The 1930 volume and its American counterpart contain the dedication “TO | MY WIFE” (see note on dedication to Prufrock and Other Observations). The front panel of the jacket of the trade edition describes Ash-Wednesday as “Six Poems”. The front flap reads: “ ¶ A new sequence of six poems with certain recurrent themes. They are further developments of a style used by the author in at least one of his recent Ariel Poems” (“new” and “recent” were omitted in 1933). TSE and Pound had been inconsistent about whether The Waste Land was one poem or a “poem sequence” or a “series of poems” (see headnote, 2. POUND’S PART), and similarly TSE never quite decided whether to speak of Ash-Wednesday as one poem or several. (In 1963, the first line of each part was listed in the Index of Titles, as was the title of each part of The Waste Land. The parts of The Hollow Men were not individually listed.)
TSE referred repeatedly to Ash-Wednesday as “the poem” in his correspondence of 1930. In reply to a request to reprint Part I in an anthology, he wrote to Norman Foerster, 15 June 1932: “I had rather not include Because I do not hope inasmuch as that is merely the first section of Ash Wednesday and I had rather not have it appear again separately.” This had become a rule by the time he wrote to R. J. Wilkinson, 8 Oct 1935: “I do not allow parts of either Ash Wednesday or The Waste Land to be published separately.” Yet The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) printed Parts I and II of Ash-Wednesday, and on 24 May 1938 TSE wrote to the Rev. H. Escott: “I should be quite willing to appear in your anthology, but I consider that the whole of Ash Wednesday is too much to concede to an anthology at any price. I suggest that you should choose one section, and write to Messrs Faber & Faber again.”
Recorded 1933, Columbia U. Second: 26 July 1946, NBC (NY) for the Library of Congress; released Feb 1949. Third: 26, 28 Sept 1955, London; released by Caedmon, 1955 (US), 1960 (UK). Additionally: Part VI, 23 May 1947, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
2. COMPOSITION
“Writing the ‘Ariel’ pieces released the stream, and led directly to Ash-Wednesday”, T. S. Eliot Talks about Himself and the Drive to Create (1953). Journey of the Magi was published in Aug 1927, and the first part of Ash-Wednesday to be published appeared on 10 Dec. Thereafter the writing of the Ariel Poems and Ash-Wednesday overlapped, with Marina appearing five months later than Ash-Wednesday (see Textual History). The Ariel Poems appear as a section after Ash-Wednesday in TSE’s collected editions.
To Marguerite Caetani, 21 Aug 1926, referring probably to Part II of Ash-Wednesday: “I have not got on with my Hymn to the Virgin.”
To his mother, 2 Sept 1927: “I have just written another small poem, which I shall offer to Commerce (Margaret (Chapin) de Bassiano’s review) simultaneously [with a Chronicle for La Nouvelle Revue Française], when I have polished it up, and will send you a copy.”
[Poem I 85–97 · Textual History II 421–31]
To I. A. Richards, 28 Sept 1928: “I am now venturing to send you herewith for inspection and return a copy of most of a group of poems I have been working on. I am not sure whether their weakness is a question of detail, or whether they are fundamentally wrong. They seem to get feebler towards the end too. No. 2 was published in the Criterion, No. 1 in Commerce; the rest are unprinted.” Richards to TSE, 1 Oct: “I don’t think there is much wrong with the poems. Perhaps you have been working at them too closely. They are stronger—to a stranger’s eye—than you suggest. May I keep them a little to see how they wear. The last thirds of some of them are perhaps a little thin and a little evidently deliberate. I certainly don’t think there is anything fundamentally at fault.”
TSE to Freda Kirchwey of the Nation, 7 Feb 1929: “It is not quite certain but I am at present negotiating for a small number of new poems to be published in America.” On 6 Sept 1929, Vivien Eliot reported to Mary Hutchinson that TSE had “finished those poems that he read to you—at last. They have gone to America.”
TSE to Marguerite Caetani, 3 Oct 1929, on Som de l’escalina: “The poem I sent you of my own is one of a set of six (including Perch’io non spero from Commerce) which is to be brought out in a limited edition by Faber & Faber and the Fountain Press of New York; but I think it extremely unlikely that the book will be printed before the new year, so it should not affect Commerce.”
