The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 47
The Daily Illini 5 June 1953, reporting TSE’s reading the previous day: “Eliot commented people had often asked him to tell them about the emotional experience behind his work La Figlia Che Piange, the Weeping Girl. He said he wouldn’t talk about his emotion behind a poem. It is unimportant. Besides, he added, there wasn’t any emotion. The poem, Eliot said, was suggested by an Italian painting which his friends had told him about. He never got to see the painting.”
To Sir Algernon Methuen, 2 Nov 1920, responding to his request for a poem for an anthology for schools and general readers: “The only poem that strikes me as possible is one called La figlia che piange.” But the following year TSE wrote to Richard Aldington, 8 Sept 1921, of “Messrs. Methuen, against whom I have no grievance except that they chose La figlia che piange to print in an anthology because it is the mildest of my productions”. TSE referred to this poem as having “a certain low popularity”, Excerpts from Lectures 1932–1933. Chapin, of TSE’s reading at the National Gallery, Washington, 23 May 1947: “Of La Figlia Che Piange he said, whimsically, he read it because people expected it and that, as it was his first to be put in any respectable anthology, it must be completely inoffensive.” When reading it for broadcast: “in its time the most popular, I suppose, because it seemed to many people to be more like poetry than my other work”, Chicago Round Table (1950).
[Poem I 28 · Textual History II 335–36]
Title] [The Girl Who Weeps]. Purg. XVI 87–88: “che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia, | l’anima semplicetta” [like a little child that plays, with weeping and laughter, the simple soul], tr. TSE (see headnote to Animula). Dante’s tercet ends “volentier torna a ciò che la trastulla” [willingly she turneth to that which delights her] (TSE: “she turned away”, 17). “Figlia del tuo figlio”, The Dry Salvages IV 9.
Epigraph] Against this TSE wrote in Thayer’s AraVP: “Aenaeid”, changed to “Aeneid” and “O dea certe”. Aeneas to his mother, Venus, who is disguised as a huntress (I 327–28):
O—quam te memorem, virgo? namque haud tibi voltus
mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat; o dea certe!
[by what name should I call thee, O maiden? for thy face is not mortal nor has thy voice a human ring; O goddess surely!]
1 Stand on the highest pavement of the stair: Rossetti: “It was the rampart of God’s house | That she was standing on”, The Blessed Damozel 25–26 (Praz). The poem is in Oxf Bk of English Verse. TSE: “Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, first by my rapture and next by my revolt, held up my appreciation of Beatrice by many years”, Dante (1929).
2–7 Lean on a garden urn— | Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair · · · But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair: Laforgue: “Penche, penche ta chère tête, va, | Regarde les grappes des premiers lilas” [Bend, bend your darling head – come, look at the bunches of the first lilacs], Dimanches [Sundays] IV 61–62 (Greene 48).
3 Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair: Tennyson: “with her sunny hair · · · She meant to weave me a snare”, Maud I [vi] 212–14 (Musgrove 88). Swinburne: “Always the shuttle cleaves clean through, and he | Weaves with the hair of many a ruined head”, Laus Veneris 43–44. Symons: “With what flounces and what curls | To weave the painted web of light?” Bal Masqué.
3–4 weave the sunlight · · · Clasp your flowers: “While all the East was weaving red with gray, | The flowers at the window turned toward dawn”, Before Morning 1–2.
4–5 flowers · · · Fling: Ernest Dowson: “We fling up flowers and laugh”, The Carthusians 29 (“and laugh”, Preludes IV 14). TSE described Methuen’s An Anthology of Modern Verse (in which La Figlia Che Piange appeared) as “not so bad as meaningless”, but added that Dowson’s poem, though “not one of his best · · · is distinguished from the verse of our contemporaries, which surrounds it, precisely by an intellectual dignity”, A Preface to Modern Literature: Being a Conspectus Chiefly of English Poetry, Addressed to an Intelligent and Inquiring Foreigner (1923).
6–7 your eyes · · · weave · · · your hair: Coleridge: “His flashing eyes, his floating hair! | Weave a circle round him thrice, | And close your eyes”, Kubla Khan 50–52.
