I do not know whether a man or woman
[V] 365
—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
615
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over Polish plains, stumbling in cracked earth
[V] 370
Ringed with a flat horizon, only.
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and breaks in the violet air
620
Tumbling towers
Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria
[V] 375
Vienna, London. Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
[Commentary I 691–96 · Textual History II 403–404]
625
And bats with baby faces, in the violet light,
[V] 380
Whistled, and beat their wings
A man crawled downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours.
630
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
[end of leaf]
[V] 385
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel,
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home,
635
There are no windows, and the door’s swing;
[V] 390
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a black cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico Co co rico
In a flash of lightning, then a damp gust
640
Bringing rain …
[V] 395
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Writhed for the rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
645
Then spoke the thunder
[V] 400
DA
DATTA. well then, what have we given?
My friend, my friend, beating in my heart,
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
650
Which an age of prudence cannot retract—
[V] 405
By this, and this only, we have existed,
Which is not to be found in our obituaries.
Nor in that which will busy beneficent spiders
Nor in documents eaten by the lean solicitor
655
In our empty rooms. [end of leaf]
[Commentary I 696–702 · Textual History II 404–406]
[V] 410
DA.
Dayadhvam. friend, my friend I have heard the key
Turn in the door, once and once only.
We think of the key, each in his prison,
660
Thinking of the key, each has built a prison.
[V] 415
Only at nightfall, aetherial murmurs
Repair for a moment a broken Coriolanus,
DA
Damyata. the wind was fair, and the boat responded
665
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and wheel.
[V] 420
The sea was calm, and your heart responded
Gaily, when invited, beating responsive
To controlling hands. I left without you
Clasping empty hands I sit upon the shore
670
Fishing, with the desolate sunset behind me
[V] 425
Shall I at least set the kingdom in order? [end of leaf]
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel fuoco che gli affina.
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronimo’s mad againe.
675
Le prince d’Aquitaine de la tour abolie
[V] 430
These fragments I have spelt into my ruins.
Datta, dayadhvam, damyata
Shantih shantih shantih.
[Commentary I 702–709 · Textual History II 406–408]
Commentary
Commentary: Introduction
1. Scope 2. References 3. Glossary 4. Symbols 5. Abbreviations
1. SCOPE
From the beginning, commentators on TSE have found precedents of all kinds, and the resources of the internet now enable editors to search non-literary materials beyond the scope of the reference shelf or even the Oxford English Dictionary (for which, see “Where Every Word is at Home”).
An effort has been made not to use the Commentary for critical elucidation. The frontiers are uncertain, but the principle has been to provide only notes which constitute or proceed from a point of information. Parallels with other writers will sometimes not only suggest a source but amount to an allusion. Conversely, it may not be a source but an analogue that brings back what was in the air. Notes of this kind try to put down only the parallels themselves (though in the awareness that annotation is inseparable from interpretation, selection and judgement), leaving the reader to decide what to make of what the poet may have made of this. As often in literary matters, the case is altered incrementally. Percy Allen, TSE wrote, had mustered “many other parallels, each slight in itself, but having a cumulative plausibility”, Poets’ Borrowings (1928). Similarly, “Miss Jeffery has not quite as clear a case as Dr. Schoell had in tracing the borrowings of Chapman, but her accumulation of probabilities, powerful and concurrent, leads to conviction”, The Early Novel (1929).
Parallels between different passages from within the couple of hundred pages of the Collected Poems have been given only when part of a larger collocation.
Scholars who have discovered pertinent information are credited, not least to indicate what was available at different stages in the appreciation of the poems. But in the face of a vast secondary bibliography, we cite interpretative articles and books only when they contain informative findings.
The Commentary to each section, such as “Poems (1920)” or “Uncollected Poems”, has a headnote, as does each individual poem. The headnote to Four Quartets is supplemented by a headnote to each individual Quartet.
The annotation by John Hayward for French editions of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, and by Valerie Eliot to the drafts of The Waste Land, are included in the Commentary to those poems. Inventions of the March Hare has been drawn upon for all parts of the edition, but some notes have been entirely or partly omitted.
TSE was recorded reading many of his poems. “It’s always worthwhile to hear a poet read his own poetry”, The Daily Illini 5 June 1953, reported him as saying at a reading at the University of Illinois the previous day. “It’s always interesting, once.” In the Preface to Anabasis he wrote that the “declamation, the system of stresses and pauses, which is partially exhibited by the punctuation and spacing, is that of poetry and not of prose”. Recordings of some poems more than once indicate that his sense of their stresses and pauses scarcely varied over the years. An exception is
Shantih shantih shantih
at the end of The Waste Land in 1933 as against 1946.
