Modern American Poetry

(^164) Robert Langbaum
But this isolation is counteracted by the ability of the speaker in “Preludes”
and the protagonist in The Waste Landto project into the other characters.
Hence the speaker’s fancy in “Preludes” is of a compassionate humanity they
all share, and his view remains general when he reverses himself to see that
our general fate, instead, is as loveless as the force that moves the stars. The
final lines may invoke an ironical comparison with Dante’s final vision in
Paradisoof “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” And, indeed, the
minimal “notion of some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing” is just
the unreduced residue of feeling out of which Christian mythology takes
shape.
In The Waste Land,the speaker’s projection into the typist’s room takes
shape in the figure of Tiresias. Bound up with the original draft of The Waste
Landare some poems that demonstrate the projective sensibility that was to
produce Tiresias. In “The death of Saint Narcissus,” the speaker knows he
has been a tree, a fish, “a young girl/ Caught in the woods by a drunken old
man”; now he is happy to experience even martyrdom. “Song. [For the
Opherion]” speaks of “Bleeding between two lives”; and some untitled lines
help us understand how the protagonist of The Waste Landcan be both
Quester and Fisher King:
I am the Resurrection and the Life
I am the things that stay, and those that flow.
I am the husband and the wife
And the victim and the sacrificial knife.
The protagonist’s projective imagination, which sees or creates the
connections among the characters, sees in them a memory of and yearning
for a communal identity, and that communal identity is expressed through
the mythical figures in the poem, most notably the figures of the Tarot cards.
In a 1916 paper, “Leibniz’ Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres,” Eliot threw
light on the method of establishing identities he was to use in The Waste
Land: “Nothing is real, except experience present in finite centres. The
world, for Bradley, is simply the intendingof a world by several souls or
centres.... For Bradley, I take it, an object is a common intention of several
souls, cut out (as in a sense are the souls themselves) from immediate
experience. The genesis of the common world can only be described by
admitted fictions.”^15
Thus the mythical figures and patterns—the Grail Quest, the
vegetation myths leading to the Christian myth—are the admitted fictions
rising out of the characters’ memories and desires, their unreduced residue