We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
J. Alfred Prufrock’s pathetic admission—“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”—states a central theme of many of T. S. Eliot’s works, which concern the frustrated struggle to achieve satisfactory expression. The poems are varied “raids on the inarticulate” (“East Coker”) by the inarticulate. Their failure of speech leads, in many poems, to the shifting of verbal action to nonhuman agents—a process epitomized by the thunder’s utterance, “da,” in The Waste Land. Given the weaknesses of language, the poems display a baffling world in which neither principles nor particulars can be expressed, so that poetry fails to work and, ultimately, ceases to matter. Among such inadequate words, Eliot concentrates, ironically or devoutly, on the paradox of the Incarnation expressed as the wordless Word. The end of Eliot’s exploration is a vision of a condition of stillness, which poems can point to but never reach.
1 See Elizabeth Drew. T. S. Eliot : The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribners. 1949). p. 165.
2 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 6. This edition is cited hereafter as CP.
3 Line 262 of The Waste Land—“And a clatter and a chatter from within”—resembles a passage in Ch. i of Wuthering Heights in which Lockwood says, “I distinguished a chatter of tongues, and a clatter of culinary utensils, deep within.”
4 These noises link the ending of The Waste Land (“shantih” thrice) with the obsessive endings of “Virginia” (“river” thrice) and “Difficulties of a Statesman” (“RESIGN” thrice) (CP. pp. 69. 139, 129). In the last poem, indeed, the repeated motif—“Cry what shall I cry?”—could belong to most of Eliot's earlier speakers.
5 Eliot's widow has commented on the earlier title of The Waste Land: “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” She suggests a connection with the “many voices” of the sea in Tennyson's “Ulysses” (and later in “The Dry Salvages”) as well as the immediate derivation from Ch. xvi of Our Mutual Friend (where, in fact, the talented reader, a boy named Sloppy, has next to nothing to say). See Valerie Eliot, ed. The Waste Land : A Facsimile and Transcription of the Original Drafts, including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1971), p. 5.
6 A recent anthology annotates “Prufrock” in such a way as to dismiss any possibility of its being an interior monologue: “Some readers have understood the epigraph to mean that Prufrock is speaking not to another person but to himself as alter ego, but Eliot specifically denied this interpretation. He said that the ‘you’ of the poem was an ‘unidentified male companion.’ ”Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair. eds. The Norton Anthology of Modem Poetry (New York: Norton, 1973). p. 449. Presumably, the basis for this unconditional dismissal is a condition-riddled letter from Eliot quoted by Kristian Smidt in his Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot (London: Routledge. 1961). p. 85: “As for THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK anything I say now must be somewhat conjectural, as it was written so long ago that my memory may deceive me; but I am prepared to assert that the ‘you’ in THE LOVE SONG is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex. whom the speaker is at the moment addressing and that it has no emotional content whatever.” There are so many teasing hedges there that we need not accept the assertion without skepticism. I continue to think it improbable that Prufrock has anyone to talk to so freely and candidly: the only person he could talk to senza tenia d'uijuinia is himself or some aspect of himself.
7 Selected Essays. 3rd enl. ed. (1951; rpt. London: Faber. 1972). pp. 141–46.
8 Browning's poem—in full, “An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish. the Arab Physician”—explores the nature of humanity and divinity. It bears oblique relationships with “Prufrock” (because of Lazarus. although in Browning's version he does not exactly “tell all”) and The Waste Land (as when “through the thunder comes a human voice”).
9 Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York : Grove. 1958). p. 17. The title of Anne C. Bolgan's What the Thunder Really Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Making of The Waste Land (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1973) promises help with the meaning of “da.” but that study addresses an altogether different order of problem.
10 After Strang“ Cods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, 1934), p. 44.
11 Certain editions—e.g. Swami Nikhilananda. 1 he L panishads, abridged ed. (New York: Harper. 1964)—follow the practice of ending each Upanishad with “shantih”: but several. including Deussen's, do not.
12 The 3 “da” injunctions could correspond directly to the 3 evils explicit in the Fire Sermon and implicit in the triple “shantih.” Without any reference to Eliot. S. Radakrishnan suggests the first part of this collocation: “In one passage [i.e. in the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad] all the virtues are brought together under the three da's which are heard in the voice of the thunder, namely, dama, or self-restraint, dâna or self-sacrifice, and dâya or compassion. Prajâ-pati conveys it to the three classes of his creation, gods (deca). men (manusya) and demons (asura). [The commentator] Samkara makes out that gods have desires (kâina). men suffer from greed (lohha). And demons from anger (krodha). By the practice of the three injunctions we free ourselves from the sway of craving, greed and anger. When the Buddha asks us to put out in our hearts the monstrous fires of infatuation, greed and resentment, he is emphasising the three virtues enjoined by the Upanisads.” The Principal Upanisads (New York: Harper, 1953). pp. 108–09. For the second part of my collocation. I invoke a standard lexicon, which interprets a triple “shantih” as meaning specifically “May the three kinds of pain be averted!”—that is. the pains caused by lust, greed, and wrath. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, new ed. (Oxford : Clarendon. 1899). p. 1064. s.v. iemti. (See also p. 467. s.v. datladas. lor an onomatopoeic representation of thunder.) “Shantih.” as Eliot says in his note (p. 76). means peace or tranquillity (and a good many other things as well); but I canfind no confirmation for his claim that “repealed as here” it has to be “a formal ending to an Upanishad.” It is found at the end of the Invocations of several Upanishads (e.g.. Aitareya. Taittirïya, Isa, Kena, Katha, Prasna) but never, to my knowledge, as the ending of an Upanishad proper and not at all in the Brihadaranyaka. Some parts of the Invocation of the Aitareya Upanishad resemble Hieronymo's “He fit you” at the end of The Waste Land: “My speech is well established in my mind. My mind is well established in my speech. ? Thou manifest one, be manifest for me. Be a nail for my Veda. Do not let go my learning. By this that has been studied, I maintain days and nights. I will speak of the right. I will speak of the true. May that protect me. May that protect the speaker.” And the ending of the Invocation: “Aum, santih, santih, santih.” Radakrish nan. p. 514. (Transliterations of Sanskrit vary so from work to work—and even within a single work—that consistency is impossible. I follow the practice of the text being quoted.)