8–15 So I would · · · So I would · · · So I would have had her stand and grieve · · · I should find · · · Some way we both should understand: “I would come · · · I should for a moment linger · · · at last you would understand · · · You would love me”, The Love Song of St. Sebastian 22–34. “How steadfastly I should have mourned | The sinking of so dear a head!” Elegy 5–6.
8, 10, 22 I would have had him leave · · · he would have left · · · I should have lost: (i) “You have the scene arrange itself”, Portrait of a Lady I 2. “You have the other raise”, Mandarins 2 15. (ii) “Your heart would have responded”, The Waste Land [V] 420. “you would have to put off”, Little Gidding I 42.
[Poem I 28 · Textual History II 336]
11 As the soul leaves the body: in his Oxford notes on Aristotle (1914–15), TSE recorded R. G. Collingwood on De Anima: “If the soul moves in space, it might move out of the body and back again”, adding the title of Frazer’s Golden Bough, where such beliefs are described (Crawford 2015 215).
14–22 Some way incomparably light and deft · · · we both should understand · · · a smile and shake of the hand. | | She turned away · · · gesture: in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance ch. XVIII, Coverdale, from his hotel, spies Zenobia and Westervelt through a window: “she broke away, and vanished beyond my ken. Westervelt approached the window · · · smile · · · smile · · · endowed with a cat-like circumspection · · · He now proved it, considerably to my discomfiture, by detecting and recognising me, at my post of observation · · · Immediately afterwards, Zenobia appeared · · · She signified her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal.” Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand: Laforgue: “l’Amour | S’échange par le temps qui court. | Simple et sans foi comme un bonjour” [that Love is exchanged the way it is these days. Simple and faithless as a “hello”], La vie qu’elles me font mener [The Life They Make Me Lead] 11–13. In his prose tale Hamlet, Laforgue has these lines of verse. TSE began a translation of Laforgue’s Hamlet (to Conrad Aiken, 21 Aug 1916). “a smile | Simple and profound”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 44–45. a smile and shake of the hand. | She turned away: “He turned away, and with his motion of dismissal”, Little Gidding II 67–96, first venture in verse [22] variant.
17–18, 20 She turned away · · · Compelled my imagination · · · Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers: Hawthorne: “long after · · · her daily flower affected my imagination” and “She had, as usual, a flower in her hair · · · she turned away, exemplifying · · · that noble and beautiful motion which characterised her”, The Blithedale Romance ch. VI, XVIII.
17–24 She · · · many days, | Many days and many hours · · · troubled: Isaiah 32: 10: “Many days and years shall ye be troubled, ye careless women.” turned away · · · they · · · troubled midnight: Job 34: 20: “In a moment shall they die, and the people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away.”
18 Compelled my imagination: reviewing Herbert Read’s Reason and Romanticism, TSE quoted his remark that the scientific equivalents of Christianity’s unconscious symbols “no longer compel the imagination”, Mr. Read and M. Fernandez (1926).
18, 24 imagination · · · troubled midnight and the noon’s repose: Wilde: “He saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day”, The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. XI.
20, 22–23 flowers · · · pose · · · these cogitations: “Oh, spare these reminiscences! | How you prolong the pose! · · · attar of rose”, Portrait of a Lady II 15 ^ 16 variant.
22 pose: “With Byron, if you like, everything was pose, but the existence of a pose implies the possibility of a reality to which the pose pretends”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 209 (Clark Lecture VIII).
[Poem
I 28 · Textual History II 336]
22, 24 lost · · · repose: “It is the mark of the man who has no core, no individual moral existence, to be possessed with moral notions, to be goaded by the necessity of continual moral formulations. In this he finds repose”, London Letter May 1922. “Baudelaire was man enough for damnation · · · we are not prevented from praying for his repose”, Baudelaire (1930). Irving Babbitt writes of “vital respose” as against “inert repose”; of “the romanticists” as seeing “in repose only lifelessness and stagnation”; and of what is “suggestive of repose, of something that without being in the least inert and soulless is nevertheless raised above the region of motion and change”, The New Laokoon (1910) 229–30. “A stoic in obese repose”, Mandarins 3 2. For “repose” as a verb in Blake, see note to A Cooking Egg 25–32.
