TSE to Anne Ridler, 25 June 1945: “It was kind of you to let me see your broadcast. A few comments. 1. I wonder whether your Hindus will understand that Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg were the cur and the cat referred to in the poem? The former was not the original Pollicle (Dinah, who attached herself to me one evening in Eastbourne, and after a few nights at the police station became mine for the fee of five shillings) but a successor of known antecedents. The latter was a Persian kitten given me by Alida Monro, nervous and rather dull-witted—a descendant of the well-known prizewinner Woolly Bear.” (For Dinah, see TSE to his mother, 23 Apr 1919, quoted in headnote to II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier. For “Woolly Bear”, see note to I. Lines to a Persian Cat 5.) Proposing a toast for the Kipling Society: “I leave you to guess why a Persian cat I once possessed was dignified by the name of Mirza Murad Ali Beg”, “The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling” (1959). For TSE’s description of Mirza Murad Ali Beg to Tom Faber, 28 Dec 1931, see headnote to Practical Cats: 8. APROPOS OF PRACTICAL CATS BY VALERIE ELIOT.
[Poem I 143 · Textual History II 461]
V 1 How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! (variant to know): Edward Lear: “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!” with its fifth line: “His mind is concrete and fastidious”. In his copy of The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman (1935) 156, TSE scored “We all have one unpleasant person to live with, whom we can’t get away from—ourself” (King’s). Tomlin 89 reports TSE on 25 May 1937: “Looking back he said he realised how clumsily he had behaved in certain situations, and indeed what an ‘unpleasant’ person (that was the adjective he used) he knew he had sometimes been.” TSE to Frank and Christina Morley, 3 Feb 1947, after the death of Vivien (23 Jan): “I feel as if I had descended into depths such that there was a great gulf fixed. The shock of looking at a rather unpleasant stranger, and finding that it is oneself in a mirror; the shock of finding, at 58, the greatest crisis of one’s life—but I can’t, and probably shouldn’t try, to express myself at present.” (See Portrait of a Lady III 16–17, “I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark | Suddenly, his expression in a glass”, and note.) “Sometimes my poems turn out to be much more unpleasant than I thought they were”, T. S. Eliot Talks about His Poetry (1958). unpleasant: on Georgian Poetry: “What nearly all the writers have in common is the quality of pleasantness. There are two varieties of pleasantness: (1) The insidiously didactic, or Wordsworthian (a rainbow and a cuckoo’s song); (2) the decorative, playful or solemn, minor-Keatsian, too happy, happy brook, or lucent sirops · · · Another variety of the pleasant, by the way, is the unpleasant”, Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant (1918). (Shaw published Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant in two vols. in 1898. TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934) includes Plays Unpleasant.) On the “peculiarity” of Blake: “It is merely a peculiar honesty · · · against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry”, William Blake (1920) I. Of the mature poet: “He is not, my poet, altogether a pleasant character · · · I must say for myself lest I should be misunderstood, that I am not talking about myself”, Modern Tendencies in Poetry (1920). On Dryden: “It is harder to be natural than to be artificial, it requires a great deal more work, and is painful and unpleasant because sincerity is always painful and unpleasant. Well, Dryden did the work, and experienced no doubt the pain and unpleasantness, and he restored English verse to the condition of speech”, Dryden the Poet (1931). On Yeats’s The Spur: “These lines are very impressive and not very pleasant · · · I do not read them as a personal confession of a man who differed from other men, but of a man who was essentially the same as most other men; the only difference is in the greater clarity, honesty and vigour · · · Similarly, the play Purgatory is not very pleasant, either”, Yeats (1940). On Leonardo: “that formidable and unpleasant personality”, A Note on “Monstre Gai” (1955). to meet Mr. Eliot: to his mother, 6 Jan 1920, of his cousin Abigail Eliot: “we were both much taken with her. She seems intelligent, and has a sense of humour, and charming manners. She and Vivien found each other very congenial. Vivien had always longed to meet an Eliot.” Mr. Eliot: among TSE’s various identities (T. S. Eliot, TSE, Possum, Uncle Tom, T.P.), this was the formal name used among the junior ranks at Faber, and in publicity for his books and the firm’s other activities—there being no need for further identification. To W. H. Auden, 30 Jan 1934: “Dear Auden (I think that we might drop the Mr)”. To George Every, 4 Jan 1937: “Dear George, (Please drop Mr.)” To Charles Madge, 28 Oct 1940: “Dear Madge, (I think we might ‘drop the mister’).” After thirteen years of “Dear Gallup” and “Dear Mr. Gallup”, “My dear Mr. Gallup” and “My dear Gallup”, TSE addressed a letter to “Dear Donald Gallup” (10 Aug 1949), before the final step, on 19 Oct 1949: “Dear Donald, (I think that we might become rather more informal)”—yet he did not sign himself “Tom” until 1951. See notes on the titles Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
V 2 of clerical cut: OED “cut” 17: “The shape to which, or style in which a thing is cut”, quoting As You Like It II vii: “With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut”, and “A broad-brimmed hat and coat of Quakerish cut” (1883). TSE: “a clerical hat and an apron and gaiters | For a Possum who dresses in Style”, A Practical Possum 4–5.
