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The third chapter focuses on T. S. Eliot’s turn to the “mythical method” as a strategy of literary creation through division. Examining the delimitation in The Waste Land of the history of verse as it develops from Chaucer to Whitman, it shows that Eliot turns to myth not to forge connections with something temporally or spatially other but to cut his poem free from its literary-historical past. Within the realm of myth, broken off from the unending historical cycles that provide The Waste Land with its subject matter, Eliot attempts to place the poet’s creative act. The results are volatile: history remains, in the poem, the space of production, however fallen its products, while myth stands apart from history as a space where nothing—not history and certainly not literary history—happens.

This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language, and manipulating the sense-making gestures of French in creative play. This breakthrough initiative is developed in the pseudo-logical prosody of the major quatrain poems of 1917-1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, and “A Cooking Egg”, while the monologue of “Gerontion” exercises the new poetics in a vivid evocation of its founding historical context. The draft manuscripts and revisions of The Waste Land are discussed in relation to the same poetic principles.

Published in the first number of The Criterion in October 1922, The Waste Land quickly codified high modernism’s poetic style. But it also launched the project that absorbed the greater portion of Eliot’s career, a critical review that (from 1922 to 1939) systematically elaborated the logic of historical reference and mode of formal intention first tested in the poem. Arguing that The Waste Land and The Criterion effectively form the same text, this chapter returns to the poem’s method of metonymic allusion, especially as condensed in its famous final fragments. The historical situation registered but unvoiced in those last lines—the European collapse of 1914–1919, reverberating in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles—establishes the formative problem of The Criterion, seeking to conceive a postwar world that still lacks an ordering conceptual language.

Chapter Five discusses the aforementioned methods in relation to The Waste Land itself and the interlinked aftermaths, Sweeney Agonistes and ‘The Hollow Men’. Eliot's move towards a more overtly dramatic interest, from 1923 onwards, is shown to operate alongside a purgatorial siting of his poetry following The Waste Land. This chapter involves a full review of The Waste Land manuscript, in order to discover the thread of interconnection around Eliot's Early Modern sources that resonates behind the ‘final’ version of the poem. The chapter also reviews the editions of the Early Modern texts underlying Eliot's masterwork, in order to trace threads of association made by earlier critics that are taken up in his poem. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar then emerges as a key text behind Sweeney Agonistes and ‘The Hollow Men’.

The second chapter treats the formal role played by satire in the drafts of The Waste Land, focusing in particular on T. S. Eliot’s parody of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in an early version of “The Fire Sermon.” In Eliot’s hands, satire becomes a means of responding to a specifically modernist crisis in aesthetic judgment: the seeming impossibility of distinguishing, after the collapse of traditional standards of beauty, popular charlatans from individuals of real talent. By placing The Waste Land under the sign of satire, Eliot attempts to distinguish his long poem from the wasteland of literary history that it recollects. The disappearance of satire from the final version of The Waste Land following the editorial suggestions of Pound, and Eliot’s replacement of his earlier satirical method by the so-called “mythical method” reflect satire’s failure to accomplish its task.

Chapter 4 offers a series of interpretive takes on T. S. Eliot’s 1930s electrically recorded voice experiments in reading his poem The Waste Land aloud. It traces Eliot’s attempt to invent a way to read modernist poetry. Explaining the production context of the 1933 recordings, the chapter situates Eliot’s audible reading experiments within contemporary debates surrounding the English verse-speaking movement, and Eliot’s work for the BBC. Finally, it provides a close-listening analysis of Eliot’s reading experiments with duration and amplitude, as well as a series of nonsemantic phrasing and intonation techniques, and especially the use of monotone in reading. Eliot’s method of reading is interpreted as a performance of the abstract conception of “voice” that functions as an organizing principle in New Critical discourse. Eliot’s recorded readings are heard to sound an organizing method of incantation that evokes the possibility of an overarching oracular or otherworldly voice.