24 The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose: Shelley: “The cloud-shadows of midnight possess their own repose”, Stanzas.—April, 1814, with “autumn woods” (TSE: “autumn weather”, 17). TSE’s schoolboy copy of The Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Dowden (A. L. Burt, NY, n.d.) is recorded in a Milton Academy catalogue from the late 1930s. midnight · · · noon’s repose: “the Jellicle Moon appears · · · repose · · · To dance by the light of the Jellicle Moon”, The Song of the Jellicles 17–18, 28. “by day or night · · · enjoy well-earned repose”, He who in ceaseless labours took delight 2, 4. noon’s repose: “repose of noon, set under the upper branches of noon’s widest tree | Under the breast feather stirred by the small wind after noon”, Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman 33–34.
[Poem I 28 · Textual History II 336]
Poems (1920)
1. Contents in Order of First Publication 2. A New Start 3. The Dramatists 4. What France Meant to TSE 5. TSE’s Proficiency in French 6. Publication of Poems (1919) 7. Publication of Ara Vos Prec 8. Publication of Poems (1920) 9. TSE on the 1920 Poems
1. CONTENTS IN ORDER OF FIRST PUBLICATION
Le Directeur Little Review July 1917
Mélange Adultère de Tout Little Review July 1917
Lune de Miel Little Review July 1917
The Hippopotamus Little Review July 1917
Sweeney Among the Nightingales Little Review Sept 1918
Whispers of Immortality Little Review Sept 1918
Dans le Restaurant Little Review Sept 1918
Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service Little Review Sept 1918
A Cooking Egg Coterie May Day 1919
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar Art & Letters Summer 1919
Sweeney Erect Art & Letters Summer 1919
Gerontion Ara Vos Prec Feb 1920
[Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”) Ara Vos Prec Feb 1920]
These poems formed the first half of two books published in 1920: Ara Vos Prec (early Feb) and TSE’s first American volume, Poems (late Feb), respectively AraVP and US 1920. In practice, each was a collected poems, with the Prufrock poems as the second half. Ode (“Tired. | Subterrene”), for which see “Uncollected Poems”, was printed in AraVP, which omitted Hysteria from the second half of the volume. US 1920 omitted Ode but included Hysteria. For TSE’s fears about his mother’s reaction to Ode, see headnote. Seven of the “Poems (1920)” had appeared the previous year in the Hogarth Press Poems (1919). None of the French poems was to appear in Penguin / Sel Poems.
TSE may have known that the US Copyright Office would grant US copyright on a foreign book only if it received two copies of the foreign edition by publication day and if an edition was typeset in the US within two months. Although he fulfilled the second condition, he did not fulfil the first. However, change of title and substitution of a poem might have been sufficient to make US 1920 legally a different book, which could be copyrighted. The copyright status of the Prufrock poems in the US was highly uncertain. See Spoo 60–61, 94–107.
[Poems I 29–52 · Textual History II 337–358]
2. A NEW START
Around the time that proofs were received of Prufrock and Other Observations, Pound wrote to the editor of the Little Review, Margaret Anderson, 22 Apr 1917: “Eliot has turned in a good bunch of poems, for July. Three french and one english, announce simply ‘a group of poems by T. S. Eliot will appear in the July number’. S.V.P. I dare say there’ll be one or two more by then. Getting his book into print seems to have set him off again.” Vivien Eliot to Charlotte Eliot, 30 Apr [1917]: “Only when he began to be more bright and happy and boyish than I’ve known him to be for nearly two years, did I feel convinced—and only when he has written five, most excellent poems in the course of one week, did Ezra Pound and many others, believe it possible.”