Pronunciations have been selectively noted when they involve any of the following: American English as against British English; foreign languages; names; unusual words; disputed or idiosyncratic pronunciation; changes over time, or differences between one recording and another. Not all recordings can be securely dated or have been available to the editors, so a note that TSE pronounced a word in a particular way in, say, 1947, does not mean that he did or did not do so at other times.
Information about the writing of the poems and their appearances in print appears in the Textual History.
2. REFERENCES
Unattributed quotations are from TSE. Poems and the
corresponding pages of Commentary can be located using the Index of Titles and First Lines. (The rejected draft addition to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock headed Prufrock’s Pervigilium is referred to simply by that title and is printed in Vol. II, within the Textual History to the published poem, after line 69.)
TSE’s prose appeared in many places and has been widely reprinted. The present edition provides information about the most important of these printings, without insisting upon the use of particular editions. References to the prose writings are standardised by the use of Identifying Titles, which consist of the item’s title in italics, followed by the year of first publication: Ben Jonson (1919). The Index of Identifying Titles in this volume gives exact details of first publication, along with the title of the first collection of TSE’s (if any) in which the item was collected, as well as indicating if it appeared in the final lifetime edition of Selected Essays (1951). Unless specified, the text used is that of its final authorised appearance. The Identifying Title of an item published by TSE under more than one title is that of the item’s final appearance, with earlier titles listed in the Index in brackets and alphabetically as cross-references. The date, however, is always that of the first appearance (under which the item will be found listed in Donald Gallup’s Bibliography).
When items appeared in two or more parts, the numerals “I”, “II” etc. are adopted as part of the titles, without square brackets irrespective of the original appearance. “Separately” indicates that an item was issued independently as well as previously or subsequently in a periodical, collection or anthology. Items listed as appearing within Selected Essays were in the book from the first edition (1932) unless otherwise specified. Later printings of essays from Selected Essays or TSE’s other collections are not noted.
Identifying Titles have also been assigned to a small number of documents often referred to in the Commentary, such as the typed inventory TSE’s books: Bodleian list (c. 1933) and Henry Eliot’s record of TSE’s year in America, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–1933. In the case of unpublished prose items (other than letters), locations of manuscripts and typescripts are given when known. TSE’s plays and full-length books are referred to without dates (which can be found in the Index of Identifying Titles).
Letters quoted are from TSE unless otherwise specified:
To Lytton Strachey, 6 Aug 1919: “Besides, my dear Lytton, I am a very ill-read person.”
Notation of letters is as economical as possible in the particular context, with the year and the correspondents’ names often not repeated in the course of exchanges. References to “Letters” are to the original edition (1988) of the first volume of T. S.Eliot’s letters. The revised edition is referred to as “Letters 1”, corresponding to the abbreviations for subsequent volumes (“Letters 2” etc). Letters by other people are mostly to be found within standard collections listed in the Bibliography, although some texts have been corrected from originals.
Many books and articles not by TSE are keyed to the Bibliography by the use of italics for the names of the author or editor: Fowler or Litz ed. If more than one title by an author is listed, the italicised name without date signifies the most important in this context, which is listed first; references to other titles are then given with name and date. So Gallup signifies his T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (1952, rev. ed. 1969), while Gallup 1970 signifies his T. S. Eliot & Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters (1970). If more than one title from a single year is listed, then the abbreviation is expanded, as for instance Harmon 1976a, Harmon 1976b. For economy’s sake, similarly, other references in the Commentary to articles not by TSE have been pared to the author’s name, journal and date.
In references to primary materials by other writers, the Commentary generally gives preference to editions that were or might have been known by TSE, and to British rather than American editions. When annotations from TSE’s own copy of a book are quoted, the current whereabouts of that copy is given in the Bibliography. Because many of the books used by TSE and quoted in the present edition are a century old or more, an attempt has been made to avoid page references which depend upon the exigencies of particular editions. Authorial divisions such as chapter or section numbers have been preferred to page numbers (although exceptions are made for books never likely to be reprinted). This has disadvantages, but does offer a consistent and widely applicable means of reference without encumbering the Commentary with bibliographical detail.
Within quoted material, titles have been standardised, unless the exact form is of interest and to change it would be misleading, as when TSE referred to “THE HIPPOPOTOMOS” or Arnold Bennett asked “Were the notes to Wastelands a lark or serious?” Other references within quoted material are likewise brought into conformity with the reference system of the present edition. (For inconsistencies in TSE’s “Notes on the Waste Land” and his misnumbering of his own lines, see Textual History headnote to those Notes.)
