THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. The twelve poems in the collection include ‘Portrait of a Lady’, like
‘Prufrock’ an exquisitely poised account of uneasy social intercourse, bleakly restless evocations of urban landscape
(such as the musically entitled ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’), and the character sketches ‘Aunt
Helen’, ‘Cousin Nancy’, and ‘Mr Apollinax’ (this last a sharply imaginative remaking of an encounter with Bertrand
Russell at an academic tea-party at Harvard). The poems are specifically American and often precisely Bostonian
(including the nods to the example and the titles of Henry James). ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ sets the tone
of the whole volume with its play with politeness and failures of comprehension, with surfaces and hints of
subcutaneous despair. Prufrock carefully presents himself as modestly fashionable and sociable but he also reveals an
acute self consciousness about the opinions of others (‘They will say: „How his hair is growing”’ ‘They will say: „But
how his arms and legs are thin!”’). He indulges in the social niceties represented by ‘the cups, the marmalade, the tea’
but is aware of the impossibility of saying what he means while being ‘formulated’ like a butterfly ‘sprawling on a
pin’. It was in many ways fitting that this disconcerting and subtly evasive monologue should be placed first in all the
collections of his verse published in Eliot’s life-time.
The nuances of a broader tradition which help shape the tone of ‘Prufrock’ (Dante, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare,
Dostoevsky, the Bible) became more emphatic in Eliot’s Poems printed in London in 1919 by Virginia and Leonard
Woolf’s Hogarth Press. The volume contained ‘Gerontion’ (an old man’s
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monologue burdened with an ominous perception of divinity) and four poems in French (one of which, ‘Dans le
Restaurant’, was also later fed into The Waste Land), but its overall character was most determined by the seven short
quatrain poems. The temporary shift away from vers libre allowed both for a new sharpness, even slickness, and for a
new variety of tone. In ‘The Hippopotamus’ Eliot comments satirically on the claims and pretensions of ‘the True
Church’; in ‘Whispers of Immortality’ he edgily contrasts the ‘anguish of the marrow | The ague of the skeleton’ in
the work of Webster and Donne with the ‘promise of pneumatic bliss’ offered by an uncorseted Russian girl; in
‘Burbank with a Baedaeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ he unflatteringly, even prudishly, observes the sexual adventures
of American tourists against a backdrop of a decaying Venice derived variously from Canaletto, Shakespeare, and
Jonson. The effects of incongruity, historical anomaly, and densely amalgamated reference are perhaps most
successfully exploited in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’. The ‘Nightingales’ of the title are at once the prostitutes
amongst whom the unlovely Sweeney amuses himself and the song-birds which ‘sang within the bloody wood’ | When
Agamemnon cried aloud | And let their liquid siftings fall | To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud’. It is not only the
murdered Agamemnon who is dishonoured; the whole inheritance of history, tradition, and historical literature seems
soiled by the shabby commonplaces and compromises of the modern world.
The epigraphs to the Poems, derived from Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Villon, St Paul, Marlowe, and
Aeschylus, serve to alert readers to Eliot’s fascination with order and fragmentation, with the survival of tradition and
the collapse of tradition. The last section of The Waste Land ends with a series of quotations which are, if anything,
yet more abstruse. In the midst of these echoes Eliot places his own line: ‘These fragments I have shored against my
ruins’. Is his poem therefore to be seen retrospectively as a series of fragments? Or does he intend that these jerky half
quotations from Dante, the Pervigilium Veneris, Tennyson, Nerval, Kyd, and the Upanishads somehow shore up a
tottering ruin that was Western civilization? Or is he suggesting that a poet needs the shield of tradition as a defence
against a hostile and encroaching world? The poem remains fragmentary and ambiguous to many of its readers. The
original draft (published in 1971) was severely edited by Ezra Pound, and we are left with five interrelated sections,
each with a separate title. This final shape, with a long introductory section, a terse fourth one, and a long meditative
conclusion, was one that Eliot repeated in each of his Four Quartets. What unity the poem has is based on the
reiterated idea of the exploration of a desert which is both physical (‘where the sun beats, | And the dead tree gives no
shelter’) and figuratively urban (as in its references to the ‘falling towers’ of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna
and, above all, London). Baudelaire’s `fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves’ is here a specific but ‘unreal’ London
where bemused crowds flow over London Bridge, where there are recognizable streets, churches and hotels and
suburbs called Greenwich, Richmond,
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and Kew. London accrues the cultural resonance not simply of its own Elizabethan and Dickensian pasts, of
Baudelaire’s Paris and Saint Augustine’s Carthage, but also of the decayed metropolises of the Jewish and Greek
Empires; like them all, it shares in corruption. Eliot delves into this corruption like an archaeologist exploring the
layered detritus of broken civilizations. The urban wasteland also assumes a mythical identity as a landscape in which
a quest for healing, fertility, power, and meaning is pursued. This ‘quest’ is both Arthurian (with occasional
Wagnerian emphases) and anthropological (in its glances at the theories of Jessie L. Weston and Sir James Frazer).