The Waste Land and Other Poems Read Free

the poem ends with self-protective solitude: ‘I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.’
    A recent edition of Eliot’s notebooks from 1909 to 1917, Inventions of the March Hare (edited by Christopher Ricks), generates many fascinating insights into the composition of the early poems. The notebooks illustrate how long Eliot spent carefully working and nurturing the relatively few poems he actually published, and demonstrate the difference between the published work and a considerable number of other attempts, most of which one would classify as juvenilia, that he did not publish.
    The notebooks reinforce how carefully Eliot modulated the diction and tenor of this poetry. We see, for example, in a passage from the fourth stanza of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ in which a street-lamp surrealistically speaks of ‘the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, / Slips out its tongue / And devours a morsel of rancid butter,’ that the word ‘rancid’ was a late addition. We may surmise that that word carries an especially potent resonance: that it was (as Flaubert would say) le mot juste, carrying the connotation that, Eliot judged as he perfected the poem, emphatically conveyed the atmosphere of this scene. In the next stanza, it is a deletion that shows how Eliot conveys the mood: The line that reads ‘A washed-out smallpox cracks her face’ began, in draft, as ‘the hideous scars of a washed-out pox’: But Eliot must have decided that it was too heavy-handed and obvious; the more suggestive and understated description is more powerful. The whole milieu is, of course, hideous, but it is more effective if readers infer that instead of the poet explaining it.
    The most interesting textual revelation in these notebooks concerns a long section (thirty-nine lines) that originally had been part of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ but was finally suppressed. Eliot called this section ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ (a pervigilium is an all-night vigil), and it describes an experience strikingly more feverish and nervous than the rest of the poem and close in tenor to the spirit of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night.’ Of course, the fact that this section does not appear in the final draft of ‘Prufrock’ means that it is not, precisely, part of the poem’s ambience, but nevertheless it colors our understanding of the character. The fact that such writhing, nauseous madness (as Eliot describes it) pervades the pervigilium that Prufrock might have kept helps readers to appreciate the sublimated tensions in the poem that may otherwise seem unexpected, or exaggerated, or perverse. The dark energies of the ‘Pervigilium’ suggest how terrifying the world of this quiet, mannerly character might have become.
     
    As antithesis to Prufrock and Other Observations, we have Poems 1920: highly wrought (overworked and nearly impenetrable, one might reasonably conclude) and densely allusive. The voice is intellectually haughty, which seems to be another mode of achieving the distanced isolation that pervaded Prufrock. The poems are wrenched with unstable combinations of classicism and fetid contemporary Hobbesian turmoil. What had been a minor strain in Eliot’s first collection—the interiorized angst of ‘Hysteria,’ the tensely uncomfortable atmosphere of ‘Mr. Apollinax’—blossoms into a full-blown neurosis in the second. If the poems in Prufrock were almost too simple, those in Eliot’s 1920 collection were far too difficult—and both the simplicity and the difficulty suggest a strategy of evasiveness that Eliot employs to avoid what he will finally achieve in The Waste Land: a direct, honest, realistic appraisal of the condition of the world around him.
    Poems 1920 (published in a nearly identical edition in 1919 as Poems, and also published under a different title, Ara Vos Prec, in 1920) has an offhand but insistent anti-Semitic taint, as Anthony Julius has convincingly expounded: from the