Modern American Poetry

(^412) Anita Patterson
That Shakespearian rag,—
Most intelligent, very elegant,
That old classical drag,
Has the proper stuff, the line “Lay on Macduff,”
Desdemona was the colored pet,
Romeo loved his Juliet—
And they were some lovers, you can bet, and yet,
I know if they were here today,
They’d Grizzly Bear in a diff’rent way,
And you’d hear old Hamlet say,
“To be or not to be,”
That Shakespearian Rag.^48
Eliot adapted lines from the original chorus by adding the “O O O O” and
a syncopated syllable in “Shakespeherian” (McElderry, 185–6):
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
(WL,57)
The poem’s miming of ragtime gives both the speaker and the reader a brief
reprieve from the burdensome duty to convey meaning truthfully. But the
“vacuity of sense” brought about by the repetition of the apostrophe “O”—
a repetition that reduces the trope, quite literally, to a series of zeroes on the
page—also signals the tragic lack of continuity, as well as a tragic lack of
engagement with the sense of Shakespeare’s vibrant words, evidenced by
American popular music. Eliot’s allusion to ragtime, followed by the listless,
bored, near-hysterical line “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” evokes
apocalyptic dread. The passage implies that, taken to an extreme, such
fleeting moments of enjoyable irresponsibility toward sense may promote an
increasingly automated, vast inattention in American society. By pursuing
the analogies between music and poetry in The Waste Land, Eliot’s
“Shakespeherian Rag” responds stylistically to conditions that imperiled
artistic freedom and anticipated Hughes’s experiments with a jazz poetics.^49
The Waste Landcalls attention to the danger of popular ragtime songs,
in which words have been torn away from their traditional contexts. In “The
Music of Poetry,” however, Eliot proposes that nonsense verse also has
profoundly restorative powers, as in Lear’s work. “The Jumblies,” for