[Poem I 143 · Textual History II 461]
V 2 variant figure of corpulent size: Lear: “His body is perfectly spherical”, “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear!” 19.
V 3 variant his nose inflamed: Lear: “His nose is remarkably big”, “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear!” 6 (author also of The Dong with the Luminous Nose).
V 5 nicely: obsolete or rare senses in OED include 1: “Foolishly, unwisely”; 3a: “Finely, elegantly, refinedly, daintily”; 4a: “sparingly, grudgingly”; 4b: “Fastidiously, squeamishly”; 4c: “Scrupulously, punctiliously”; 5a: “With insistence on detail”. Fowler, “nice”: “Everyone who uses it in its more proper senses, which fill most of the space given to it in any dictionary, & avoids the modern one that tends to oust them all, does a real if small service to the language.”
V 5–7 so nicely | Restricted to What Precisely | And If and Perhaps and But: Alfred Kreymborg: “back to the starting-point, | with if or suppose or providing or but—”, Pianissimo (published in Poetry in 1922, and perhaps known to TSE from Prize Poems 1913–1929, ed. Charles A. Wagner, with an introduction by Mark Van Doren, in which The Waste Land was reprinted). Aurelia Hodgson: “In spite of Lady Ottoline’s story of Mr. Eliot’s careful speech and the legend of ‘Just-what-do-you-mean-by-the-second-“very”’ type, his conversation was wholly free from pedanticisms. He always said, ‘Who’ll have sauce on their meat?’ · · · he told us of a phrase on which he had become selfconscious in Eng[land]. When he was working in Lloyds Bank, a superior drew to his attention ‘under the circumstances’ · · · he told me of a legend about himself, which had never occurred and wasn’t uncomplimentary—he could wish it were true. The story goes that he was at dinner, with a gushing young woman beside him. She turned to him and said, ‘Don’t you find D. H. Lawrence’s latest book [whatever it was] is too amusing?’ Mr. Eliot is reported to have thought this over in silence, and then to have replied, ‘And just what do you mean by “too”?’”, notes on TSE from his conversation, 1930s (Bryn Mawr). Asked about sub-clauses and parentheses in his prose: “The reason for the syntactical complications is a passion for avoiding over-simplifications and over-emphasis”, T. S. Eliot Answers Questions (1949). “As I have a reputation for pedantic precision for a pedantic affectation of precision for affecting pedantic precisions for being pedantic, which I do not want to lose · · ·” American Literature and the American Language (1953), draft (King’s).
V 6 What Precisely: “‘Mother, why precisely does the refrigerator drip?’” are the supposed first words of Jeremy Cibber in Richard Aldington’s satire on TSE, Stepping Heavenward (1931) 5 (T. S. Matthews 105).
V 7 And If and Perh
aps and But: “offends and perplexes more | With the imperatives of ‘is’ and ‘seems’ | And ‘may’ and ‘may not’”, Animula 18–20 variant. To Desmond MacCarthy, 28 Dec 1942: “avoidance of repetition of words (even ofs and ands and buts have to be carefully watched)”.
[Poem I 143 · Textual History II 461]
V 11 porpentine cat: OED “porcupine”: “Porpentine was the form known to Shakes. who uses it 7 times”, citing no examples between 1657 and this of TSE’s. Hamlet I v: “And each particular hair to stand on end | Like quills upon the fretful porpentine”.
V 12 wopsical: Edward Lear has “a runcible hat” in “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear!” and used his invented adjective in other contexts. For TSE on “pollicle” and “jellicle”, see headnote to Practical Cats, 3. COMPOSITION; for “moley”, see note to Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot 41. TSE to E. Foxall, 3 Feb 1932: “the confection of new words · · · is not a device which particularly commends itself to me. The idea, of course, is not a new one, and an argument in its favour may be found in Alice in Wonderland. Of course I admit that a similar technology has been extensively employed by Mr. James Joyce, but you must remember that Mr. Joyce has only arrived at it after a very long process of literary toil · · · I think that in the verses you have shown, the composite words stand out far too conspicuously.” To Hugh Ross Williamson, 18 May 1932: “I have come across in Walter de la Mare’s Lewis Carroll a quotation from a letter which Carroll wrote about The Hunting of the Snark. ‘I am very much afraid’, he said, ‘I didn’t mean anything but nonsense … But since these words mean more than we mean to express when we use them … whatever good meanings are in the book I am very glad to accept as the meaning of the book.’” (De la Mare’s Lewis Carroll was published by Faber in 1932. TSE and de la Mare both admired Carroll and Ralph Hodgson; but see To Walter de la Mare headnote.) “non-sense is not vacuity of sense: it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it”, The Music of Poetry (1942).
V 14 Whether his mouth be open or shut: Herbert: “Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing”, Death 4. (For Swinburne’s “The grave’s mouth”, see note to The wind sprang up at four o’clock 1–15.)
[Poems I 143–48 · Textual History II 461–64]
Landscapes
New Hampshire and Virginia were published as Words for Music in Virginia Quarterly Review Apr 1934 and in Britain in The Best Poems of 1934 ed. Thomas Moult (1934). (Yeats had published his Words for Music Perhaps in 1932.) A small number of copies of the pair was privately printed that year as a “Butterfly Book” for Frederick Prokosch, still under the title Words for Music. Prokosch sent several copies to TSE, who replied, 20 Feb 1935: “Very many thanks for your kind gift, and for printing my two poems in such a charming way. I am sure that no one could raise any objection to your printing poems in this way which are not for sale, and I am very pleased by the gifts. It occurs to me that a short poem produced in this way would make a very nice Christmas card, and if you cared to produce something in this way for next Christmas for me, I would write a poem for the purpose. Of course, an arrangement of that sort would naturally involve my paying for your expense and time.” TSE may have had in mind the Ariel Poems series which had finished in 1931. He sent copies of the Butterfly Book to W. H. Auden, I. A. Richards and others. To Stephen Spender, 22 Feb 1935: “I haven’t the slightest idea who Prokosch is, but he seems a very amiable person. I printed one of his own poems last year, and he has just sent me another, which I also like.” (Prokosch’s poems The Voyage and Going Southward appeared in Criterion July 1934, July 1935.)
Rannoch, by Glencoe was published in NEW 17 Oct 1935 and in New Democracy (NY) 15 Dec 1935.
Cape Ann was published in New Democracy 15 Dec 1935.
“Twenty-two copies” of Cape Ann and Usk were privately printed for Prokosch as the Butterfly Book Two Poems, for distribution by the author at Christmas 1935.
The five Landscapes were collected in 1936+ and New Hampshire, Virginia and Usk appeared in Sesame.
Recorded 26 July 1946, NBC (NY) for the Library of Congress. Second: 13 May 1947, Harvard, as part of the Morris Gray Poetry Reading. Third: 23 May 1947, Washington. Fourth: 12 Nov 1950, for U. Chicago Round Table, broadcast by NBC. Additionally: I and II were recorded after the lecture From Poe to Valéry, 19 Nov 1948, at the Library of Congress.
TSE was probably referring to Landscapes when he wrote to John Lehmann, 22 Aug 1935, about a request for new work for an anthology: “I have a few small and trifling pieces, but the difficulty is that I contemplate bringing out a new collected edition of my poems in the spring, and as my output is so small I cannot offer to print separately any unedited verse which is likely to go into that book.”
To William Force Stead, 9 Aug 1930, on Stead’s poems The House on the Wold: “the transitions between the Umbrian and the Oxfordshire background enhance the effect. This leads to the second point: my admiration, as a fellowcountryman, at the degree to which you have absorbed these two landscapes. I do not think I am wholly deficient in the ‘feeling for nature’; it is either that I have lived for many years almost exclusively in towns, or else that I only have it in association with strong human emotions—I don’t think the latter—however that may be, I know I have to go back to Missouri and New England for natural imagery.” See TSE’s Preface to This American World (1928)—“In New England I missed the long dark river · · · in Missouri I missed the fir trees”—quoted in headnote to The Dry Salvages, the poem in which New England and the American South were finally combined, as were seas and rivers.
