Making It New: 1900–1945 373and voice are, in this sense, unlocated: the “one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust
restaurants” that are recalled could be part of any unreal city, Paris or London as
much as (or perhaps even more than) St. Louis.
After his stay in Paris, from which he returned “perceptibly Europeanized”
according to Conrad Aiken, Eliot spent three more years in the United States before
embarking for England in the summer of 1914. Apart from a brief trip back a year
later, he did not revisit the United States until 1932; and, although Eliot was to
continue these visits almost annually from the late 1940s until his death in 1965, he
came to look on England as his home. This was confirmed in 1927 when, in the same
year that he announced his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Eliot became a British
citizen. Gradually, he assimilated a particular concept of the English tradition: his
dress, speech, and manners all became impeccably English although, if anything,
excessive in their perfection. He was, he declared, “classicist in literature, royalist in
politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” Almost from the beginning, he had been
convinced of the necessity of a literary tradition: something that, as he put it in his
essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1934), “compels a man to write not
merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of
literature of Europe from Homer ... has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order.” Slowly, this idea of a specifically literary tradition enlarged so
as to acquire social, political, and theological implications. The individual was to
shuffle off the constraints of the self, was to find perfect freedom in service to his
culture, just as the poet, he had once said, was to “escape from personality” in
obedience to the demands of an impersonal art. How Eliot himself did this, as
individual and poet, is the story of his career. He moved from The Waste Land, where
he uses a cunning mixture of Symbolist, Imagist, and dramatic strategies to expose
the rootless, sterile nature of his own immediate culture, through the spiritual
voyagings of Ash Wednesday to the more achieved, if still tentative, spiritual wisdom
of the Four Quartets. And in the course of this career he raised, in a particularly
sharp way, the problem of his and others’ literary nationalism.
The problem can be stated simply. Eliot “became” an Englishman and an English
poet, but he did so in a fashion that is characteristically American that betrays his
origins in the New World. His earlier poetry demonstrates that concern with the
isolated self, the lonely “I” which is perhaps the predominant theme in American
writing. Only it demonstrates it in what was to become known as a characteristi-
cally Eliotic way: refracted through a fragmented persona, the self being dissolved
into a series of objective correlatives. At its most obvious – in, for example, the
opening line of “Prufrock,” “Let us go then, you and I” – “I” becomes “you and I” to
dramatize the narcissism of isolation; and the narcissistic ego translates the blank
stare of reality into, alternatively, a mirror of its own concerns or a threat to its
purity, or even its existence.
And in a very real sense, The Waste Land continues this lonely drama of the self.
Of course, any genuinely imaginative reading of Eliot’s most famous poem is likely
to yield larger cultural inferences. Like the Cantos, The Waste Land uses a form of the
ideogrammic method, dense patterns of imagery and a disjunctive narrativeGGray_c04.indd 373ray_c 04 .indd 373 8 8/1/2011 7:53:51 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 51 AM