To A. J. Matthews, 27 Dec 1934, about Hysteria: “I regard the ‘prose poem’ as a minor form of a past era, and of less importance for English literature than for French. As to the only one which I have committed myself, I regard it as a kind of note for a poem, but not as a poem.” To Roberto Sanesi, 10 Dec 1959, responding to a list of 29 poems Sanesi proposed to translate into Italian: “On reviewing your list it seems to me comprehensive enough to be representative. I should say that the short piece in prose called Hysteria was too slight to be worth translating.”
Title Hysteria: OED: “Cf. Fr. hystérie. Women being much more liable than men to this disorder, it was originally thought to be due to a disturbance of the uterus and its functions” (entry pub. 1897–99). Resident in Paris in 1910–11, TSE read Pierre Janet (whom he recalled as “the great psychologist”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1934). Grover Smith 1998: Janet “gave a series of fifteen lectures at the Harvard Medical School in 1906 and issued them in the following year as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. These lectures, founded on decades of clinical observation, gave a preview substantially of Les Névroses, Janet’s 1909 cumulative account of his work. Janet always focussed on hysterical disorders, to which he attributed several types of dissociated personality · · · The symptoms may range from sleepwalking (for Janet always hysterical) or momentary trance and confusion to gross physical afflictions such as hysterical paralysis, blindness, and alimentary or erotic breakdowns. Janet considered the idée fixe to be moral—that is, social in origin. It was always created by a trauma the details of which eluded conscious memory. The hysteric confronts anew an image precipitating turmoil but does not know why it does so.” Houghton has several pages of notes by TSE on cases from Janet’s Névroses et idées fixes (1898) (Childs 96–97).
[Poem I 26 · Textual History II 334]
teeth: Edwin B. Holt: “while the teeth serve as a symbol of repugnance, their associated context in the dreamer’s mind shows clearly how they come to have such a meaning. [Footnote: In hysteria, vomiting is regularly a symptom of repugnance]”, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics (1915), which TSE mentioned in New Philosophers (1918) (Crawford 2015 293). short gasps, inhaled: see Commentary on The Waste Land [I] 63–68 for “Sighs, short · · · exhaled”. aware of: often discomfiting in TSE. “I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids”, Morning at the Window 3. “aware of his limbs smoothly passing each other · · · And his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers”, The Death of Saint Narcissus 9, 15. “lives in the awareness of the observing eye”, WLComposite 339. “She was aware of her small square room: alone, alone in a glass coffin”, ms story for Vivien Eliot (beginning “Fanny lying in bed late”), c. 1924–25 (U. Maryland). she laughed · · · the dark caverns of her throat: “the one great line that leaps out so surprisingly towards the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death’”, The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937), quoting V ii. I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end: “I tried to assemble these nebulae into one pattern”, The Engine II. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”, The Waste Land [V] 430.
Conversation Galante
Published as the first of four Observations in Poetry Sept 1916, then 1917+. Quoted in full by Pound in Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot (Egoist June 1917), a review of 1917 perhaps slightly preceding its publication. No recording known. Faber & Faber letter to Allen Lane of Penguin, 13 May 1947, on the selection previously made for Guild ed.: “omitted · · · two short passages, Hysteria (which is prose) and Conversation Galante (which I think he regarded as not up to the level of the others).”
Dated Nov 1909 in Notebook. Dated Cambridge, Mass., 1909 in Isaacs’s US 1920, and by TSE in both Morley’s US 1920 and Hayward’s 1925. TSE to Edward J. H. Greene, 18 Oct 1939: “Conversation Galante is very early. It should be dated, I think, 1909.”
Pound to Harriet Monroe, 16 Sept 1916: “I vote that the lyric prize be given to T. S. Eliot for Conversation Galante · · · (If anyone votes for a different poem by Eliot please transfer my vote to it.)” The prize of $100 for a lyric poem offered by Mrs. Julius Rosenwald was awarded to Muna Lee of Oklahoma City, for Foot-notes, with Conversation Galante being one of twenty poems to receive honourable mention (Poetry Nov 1916).
Modelled, as the Westminster Gazette reviewer noted on 28 July 1917, on Laforgue’s Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot, which Symons 110 had quoted in full. In Thayer’s AraVP, TSE wrote beside the title: “Laforgue”.
