A History of American Literature

374 Making It New: 1900–1945

sequence, a radical juxtaposition of different perspectives and languages, to solicit

an active response, a collaboration in the creation of meanings; and the meanings so

created will probably include commentary on the decay of contemporary civilization.

It is, however, worth recording Eliot’s own comment here. “To me,” he declared of

The Waste Land, “it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse

against life; it is just a piece of rhythmic grumbling.” “I wrote The Waste Land simply

to relieve my own feelings,” Eliot said elsewhere; and there can be little doubt that a

sense of sterility is so powerful in the poem precisely because its ultimate source is

personal. At its inception, The Waste Land was a poem of the lonely self: a cry from

the heart of a man who had been haunted since childhood by the “hidden laughter

of children,” whose own marriage was childless, and who, at the time of writing, was

acutely troubled by feelings of sexual unhappiness. Characteristically, Eliot then

transformed this cry into a dramatic, imagistic, objective work of art that each

reader could experience and interpret according to his or her own terms of refer-

ence, personal and cultural.

The search for otherness, some order that denies and disciplines the lonely self

that cries out in The Waste Land, is at the heart of Eliot’s later poetry. Consider, for

instance, these lines from Ash Wednesday:

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell

Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover ...

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This passage occurs toward the end of the poem, when the narrator has come to

believe what he has only sensed up until then: that the only way he can redeem him-

self is to surrender himself, that the only means of finding his being is to lose it. Only

the blind eye sees the true forms of liberation, the intimation is; only the spirit that

rebels against its own devouring inwardness can begin to tap the sources of salvation

and creativity. There is repetition in these lines, and parallelism, of a kind that

hauntingly recalls Whitman, and a sense of natural bounty, the fruits of earth, sea,

and sky, that is reminiscent of both Whitman and many other American poets. But

the formal echoes of these other poets only emphasize the utter difference of tone

and sensibility. If anything, the Whitman style is adopted here in order to deny the

cogency and truth of all that Whitman said; memories of the American Adamic

mode are evoked only so as to be slyly mocked and rejected.

As his career developed, Eliot grew sufficiently sure of his grounding in another

established tradition to be able to measure himself openly against the Whitman line.

In these lines from “East Coker,” for instance, the opposition is scarcely veiled at all.

There is not only an echo of Whitman’s phrasing but also a recall of the earlier poet’s

metrical arrangement of syntax – and both seem to be there openly so as to establish

moral, emotional, and imaginative distance:

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