain the cornerstone of the kind of literary analysis called “close reading.”

In 1932, Eliot returned to the United States to deliver the Charles Norton Lectures at his alma mater. He did so as “perhaps the most distinguished man of letters today in the English-speaking world,” as a critic at the Saturday Review of Literature put it. His time at Harvard and subsequent lecture tour around the Depression-era United States is notable for three things. First, he overcame his professed religious scruples and resolved to formally separate from Vivien when he returned to London. The Eliots’ marriage was unhappy almost from the start, but Eliot’s cruel decision was exacerbated by his refusal to convey it in person and by the fact that he and Vivien’s brother retained control over her finances. Later, she was committed against her will to the Northumberland House mental asylum, where she died more than a decade later, never once receiving a visit from the man who was still legally her husband. (Eliot’s long-time love interest and correspondent Emily Hale, whom he was courting in the United States, as well as later intimates, such as Mary Trevelyan and John Hayward, came to know this pattern of abandonment to a lesser degree in their turn.)

Second, during a lecture, “The Meaning of Tradition,” at the University of Virginia on May 10, 1933—the same day of the infamous Nazi book burning in Berlin—Eliot told the audience that he believed “the population” of an ideal society “should be homogenous” and that “what is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." After the Holocaust, these comments became the basis of the frequent charge that Eliot was an anti-Semite. Although he denied this and even suppressed further publication of After Strange Gods, the collection in which the lecture appeared, a cursory glimpse at his correspondence and the depictions of the character Bleistein in his published and unpublished poetry, which reveal a visceral disgust of Jews, make clear that these were efforts at reputational management. (If there is anything at all worth considering in Eliot’s private slurs against Jews—as bankers, as foreigners, as city-dwellers, as hook-nosed—it is how invariably they could be applied to Eliot himself. Where his reputation is concerned, the less that is said of his racist “King Bolo” poems, found among his papers after his death, the better.)

Third, it was the lecture tour that, in Lawrence Rainey’s words, “seal[ed] the fateful association between modernism and the academy” in the United States. Eliot’s poetry, literary criticism, and political commentary had become touchstones for the Southern Agrarians, a group of academics at Vanderbilt University. In their völkisch 1930 manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, which championed “the culture of the soil” against “unrestrained industrialism,” Eliot is characterized as a “Romantic” and “rear guard” writer, and the seduction of the typist in The Waste Land is cited approvingly for presenting the “bankruptcy of the modern formula” of living. Eliot overlooked the characterization but returned the compliment, speaking favorably of the “localism” of the Southern Agrarian project. Three contributors to I’ll Take My Stand—Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom—went on to form, along with Vanderbilt graduate Cleanth Brooks and, later, W.K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, René Wellek, and Austin Warren, a loose coalition known as the New Critics. Transmitted primarily by Brooks’s and Warren’s textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), New Critical theories of interpretation became pedagogical orthodoxy in American English departments for a generation.

Named for Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism, the first two chapters of which cover Eliot and Richards, New Criticism represented, among other things, an intensification of the impersonality doctrine. In their 1946 essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” the best-known New Critical statement on the matter, Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that “the design or intention of the author is neither available or desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” According to these critics, extratextual information such as a poet’s biography or a work’s historical context tells readers little about the meaning of a text.

The “intentional fallacy” has been criticized on political grounds as an illegitimate means of quarantining a text from discussions about its author’s abhorrent political views, such as the ones Eliot held, or personal conduct, such as Eliot displayed in private. It’s also been denounced on the grounds that what critics notice—or fail to notice—in close readings can never be free of evaluations formed by prior normative commitments, whether critics are aware of them or not. But perhaps a better criticism is that although Wimsatt and Beardsley’s premise—biographical data and historical context are insufficient to make any conclusions about an author’s mental state at the time of composition—stands on firm epistemological ground, the inference they draw from it—texts are autonomous entities and not acts of communication, however formally complex, between a producer and a receiver—runs afoul of the fact that language is an inherently public medium. Publishing a poem in the first place is a sign of at least a minimal intent by the author: the text should be read. One can look at a poem as though it were simply an object made of a finite series of linguistic markings, and the results of doing so are sometimes fruitful as an academic exercise. The rather more metaphysical view that this is fundamentally what texts are is easily refuted by an empirical observation of how the vast majority of reading occurs and what readers think they’re doing when they perform this activity. In the end, treating text exclusively as an autonomous entity is not so much wrong as limited. For what it’s worth, Eliot, who had views to promote, would not have endorsed this concept of criticism.