Title Conversation Galante: not in OED. For its appearance in Baedeker, see Mr. Apollinax 2–5 note. Galante: Watteau was received into the French Academy in 1717 “pour un tableau qui représentait une fête galante”, his Embarquement pour l’Île de Cythère (see note to Goldfish II). Verlaine’s title Fêtes galantes was adopted by “F. M.” for Fête Galante (1925).
1 sentimental friend the moon: Gautier: Variations sur le carnaval de Venise IV. Clair de lune sentimental. For “a sentimental sunset” in Paris, see volume headnote on the dedication to Verdenal (in 4. TITLE, DEDICATION AND EPIGRAPH TO THE VOLUME).
1–3 moon · · · balloon: Laforgue’s prose: “oui, une lune naïve en son énormité comme un ballon lâché!” [Yes, a moon whose innocent enormity is like a liberated balloon!], Lohengrin, fils de Parsifal (Greene 27).
1–5 the moon! · · · balloon | Or an old battered lantern hung aloft | To light poor travellers to their distress: T. E. Hulme’s Above the Dock (published by Pound, 1912):
[Poem I 26–27 · Textual History II 334–35]
Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.
To Mary Hutchinson, [9 July? 1919]: “I am not sure whether you thought that Hulme is a really great poet, as I do, or not. I can’t think of anything as good as two of his poems since Blake.” To Emily Hale, 6 Oct 1930, on Hulme’s Speculations ed. Herbert Read (1924):
You may wonder particularly why I sent a big book of prose by Hulme with only five little poems at the end. The reason is that these little poems have been a kind of symbol of the whole of the first phase of modern poetry in England: say from about 1909. Hulme was an extraordinary man, who has had a great stimulating influence on many of us (his views on Humanism and Original Sin are the starting point for Herbert Read and myself, and Ivor Richards and Ramon Fernandez know his work etc.) He wrote the poems as a tour de force, among a group of friends, Monro, Flint, Pound and others, as a kind of illustration of ‘Imagism’ and they should be read in connexion with what he says about modern poetry in the prose text. I think Conversation Piece is very beautiful, though I do not understand it.
To F. O. Matthiessen, 18 Oct 1934: “I didn’t know T. E. Hulme personally although I had heard much about him. I never read anything he wrote until Speculations came out. Herbert Read didn’t know him personally either: only people living in London before the War knew him.” the moon · · · To light poor travellers: Dryden: “Moon and Stars | To lonely, weary, wandering Travellers”, Religio Laici 1–3 (Richard Luckett, personal communication).
3 Prester John’s balloon: in R. E. Raspe’s The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1785) ch. XXXI, Prester John, the legendary medieval Christian monarch of an exotic realm, sends a “Wauwau” bird to London from Africa by balloon (Barbara Lauriat, personal communication). Writing to Bonamy Dobrée in Egypt in 1927, TSE repeatedly joked about Dobrée being an envoy to “the University of Ethiopia and Nubia and the land of Prester John” (see “Improper Rhymes”). balloon: on the meaning of a name: “it disappears like a gasballoon into the sky: the person who let the toy escape, and who continues to fix his eye upon it, can still see it long after it has become impossible for a random eye to find · · · The extension of me
aning (on the one hand extension of the meaning of names, and on the other hand extension of the being of facts) is, it must be insisted, not a falsification; it is imprudent, but so is a balloon ascension; though our balloon finally collapse, we have taken a certain number of observations while in the air; and it will be only to the eyes of the vulgar that our descent appear a disaster”, The Validity of Artificial Distinctions (1914).
[Poem I 27 · Textual History II 335]
5 To light poor travellers to their distress: OED “ignis fatuus”: “A phosphorescent light seen hovering or flitting over marshy ground, and supposed to be due to the spontaneous combustion of an inflammable gas · · · When approached, the ignis fatuus appeared to recede, and finally to vanish · · · This led to the notion that it was the work of a mischievous sprite, intentionally leading benighted travellers astray. Hence the term is commonly used allusively or fig. for any delusive guiding principle, hope, aim, etc.” See note to East Coker II 42, “fancy lights”. Edward Young: “to light revellers from shame to shame”, Night Thoughts IX 680. See note to The Burnt Dancer 34, and for Young’s volume see headnote to Whispers of Immortality. to their distress: Gautier (at the line-ending): “Dans ce regard, à ma détresse” [In this regard, to my distress], Tristesse en mer [Sadness at Sea] 9.
