famous letter to Eliot (24 December 1921) in which Pound says: "Complimenti, you
bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies, and cogitating an excuse for always exuding
my deformative secretions in my own stuff, and never getting an outline. I go into nacre
and objets d’art." But the fact is that, despite these self-depreciating words, Pound
knew well enough that The Waste Land, like "Gerontion," was not his sort
of poem. As Eliot himself observes, after thanking Pound for "helping one to do it in
one’s own way," "There did come a point, of course, at which difference of
outlook and belief became too wide."
From The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, Princeton UP,
1981.
Louis L. Martz
And yet it was evident, even in 1936, that ‘Burnt Norton’ was adapting the five-part
structure of The Waste Land, for that structure was signalled by the use of
a short lyric as part IV of the sequence. But what did it mean, what does it mean, to feel
the five-part structure of The Waste Land working within so different a poem? To
answer this question it may help to review the process by which The Waste Land gained
its peculiar structure, emerging from the hands of Ezra Pound, as Eliot says, reduced to
half manuscript length.
First of all, without Pound’s editorial intervention, we would not have the short
lyric, ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’, appearing by itself as part IV of The Waste Land, and
thus, presumably, we would not have the short lyrics constituting the fourth sections of
all the Four Quartets — the short movement that helps to create analogies
with Beethoven’s late quartets. Indeed we might not have the Phlebas lyric at all, without
Pound’s advice, for Eliot, upset by Pound’s slashing away at the eighty-two lines
preceding this lyric in the manuscript, wrote to Pound, ‘Perhaps better omit Phlebas
also???’ Pound was horrified: Eliot seemed not to understand the central principle of the
poem’s operation. ‘I DO advise keeping Phlebas,’ Pound replied. ‘In fact I more’n advise.
Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen.
sailor, and he is needed ABSoloootly where he is. Must stay in.’
What Pound describes in that vehement answer is the sort of organization that Eliot
later called musical, in his lecture ‘The Music of Poetry’, delivered in 1942, just as he
was completing Four Quartets: ‘The use of recurrent themes is as natural to
poetry as to music,’ Eliot says:
There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme
by different groups of instruments ['different voices', we might say]; there are
possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony
or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter.
So, in The Waste Land, after the embers of lust have smouldered in ‘The Fire
Sermon’ — ‘Burning burning burning burning’– the death of Phlebas by water provides a
moment of serenity, quiet, poise, as Phlebas enters the whirlpool in whispers to a death
not to be feared, but foreseen and accepted. The lyric acts as the lines about the still
point act in the two poems of ‘Coriolan’, where, first, amid the turmoil of the crowd at
the parade, the people think they find their answer in the military leader: ‘O hidden
under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast, / Under the palmtree at noon, under
the running water / At the still point of the turning world. O hidden.’ But then,
ironically, it appears in the second poem that the difficulties of a statesman have led
him also to seek the still point: ‘O hidden under the … Hidden under the … Where the
dove’s foot rested and locked for a moment, / A still moment, repose of noon.’ The lyric
of Phlebas acts as such a moment of repose, a nodal moment, tying together the strands of
the poem, as Pound explained. And the fourth part, the short lyric, in all the Four
Quartets, performs a similar function of poise and knotting, as the poem finds a
temporary rest where themes and images and voices merge for a moment.
One voice of great importance speaks at the close of the Phlebas lyric, which is not
simply a translation from Eliot’s poem in French, Dans le Restaurant, for the
closing lines are quite different. The French poem ends in an offhand, conversational
tone: ‘Figurez-vous donc, c’?tait un sort p?nible; / Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel
homme, de haut taille.’ (Imagine then, it was a distressing fate; / Nevertheless, he was
once a handsome man, of tall stature). In The Waste Land Eliot has changed
the tone from conversational to prophetic by evoking the voice of St Paul addressing ‘both
Jew and Gentile’ in his epistle to the Romans (ch. 2, 3): ‘Gentile or Jew / O you who turn
the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as
you.’
A similar effect is created by Pound’s critical slashing away of all those weak and in
part offensive Popeian couplets at the outset of part III of The Waste Land manuscript.
‘Do something different,’ Pound advised. So Eliot did: he pencilled on the back of the
manuscript page a draft of the new opening passage, ‘The river’s tent is broken . . .’ –
lines that stress the eternal presence of the river within the waste land, culminating in
the line that echoes the voice of the psalmist in exile: ‘By the waters of Leman I sat
down and wept’, with its attendant question, ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a
strange land?’ (Psalm 137:4).