As a general rule, the more committed to a single mode of interpretation a critic is and the less aware of that mode’s limitations, the worse the critic’s readings are. Consider, for example, Brooks’s reading of The Waste Land in his 1937 paper “The Waste Land: A Critique of the Myth,” one of the first serious academic appraisals of the poem. Rainey describes Brooks as a devout Christian with an “ahistorical nostalgia” for the American South as “the last outpost of a pre-industrial order” and a “disdain for industry, science, popular culture, and every other index of modernity,” which he “summarized in a single word: secularism.” Brooks thought he had found a kindred spirit in Eliot’s political writings of the early 1930s and read The Waste Land accordingly. "The Waste Land,” he wrote in Understanding Poetry, “is a poem totally concerned with the breakup of civilization—not, to be sure, the physical breakup, with buildings crashing into the street or government offices burning, but a spiritual breakup." “A Critique of the Myth” is concerned with elucidating the symbolism of, and allusions in, The Waste Land in light of the Notes Eliot appended to it, with a special emphasis on the themes of the Fisher King and the Grail romance, which would be congenial to a Christian critic such as Brooks. This produces a number of crude interpretations. Having claimed that the name Stetson had no “ulterior significance” but was “merely an ordinary name,” Brooks then claimed that Eliot changed Webster’s wolf to Dog a few lines later to symbolize Irving Babbitt's “Humanitarianism, and related philosophies which, in their concern for man, extirpate the supernatural” rather than because there were no wolves in London circa 1922. Eliot, Hugh Kenner wrote, was not being “merely literary” when he added this little bit of grotesque small talk to the last stanza of “The Burial of the Dead”: regular news items in English papers during the era were lurid tales of corpses disposed of by garden burial. 

Contemporary readers know what Brooks did not—namely, that Eliot added the Notes to make the poem meet the length requirements of commercial publication. But an insistence on the total autonomy of a poem-as-published means that critics have no means of distinguishing text from paratext or ways of judging the relevance of one paratext versus another. By taking the Notes at face value, Brooks’s interpretations also miss the ironic play between the poem and the Notes, which are not so much academic as mock-academic, following the example of Pope’s satire The Dunciad. The Notes themselves are extremely tentative, which should be a tip-off for those who seek, as Brooks did, a fundamental unity in the reference material:

I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience.

The Man with the Three Staves…I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King.

This may not appear as exact as Sappho’s lines, but I had in mind the ‘longshore’ or ‘dory’ fisherman…

The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which…).

And so on. Eliot, who wrote Brooks a letter gently objecting to his interpretation, later had this to say in front of that 13,500-person crowd at the University of Minnesota:

Here I must admit that I am…not guiltless of having led critics into temptation…the result is that [the Notes] became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view today. I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes; but now they can never be unstuck. They have almost greater popularity than the poem itself…stimulated the wrong kind of interest among the seekers of sources…I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot Cards and the Holy Grail.

A different kind of complaint objection might be leveled at textual autonomy: it is a kind of critical commodity fetishism. Severing the author entirely from the text takes an artwork whose meaning is always mediated by the socioeconomic conditions of its production, dissemination, and reception and the many ways the latter changes according to time and context and replaces it with an abstract textual object fit only to be run through a series of hermeneutic protocols characteristic of a different reception context entirely, namely, in Ransom’s telling phrase, that of “Criticism, Inc.”

True, the professionalization of literary criticism Ransom called for—as distinguished from poet-practitioners such as Eliot, the amateurs who wrote for newspaper audiences, and those who put literature in the service of some humanistic or political program—could be described as the growing self-consciousness of the field and thus as a kind of Modernist moment in the art of interpretation. Granted, there is a symbiotic relationship between Modernist difficulty and academic hermeneutics. A difficult text both elicits and requires sophisticated techniques of interpretation, and institutions devoted to the manufacture and application of those techniques preserve texts for the consideration of audiences who come generations after the initial readership.