13 humorist: OED 3: “One given to humouring or indulging. Obs.”, last citation 1686: “Man is the greatest Humorist and Flatterer of himself.”
[Poem I 27 · Textual History II 335]
14 the absolute: of Laforgue: “It is noticeable how often the words ‘inconscient’, ‘néant’, and ‘L’absolu’ and such philosophical terms · · · recur”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 215 (Clark Lecture VIII). Laforgue often stationed the word at the line-ending: “Me laisser éponger mon Moi par l’Absolu?” [allow my Self to be rubbed out by the Absolute?], Préludes autobiographiques 106 [Autobiographical Preamble]. “Nul Absolu; | Des compromis; | Tout est pas plus; | Tout est permis” [No Absolute. | Some compromise. | The whole is not more. | All is allowed], verse within the prose tale Lohengrin II (tr. Frances Newman). TSE, similarly: “On the doorstep of the Absolute”, Spleen 16. “Just out of reach | First born child of the absolute”, Suite Clownesque III 21. “Towards the unconscious, the ineffable, the absolute”, Afternoon 9 (see note).
Much debated in Harvard philosophy circles in TSE’s youth. Jain 1991 15–16: “The chief exponent of Kantian idealism in America was Josiah Royce. It was predominantly his thought that shaped the emphases of twentieth-century American philosophy until the First World War. Eliot paid tribute to him as the ‘doyen of American philosophers’ [Knowledge and Experience 10]. In his attempts at resolving the dispute between evolution and religion, Royce posited an absolute, a world soul that reconciled the antithesis between the finite and the infinite.” (On what the Absolute meant to Royce, Bradley and William James see Jain 1992 passim; for Bergson’s Absolute, see note to He said: this universe is very clever 6–7, “like a syphilitic spider | The Absolute sits waiting”.) Jain 1991 19–20: “Bradley’s metaphysical system is constructed on the basis of the immediately given, or immediate experience · · · Bradley’s Absolute is a perfect, harmonious, all-inclusive system that contains in itself all experience. When viewed from the standpoint of the Absolute the parts—time, space, the self, thought, truth, God—are finite, incomplete, and contradictory. They are therefore appearances in relation to the Reality into which they are ultimately absorbed. These appearances, however, are true or false, real or unreal, in degree—relative to the Absolute.” TSE to Norbert Weiner, 6 Jan 1915: “it is all one if one call the Absolute, Reality or Value. It does not exist for me, but I cannot say that it does not exist for Mr. Bradley. And Mr. Bradley may say that the Absolute is implied for me in my thought—and who is to be the referee?”
Bradley’s Absolute, wrote TSE, “represents in fact only the pathetic primitive human Credo in ultimate explanations and ultimate reality which haunts us like the prayers of childhood”, Report on the Relation of Kant’s Criticism to Agnosticism (1913). “The crudest experience and the abstrusest theory end in identity, and this identity I call the absolute. If you choose to call it nothing, I will not dispute the point. But whichever it is, it is both beginning and end”, Degrees of Reality (1913). “The Absolute, we find, does not fall within any of the classes of objects: it is neither real nor unreal nor imaginary”, Knowledge and Experience 169. “Professor Bosanquet is the prophet who has put off his shoes and talks with the Absolute in a burning bush”, The Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics (1913). (For Bosanquet, see note to Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think? 1.) Jean Verdenal to TSE, 22 Apr 1912: “Voici sans doute le prélude de quelque nouvelle course après l’absolu, et comme les autres fois on se laissera tromper” [This is no doubt the prelude to some new pursuit of the absolute and, as on previous occasions, I shall be taken in]. TSE: “It is to the immense credit of Hulme that he found out for himself that there is an absolute to which Man can never attain”, Second Thoughts about Humanism (1929).
