Professor Langdon
Hammer: Is private ritual
possible?
This is a kind of oxymoron,
"a private ritual," because
ritual is, or should be,
precisely something that's
collective and shared.
Is it possible for the
individual to produce some kind
of shared patterning of
experience such as ritual
represents?
For Freud, who is,
of course, a thinker in the
background of The Waste
Land and all of the poetry
that we're reading and thinking
about this semester,
private ritual meant neurosis,
sickness of a kind,
some kind of derangement.
And indeed, The Waste
Land, which is a poem that
in certain ways tries to imagine
a form of private ritual,
or at least struggles with this
question, was certainly
considered by some readers to be
a neurotic poem.
I began last time by talking
about that first verse paragraph
of the poem.
Why don't we go back there.
That's on 474 in our anthology.
 
 
 
I'll try to talk about the poem
in sequence from first section
to last and at least tell you
some of the ways in which I make
sense of it.
And this may be,
I hope, helpful to you.
 
In this first section,
"The Burial of the Dead," we
have, well, what I think of as a
series of preliminary statements
about the poem's aims:
what it seeks,
what it would gesture towards
or move towards.
They include,
well, some form of ecstasy.
I think Marie's sled ride is an
experience of personal freedom
in its modest way.
 
"In the mountains,
there you feel free," she says,
recalling that experience.
 
Prophecy.
The poem introduces us to
prophecy in the second verse
paragraph.
Freedom, I suppose.
 
Intimacy between people,
some kind of meaningful
coherence.
All of these possibilities of
experience are,
as it were, glimpsed in the
poem in this beginning,
glimpsed and then withdrawn or
blocked or parodied.
 
Marie's sled:
well, isn't that a kind of
figure for letting go and,
well, for release and for
trust?
An experience,
as I say, of freedom.
 
Ultimately, in "What the
Thunder Said," the poem will
again return to those specific
themes when it interprets those
Sanskrit words Datta,
Dayadhvam, and so on.
Well, in the second paragraph
of the poem – a sort of second
strophe, if you like – we're
introduced to this sort of
wasteland landscape.
 
It's a kind of landscape that
the poem returns to at different
points.
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,
where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no
shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of
water.
 
 
 
Here, well, we have a kind of
symbolic representation,
a kind of modernist
iconography, if you like,
of a spiritual state,
one of desiccation.
It is, as it were,
a kind of picture of the mental
space inhabited by the people
that we'll meet in this poem.
Well, there are quotations
here, your notes from Eliot and
then your editor explain,
from Ezekiel.
The poem is drawing on
prophetic language and giving
its own form of prophecy.
 
But Ezekiel here is secularized
in this context.
And you might look at this as
something more like a quotation
from prophecy rather than
prophecy itself.
Here, the poem's general
concern with a spiritual state
that – let me call it the
withdrawal of God – is
represented,
as I say, as dryness,
as dryness and as
fragmentation.
What we have is "stony rubbish.
 
.
.
/ a heap of broken images,
where the sun beats."
Here, you know,
we've got a kind of fragment of
sacred text, itself,
you know,
if you like,
a bit of rubbish that's part of
the poem's heap of broken images
that we will explore.
The withdrawal of God in the
poem is a kind of fall into
fragmentation where experience
doesn't cohere,
where there's dryness;
there's no connectivity,
there's not fluidity.
 
The poem then moves abruptly.
 