One need look no further than Eliot’s “alliance with the New Critics” to see how this works in practice. The poet and scholar Jed Rasula wrote, “His eminence lent authority to the initiative that would dominate literary study during the Cold War boom years of higher education; and the interpretive protocols of close reading promoted by New Criticism ensured canonical status to Eliot's poetry and critical views. The Waste Land became a permanent fixture of the curriculum.” Yet, it is no small irony that Modernism, which began as an attack on the institution of the academy, ended up totally dependent upon it for survival. The same economic forces that drove poets to take refuge there are currently hollowing it out from within. Just how “permanent” the curricula really are remains to be seen.

 

What the Thunder Said, or Eternal Return

Eliot’s other institutional contribution to literature was as the editor of Faber & Faber, where he was known as the “Pope of Russell Square.” In that capacity, he was a key tastemaker who directly fostered the careers of an entire generation of English-language poets and writers, including Stephen Spender, Djuna Barnes, William Empson, Philip Larkin, Louis Zukofsky, David Jones, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, and Ted Hughes. Among Eliot’s last acquisitions were the first two installations in the mass-market Adam Dalgliesh series by the Anglo-Catholic mystery writer P.D. James. Outside the mystery community, James is best known for her dystopian novel The Children of Men (1992), which was later made into a major motion picture by director Alfonso Cuarón. Written in the early years of “the End of History,” the premise of The Children of Men is that a mysterious illness has led to global infertility. The human species begins its slow slide into viciousness, hedonism, apathy, and suicidal despair en route to probable extinction as the book opens with the diary of Dr. Theodore Faron in the not-too-distant future of 2021.    

James’s novel is every bit as much of a rewriting of The Waste Land as “Desolation Row” was; Cuarón’s film makes the parallels explicit. Cuarón changes Theo’s profession from professor of Victorian history to civil servant and moves the scene of the action from the quadrangles of Oxford to the “Unreal City” of London. In the film, Theo (Clive Owen) is kidnapped by a cell of a terrorist group known as the Fishes led by his ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore). He is persuaded to help the Fishes in their quest to smuggle Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a young refugee who has miraculously become pregnant, out of a semi-autocratic Britain and into the care of the Human Project, a group of scientists attempting to cure infertility. In the final scene, a mortally wounded Theo and Kee, who has given birth to a baby girl, in a rowboat (“the boat responded / Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar”) are in the English Channel awaiting pickup by the Tomorrow, the Human Project’s ship. As Theo dies, Kee tells him that she will name her daughter after his and Julian’s dead son: Dylan. The credits close with an end title that reads “Shantih shantih shantih.”

In his influential pamphlet Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, theorist Mark Fisher proposes reading the sterility theme in Children of Men “in cultural terms” as the “displacement of another kind of anxiety” specific to late capitalism: “how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” In Fisher’s diagnosis, a political condition—the view attributed to Francis Fukuyama that after the end of the Cold War, capitalism was “the only viable political and economic system”—cross-morbidizes with a cultural condition most famously articulated by Margaret Thatcher—it is “impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative” to capitalism, which produces a feedback loop in which no ship named Tomorrow comes to deliver anyone from the eternal return of the present.

Today, the manifestations of this stagnation in a cultural industry devoted to what Frederic Jameson called “pastiche and revivalism” are difficult to ignore. Capital is so heavily concentrated that producers of, say, blockbuster films, no longer feel the need to compete for audiences with new cultural properties but are content to indefinitely remake or add prequels, sequels, and offshoots to existing cinematic universes. The neighborhoods in North American, European, and East Asian metropolises in which immigrants, émigrés, exiles, and expatriates once fomented the Modernist revolution have become expensive, homogenous zones for a mobile, information-rich class of culture producers. The study and production of culture have become increasingly professionalized and administered, and have taken on the characteristics and values of its patron, the corporate university. Lyric poetry and literary fiction have returned to pre-Modernist formations, eschewing formal innovation for the presentation of notionally unique but increasingly prefabricated selfhoods; academically-credentialed craft training underlies the composition of generic but nonetheless minimally market-viable forms. The closest thing we have to a consensus culture hero is an 81-year-old musician who has been on what he calls the “Never Ending Tour” since 1988.