To Jean de Menasce, 5 Oct 1929, on a proposed French selection of TSE’s poems: “What I should like, if possible, would be a selection made by you and myself · · · I should rather like to include several of my later poems—the Magi, the Simeon, possibly Animula, which I shall send you shortly, and the set of six which includes Perch’io non spero and the one which Madame de Bassiano will have sent you (I have just given her your new address). This set will appear in English for the first time early next year.”
To Walter de la Mare, 11 Oct 1929: “I rather hope that you may like one or two other of the poems better than that one” (Perch’io non spero).
To I. A. Richards, 29 Oct: “I have also revised for publication in the spring those poems which you criticised, and think that I have much improved them; and that the improvements just make all the difference between sincerity and sham.”
To the Rev. E. Gordon Selwyn, 20 Jan 1930 on Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone?, which was to be published on Ash-Wednesday (5 Mar): “By the way my firm is publishing early in the spring, on my recommendation, a very remarkable book on the Trial and the Resurrection. The author is a man, unknown to me, who was convinced by an ingenious examination of the records, to believe in the Resurrection. It is amazingly matter of fact, and the way the man works out the events from the moment of Gethsemane according to the time that must have elapsed, is very brilliant. I shall see that a copy is sent to you, even an advance proof copy. If I was wrong about this book, I ought not to be publishing in a firm at all! At the same time, we are publishing a small book of verse of my own, entitled Ash-Wednesday.” On 9 Apr he promised Selwyn an advance copy of Ash-Wednesday the following week, adding “It does not appear (to my vexation) till April 29.” (For 17th-century harmonies of the events of gospels, see headnote to Little Gidding, 1. HISTORY OF LITTLE GIDDING.)
[Poem I 85–97 · Textual History II 421–31]
3. AFTER PUBLICATION
To A. L. Rowse, 14 May 1930: “I feel that you are disappointed in Ash Wednesday; and I am disappointed too; because I fancy that parts IV and V of it are much better than II (Salutation).” To Laurence Binyon, 16 May, commenting on his translation of Dante: “I shall send you my Ash Wednesday, which is merely an attempt to do the verse of the Vita Nuova in English, so that you may have me at your mercy” (see headnote to Little Gidding, 3. DANTE). To Algar Thorold, 23 May: “I hope [René] Hague will not call Ash-Wednesday religious or devotional verse—it is merely an attempt to put down in words a certain stage of the journey, a journey of which I insist that all my previous verse represents previous stages.” To the Rev. M. C. D’Arcy, 24 May: “I leave Ash-Wednesday in your hands with confidence, to interpret to Oxford. But please dont let the young men call it ‘religious’ verse. I had a shock on reading The Granta to see stated categorically that it was ‘the finest religious poem in English since Crashaw’. If it was, it wouldn’t be; and anyhow it was I who told them of a poet named Crashaw; and such assertions can only do me harm. I don’t consider it any more ‘religious’ verse than anything else I have written: I mean that it attempts to state a particular phase of the progress of one person. If that progress is in the direction of ‘religion’, I can’t help that; it is I suppose the only direction in which progress is possible.” (See letters of 1946 to Dom Sebastian Moore, quoted in note to I 1–3, 5.)
On the Vita Nuova: “There is also a practical sense of realities behind it, which is antiromantic: not to expect more from life than it can give or more from human beings than they can give; to look to death for what life cannot give. The Vita Nuova belongs to ‘vision literature’; but its philosophy is the Catholic philosophy of disillusion”, Dante (1929) III. To Paul Elmer More, 2 June 1930, thanking him for praise of
Dante: “My only original contribution is possibly a few hints about the Vita Nuova, which seems to me a work of capital importance for the discipline of the emotions; and my last short poem Ash Wednesday is really a first attempt at a sketchy application of the philosophy of the Vita Nuova to modern life.”
To Geoffrey Curtis, 17 June 1930: “I am pleased that you like the verses. As for obscurity, I like to think that there is a good and a bad kind: the bad, which merely puzzles or leads astray; the good, that which is the obscurity of any flower: something simple and to be simply enjoyed, but merely incomprehensible as anything living is incomprehensible. Why should people treat verse as if it were a conundrum with an answer? when you find the answer to a conundrum it is no longer interesting. ‘Understanding’ poetry seems to me largely to consist of coming to see that it is not necessary to ‘understand’.”