In July four new poems appeared in the Little Review: Le Directeur, Mélange Adultère de Tout, Lune de Miel and The Hippopotamus. Aldous Huxley to Ottoline Morrell, 6 Feb 1917: “I dined with Eliot in his flat—Mrs. E happily being out we had a very good talk, Eliot in good form all considered and showed me his latest verses—very odd indeed: he is experimenting in a new genre. Philosophical obscenity rather like Laforgue and dimly like a great series of poems which I once planned to be called ‘Vomic Songs.’ Eliot’s are very good: some in English, some in the most astonishingly erudite French.” After this, new poems came slowly, although Pound assured Anderson that more were on the way. On 16 July 1917, Pound wrote: “for Oct. Eliot should have finished revising a poem”; 3 Aug: “Poem by Eliot (IF he gets it in. It’s writ, but he is still revising)”; 17 Aug: “Eliot is coming tomorrow. I hope with a poem”; 24 May 1918: “Four T.S.E. poems in hand, one or two questions I want to ask T. before sending them”; 10 June: “Here are Eliot’s cameos. for Sept.” Pound to Quinn, 4 June 1918: “Eliot has emitted a few new and diverting verses. Sending ’em for Sept.” Finally, under the heading “Four Poems”, the Little Review published Sweeney Among the Nightingales, Whispers of Immortality, Dans le Restaurant and Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service. (Immediately preceding them in the issue was an extract of a review by Edgar Jepson of American poetry, extolling Prufrock and Other Observations.)
3. THE DRAMATISTS
“My own verse is, so far as I can judge, nearer to the original meaning of vers libre than is any of the other types: at least, the form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue together with the later Elizabethan drama; and I do not know anyone who started from exactly that point.” (Ezra Pound’s “Selected Poems” (1928), Introduction)
[Poems I 29–52 · Textual History II 337–358]
For TSE, the “Elizabethan” could stretch beyond the Queen’s death in 1603, as in the contents of his Elizabethan Essays (1934). “The Elizabethan Age had, even in its smallest writers, the sense of tragedy and of comedy, the attitude of a kind of inspired recklessness. The Jacobean–Caroline period has a more civilised grace”, The Minor Metaphysicals (1930). Beginning in 1916, TSE gave a three-year tutorial class in English literature, in Southall, Middlesex, as part of Oxford University’s Committee for the Promotion of Higher Education for Working People (Schuchard 26–51). The third year, from autumn 1918 to May 1919, was devoted to Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. To his mother, 10 May 1918: “My Southall people want to do Elizabethan Literature next year which would interest me more than what we have done before, and would be of some use to me too, as I want to write some essays on the dramatists, who have never been properly criticized.” In Studies in Contemporary Criticism II (1918), TSE listed—slightly inaccurately—some of the books he had read “lately”: Swinburne’s The Age of Shakespeare (1908), John Addington Symonds’s Shakespere’s Predecessors in the English Drama (1884), Frederick S. Boas’s Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896) and Felix E. Schelling’s Elizabethan Drama (1908). Concurrently in “Poems (1920)”, he drew upon Beaumont & Fletcher, Chapman, Jonson, Marlowe, Marston, Middleton, Tourneur and Webster.
It was from these minor dramatists that I, in my own poetic formation, had learned my lessons; it was by them, and not by Shakespeare, that my imagination had been
stimulated, my sense of rhythm trained, and my emotions fed. I had read them at the age at which they were best suited to my temperament and stage of development, and had read them with passionate delight long before I had any thought, or any opportunity of writing about them. At the period in which the stirrings of desire to write verse were becoming insistent, these were the men whom I took as my tutors. Just as the modern poet who influenced me was not Baudelaire but Jules Laforgue, so the dramatic poets were Marlowe and Webster and Tourneur and Middleton and Ford, not Shakespeare. A poet of the supreme greatness of Shakespeare can hardly influence, he can only be imitated: and the difference between influence and imitation is that influence can fecundate, whereas imitation—especially unconscious imitation—can only sterilize.
To Criticize the Critic 18
To Helen Gardner, 13 May 1964: “I am content that I have drawn attention to some of the old dramatists. That is the only value of my criticism, that it should lead people to read works that they have never read, or to re-read them with fresh eyes. As I have said, I don’t think that anything I have written about Shakespeare is worth preserving, and my criticism of the others has its only value in its enthusiasm and the introduction of the writers to a new public.”
4. WHAT FRANCE MEANT TO TSE
From Oct 1910 to July 1911, TSE lived in Paris. “ce n’est pas un accident qui m’avait conduit à Paris. Depuis plusieurs années, la France représentait surtout, à mes yeux, la poésie” [It wasn’t an accident that took me to Paris. For many years, France had represented above all, to my eyes, poetry], What France Means to You (1944).