The seemingly endless repetitions of capitalist realism are not “conservative” as those who promote them would have people believe, let alone “traditional” in Eliot’s sense. His views on the matter were shrewder than he is generally given credit for by his right-wing admirers and his left-wing critics. Eliot understood that the only way to keep literary tradition alive was not for contemporary writers to worship it or ignore it but to continually reshape and extend it. In this respect, his position on the relationship between past and future is no different from that of the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, who wrote: “Only that historian who will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” A culture that cannot “make it new,” that cannot create alternatives to rather than repetitions of the present, is a culture whose past will shrivel up and die. All that remains when the commodity form permanently installs itself in the place between life and art once occupied by ritual, Mark Fisher wrote, is the “consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”

That takes us back to the beginning—or at least to a beginning: the passage from Petronius’s Satyricon that Eliot ultimately chose as the epigraph for his and Pound’s great ruin-poem. At the heart of Petronius’s satire is an account of a dinner party given by a wealthy freedman named Trimalchio—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s source for the party-throwing protagonist of The Great Gatsby, whose working title was Trimalchio at West Egg. The host recounts a visit to the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient prophetess who, according to Ovid, promised her virginity to Apollo in exchange for as many years as the grains of sand she held in her fist. When she refuses him, Apollo nonetheless grants her wish: because she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth, her cruel punishment (“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”) is to wither away for a millennium until she becomes so small she has to be kept in a jar, where the tourist Trimalchio encounters her sometime during the reign of Nero:

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumīs ego ipse oculīs meīs vīdī in ampullā pendere, et cum illī puerī dīcerent: "Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις;" respondēbat illa: "ἀποθανεῖν θέλω."

For I indeed once saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in her jar, and when the boys asked her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered, “I want to die.”

The Roman ampulla was a two-handled container made of glass, which was used for perfumes and ritual anointments. This, for example, is the official term for the gold, eagle-shaped vessel that has been used in the coronation ceremony of the British monarch since Charles II ascended to the throne in 1661, around the time Eliot claimed the “dissociation of sensibility” between English poets and the social order they inhabited set in. For the Sibyl, the sacred object is effectively a cage, which is how it is frequently—if somewhat erroneously—translated. Images of imprisonment and confinement haunt The Waste Land and the life of its author. “Of no other poet,” remarked Edmund Wilson, “does a bon mot of Cocteau’s seem more true: The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.” The original title of “A Game of Chess” was “In the Cage,” after Henry James’s 1898 novella about a female telegrapher in London, the precursor to Eliot’s typist. In 1926, Vivien Eliot—who added the line “What you get married for if you don’t want to have children” to the second section of The Waste Land and wrote semi-autobiographical fiction with a protagonist named Sibylla—described her marriage as 11 years of being in “one cage after another.” After the second clap of thunder in the poem’s penultimate stanza, one of its voices says, “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.” Pound ended up in a literal cage in Pisa in 1945 after he was captured by Italian partisans and handed over to the US Army on charges of treason for his wartime radio broadcasts supporting Mussolini. And Eliot, according to I.A. Richards, felt imprisoned by the success of his least representative poem. Following Fisher, readers can interpret Eliot’s recontextualization of Petronius in cultural terms and note a further resonance: with sociologist Max Weber’s description of capitalist modernity as a stalharte Gëhause—a steel-hard casing—famously, if somewhat erroneously, translated as the “iron cage.”

“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future,” Weber went on to say, “or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.” Eliot was this prophet, less for his age, as readers have generally believed, than for the era of “petrification” Fisher describes—digitized, as it happens, rather than mechanized but convulsive nevertheless and seemingly destined, due to the ecological limits of unrestrained capitalist accumulation, to inhabit the “arid plain” that appears in the poem’s final stanza.

