Table Of ContentTHE ANNOTATED WASTE LAND
WITH ELIOT'S CONTEM PORARY PROSE
EDITED, WITH ANNOTATIONS AND INTRODUCTION, BY
LAWRENCE RAINEY
Second Edition
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A Note on the Text
THE WASTE LAND
Editor's Annotations to The Waste Land
Historical Collation
ELIOT'S CONTEMPORARY PROSE
London Letter, March 1921
The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism
The Lesson of Baudelaire
Andrew Marvell
Prose and Verse
London Letter, May 1921
John Dryden
London Letter, July 1921
London Letter, September 1921
The Metaphysical Poets
Notes to Eliot's Contemporary Prose
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL INDEX
INDEX TO ELIOT'S CONTEMPORARY PROSE
Illustrations follow page
Lawrence Rainey
W H EN DONALD HALL ARRIVED in London in September 1951, bearing an
invitation to meet the most celebrated poet of his age, T. S. Eliot, he could only
marvel at his strange good fortune. A young and aspiring American poet, he had
earlier been an editor of Harvard University's celebrated literary magazine, the
Advocate-as Eliot had once been-and more recently won a fellowship to Oxford-
as Eliot had done, too, long ago, in 1914. Now he was going to meet the great
man himself, the poet of his age, the man awarded the Nobel prize for literature
in 1948. Hall was frankly terrified. His appointment was for three in the
afternoon, but he turned up an hour early at the office of Eliot's employer, Faber
and Faber, at 24 Russell Square, then decided to kill time by admiring the
surrounding buildings. Finally, at three, he was duly escorted to Eliot's small
office and greeted by Eliot himself, a person as diffident and distant as report
had portrayed him. Their conversation went poorly. "I was so convinced of the
monumentality of this moment-'I will be speaking of this, ages hence'-that I
weighed every word as if my great-grandchildren were listening in, and I feared
to let them down by speaking idiomatically, or by seeing the humor in anything."
Eliot commented on some of Hall's poems, the hour passed swiftly, and by four
it was time for Hall to leave. He leapt to his feet, sputtered ponderous thanks,
and awaited Eliot's farewell:
Then Eliot appeared to search for the right phrase with which to send
me off. He looked me in the eyes, and set off into a slow, meandering
sentence. "Let me see," said T. S. Eliot, "forty years ago I went from
Harvard to Oxford. Now you are going from Harvard to Oxford. What
advice can I give you?" He paused delicately, shrewdly, while I waited
with greed for the words which I would repeat for the rest of my life, the
advice from elder to younger, setting me on the road of emulation. When
he had ticked off the comedian's exact milliseconds of pause, he said,
"Have you any long underwear?"
I told him that I had not, and paused to buy some on my dazzled walk
back to the hotel. I suppose it was six months before I woke up enough to
laugh.'
The reader who comes to Eliot's masterpiece for the first time faces much the
same dilemma as Hall did. The poem is preceded by its reputation, endowed
with authority so monumental that a reader is tempted to overlook the poem
itself, to slight its grisly comedy or miss its mordant and ferocious wit, its
dazzling series of surprises, its sheer wildness and irredeemable opacity. While
Eliot's status as an international celebrity has plainly waned since his death in
1965-what other poet could give a lecture in a basketball arena holding fourteen
thousand spectators, as Eliot did in 1956?-his most important poem still retains
its lacerating power to startle and disturb.
ELIOT'S CAREER BEFORE THE WASTE LAND
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 26 September 1888,
the last of six children. He had four sisters, the oldest of whom was nineteen
years his senior, and one brother, Henry, who was nine years older. His mother
and father were already in their forties by the time Eliot was born. His father,
Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman and president of the Hydraulic-
Press Brick Company. But Eliot seems never to have been very close to him.
Instead it was to his mother, Charlotte, that Eliot was drawn. Proud of her
intelligence, she had not been able to attend university and instead had earned
her living as a teacher until she met her husband. She had also written poetry.