And the poem,
you know, it moves at this kind
of exhilarating abruptness
throughout between kinds of
language;
here, introducing Wagner and a
little quotation from a quatrain
from the libretto for Tristan
und Isolde,
translated for us:
Fresh blows the wind
To the homeland;
My Irish darling,
Where are you waiting?
Isolde hears this song,
and it's a kind of,
well, song of longing as she
goes off to marry the wrong man.
This Wagner text and the little
quotation from it down below –
again, another quotation from
Wagner,
"Oed' und leer das Meer" – is
a more sinister and haunting
phrase that may be translated
as,
"waste and empty the sea" or
"desolate and empty the sea"
here.
This frames a little vignette,
a little scene,
a dialogue or part of a
dialogue: "'You gave me
hyacinths first a year ago;
/ They called me the hyacinth
girl.'"
And then out of that quotation,
the poem now speaks to us,
as it were, more directly
without quotation marks.
-- Yet when we came back,
late from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full,
and your hair wet,
I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed,
I was neither
Living nor dead,
and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of
light, the silence.
A kind of ecstatic vision,
but here one of a certain,
perhaps frightening emptiness
where a couple,
presumably, have had some kind
of exchange that leaves the
speaker with this particular
vision of the heart of light and
silence.
The references to the flower,
the hyacinth,
call up the whole system of
images of April and spring that
the poem will play on,
as well as the story of
Hyacinth from The
Metamorphoses.
And your editor here will
explain that "Apollo loved and
accidentally killed Hyacinth;
from his blood sprang the
flower named for him,
inscribed with ‘AI,' a cry of
grief."
Here, love is associated with
killing and also with a kind of
generation, though of a painful
and disturbing kind.
 
Here the general,
you know, wasteland space,
with what I'm calling the space
of God's absence,
becomes a space between two
people, two lovers and,
it seems, some form of missed
connection.
As a sequence,
these lines I've just been
talking about,
like the poem as a whole,
advance by collage.
 
They make a kind of argument.
 
They make a kind of sense,
but perhaps not in the ways
that we're used to.
 
These materials together,
I think, suggest that the loss
of common experience that comes
with the withdrawal of God is
played out between people in
their erotic relationships.
Where God was, sex is.
 
Or you could say that the loss
of collective and sharable
meanings, which results in the
privacy of our mental experience
– our dreams,
our aspirations,
memories, poems,
difficult poems – is
represented here in this poem by
the irreducibly private,
and therefore anguishing,
nature of sexuality.
And this is a theme that the
poem will return to again and
again.
Instead of reciprocity and some
kind of mutuality in human
relations, we find people doing
kinds of violence to each other,
dominating each other;
finding incompleteness in their
unions.
The poem then moves on,
again, with a kind of
exhilarating shift of register
or reference,
to a comic figure,
"Madame Sosostris,
famous clarvoyante" with a bad
cold.
I think of Madame Sosostris
often in the winter.
She is nevertheless "known to
be the wisest woman in Europe,"
and she had "a wicked pack of
cards."
What does she produce?
 
Well: Here, said she,
Is your card,
the drowned Phoenician Sailor.
 
[Who is "you"?
Perhaps ourselves,
the reader; perhaps the poet.]
(Those are pearls that were his
eyes.
Look!)
Here is Belladonna,
the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
 
Here is the man with three
staves, and here the
Wheel…
And so on.
And something that she is
forbidden to see:
I do not find
The Hanged Man.
Fear death by water.
 
I see crowds of people,
walking round in a ring.
Thank you.
If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope
myself:
One must be so careful these
days.
This is a wonderful passage.
 
Here, it's doing a number of
different things.
The horoscope seems like a kind
of debased modern form of--a
modern system of interpretation,
a way of understanding the
self.
There is, in these lines,
a kind of parody of occultism,
which would include,
perhaps, a parody of Yeats,
although Yeats's Vision
wasn't published yet.
 
At the same time,
even while the poem is parodic,
it's serious,
too, because in this kind of
ad hoc,
somewhat fanciful and crazy
way, Madame Sosostris's cards
are producing images that Eliot
is dealing us and that he will
collect in the course of the
poem and try to make some sense
of in the collage that is The
Waste Land,
including among those cards the
drowned Phoenician sailor who
will return for us in that
little section "Death by Water."
 
 
 
Well, I like to think of Eliot
himself as Mrs.
Equitone.
That is because he's so
difficult to read in his tone,
and after all,
it's, in a sense,
Mrs.
Equitone who is getting this
stuff and is going to try to do
something with it.
 
Well, Part I,
"The Burial of the Dead," ends
with another instance of
scene-setting.
Now, this sort of symbolic
iconography of the dry landscape
is going to be overlaid on
another landscape,
which is metropolitan London.
 