[Poem I 85–97 · Textual History II 421–31]
To the Rt. Rev. George Bell, 20 July 1930: “I am very much pleased by what you say of Ash-Wednesday. Most of the people who have written to say that they couldn’t understand it seemed to be uncertain at any point whether I was referring to the Old Testament or to the New; and the reviewers took refuge in the comprehensive word ‘liturgy’. It appears that almost none of the people who review books in England have ever read any of these things! But you would be shocked yourself to learn how much of the poem I can’t explain myself. Certain imagery—the yew trees, the nun, the garden god—come direct out of recurrent dreams, so I shall abandon them to the ghoulish activities of some prowling analyst. The three leopards are deliberately, however, the World, the Flesh and the Devil; and the whole thing aims to be a modern Vita Nuova, on the same plane of hallucination, and treating a similar problem of ‘sublimation’ (horrid word). However pathetically it falls below that amazing book, the comparison is useful, in making clear that this is not ‘devotional’ verse. That can only be written by men who have gone far ahead of me in spiritual development; I have only tried to express a certain intermediate phase.”
The American poet William Force Stead had become Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford, in 1927, and in the same year had baptised TSE into the Church of England. TSE to Stead, 9 Aug 1930: “between the usual subjects of poetry and ‘devotional’ verse there is a very important field still very unexplored by modern poets—the experience of man in search of God, and trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal. I have tried to do something of that in Ash-Wednesday.”
In November 1933, the month in which Faber issued what the cover announced as the “second edition” of Ash-Wednesday, with no substantive revisions, TSE published the text of his lectures as Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard:
If a poem of mine entitled Ash-Wednesday ever goes into a second edition, I have thought of prefixing to it the lines of Byron from Don Juan:
“Some have accused me of a strange design
Against the creed and morals of this land,
And trace it in this poem, every line.
I don’t pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing planned
Except perhaps to be a moment merry …”
There is some sound critical admonition in these lines.
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 30–31,
slightly misquoting Don Juan IV v
(For “Some have accused the Reformed Church of England”, see note to Little Gidding III 17–19.) TSE also quoted 4–7 of Byron’s stanza in a letter to Conrad Aiken, 16 Nov (again omitting Byron’s clinching line, “A novel word in my vocabulary”). In his third Turnbull Lecture TSE again slightly misquoted the whole stanza, as being “words which I have often been tempted to quote in extenuation of my own writings”, adding that Byron is, “at bottom, affirming that the actual social values, whatever they are, are not the same as the poet’s” (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 288).
Paul Elmer More, in an essay of 1932 entitled Mr. Eliot’s Return: “a sensitive mind cannot read Ash-Wednesday without an uneasy sense of something fundamentally amiss in employing for an experience born of Anglo-Catholic faith a metrical form and a freakishness of punctuation suitable for the presentation of life regarded as without form and void” (Genesis 1: 1–2: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void”). TSE ringed “freakishness”, with “I deny this” (More papers, Princeton).
On 10 May 1933, Vassar Miscellany News reported TSE’s reading at the college three days previously: “He read two sections from Ash-Wednesday, the second and the fifth. ‘The three white leopards of the first,’ he explained, ‘are of course, the World, the Flesh and the Devil.’ The second borrowed John Donne’s pun of ‘world’ and ‘whirled,’ and introduced ‘word’ into it. It was a protest against spiritual blindness, spiritual deafness, and it made use of a refrain from the Mass for Good Friday. Ash-Wednesday celebrated Mr. Eliot’s conversion to the Anglo-Catholic faith.”
[Poem I 85–97 · Textual History II 421–31]
To Stephen Spender, 9 May 1935: “‘To relate art to the life of moral values’! Certainly, there you have Corneille and Racine with you, except that they were not aware of any unrelation to be made relation. I haven’t myself any awareness of Art, on the one hand, and (my) moral values on the other, with a problem set: how to relate them. My own ‘art’ (such as it is) has always been at the disposal of my moral values. Ash Wednesday for instance, is an exposition of my view of the relation of eros and agape based on my own experience. I think and hope that I have overcome any desire to write Great Poetry, or to compete with anybody. One has got at the same time to unite oneself with humanity, and to isolate oneself completely; and to be equally indifferent to the ‘audience’ and to oneself as one’s own audience. So that humility and freedom are the same thing.” (“I no longer strive to strive towards such things”, I 5.)