In 1923 TSE commissioned a Criterion article on “the attempt to conceive the Absolute as a spirtual life” from his former Oxford tutor, Harold Joachim, but it was eventually printed elsewhere (TSE’s letters 24 Jan 1924, 21 Jan 1927). TSE returns often to the Absolute in his Clark Lectures, 1926: “You know how the Absolute of Bergson is arrived at: by a turning back on the path of thought, by divesting one’s mind of the apparatus of distinction and analysis, by plunging into the flow of immediate experience”; “whether you seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery or debauchery, it is all one—you are seeking in the wrong place”; “In these lines of Donne there is a great deal of the modern recherche de l’absolu [the search after the absolute], the disappointed romanticism, the vexation of resignation at finding the world other than one wanted it to be”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 99, 115, 128.
15 slightest: on W. J. Turner’s Ecstasy: “Mr. Turner is not very happy in his adjectives. He weakens one of them by a superlative (‘frieze on whitest marble’)”, Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant (1918).
18 Are we then so serious?: Laforgue: “‘C’était donc sérieux?’” [“Was it serious after all?”], Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot [Another Complaint from Lord Pierrot] 20. TSE: “Romeo, grand sérieux”, Nocturne 1 (“nocturne”, 8).
La Figlia Che Piange
Published as the second of four Observations in Poetry Sept 1916, then 1917+. Included in full and with no variants in Pound’s Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot (see headnote to Conversation Galante). Reprinted in An Anthology of Modern Verse, ed. A. Methuen (1921) with epigraph reading “O quam te memorem virgo … O dea certe!” (see note to epigraph).
Dated Cambridge, Mass., 1911 by Poèmes; “1911 (near the end)” in VE’s 1951; 1912 by TSE to Edward J. H. Greene, 18 Oct 1939; and Cambridge, 1912, by TSE in both Morley’s US 1920 and Hayward’s 1925. For Aiken’s claim to have offered this poem “at a party” to Harold Monro, who rejected it, see volume headnote, 2. COMPOSITION AND SHAPING.
Recorded May 1942 in Stockholm for the Swedish Broadcasting System. Second: 23 May 1947, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Third: 12 Nov 1950, for U. Chicago Round Table, broadcast by NBC.
[Poems I 27–28 · Textual History II 335–36]
Vassar Miscellany News 10 May 1933, on a reading by TSE at the college three days earlier: “he read his poem, La Figlia Che Piange, a poem, he said, which other people liked, and for which he did not care a great deal. People might think, he remarked, that this poem had been suggested by an incident, the sight of a deserted girl. But not at all. Some one had advised him to see a stone stele of Egyptian origin in an Italian museum. The figure was of a woman, and the Italians called it La Figlia Che Piange. He never saw the stele, but the title stuck in his head, so that in the end the poem gave his impression of what that piece of sculpture ought to be. Here the picture and the verbal image were the starting point, and the subject of the poem was the last thing to
arrive. ‘About such things one can only say that different poets’ minds work differently and one poet’s mind works differently at different times,’ Mr. Eliot explained.” In 1907–1908, TSE took George Henry Chase’s History of Ancient Art course at Harvard on “Architecture, sculpture, and painting in Egypt, Assyria, and Greece, with some account of the lesser arts”.
In Wellesley College News 8 May 1947, Judy Wolpert reported TSE’s reading at Wellesley three days earlier, which included this poem, “inspired by an Egyptian carving in Italy which the poet never saw. This is one of Mr. Eliot’s most oft requested readings, and he noted that ‘people are often disappointed if they don’t get what they expect, even if they don’t want it’.” On the BBC Third Programme 4 Aug 1948, John Hayward mentioned “faint reminiscences” of Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel (see note to 1), adding that many readers had supposed “that ‘The Weeping Girl’ must have been a real girl with whom the poet had been in love · · · The poem in fact is one of speculation and regret, about a statue which Mr. Eliot had looked for in a museum in Italy but had failed to find”, ts of Hayward’s “Prufrock and Other Observations” (King’s HB/M/9). Louis Bertrand, tr. Stuart Merrill: “‘Ah, Signora, you are as a statue in a garden!’” Evening on the Water in Pastels in Prose. TSE: “Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone | But evanescent, as if one should meet | A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat, | An immaterial fancy of one’s own”, On a Portrait 5–8. On poems and paintings (such as Rossetti’s sonnets For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione and Rend, rend thine hair, Cassandra, and Swinburne’s Hermaphroditus and Before the Mirror), see Roper 2002.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 46