Continuing the themes of chapter 5, this chapter looks at the relationship between Kirk and T. S. Eliot, noting the profound influence they had on each other. It also carefully considers the influence of T. E. Hulme on modern art and poetry.

This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.

Chapter Four continues the momentum from the discussion of ‘Gerontion’, to consider Eliot's development of a method in 1920–22 to structure a long sequence confronting contemporary history, a method founded on the principles of metaphysical poetry. The Waste Land deploys those Early Modern facets of ‘wit’ and ‘conceit’ that were receiving particular definition in Eliot's critical thinking at the time he was working on the new poem. This period also saw Eliot achieving greater concision in his understanding of the role of allusion in relation to these other technical facets, and his development of the notion of the ‘cryptogram’ to explore how allusions might be remade and interconnected in the structure of modern work.

The presence of Virgil in The Waste Land is at least as pervasive and important as that of Dante. Although the poem has no overarching structure or narrative, it has a world, a geography, a cast of characters, and a sense of human experience that is most like the world of Virgil: it begins and ends in the world of The Aeneid, overlaps with Eliot’s own experience during World War I, and incorporates—in its images—a background of Roman and Carthaginian history. While Eliot wrote little on Virgil until his late major essays, “What is a Classic” (1944) and “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951), The Aeneid is present much earlier, in The Waste Land, as a journey with sorrow, loss, betrayal, and war. The Waste Land is not only more Virgilian than is still usually acknowledged, it reveals very early Eliot’s lifelong developing conception of a Latin Europe.

Any “logic” of imagery must be ampliative rather than explicative, and conceived as independent of argument. Its semantics may be closer to intuitionist than to classical logic, and concerned to assess how far an imagistically ampliative process remains appropriate to its starting point. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land together with Four Quartets, and Pascal’s Pensées are used to show how such assessments may be carried out. Where imagistic discourse has an argumentative agenda, weakness in its imagistic logic may assist in the diagnosis of conceptual or experiential inadequacy. But where there are no such deficiencies, “leakage” between the conceptual and imagistic levels may not only facilitate the argumentative imagination and the generation of insight, but also have a bearing on the propriety of certain types of paradox.

This chapter looks at Cummings’ responses to antiquity and modernity framed in terms of aliveness and deadness. I look at Cummings’ theories of art, with a particular focus on his response to Greek friezes and statuary. The importance of Greek marble statues to Cummings raises issues of the problematic aesthetic of whiteness, which—as the writing of Derek Walcott helps us to understand—has inextricable links with Classical claims to permanence. I turn to issues of permanence versus sterility in Cummings’ response to T.S. Eliot, drawing on poems from Cummings’ 1926 collection, is 5. Finally, I conclude the chapter with a discussion of Cummings’ previously unknown parody of The Waste Land, which is made available for the first time in the Cummings edition in this book.

Scholars often study instances of intertextuality within Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which they connect to both classical and contemporary authors. Though some of these scholars have noted a connection between Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, there has been little criticism that attempts to explain how this connection affects the meaning within Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s diaries reveal that she crafted her novel during the period in which she developed a personal and collaborative relationship with T.S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land: Eliot recited the poem to Leonard and Virginia Woolf in June of 1922, two months before Virginia began writing Mrs. Dalloway, and she set the type for The Waste Land herself in 1923. In my paper I will examine how Mrs. Dalloway interacts with Eliot’s work, including his theoretical text “Traditional and the Individual Talent.” Meaning, in Eliot’s model, is cumulative and cultural. By tapping into the larger historical dialogue embodied by “tradition” meaning is transformed, created anew, challenged, and reproduced. In many ways, Mrs. Dalloway is a performance of Woolf’s ability to exercise Eliot’s concept of the historical sense. More importantly, however, Woolf’s appropriation of “tradition” allows her to collaborate with past authors to create meaning in the face of a changed world.

