the annotated waste land with eliot’s contemporary prose edited, with annotations and introduction, by lawrence rainey The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose Second Edition yale university press new haven & london First published 2005 by Yale University Press. Second Edition published 2006 by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Lawrence Rainey. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Scala by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2006926386 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Commit- tee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11994-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-300-11994-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 10987654321 contents introduction 1 A Note on the Text 45 the waste land 57 Editor’s Annotations to The Waste Land 75 Historical Collation 127 eliot’s contemporary prose London Letter, March 1921 135 The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism 141 The Lesson of Baudelaire 144 Andrew Marvell 146 Prose and Verse 158 vi contents London Letter, May 1921 166 John Dryden 172 London Letter, July 1921 183 London Letter, September 1921 188 The Metaphysical Poets 192 Notes to Eliot’s Contemporary Prose 202 selected bibliography 251 general index 261 index to eliot’s contemporary prose 267 Illustrations follow page 74 the annotated waste land with eliot’s contemporary prose Introduction Lawrence Rainey when donald hall arrived in London in September 1951, bear- ing 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 cele- brated 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 oªce of Eliot’s employer, Faber and Faber, at 24 Russell Square, then decided to kill time by admiring the sur- rounding buildings. Finally, at three, he was duly escorted to Eliot’s small oªce and greeted by Eliot himself, a person as diªdent and distant as re- port 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 lis- tening 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: 1 2 introduction Then Eliot appeared to search for the right phrase with which to send me o¤. He looked me in the eyes, and set o¤ 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 o¤ 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.1 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 reputa- tion, 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 lec- ture 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, Char- lotte, 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 am- bitions were transferred to her son, who was nurtured to become a scholar, introduction 3 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.2 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 life- long 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 prepa- ratory 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 1906 Eliot began his undergraduate studies at Har- vard. 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 cov- ered 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 (1857–1908), 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 4 introduction of content and idiom: for I also had a good many dingy urban images to reveal.”5 More important, however, was his discovery of Arthur Symons, whose study of The Symbolist Movement in Literature he purchased in De- cember 1908. The book was “one of those which have a¤ected the course of my life,” he said many years later.6 Above all it led Eliot to the discovery of the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860–1887), the author who was “the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech.”7 Eliot promptly ordered the three volumes of La- forgue’s Oeuvres complètes, 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 inter- weaving stanzas with di¤erent 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 1909, “Humouresque (after J.