Among the many paradoxes of The Waste Land—a difficult work of art that reached a mass audience, a work of art by a political conservative whose early adopters were Communists, a work of art composed in large percentage of citations of older poets but was immediately recognized as something that had never been seen before, an impersonal work of art whose most pronounced emotional tonality is hysteria—the one that has the most salience for contemporary readers is this: a poem that seems to condemn the sterility of the culture that produced it has proven to be the exemplary literary artwork of one of the most fertile moments in its history. The annus mirabilis of 1922—which also saw the publication of Ulysses, Jacob’s Room, Harlem Shadows, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Poetry,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Sodom and Gomorrah, Anno Domini MCMXXI, Zangezi, and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as well as the composition of Spring and All, Sonnets to Orpheus, Duino Elegies, the Ursonate, and The Castle—was, in the words of Franco Moretti, the “last literary season of Western Culture.” He added, “Within a few years European literature gave its utmost and seemed on the verge of opening new and boundless horizons: instead, it died.”

Periodization is always a contentious matter, and scholars are particularly divided as to when the phenomenon known as Modernism began—whether it was as early as the Renaissance, whether it was with the birth of the factory system in the mid-18th century and the coinage of the term by Jonathan Swift in a letter to Alexander Pope, or during the second year of the French Revolution, or around the time of the worldwide uprisings of 1848 that sparked the political experiments of Marx and Engels and the artistic experiments of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet. There is near-unanimous consensus, however, that the last echoes of the Modernist thunderclap that sounded loudest in 1922 could be heard in 1989, a year after the centennial of Eliot’s birth, when the Berlin Wall fell, inaugurating the era of capitalist realism. It is, of course, not true that European literature died in or around 1922: innumerable works of seriousness, originality, complexity, and daring have been produced since then and, indeed, are still being written and published today. (A fact that becomes only more visible when the scope is broadened beyond the parochial bounds of geopolitical entities such as Europe and the West.) The distinctive feature of the apex period called high Modernism, however, is that, for a few years, such works were at the center of Western cultural life, rather than at the margins, to which they have receded today.

What we are celebrating when we commemorate the centennial of The Waste Land is less the singular achievement of a particular poet than the moment when the aforementioned aesthetic norms improbably broke through to a popular audience and became the idiom in which art was produced, received, discussed, interpreted, judged, and—one wants to say—lived. That is perhaps why it has been difficult not to detect in the many centennials this year an undercurrent of melancholy and nostalgia, a mixture of memory and desire. Since 1989, it has become increasingly clear that the high Modernist period was a historical exception and the current era is the historical rule. Although the time-travel simulation of anniversary rituals allows readers to taste a little of the excitement of reading these works when they were first published, it comes with the uneasy recognition that the culture of the current era doesn’t measure up. One simply cannot celebrate 1922 today with a good conscience: to continue to venerate works of art produced 100 years ago, works that explicitly aimed to “make it new,” for succeeding in their aims, is to violate the precise terms of that veneration, which could be satisfied only by making it new—without any reference whatsoever to this now canonical desideratum. This vicious circle delimits a cultural space no less constricting than the Sybil’s ampulla; unfortunately, with the current intensely apocalyptic sense of the future, readers are well-positioned to empathize with the predicament of a person for whom the only remaining novel experience is death.

Yet what if the error that gives birth to this dead end and the numerous terminological absurdities—high Modernism, postmodernism, neo-Modernism, late Modernism, long and short centuries, the end of history, the contemporary—that are heir to it is to conceive of Modernism as a period in the first place? What if the thing erroneously called the “Modernist period” were instead a tendency that has periodically recurred throughout human history, in different times and places, further back than the Renaissance, further back even than fourth-century B.C. Greece, when Diogenes paid his call on the Oracle of Delphi? What if Modernism is the name for what happens to a culture whenever social, economic, political, and ecological conditions create a collapse in the general confidence in the sign and a segment of the society bands together to debauch the currency of the symbolic order by creating artifacts to match the times?

Not one Modernism but many Modernisms: all of them quotations of one another and all of them contemporaneous insofar as each produces the shimmering illusion of the new. The 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis of 1922 offers not only the occasion to praise The Waste Land, but also the occasion to bury it, knowing that, if history is any guide, the corpse surrendered to the gardens of the past will inevitably sprout and bloom once more in the future. When April comes, we'll dig it up again.