Jerusalem whom Christ told to weep not for him but for themselves and for their
children. Their city was to be destroyed, but would re-form above the mountains:
blown sky-high, to reappear as a heavenly Jerusalem.
Pound, editing the poem, had cut out half of it, increasing fragmentation and
intensity. He wrote to the author that at nineteen pages it was ‘the longest poem in
the English language’. But the publisher now wanted something to fill the blank
pages at the back; hence Eliot’s Notes, explaining that the poem’s title and plan were
suggested by a book on the Grail legend. A devastated world is presented as a Waste
Land where no crops grow, no children are born, and sex is unlovely. Eliot’s frag-
ments illustrate this theme, looking finally to religious texts, Christian and Hindu:
‘Prison and palace and reverberation / Of thunder of spring over distant moun-
tains’. Is the thunder at the death of Christ the thunder that brings rain for the sacred
River Ganges? Eliot uses many languages to pose unanswered questions in inclusive
mythological forms bearing several senses.
In his essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921) Eliot credited Donne with a ‘unified
sensibility’ in which thoughts and feelings were not dissociated, as they were to
become. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), he separated the man that
suffers from the mind that creates, recommending impersonal art rather than roman-
tic self-expression. Like Joyce, T. E. Hulme, Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and unlike
Lawrence, Eliot opposed Wordsworth’s idea that good poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feeling. Poetry may arise from emotion and can arouse
emotion, but its composition is an art guided by intelligence. This fits his own work.
The Waste Land is an agonizing poem, written after a nervous breakdown arising
from overwork and marital unhappiness. Lines can be linked to places Eliot visited in
distress of mind, Margate Sands, for example, and Lac Leman (Lake Geneva). But the
poem’s biographical occasions illuminate little. It is a planned musical drama in five
parts for male and female voices, representing a world of confusion and suffering.
Eliot later pooh-poohed the idea that The Waste Land had articulated post-war
disillusion,describing it as a fit ofrhythmical grumbling. But by the late 1920s he
had become central to English literary culture. Undergraduates quoted with delight
lines expressing a modern emptiness: ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a
bang but a whimper’(from ‘The Hollow Men’) and ‘birth and copulation and
death’(from Sweeney Agonistes). But Eliot turned away from Sweeney – Prufrock’s
brutish opposite – towards something graver. He came to believe that the compara-
tive anthropology underlying The Waste Land, which relativized the higher religions,
explaining them away as sophistications of vegetation ceremonies, was mistaken;
and that the ways to truth had to be religious. After his Anglican conversion, Dante
replaced Donne as his model. His later poetry is less agonized and less dramatic.
His play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), commissioned by Canterbury, is success-
ful;Becket’s martyrdom in defence of Christianity was close to Eliot’s new position.
The Family Reunion (1939) was the first of four mysterious dramas, disguised as
bright West End comedies in ever less noticeable verse. The implicit themes, dedica-
tion, sacrifice, transfiguration, healing, are at a strange angle to their ‘amusing’ draw-
ing-room settings.
Four Quartets
‘Burnt Nor ton’ (1936), a fragment unused in Murder in the Cathedral,was followed
by ‘East Coker’ (1940), ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941) and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), gath-
ered as Four Quartets. The title suggests chamber music played by four players. Each
‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 353