Smidt 33 records an exchange with TSE on 13 July 1948: “S. There’s a painting that comes vividly to my mind when I read Ash-Wednesday. Were you ever struck by Murillo’s picture of the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin standing on a crescent moon? E. It is curious you should mention that. There was a steel engraving of it, my mother’s, in my father’s house. I also remember a statue I saw in a Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland, which I thought very striking. Things have a way of sticking in the memory.”
Lehmann on TSE’s reading at Bryn Mawr in Oct 1948: “Then the first and sixth parts of Ash-Wednesday. He read the first part quickly, expressing a great inner excitement and restlessness. The last part had the same anxiety to it, only on another level or in another direction: while the first part was like a running in circles, the last went forwards, so to speak, on a path that is still—perhaps permanently—endangered. He said he had to refrain from reading the fifth part, which he would have done otherwise had his voice been better. It made too great demands on the breathing technique. He would have also read this fairly quickly, combining long passages in one breath.” The reading of this Part in his recordings suggests a liturgical chant.
Title Ash-Wednesday: the first day of Lent, the 40 days of fasting before Easter which commemorate Christ’s fasting in the wilderness. On Ash-Wednesday the priest ritually marks a cross of ashes on the congregant’s forehead while reciting: “Memento homo quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” [Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return], Genesis 3: 19. For the hyphenation of the title, see Textual History and Ricks 211. TSE frequently wrote of the day and the poem without using a hyphen. Louis Untermeyer’s anthology American Poetry 1925 had contained Untermeyer’s own Ash Wednesday, as well as reprinting three parts of The Hollow Men. To Enid Faber, 1 Feb 1948, declining an invitation (and alluding to 1 Henry IV V iv): “Ash Wednesday is one of the two days a year when my virtue is not in danger and when I try to live cleanly and forswear sack.”
[Poem I
85 · Textual History II 421–24]
I
Unadopted title All Aboard for Natchez Cairo and St. Louis: (pronounced “Natches, Carro and Saint Lewis”); opening line of The Early Bird Catches the Worm (1927) by blackface comedy partnership Two Black Crows (Moran & Mack, stars of radio, record and cinema), referring to stops on the paddlesteamers’ route up the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis. I. A. Richards noted that the record was a favourite with TSE in the late 1920s (Tate ed. 6), and Levy 1965 states that as a boy TSE had seen the duo perform. TSE to Richards, 29 Oct 1929: “You left England, I believe, in time to escape The Two Black Crows in Hades, which is pitiful.” Levy 107–108 describes TSE’s recital of another of their routines: “Tom was uproarious … not only in repeating the patter, but also because the Negro dialect which he thought he had mastered made him sound more like an Archbishop of Canterbury!” A letter to Polly Tandy, 3 June 1937, included a photograph of two white men which TSE captioned: “Geoffrey Tandy (clean shaven); and T. P. Eliot (bearded): the popular B.B.C. Comedians (‘The Two Black Crows’) in their Harry Hall lounge suits” (T. P. = Tom Possum). An account of visits to Natchez, Cairo and St. Louis had appeared in John Gould Fletcher’s The River Flows in Criterion Jan 1926. To Allen Tate, 18 May 1933: “I hope to return in 1935 and visit Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and so on via Tennessee to New Orleans and then up the River to St. Loouss.” To Pound, 15 Apr 1936: “I have every sympathy with yr fulmination against the English Church, in fact I thought of it some time before but you know I need a lot of pressure in the boiler before I let the old Creole Belle out for her record run from St. Louis to Natchez, I dont like to blow up until just as I reach the levee.” To his sister Theodora, 4 Jan 1937, thanking her for a print of Old St. Louis: “I have a sentiment about St. Louis which the St. Louis of to-day (or even of my childhood) hardly justifies. It is in fact one of the most unpleasant large towns in the world · · · Nevertheless · · · I have a sentimental feeling which is excited to exaltation by Show Boat and Old Man River and all that sort of thing: and what I do miss on New Year’s Eve is the sound of the steamboat whistles (there aren’t any steamboats now, apparently).” Ol’ Man River was composed for the musical Show Boat (Broadway, 1927; London, 1928). To Enid Faber, 17 May 1943: “it is a pity that some of the best places one is never sent to: Richmond, Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans. I have never seen them myself, nor have I been down the Mississippi on a paddle wheel steamer”. Cairo: For TSE on Nathaniel Wanley and “Gran Cairo”, see headnote to II.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 98