13 Prometheus Unbound Il.iv.l 16.
14 “The Development of Leibniz's Monadism,” Monist, 26 (1916). 541–43.
15 “Eeldrop and Appleplex, I,” Little Review, 4(1917), 8–9. In time, Eliot was to apply identical terms of censure to Pound's version of Hell in A Draft of xxx Cantos. See After Strange Gods, pp. 44–47.
16 Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1952). pp. 234–35.
17 Complete Poems and Plays, pp. 149, 171. Wyndham Lewis' The Apes of God (London: Arthur Press, 1930), p. 341, contains a passage that may have contributed to Eliot's treatment of cats' names. Grotesque characters called Horace Zagreus and Julius Ratner conduct a mock-scholastic discussion of names, and at one point Zagreus declaims in “a prophetic style”: “Never change the barbarous names given by god to each and all—you read in the spurious AVESTA compiled in Alexandria : Because there are names possessing an unutterable efficaeity'. Beginning with the stock-in-trade of the Phap: the name you utter is not the name. The UNNAMED is the principle of heaven and of earth. But the name is an abortion and a tyranny—and you do not have to ascend into the sky, with the Tao, or allege anything more than a common cat, for that. Name a cat and you destroy it! ‘Not knowing his name I call him TAO.‘ ” An earlier and slightly different version of the chapter containing this passage appeared first in Eliot's journal The Criterion, 2, No. 6 (Feb. 1924), 140.
18 Eliot's essay is in Selected Essays, pp. 341–53. One or another variant of the Verbum infans series of paradoxes is found in four of Andrewes' Nativity Sermons (ii, vi, vii, and XII), the most extended in Sermon II. See Lancelot Andrewes, Ninety-Six Sermons (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), I, 29, 92, 115, 204. Current reprintings of Eliot's essay on Andrewes contain at least 2 serious misquotations—one evidently perpetrated by a printer and one evidently by Eliot himself. Andrewes' Nativity Sermon vi, in all texts, says, “the Word an infant,” which is quoted correctly in Eliot's “Lancelot Andrewes” as it originally appeared in Times Literary Supplement, 23 Sept. 1926, p. 622, and as it was subsequently reprinted in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London : Faber and Gwyer, 1928, p. 28 ; also in first American ed., Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1929) and in Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 1936, p. 24; also in first American ed., New York: Harcourt, 1936). But this powerfully paradoxical juxtaposition is weakened to “the Word of an infant” in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), p. 326, and in all later collections called Selected Essays. All texts of Andrewes' Nativity Sermon XII contain the wording, “ Verbum infans. the Word without a word; the eternal Word not able to speak a word.” Every printing of Eliot's “Lancelot Andrewes,” in a passage arguing that the Bishop's language is memorable, misquotes these words as “The Word within a word, unable to speak a word.” As the phrase appears in “Gerontion,” the misquotation—and particularly the change from “without” to “within”—operates as a mocking perversion, later to be restored to its proper form in Ash-Wednesday. But in the essay itself, the new wording is simply an odd misquotation. The inversion is brilliant in the poem; in the essay, which followed the poem by some 6 years, it seems only dull.
19 Simeon prays that “the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word, / Grant Israel's consolation” (p. 101). For another examination of Eliot's treatment of Word and Incarnation, see Marion Montgomery. T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the American Magus (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1969), esp. pp. 26–29.
20 The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 12.
21 The Sacred Wood (1920: rpt. London: Methuen, 1960), p. v.
22 Some years later, in his introduction to a translation of Paul Valéry's The Art of Poetry, Eliot added something further to this condition of stillness. His comment on some analogies among architecture, music, and poetry goes far beyond the topic required by the occasion. “Between these analogies,” he says, “there is no contradiction, unless we are misled by the famous phrase of Walter Pater. For Music itself may be conceived as striving towards an unattainable timelessness; and if the other arts may be thought of as yearning for duration, so Music may be thought of as yearning for the stillness of painting or sculpture.” The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon, 1958), pp. 42–43.
In a letter of 28 March 1931, Eliot spoke of Beethoven's Late Quartets: “I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.” Stephen Spender, “Remembering Eliot,” in Allen Tate, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (New York: Delacorte, 1966), p. 54. In a lecture delivered in 1933 but never published, Eliot commented on an argument in favor of “stark directness” put forward in one of D. H. Lawrence's letters. “This,” Eliot said, “speaks to me of that at which I have long aimed, in writing poetry; to write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry, poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music. We never succeed, perhaps, but Lawrence's words mean this to me, that they express to me what I think that the forty or fifty original lines that I have written strive towards.” Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1959), pp.89-90, 96.
Please note a has been issued for this article.