"Unreal City":
this is Eliot's evocative name
for the urban space that the
poem represents.
Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn,
A crowd flowed over London
Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had
undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent,
were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes
before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down [in
a rhyming couplet]
King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth
kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final
stroke of nine.
You go to the note,
and Eliot says,
"A phenomenon which I have
often noticed," just in case you
were wondering whether he's in
the scene or not.
Well, here we are being
introduced to the metropolis,
which, as I say,
is the scene of The Waste
Land.
It's where the events of the
poem will take place,
more or less.
What we're seeing here are
people going to work,
people that we're going to see
later,
in effect, in the poem:
the typist and "the young man
carbuncular" must be crossing,
too, or the people that we'll
meet in the pub and so on.
 
There's a kind of strange
mixing here of the dead and the
living, of the apocalyptic and
the utterly ordinary.
Eliot then moves with,
you know, again,
no framing that would help us:
There I saw one I knew
[and then who of course is this
"I" who is speaking to us?
We don't really know],
and stopped him,
crying:
"Stetson!
"You who were with me in the
ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last
year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout?
 
Will it bloom this year?
 
[A hyacinth perhaps?]
"Or has the sudden frost
disturbed its bed?
 
"O keep the Dog far hence,
that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it
up again!
"You!
hypocrite lecteur!--mon
semblable,--mon frère!"
He says, quoting Baudelaire,
at the very end bursting out
with it.
It's a, again,
fascinating turn that the poem
takes.
There is, perhaps,
a kind of glimpse of the still
echoing World War in the here
imagined hailing of one man who
knew another in battle.
That is, the ships at Mylae
where they last met.
 
 
There's here another instance
of exchange between two people.
Here, there's a way in which
that first person's address to
Stetson plays upon or parodies,
if you like,
the poet's relation to you or
to me the reader.
There's here a general problem
or question of how to make each
other out, how to recognize and
acknowledge the relation between
brothers or "semblables,"
as Baudelaire would have us
call them.
The little glimpse of war and
the war dead,
perhaps, that we get in these
lines will throughout the rest
of the poem turn into a post-war
vision of,
again, war between the sexes
and war between people,
most immediately in "A Game of
Chess."
In this second section,
which is built around two
conversations,
the first takes place in a
well-to-do drawing room,
the second in a pub.
 
There's much to contemplate in
the opening description of that
home, where we'll hear these two
characters speaking and thinking
in a moment.
One that is important and
recurs often in the scene--one
detail that recurs often in the
poem, is the image of Philomel
around line 98.
"As though a window" --oh,
excuse me.
Let me go a little bit further:
Above the antique mantel
was displayed
As though a window gave upon
the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel [another
Ovidian metamorphosis],
by the
barbarous king
So rudely forced [Philomel
raped by Tereus is transformed
into the nightingale];
yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with
inviolable voice…
Suddenly, Eliot has brought us
into this dining room to see
this picture,
and now we're in the picture
listening to the nightingale
filling all the desert,
this wasteland space,
with a kind of,
again, song of complaint,
a kind of lyric voice that's
called here "inviolable."
…And still she cried,
and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.
"Jug Jug" being the
conventional representation of
the nightingale's song in
Elizabethan poetry.
 
Well, this is,
you know, again,
an image of sexual violence
that produces a particular kind
of lyric utterance.
 
It is a kind of motif that
recurs in the poem,
and it's also a way of imaging
the poem itself as a kind of
"inviolable voice" that emerges
from some kind of vision of
erotic violation.
 
In the conversation that
follows, if it's a conversation,
what we have is one speaker
speaking in quotation marks and
the other speaking without
quotation marks.
What does that mean?
 
Presumably, the one speaker
that we overhear that seems to
be female, we're hearing her
speak.
When those quotation marks
disappear, probably for the
man's speech,
that would seem to represent
some kind of interiorized
speech,
some kind of thought:
"My nerves are bad
to-night.
Yes, bad.
Stay with me.
"Speak to me.
Why do you never speak.
 
Speak.
"What are you thinking of?
What thinking?
What?
"I never know what you are
thinking.
Think."
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their
bones.
"What is that noise?"
 
The wind under the door.
 
"What is that noise now?
 
What is the wind doing?"
 
Nothing again nothing.
 