The Bodleian Library manuscript classmarks “MS Eng. misc c.” and “MS Eng. misc d.” are abbreviated to “c.” and “d.” in references such as “c. 624 fols 107–108”.
“A Beginner in 1908”
1. A Break with Tradition 2. Symons and Laforgue 3. Vers Libre
1. A BREAK WITH TRADITION
One usually expects to find with a young man of poetic genius that he expresses in his verse a more mature aspect of himself than that which appears in his life and personal relations. (To E. Graham Howe, 11 Aug 1939)
“Whatever may have been the literary scene in America between the beginning of the century and the year 1914, it remains in my mind a complete blank. I cannot remember the name of a single poet of that period whose work I read: it was only in 1915, after I came to England, that I heard the name of Robert Frost. Undergraduates at Harvard in my time read the English poets of the ’90s who were dead: that was as near as we could get to any living tradition. Certainly I cannot remember any English poet then alive who contributed to my own education. Yeats was well-known, of course; but to me, at least, Yeats did not appear, until after 1917, to be anything but a minor survivor of the ’90s · · · There were in the early years of the century, a few good poets writing in England, but I did not know of their existence until later; and it was often Pound (whose appreciation was much more comprehensive than most people realise) who directed my attention to them. But I do not think it is too sweeping to say, that there was no poet, in either country, who could have been of use to a beginner in 1908. The only recourse was to poetry of another age and to poetry of another language. Browning was more of a hindrance than a help, for he had gone some way, but not far enough, in discovering a contemporary idiom. And at that stage, Poe and Whitman had to be seen through French eyes. The question was still: where do we go from Swinburne? and the answer appeared to be, nowhere”, Ezra Pound (1946).
To Pound, 22 Dec 1924: “Probably the fact that Swinburne and the poets of the nineties were entirely missed out of my personal history counts for a great deal. I never read any of these people until it was too late for me to get anything out of them, and until after I had assimilated other influences which must have made it impossible for me to accept the Swinburnians at all. The only exception to the above is Rossetti. I am as blind to the merits of these people as I am to Thomas Hardy.”
“The kind of verse which began to be written about 1910 or so made the same break with tradition that we find in that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But it had its origins in the sources to which the younger men of that time went for inspiration. Some of these sources are to be found in the earlier symbolist poets of France, or to be precise, in Baudelaire and his immediate followers, Laforgue, Corbière, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Some are to be found in English poetry, both dramatic and lyric, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries · · · The young American poets, who came to London about that time, had left a country in which the status of poetry had fallen still lower than in England: there was not one older poet writing in America whose writing a yo
unger man could take seriously”, The Last Twenty-Five Years of English Poetry (1940).
To A. Benedict Crannigan, 12 Dec 1945: “All I can say is that I began to write differently after my first acquaintance with the work of Laforgue and that it seemed to me to suggest the possible medium for the sort of thing I wanted to say, only I was not quite sure what it was that I wanted to say until coming across a poet who showed me how to say it · · · The best of the poems published in 1917 were written between 1909 and 1911. Some of the others were written again in 1915, and again, some in 1917. There are no poems in my published works written prior to my contact with the Symbolists but I should point out that I had no knowledge of the so-called Imagists until 1915, and Imagism made very little impression upon me. That is to say, the Imagist poetry had no influence upon me. I gained a great deal at that time from the critical writing and conversation of Ezra Pound.”
“The innovator of a new period will be the man who begins a contemporary idiom. What makes an idiom contemporary is never easy to state. It is not so much a matter of using new words, and is still more superficially a matter of mentioning new objects such as aeroplanes and machine-guns. Nor is it essentially a matter of new metres, for the abstract possibilities of metric are limited: it may be a change of cadence and inflexion or vocabulary in the same metres. It is the difference between the blank verse of Wordsworth and that of Mallet, between the lyric of Blake and that of Collins. A poet is likely to begin by using the speech of his immediate predecessors, and to be urged on rather by a sense of its inadequacy for his purposes, than by a clear provision of what he wants. Simplicity and naturalness of speech are not necessarily his gift at the beginning; he is more likely to arrive at them in his maturity by years of hard work”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937). (David Mallet, orig. Malloch, 1705?–65. Johnson’s Lives: “his blank verse seems to my ear the echo of Thomson”.)
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 28