Her thwarted ambitions were transferred to her son, who was nurtured to become
a scholar, perhaps even a poet. From what little can be discerned, Eliot was a shy
and bookish boy, one who felt somewhat out of place wherever he was. His
family maintained a strong sense of its origins in New England-his grandfather
had moved from there to St. Louis in 1834-a sense which made him feel out of
place in the South. But he was no less aware of his Missouri drawl when the
family took its annual vacation in Gloucester, Massachusetts.' He was also
isolated by a physical handicap, a congenital double hernia, which meant he had
to wear a truss for most of his life and could not participate in sports. Eliot later
recalled that his family had "lived on in a neighborhood which had become
shabby to a degree approaching sluminess, after all our friends and
acquaintances had moved further west."3 The area was being taken over by poor
African Americans, and Eliot's lifelong appreciation of popular song and his
responsiveness to the seedy side of urban life owed something to this
background.4
When he was seven or eight, Eliot began to attend a local private school. In
the autumn of 1898 he began to attend Smith Academy, a preparatory school for
Washington University, a prestigious university in St. Louis, which Eliot's
grandfather had helped found. By January 1899, he already had brought out
eight issues of his own magazine, the Fireside, a childish production that
featured adventure stories, rhyming verses, and puns. Though he finished Smith
Academy in 1905, his mother decided to wait a year before sending him to
Harvard, a year he spent at Milton Academy, a private school outside Boston.
There he met Scofield Thayer, a wealthy young man who later became co-owner
and leading editor of the Dial, the journal in which The Waste Land was first
published in the United States.
In the autumn of 19o6 Eliot began his undergraduate studies at Harvard. In
his second year he decided to complete his course for a bachelor's degree in three
years rather than the conventional four. His courses covered a wide range of
topics: German grammar, constitutional government, Greek literature, medieval
history, English literature, French literature, ancient philosophy, modern
philosophy, and comparative literature. But much that Eliot wanted to learn
could not be discovered in the classroom. He was actively reading on his own.
He later recalled the Scottish poet John Davidson (1857-igo8), and especially his
poem "Thirty Bob a Week," with its stark presentation of a city clerk. He had
"found inspiration in the content of the poem," Eliot later recalled, "and in the
complete fitness of content and idiom: for I also had a good many dingy urban
images to reveal."' More important, however, was his discovery of Arthur
Symons, whose study of The Symbolist Movement in Literature he purchased in
December 19o8. The book was "one of those which have affected the course of
my life," he said many years .6 Above all it led Eliot to the discovery of the
French poet Jules Laforgue (i86o-1887), the author who was "the first to teach
me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of
speech."' Eliot promptly ordered the three volumes of Laforgue's Oeuvres
completes, which reached him in the spring of 1909. In Laforgue's poetry Eliot
found much that he could adapt to his own use: the couplets turned by neat
rhymes, the counterpoint achieved by interweaving stanzas with different
imaginative weight and line length, and a tone that was questioning, quizzical,
ironical, inconclusive. Within months the poems which Eliot was publishing in
the Harvard Advocate were plainly showing the influence of Laforgue, even
announcing it in their titles: "Nocturne" in November igo9, "Humouresque (after
J. Laforgue)" and "Spleen" in January igio. But influence should not be taken to
imply passive imitation. "People are only influenced in the direction in which
they want to go," Eliot wrote much later, "and influence consists largely in
making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction."8 But what
was the direction in which Eliot wanted to go? Conrad Aiken, whom Eliot met in
the academic year igo9-19zo, when he stayed on at Harvard for an extra year to
study for an M.A., later recalled their conversations: "What did we talk about? or
what didn't we? It was the first `great' era of the comic strip, of Krazy Kat, and
Mutt and Jeff, and Rube Goldberg's inspired lunacies: it was also perhaps the
most creative period of American slang, and in both these departments of
invention he took enormous pleasure."9 Eliot's interest in `American slang" and
"the comic strip," his openness to vernacular culture, may go a long way toward
explaining why even the poems which most directly evince the influence of
Laforgue possess a colloquial vigor that sets them apart.
Having finished his M.A., Eliot spent the summer of 19io patiently
transcribing all the poems he had been writing, assembling them into a volume
which he titled Inventions of the March Hare, a collection which has recently
been published in its entirety.10 Then he set off for Paris, much to his mother's
consternation." In Paris he was fortunate to meet and exchange conversation
lessons with Henri Alain-Fournier (1886-1914), the young writer whose modem
classic Le grand Meaulnes was to be published in 1912. Alain-Fournier, who