[Another phrase that will recur
in the poem.]
"Do "You know nothing?
 
Do you see nothing?
 
Do you remember
"Nothing?"
I remember
Those are pearls that were his
eyes.
"Are you alive, or not?
Is there nothing in your head?"
 
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag
--
It's so elegant
So intelligent
"What shall I do now?
What shall I do?"
 
[Quotations there from
Prufrock,
right?]
"I shall rush out as I am,
and walk the street
"With my hair down, so.
[Here Prufrock's
questions are being answered
perhaps.]
What shall we do tomorrow?
"What shall we ever do?"
 
The hot water at ten.
 
And if it rains,
a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of
chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and
waiting for a knock upon the
door.
This is often understood as a
version of an evening at the
Eliots.
The female speaker is being
satirized, surely.
She's frightening,
but surely also is her
companion.
They're driving each other mad.
It's a kind of folie a
deux.
The first person here speaks
for a kind of state that other
people experience in the poem
and that other first-persons in
this poem experience:
that is the condition of having
nothing in your head;
"nothing" almost constituting
"something";
again, "nothing" being a kind
of wasteland.
But in that wasteland,
nevertheless,
there persist certain kinds of
rubbish, fragments,
bits of language,
as in Prufrock's
consciousness.
And this speaker recalls,
first of all,
when pressed,
"Those are pearls that were his
eyes": a quotation from The
Tempest,
a quotation from Ariel's song
that holds out some image of
death by water that would
provide some kind of
transformation where eyes might
become pearls.
By calling up Shakespeare and
The Tempest,
Eliot evokes Shakespeare's
whole romance promise of
transformation through drowning,
through magic,
and romance redemption.
 
In the course of the poem,
that little fragment will
become another motif that recurs
and circulates,
becoming almost a kind of
object of collective memory in
the poem, a bit of shared
knowledge of,
let's say, potential that is
drawn specifically from the
literary past.
You could say that here and
elsewhere Shakespeare and
literary tradition in general
stand in for sacred texts that
would offer some kind of guide
to action and some source of
meaning.
Here, the sacred text of
Shakespeare is no sooner invoked
than it is parodied through this
1912 jazz song that comes to
mind,
as also in, presumably,
the speaker's head:
the "Shakespeherian Rag--/ It's
so elegant / so intelligent."
 
There's a way in which,
well, Eliot's making fun of his
own wish for Shakespeare to be
meaningful.
There's also a way in which the
jazz brings this speaker
suddenly to some kind of manic
life, and he has a kind of
energy fitfully for a moment.
 
And here, as in other moments
in the poem, high culture and
low culture are brought together
in a kind of vertiginous and
interesting way.
In fact, you could see this
whole section,
"A Game of Chess," as doing
that since we move from the
drawing room and its particular
interior decoration to the pub
scene that follows with the
account of Lil's childbearing
and so forth that we then get to
overhear.
And then the poem,
or rather this section of the
poem, ends with another
quotation from Shakespeare:
Ophelia's parting words in
Hamlet,
"good night,
sweet ladies," and so forth.
 
"The Game of Chess" here,
well, it has all sorts of
complex resonances.
 
Eliot's certainly punning on
some sense of stale-mating and
unions, sexual unions,
that have gone wrong and that
have left people against each
other in warring postures.
As the poem proceeds in "The
Fire Sermon," we get more scenes
of erotic impasse or worse,
erotic violence of different
kinds.
 
 
 
The scene of the Thames,
the water that flows through
London, is now brought into
focus again,
not at London Bridge precisely,
but just the shore where,
well, Eliot describes it as:
The river's tent is
broken;
the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet
bank.
The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard.
The nymphs are departed.
 
Sweet Thames,
run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty
bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs,
cardboard boxes,
cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer
nights.
[As it usually does.] The nymphs
are departed.
And their friends,
the loitering heirs of City
directors;
Departed, have left no
addresses.
Here, Eliot's,
you know, conjuring a kind of
erotic debris that has been left
behind by these businessmen and
their nymphs.
As the poem progresses,
there are more images of erotic
confusion and desolation.
But at my back from time
to time I hear [on the bottom of
479]
The sound of horns and motors,
which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs.
Porter in the spring.
 
