Modern American Poetry

(^144) Robert Langbaum
vegetation myths. Hugh Kenner (1959) is therefore retrograde in taking off
from Pound’s later recollection of the original draft as “a series of poems,”
and in considering that Eliot, dismayed by what he and Pound had wrought
through cutting, added the note on Tiresias as an afterthought “to supply the
poem with a nameable, point of view” that was not really there.^1
Yet Eliot himself insisted in 1923 that “The Waste Landis intended to
form a whole.”^2 Pound, in his letters of 1921–1922, always referred to the
poem and showed his sense of its unity by advising Eliot not to omit Phlebas,
because “Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces
him, the drowned phoen. sailor.”^3 The original draft, now that it has been
published, shows Tiresias as we now have him and shows the same
organization as the final version.^4 Eliot tried to combine even more disparate
fragments than in the final version; Pound cut out the fragments that were at
once least successful and most disparate in tone. Even Mr. Kenner refers
more than once to “the protagonist,” without specifying who he is or how he
happens to exist at all in “a series of poems.”
The protagonist, Tiresias, and the relation between them present the
next problem for Waste Landcriticism; even the constructive critics have
fallen short here. In building upon the work of these critics, I have the
advantage of Mr. Kenner’s suggestions as to the importance of Bradley and
Eliot’s doctoral dissertation on Bradley for understanding Eliot’s modes of
characterization. I have the advantage of the recently published dissertation^5
and of the newly published original draft of The Waste Landwith Pound’s
annotations. But my main advantage is the preoccupation of the last decade
with problems of identity—a preoccupation that has caused me to single out
this question and to try to show that the next step in understanding the
structure and meaning of The Waste Land,in understanding its continuing
greatness and relevance, is to understand that the poem is organized around
new concepts of identity and new modes of characterization, concepts and
modes that Eliot had been working toward in the poems preceding The Waste
Land.
Prufrock, as we all know by now, takes two aspects of his conscious self
(“Let us go then, you and I”) to that party where he ought to, but does not,
make the sexual proposal that could have saved him. Prufrock’s sensuous
apprehension reveals also a buried libidinal self that he cannot make
operative in the social world, cannot reconcile with the constructed self seen
by “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.” In the end he makes the
split complete by constructing for the regard of his other conscious self a
Prufrock as removed as possible from the libidinal self.