Modern American Poetry

(^162) Robert Langbaum
way,” says Eliot in explaining Bradley, “to speak of myexperience, since the
I is a construction out of experience, an abstraction from it.”^12 Bradley
speaks, therefore, not of subjective perceivers but of subjective-objective
centers of experience—“finite centres.” There are as many universes as there
are finite centres; for as Bradley puts it: “My external sensations are no less
private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my
experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and,
with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which
surround it.... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the
whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.” Eliot quotes this
passage in a note to lines v, 411–13 of The Waste Land—lines in which the self
as so described is the thing to be overcome. Through an analogy to the
prison in which Dante’s Count Ugolino was locked up to starve to death,
Eliot, in meditating on the Sanskrit precept Dayadhvam(sympathize), is
saying we must break out of the Bradleyan prisonhouse of self.
In “Preludes” and “Rhapsody,” the Bradleyan view of self as opaque
and discontinuous (“The usual self of one period is not the usual self of
another”)^13 is presented as true but awful. In both poems, the word Iis
severely repressed. But we can tell from the perceived details that the
speakers—as distinguished from the characters they perceive—have in reserve
an unacknowledged ideal by which they judge the mechanical life they
portray. In “Preludes,” the speaker finally uses Ito express through the
trampled souls on trampled streets an accumulating sense of violation, and to
suggest that even these mechanical registers of sensation may obscurely feel
some core of self that has been violated.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
But no, this is only fancy; the universe is as sordid and meaningless as the
urban scene:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Yet the fancy of some other possibility remains with us here and in
“Rhapsody.”