O the moon [I should be able to
sing this for you]
shone bright on Mrs.
 
Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda
water.
Et O ces voix d'enfants,
chantant dans la coupole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
 
Tereu
Again, a kind of amazing
linguistic vertigo as we pass
from a bawdy Australian soldier
ballad about Mrs.
 
Porter, which has all kinds of
obscene stanzas that your editor
doesn't quote for you,
to Verlaine's image of
children's voices singing under
the dome in his Parsifal,
introducing another narrative
and theme that recurs throughout
the poem: the grail story and
the story of Parsifal.
 
 
The poem moves then with
those--first of all,
it's just those sounds,
which are the sounds of
Philomel;
here, you know,
human voice reduced to a kind
of noise almost,
to another anecdote:
"Mr.
Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
/ unshaven," who asks the "me"
of the poem "in demotic French /
to luncheon at the Cannon Street
Hotel / followed by a weekend at
the Metropole."
A proposition,
it seems, and again a kind of
sinister sexual invitation.
 
There then follows the extended
scene between the typist and
"young man carbuncular," an ugly
scene of sexual emptiness and
domination.
And Eliot doesn't shrink from,
you know, representing this man
in the most ugly – both
visually and morally – the
most ugly terms,
although the poem was indeed a
lot uglier yet than it is now.
At the very end of it,
after he's left and bestowed
one final patronizing kiss,
the poem used to--or this
section of the poem used to end
with a rhyme that he,
you know, then stopped outside
to take a piss.
That was excised,
however, in the course of the
poem and is an unnecessary
further registering of the
degradation of this scene.
 
Then the poem moves to,
well, these inset lyric songs
on 482.
"The river sweats";
again, we're on the river.
 
And we're given a kind of image
of Queen Elizabeth I and the
Earl of Leicester – a
potential lover for the virgin
queen – who are being carried
downstream.
And then finally,
another speaker emerges;
this time, it seems,
a woman, speaking again in
quotation marks:
"Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me.
 
Richmond and Kew
Undid me.
By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow
canoe."
"My feet are at Moorgate,
and my heart
Under my feet.
After the event
He wept.
He promised 'a new start.'
 
I made no comment.
 
What should I resent?
 
"On Margate Sands.
 
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty
hands.
My people humble people who
expect
Nothing.'"
There's a kind of extraordinary
metamorphosis of speaker here.
 
We begin listening to the
sexual anecdotes of,
presumably, one of these nymphs
abandoned by one of the city
directors who has been had in
the park in Highbury,
Richmond and Kew.
 
There's been,
it seems, an event:
perhaps, what--a pregnancy,
an abortion?
"'He wept.
He promised ‘a new start.'
/ What should I resent?'"
That experience then shifts to
another location.
 
There's a kind of mutation of
the speaker going on.
"On Margate Sands" --it's just
that location,
and then, "I can connect
nothing with nothing."
And now that phrase,
"nothing with nothing."
"What's in your head?
 
Nothing."
Those lines and that motif
recur.
That first person is like the
first person of "A Game of
Chess," as if that woman had
turned into that man.
 
And "Margate Sands" locate the
poem at this moment at one of
the places where,
after working in the city and
succumbing to a kind of nervous
breakdown, Eliot went to compose
parts of The Waste Land.
So,
there's a way in which he,
too, the poet,
is that first person there,
merged with these other
first-persons who finally then
merge with Queen Elizabeth when
we hear that first person say,
"My people humble people who
expect nothing."
Again, there's a kind of
shifting and metamorphosis of
identity as people are brought
into relationship with each
other through their shared
experience of erotic failure.
 
Let's see, not too many minutes
left to talk about the end of
the poem and to give some sense
of its shape.
 
