T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 355that made the requirement of such knowledge all the more pressing. Eliot’s
usual metaphors when these concerns are in view—metaphors that have a
source in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley—picture a realm where knowledge
is complete, intelligible, and integral, yet by its nature undisclosed to
individual consciousness. The nearest one can get to a sense of solidarity in
experience is by imagining a sequence of identical privations, each knowing
the character of the others because its contents mirror the contents of all
others:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.The comfort this thought brings may be a sort of knowledge, but it is
knowledge at the cost of experience, and what it confirms is a negation of
freedom.
These theoretical self-definitions would have come home to Crane
implicitly enough; he understood how much was at stake when he talked of
“positive” and “negative.” The Waste Landis a progress poem of a sort: it
moves continuously through its series of sure-to-be-missed connections, in
which every episode must prove to have been foresuffered. The structure of
the poem is that of a theme and variations. The apparently chance
encounters, improvised meetings, and assignations disclose themselves as
versions of a single story which goes on with all the adventitious shifts of age
and custom. A truth, we are invited to see, lies in wait beneath the
accumulation of masks—a truth not susceptible to the inflections of personal
will. There is no aspect or coloring of life that will not be known in advance
to Tiresias. The progress of The Bridgefeels just as repetitive but is harder to
follow since it aims to resemble a process of growth. The poem loses what
can be lost for the sake of a gain in experience; its recognitions have ceased
to be an affair of the guilty living and the unburied dead:
“Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout?”Eliot’s style is dramatic and satirical—a choice emphasized in his splendid
recording of the poem, with its dryness and air of continuous command.