This chapter argues that an oral mode of textual circulation, which T. S. Eliot discovered both in obscene, comic, bawdy folk song and in music hall performance, provided him with a vision of social cohesion that contrasts with the fragmentation that is otherwise central to his work. The ability of these genres to figure an otherwise lost social cohesion, however, reflects the fact that they are spaces where men bonded and created a sense of homosocial community. Eliot’s published comments on obscenity confirm his valuation of the comic or humorous obscene as a mode and index of social health; but the instances where Eliot discovers this cohesion are predicated on the exclusion of women.

This chapter explores the importance of ‘notes’ for T.S. Eliot as a form of being intimate with, or critical of, works, beginning from his marginalia as a student of Aristotelian philosophy, and extending to his blue-pencilling work as a Faber editor, by way of his own self-critical notes to The Waste Land. Beyond these literal forms of note, it proposes that we re-read Eliot’s early critical prose (up to his 1926 lectures on the Metaphysical poets) under the aspect of annotation. Countering the common assumption that Eliot quotes rather than reads, it suggests that his critical essays develop a distinctive annotative form. It traces the genealogy of this through Eliot’s early philosophical training and through his subsequent responses to the practices of quotation in the criticism of Pater and Arnold.

This chapter analyses Murry's second novel, The Things We Are, which is examined in relation to his negative response to the publication of Lawrence's Women in Love. It also describes Murry's treatment of the malaise of modernity that suggests parallels with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The references to psychoanalysis and interpretation of dreams suggest the influence of Sigmund Freud.

Starting with the response to jazz in the 1920s by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the introduction examines how a fantasy of Black America provided European audiences, and especially European artists and intellectuals, with a way of negotiating the experience of modernity. It describes the celebrity of Josephine Baker in France and Germany. It offers a theoretical account of the affective and psychological aspects of modernity, drawing especially on the work of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and (to a lesser extent) Walter Benjamin. It charts the arrival of Paul Robeson in London. A reading of the Bloomsbury art theorist Clive Bell’s anti-jazz polemic “Plus de Jazz” sets the scene for an account of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a poem that consciously responded to the modernist aesthetic embodied in jazz. The chapter shows how the imaginative take-up of Black America was a feature of transatlantic modernism.

This chapter reviews The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Eliot's letters detail his struggle to find a career and to shoulder his way into London's cutthroat literary world. Most of his early letters were addressed to a small cast: his parents and his brother Henry, the local literati, and a few gossipy London hostesses. Among the literary figures, the most impressive were Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell. Many of his letters were merely social, invitations extended or declined, appointments made or broken, but Eliot's hobnobbing life also paved the way for the opportunities that followed, especially the editorship of the Criterion, which became the premier literary journal of its day. The chapter also describes how Eliot's buttoned-up private life became the vivid background to The Waste Land, a highly personal, even confessional poem, as well as a savage social analysis.

The edition of Cummings’ own work presents translations from Horace, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Homer. It also includes a classicizing ‘Invocation (Alcaics)’ and the previously unrecognised parody of The Waste Land. The poetry is followed by two short prose works: ‘The Greek Spirit’ (a Harvard-era class essay) and ‘The Young Faun’ (a Harvard-era short story). I give a brief editorial discussion which covers the principles of selection, reviews the editorial considerations affecting the presentation of the translations (especially the order in which they are presented), and summarizes editorial issues which arise from the parody of The Waste Land. This chapter also includes a few brief comments on Cummings’ visual art which contextualize the plates and images presented in this book.

This chapter examines footnotes, endnotes, and the marginal glosses that constitute the fiction and poetry that speak of the stranger. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for example, included footnotes that pose a challenge. How are we to read them? Are they referential, merely addenda, or a vital part of the poem? Eliot himself suggested that his own notes aerere merely pale reflections of the sources that he drew inspiration from. In other words, for those who truly wanted to know the meaning behind the poem, additional reading would be required. Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Frazer’s The Golden Bough also exhibit the same characteristic in their poetry. This is simply one aspect of the appearance of small print in poetry. The rest of the chapter explores the other uses and challenges that these marks provide.