 
Here's a kind of narrative of
the poem.
"The Burial of the Dead," the
title, it comes from the
Anglican Book of Common
Prayer.
It suggests that the poem will
search for, perhaps itself try
to substitute for,
the kind of ritual
understanding of life and death
that the Anglican Book of
Common Prayer provides;
again, some kind of collective
meaning.
"A Game of Chess" then
specifies the poem's problem as
erotic impasse,
as a kind of stale-mating,
as the failure of love.
"The Fire Sermon" then proposes
a kind of solution.
From the Buddhist teaching,
self-control is a way to combat
lust and domination,
the selfishness of desire –
all of which resonates in a
moral register with the poetic
program of "Tradition and the
Individual Talent" where the
theme is self-extinction or
self-submission.
The point in the middle of the
poem where I've been dwelling
for the past few minutes--the
point is to convert the fires of
lust into refining and
spiritualizing fires.
Then there's a kind of
scherzo,
that little section "Death by
Water,"
where the drowned Phoenician
sailor seems to,
well, be a kind of sacrificial
figure meant to represent,
again, iconographically,
self-extinction.
And then finally,
after this emblematic
sacrifice, we are introduced to
the long final section "What the
Thunder Said,"
when there is a return of
divine speech and the promise of
rain and of water,
what the poem seems to be
looking for: aligning the
redemptive regeneration that
would come with the rain with
the experience of divine speech
made present here in that simple
syllable,
"Da."
Let me say just a couple things
about the shape of the poem as
we have it.
I've asked you to look at
Pound's work on the poem in the
form of some pages from The
Waste Land Manuscripts.
 
Well, Pound collaborated in the
writing of this poem by,
in particular,
excising and shortening the
poem at many points and
specifically,
if you study the drafts,
by, I think,
isolating those moments in the
poem where Eliot is drawn to a
kind of Romantic lyricism.
 
On what becomes the first page
of the poem, "April is the
cruelest month," Pound circles
the word "forgetful":
"with forgetful snow."
 
In the passage about Philomel,
he circles the word
"inviolable" for "inviolable
voice."
Pound wants to get the
Romanticism and lyricism of the
poem out of it in certain ways.
 
Eliot resists that,
and there are ways in which
these two men working together
and against each other to create
the poem enact some of the
poem's own struggle with
lyricism and with Romanticism
and help us to see that struggle
as part of what goes into the
creation of the poem itself.
One of the sections that Pound
had the biggest effect on was
"Death by Water,"
which was originally a long,
heroic narrative or mock-heroic
narrative ending in the sailor's
drowning.
That short section is worth
dwelling on for a moment because
it is an instance where we are
given, I think,
an image of what Eliot was
giving up.
He is giving up a certain
investment in romance quest and,
more generally,
Romanticism that's emblematized
by this drowned figure.
There's also a way in which
this very short section points
us to and makes us think about
the shortness of the poem as a
whole.
The Waste Land is the
shortest long poem in the
language.
It is, you know,
a kind of radically condensed
epic.
And there's a kind of,
you could say,
claim made by the poem's form
that epic extension and duration
are no longer possible,
just as romance quest is no
longer possible,
precisely because we lack the
kind of culturally shared
vocabulary and language that
would allow Eliot to create a
kind of continuous form.
 
Instead, what we have is a
radically condensed and
discontinuous form;
the brokenness of the poem's
form representing the brokenness
of a world that doesn't have a
sacred center.
Finally, there's the matter of
those notes.
They are, I think,
an important part of the poem.
 
They kind of get lost in the
editor's notes in your
anthology.
Well, when Eliot first
published the poem it didn't
have those notes,
when he published it in England
in The Dial
magazine--excuse me,
in The Criterion.
When he published it in America
shortly after,
he added those notes to extend
the length of the poem;
he was asked to make a longer
poem.
There's a way in which those
notes establish a particular
kind of figure,
a poet who is also a scholar
and an editor,
who is producing a poem that
needs notes and that needs to
explain itself in these ways,
and that draws on literary
tradition and various forms of
cultural knowledge that require
annotation.
Eliot presents himself as this
figure, a poet who is also a
kind of scholar.
And this figure emerges as a
kind of central modern figure,
replacing the epic poet of the
past,
the one who produced a poem
such as Paradise Lost
without any footnotes.
Well, Hart Crane responds to
all of what I've been talking
about today and uses it as a
point of orientation to create a
related but very different kind
of poetry,
as we'll see on Wednesday.
 