A similar concentration upon the emergence of the prophetic voice is created by the
removal of the monologue that opens The Waste Land manuscript, the monologue of the
rowdy Irishman telling of a night on the town in Boston. This was excised by Eliot
himself, perhaps under Pound’s influence, perhaps because Eliot himself saw that the rowdy
vitality of those singing, drinking men who stage a footrace in the dawn’s early light
does not accord with the voice that follows, the voice of one who is so reluctant to live
that April becomes the cruelest month. That excision brings us quickly to the voice of a
modern Ezekiel, speaking the famous lines:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images.
Then these lines of true prophecy play their contrapuntal music against the voice of
the false prophet, Madame Sosostris.
But I need to explain what I mean by the prophetic voice. With William Blake, we should
discard the notion that the prophet’s main function is to foretell the future. If, like
Blake, we think of the biblical prophets, we will recall at once that they spend a great
deal of time in denouncing the evils of the present, evils that derive from the people’s
worship of false gods and the pursuit of wealth and worldly pleasures. Prophecies of the
future appear, but these are often prophecies of the disasters that will fall upon the
people if they do not mend their evil ways. Denunciation of present evil is the primary
message of the Hebrew prophet: he is a reformer, his mind is upon the present. But then he
also offers the consolation of future good, if the people return to worship of the truth.
Thus the voice of the prophet tends to oscillate between denunciation and consolation: he
relates visions of evil and good, mingling within the immense range of his voice the most
virulent excoriation and the most exalted lyrics. This, I think, is exactly the sort of
oscillation that we find in Pound’s Cantos and The Waste Land.
From "Origins of Form in Four Quartets." In Words in Time: New
Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets. Ed. Edward Lobb. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993.
David Chinitz
The Waste Land is a much more complex case–in part because the poem that Eliot
wrote and the poem that was published differ considerably. The Waste Land would
have openly established popular culture as a major intertext of modernist poetry if Pound
had not edited out most of Eliot’s popular references. Though Pound, like Eliot,
assailed the "very pernicious current idea that a good book must be of necessity a
dull one," he did not consider contemporary popular culture seriously as a potential
antidote to literary dullness. His work on The Waste Land simply made the poem more
Poundian: he collapsed its levels of cultural appeal while leaving its internationalism
and historicism intact, recasting the poem as the first major counteroffensive in high
culture’s last stand. To be sure, almost all Pound’s emendations improve the poem, and
Eliot acceded to the recommendations of "il miglior fabbro" in
virtually every instance. Still, part of Eliot’s original impulse in composing The
Waste Land was lost in this collaboration precisely because Pound’s relation to the
cultural divide differed from Eliot’s own. Had Eliot improved rather than deleted the
passages condemned by Pound, he might have given literary modernism a markedly different
spin.
The manuscript of The Waste Land shows Eliot drawing on popular song to a
greater extent than he uses the Grail myth in the final version. For the long idiomatic
passage that was to have opened the poem he considered several lyrics from popular
musicals. "I’m proud of all the Irish blood that’s in me / There’s not a man can say
a word agin me," he quotes from a George M. Cohan show; from two songs in the
minstrel tradition he constructs "Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon Vine / Eva
Iva Uva Emmaline"; from The Cubanola Glide he takes "Tease, Squeeze lovin
& wooin / Say Kid what’re y’ doin.’" The characters’ nocturnal spree then
takes them to a bar that Eliot frequented after attending melodramas in Boston:
Blew
into the Opera Exchange,
Sopped up some gin, sat in to the cork game,
Mr. Fay was there, singing "The Maid of the Mill."
Pointing out that these lines are "the first examples in the draft of [Eliot's]
famous techniques of quotation and juxtaposition," Michael North suggests a direct
connection between the miscellaneous format of the minstrel show–or, one might add, the
English music hall–and the very form of The Waste Land. But the hints of popular
song that survive in the published Waste Land are eclipsed by the more erudite
allusions that dominate the poem. Thanks to the deletion of the original opening section,
for example, the first line places the poem squarely within the "great
tradition" of English poetry. A long poem called The Waste Land that begins,
"April is the cruellest month," largely shaped the course of literature and
criticism for years to follow. One can only imagine the effect of a long poem called He
Do the Police in Different Voices beginning, "First we had a couple of feelers
down at Tom’s place."
From "T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide." PMLA 110.2 (March 1995).