[Poems I 144–48 · Textual History II 463–67]
Publication of New Hampshire and Virginia in Virginia Quarterly Review was a result of TSE’s difficulties with what became After Strange Gods. After speaking in public some seventy or eighty times in the United States (letter to Hayward, 19 July 1933), and being obliged to publish his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism), he delayed publishing those given in Virginia. Returning to London he wrote to F. S. Barr, U. Virginia, 27 Aug 1933:
I must apologise for letting you down over the lecture. What happened was, that on re-reading the set I found that they need very much more re-writing than they should, and that I was unwilling to let even one appear in periodical form until I had been able to revise it; and until now I have had to concentrate on preparing my Harvard lectures for press for this autumn. I hope to get to work on the Page-Barbour lectures in about ten days; I will send you a revise of number III as soon as ready and hope that there will be time, if it fits your editorial plans, to have it appear in the Quarterly.
Meanwhile, as a peace-offering, I enclose two small songs—if you don’t want them for the Quarterly return them. I am not likely to use them elsewhere; some day I may add a few more, or else tear them up. I may add that they have no political significance whatever.
In the deposition he prepared for the obscenity case concerning Lady Chatterley’s Lover, TSE wrote of After Strange Gods: “It was expressly by my own wish that there were no further impressions after 1934” and, in a paragraph he then crossed out: “I should have realised that I as well as he [Lawrence] should have been described as ‘a sick soul’”, Lady Chatterley Deposition (1960). Again: “It should be mentioned somewhere that I became dis-satisfied with After Strange Gods, which I came to consider rather intemperate, especially in speaking of Thomas Hardy, and no longer keep in print in this country”, Northrop Frye corrigenda (1963). The first edition of After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy consisted of 3,000 copies, published 22 Feb 1934; a 2nd imp. of 1,500 copies followed in Dec 1934. The US ed., from Harcourt Brace, was of 1,500 copies, published 19 Apr 1934. Faber’s 2nd imp. continued to be advertised on the rear panel of The Idea of a Christian Society (Oct 1939), but the book went out of print on 3 Aug 1944 and TSE prevented further printings, although part, including a page about Hardy, appeared in John Hayward’s two selections from TSE, Points of View (1941) and Select
ed Prose (1953). For Hardy and “self-expression”, see headnote to Opera.
Moody 183: “The three American Landscapes were probably written during Eliot’s visit there in 1933; the Welsh and Scottish probably after his return to England in 1934 or 1935.” Valerie Eliot dated Virginia “1933” in her copy of 14th imp. of 1936 (1951).
To I. A. Richards, 4 June 1935 (having sent New Hampshire and Virginia in the Butterfly Book Words for Music on 20 Feb 1935): “I have done two more ‘words for music’, but I believe they are not as good as those you have seen.” To Richards, 24 Sept 1935, with Usk and Cape Ann: “I enclose two more Landscapes (these are obviously not Words for Music): are they too different in method to go together?”
Hayward to TSE 3 Mar 1942, of a Red Cross auction: “I suggested to Mary [Hutchinson] that you might be kind enough to copy out in your own hand one of your Landscapes—Rannoch by Glencoe, for example—with a note to the effect that it was specially so transcribed for the Sale”; TSE presented instead the typescript of a lecture.
[Poems I 144–48 · Textual History II 463–67]
At the Morris Gray Poetry Reading at Harvard, 13 May 1947: “I would like to read · · · not because there’s any demand for it, a series of little poems called Landscapes of which nobody takes much notice, but which I rather like. On the one hand I am reassured by two friends of mine both of whose judgments I trust in these matters. One, a Southerner, told me that the Landscape called Virginia was the best, and another, a Scot, assured me that Rannoch, by Glencoe is the best. I have had no reports from New Hampshire or Massachusetts, and nothing definite from Wales, but I have recently acquired a Welsh godson, with a name that I cannot pronounce.” Lehmann on TSE’s reading at Bryn Mawr in Oct 1948: “he read especially for the American audience two landscape poems: New Hampshire and Virginia. He introduced these two poems with the words: ‘And, now to you people here, as a relief—not for you but for my soul’—and he may well have alluded to his departure from America, which has been criticized by many and which he himself perhaps does not regard as right in every aspect, albeit necessary for him.” TSE at U. Chicago on 12 Nov 1950 (after reading Coriolan II. Difficulties of a Statesman): “I’ll give you the short Landscapes, as being something in a lighter vein.”
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 119
