The Poetry of Langston Hughes 411early poems collected in the leather-bound notebook begun in 1909—some,
such as “Opera,” “First Caprice in North Cambridge,” and “The Burnt
Dancer,” which were unpublished until 1996, and others, such as “Rhapsody
on a Windy Night” and “Portrait of a Lady,” which appeared in Prufrock and
Other Observationsin 1917—Eliot shares Hughes’s preoccupation with realism
and the analogy between musical and poetic forms.^43 But whereas Hughes’s
poems more often than not call attention to the African American folk origins
of the blues as an American musical form, Eliot takes the occasion of these
early poems to explore the hybrid European origins of modern American
music by adapting the idea of the “caprice” or the “rhapsody”: pieces that
were written out, not improvised, most likely for the piano.
In The Dialect of ModernismMichael North offers a groundbreaking,
provocative analysis of how Eliot adapted techniques such as linguistic
mimicry and racial masquerade to make the language new and to resist
institutional forces of standardization. In 1921 Eliot “was laboring to put his
knowledge of black music to work in The Waste Land,which contained at one
time references to a number of rag and minstrel songs.”^44 The musical
allusions cut from the final text are of particular interest, since many of
them—for example, Eliot’s reference to a song (“I’m proud of all the Irish
blood that’s in me”) from a musical play called Fifty Miles from Bostonand his
adaptation of lines from minstrel shows (“By the Watermelon Vine,” “My
Evaline,” and “The Cubanola Glide”)—cryptically encode the composite
regional landscapes and irreducibly hybrid cultures evoked by American
popular music.^45
Eliot’s fascination with ragtime is best understood in light of his effort
to understand the idea of “purity” in poetry, that is, the peculiar effect of
works that direct the reader’s attention primarily to style and virtually
exclude consideration of their subject matter. In “From Poe to Valéry,” for
example, he discusses poems in which words have been chosen for the right
sounds while the poet has been deliberately “irresponsible” toward their
meaning.^46 In “The Music of Poetry” Eliot singles out Edward Lear’s “non-
sense verse,” whose reader is moved by the music and enjoys, again, a
“feeling of irresponsibility towards the sense.” In these instances, however,
the source of enjoyment is not a “vacuity of sense,” or the poet’s total escape
from meaningful representation. Rather, Lear’s “non-sense ... is a parody of
sense, and that is the sense of it.”^47
In The Waste LandEliot illustrates the rich senses of nonsense by
alluding to a popular ragtime song that hit the charts in 1912, called “That
Shakespearian Rag”: