As David Chinitz pointed out almost twenty years ago, the original manuscript of The Waste Land shows Eliot citing popular songs more than the Grail myth. For the poem’s title, he wanted a sentence from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” And for the opening of the poem he considered several lyrics from popular musicals, like "I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me / There's not a man can say a word agin me," from "Harrigan," a song in a 1907 George M. Cohan show titled Fifty Miles From Boston. Out of two songs from the minstrel tradition he concocted "Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon Vine / Eva Iva Uva Emmaline." And from The Cubanola Glide he appropriated the lines "Tease, Squeeze lovin & wooin / Say Kid what're y’ doin’?"
As Chinitz says, Michael North pointed out that these lines are "the first examples in the draft of [Eliot's] famous techniques of quotation and juxtaposition," and suggested the miscellaneous format of the minstrel show--or, Chinitz adds, the English music hall--can help explain the form of The Waste Land. Thanks to the deletion of the original opening section, however, the first line ("April is. . . ") remakes the poem within English poetry’s main traditions. As Chinitz says, “One can only imagine the effect of a long poem called He Do the Police in Different Voices beginning, ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place.’”
—David Chinitz, "T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide." PMLA 110.2 (March 1995).
See other comments on the composition of The Waste Land, including those synopsized above from Chinitz.
If Eliot were to have used the title “He Do the Police in Different Voices” for Book I instead of “Burial for the Dead,” the entire poem would have taken on a new tone of lightheartedness and perhaps comedy (probably because I am not familiar with the reference and am unaware of the context). The same can be said for using the first line, “First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place.” These lines would only serve to connect Eliot with the common reader because these lines would likely be familiar to readers at the time that the poem was published and the tone of the beginning of the poem would not be as dark and menacing as it is in its current form. It seems as if Eliot was attempting to reach a more educated audience through his liberal use of intellectual allusions, but the inclusion of these contemporary references would have had the opposite effect, alienating him from the intellectual audience and possibly endearing him to the masses.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to changing the tone of the beginning passages, these discarded lines would have greatly detracted from the profound imagery of the poem. This imagery of the renewal of spring and the stirring of emotional despair that the spring brings to the speaker would be lost if this section opened with “First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place.” The current configuration of images depicting nature and renewal serve as a distressing juxtaposition of the images of death and emotional distress present in the opening lines. In this way, Eliot immediately begins by painting a bleak picture of life that was likely mirroring his own attitudes regarding the war and its disturbing repercussions of death and despair, which serve to create haunting and lasting images in the minds of his readers. I am happy that he chose not to employ the use of popular lyrics from the time as his opening lines because the poem would not have the same bitter, yet lasting effect on me that it currently does.
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ReplyDeleteIt seems that Eliot was going for a more satirical tone in the original drafts of "The Wasteland". By mixing in popular song lyrics and phrases like "He Do the Police in Different Voices" along with solemn, "poetic" lines like "April is the cruelest month" or "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", Eliot was attempting to re-interpret the classical poetical form. At Ezra Pound's suggestion, a lengthy segment depicting female defecation was removed. This segment paired austere language with debase subject matter, and thus attempted to be subversive. In the modernist era, it was expected that artist played with form, sometimes attempting to destroy previous forms to make way for new ones. "The Waste Land" as it was finally published is more subtle and less overtly iconoclastic. By emphasizing linguist skill over wit, Eliot directly confronted an established poetical form and, rather than unmake it, reformed it into his own image. By using the sterile, classical-inspired language of the past to create a work of genuine emotional effectiveness, Eliot succeeded in reforming that poetical form in his own image, and he did it without resorting to literal toilet humor.
ReplyDeleteI agree somewhat with Shanna's assessment that it would have been difficult to take the entirety of The Waste Land seriously had Eliot decided to keep his original title. On the other hand, the poem, even in its sober opening "The Burial of the Dead," isn't devoid of humor, with its reference to Madame Sosostris's "bad cold." I think the inclusion of the minstrel song lyrics would have been right in line with Eliot's mixture of high- and low-brow references. In fact, he does include a popular song in "A Game of Chess," in which he name-checks "The Shakespearian Rag." This mix of high and low creates a meandering tone that directly correlates to the poem's fragmented style. On the surface, the whole thing feels rather austere, but on closer inspection, one can see how it takes on tones of satire (as Eli mentioned) and esotericism, despair and uplift.
ReplyDeleteIn the Norton Anthology's gloss on the poem, Eliot is quoted as saying, "I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying," calling the poem "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." I'm not sure how much stock we can put in such a proclamation, which recalls MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" and its claim that poems "should not mean / But be." Do we take Eliot's word for it and read The Waste Land as nothing more than an exercise in venting one's frustrations? Eliot's assertion might actually add to our understanding of the poem as he devotes more time to the subject of loss than he does to any potential gain, putting the recognition of hope squarely on the reader's shoulders.
You raise an interesting point about whether we should take the meaning of the poem seriously, or write it off as mere "rhythmical grumbling" as Eliot claimed. I'm inclined to believe Eliot was very serious and that he believed he was writing a prescription for all of western culture. He goes to great lengths in the first 3 sections to establish contemporary life as the alienated, half-alive, Unreal City. He alludes to Buddha's Fire-Sermon to reveal that the Unreal City is only a more severe condition of human existence, which is always burning. As I read it, the final section is the prescription for how to exist peacefully in the Wasteland.
DeleteEliot is conservative in the sense that I don't think he believes humanity can ever escape the wasteland, but he is radical in that he rejects much of inherited Western culture. Christianity seems to lose all efficacy for Eliot. "Son of man/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images" (20-22).
Reading about these alternate beginnings and "Pound C-section Operations"--see Lyndall Gordon's comments on the dissection of The Waste Land's final form--totally changed my perspective on Eliot's poetic creation. We've been discussing in class the importance of the Modernist "collective" and the, to reappropriate a Bakhtinian term, heteroglossia that runs rampant in Modernist works. I knew that Pound and Eliot worked together on this classic piece, but I didn't know that without Pound's interventions Eliot may have been stuck with some colloquial, pop culture allusions and a woman's defecation scene instead of "April is the cruelest month..."
ReplyDeleteI'm still sifting through the secondary sources, but will have more to say on these critics in class!
Regarding The Waste Land, William Carlos Williams wrote "Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself." I won't argue about whether Eliot took Modernism in the right direction or not. Rather, I'm interested in Williams' misplaced blame. Seems, according to David Chinitz, that Williams was wrong about Eliot. Much of the onus for "returning us to the classroom" lies with Ezra Pound. Had it not been for Pounds editing, The Waste Land would be far less erudite and I agree with Shanna that the classical allusions and heavy reliance on the grail myth make the poem potentially more alienating than the original pre-Pound draft. Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that The Waste Land would have become the cultural touchstone that it is today without Pound's guiding hand. The significance of the poem lies in its mythic qualities.
ReplyDeleteAnecdotally, the quote from Lyndall Gordon is fairly interesting---Pound analogizes his work on The Waste Land as a surgeon aiding a difficult birth through cesarean section.
To that point, without Pound's surgical editing, we'd be reading a poem about poo and vaudeville songs that no one knows anymore---and frankly no one cares to know.
Knowing that Ezra Pound contributed so much to The Wasteland's construction changes the reading of this poem so much for me. It becomes much more inviting. Their collaboration creates, like Koestenbaum discusses, such conflicting masculine/feminine tones and "queerness". This also adds to the multiple personality disorder that The Wasteland suffers from, or perhaps enjoys and thrives in. It creates a complexity and history that is inviting rather than exclusive or alienating as some others would argue. I feel similarly about Eliot's use of allusion. Because it is so varied I feel the need to "crack the case" as it were, of its origins and meanings. If this poem were to include those allusions to popular songs, it would risk having the same effect that I think HD's poems had. That is to say, its themes and images would bore me.
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