The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed

by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination

Ian Probstein

(Touro College)

In The Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics Mikhail Bakhtin created his concept of a

polyphonic novel (combined with that of a "carnival" and Menippean satire). The most

crucial in his system was "dialogism," which enabled the scholar to reveal the many-

voiced ("different voices singing differently the same theme <...> punctun contra

punctum"), many-faceted character of Dostoyevsky's works. Bakhtin differentiates

between dialogism and monologism "...pretending to possess the final truth" and states

that "the truth is . . . born between people."1 Bakhtin says about the two main principles

of a "Socratic dialogue": syncretic (the fusion of different points of view on the same

problem) and anacretic (the ways to provoke a person entirely express his opinion), and

states that "the main heroes of a "Socratic dialogue" are ideologists <...> those who seek

and test the truth and involve the others in the process of doing it."2 Dialogue as the main

principle and the method is combined with a micro-dialogue or dialogue per se which

enables the author to create a ‘dialogic’ free character. According to Bakhtin, "The

freedom of a character is the author's intention. The word of a hero is created by the

author, but it is created in such a way that it can …develop its inner logics and

independence as… a word of a character."3

2
 Bakhtin felt that other genres were more studied, fixed, and established, while the

novel had an innovative force and was in the process of formation “in the full light of a

historic day,” as he wrote in the introduction to “Epic and Novel,” but paradoxically,

wrote about medieval literature, like Rabelais, and did not go any further than 19th

century Russian prose focusing primarily on Dostoyevsky. Even though Bakhtin never

considered poetry, not just lyric poetry, seriously, his major discoveries, such as

‘chronotopos,’ dialogism and polyphony as well as parody “as one of the most ancient

and widespread forms of rendering others’ direct speech”4 can be found not only in epic

poetry, but also in lyric poetry and most certainly, in the poetry of Modernism and Avant-

Garde.

Although Max Nanny was mainly concerned with the problem of the Menippean

satire and carnival in The Waste Land, he was among the first to point out polyphony and

dialogism in the poem connecting it with Bakhtin’s works.5 Calvin Bedient, however,

correctly stated that The Waste Land is not, unlike Satyricon, a “straight Menippea,” but

it

substitutes for the impudent marginality of laughter a poetics of banishment, in

which numerous voices, styles, and generic registers conspicuously fill a void left

by a missing All. . . The Waste Land is never really, and is finally far from being,

carnivalesque; instead, it arranges the appearance of a riot of tones and images

and languages with the cold cunning of a Hieronymo and with no less an intention

than to silence the pretensions of language and literature once and for all (a

suicidal mission that even The Waste Land, for all its severity, is unable to

perform—indeed, it even gathers, just before the close, a heap of heterogeneous,

3
 quoted phrases like a squirrel hoarding nuts for the winter, and, in the same place,

praises song).”6

In a way, Nanny and Bedient used Bakhtin’s method, so to speak, against

Bakhtin, as was recently done by Jo-Anne Cappeluti who revealed Bakhtin’s

contradictions. In addition to those contradictions, I would like to emphasize that M.

Bakhtin is essentially ‘monologic’ himself in his discourse: on the one hand, he claims

that ‘ideologists,’ as he calls them, of a Socratic school are seeking the truth as opposed

to those who already know it, but on the other hand, his rhetoric is full of teaching and

preaching, not to mention the fact, that Plato’s Dialogues and other writings, such as

Laws and Republic, are essentially monologic.

Donald Wessling recently revealed Bakhtin’s contradictions in a broader context

of lyric poetry, and Omri Ronen and the Russian scholar Iuri Lotman have both applied

Bakhtin’s principles ‘against Bakhtin’ to lyric poetry in 1970s.7

That’s what I intend to do in this paper. With the introduction of Pound’s

‘Personae’ and ‘Mask,’ even the frame and boundaries of once firm lyric first person “I”

were shuttered and shifted. We by no means can take at face value the first person “I” of

“La Fraisne,” or “Cino,” or “De Aegypto.” The same phenomenon can be observed in

Eliot’s poetry. Stephen Spender correctly states that “there are many voices which say

“I” in The Waste Land. But those which speak out their living characters are of the

surface, objects of the prophetic or witnessing voices. Even when they speak in the first

person, dramatically, they are third-person voices of people looked at from the outside.”8

As was observed by Frye, in T. S. Eliot’s “later poetry the “I,” the speaker of the poem, is

a persona of the poem himself; in the earlier work the narrators are created characters,

4
speaking with the poet’s voice but not for him.”9 The former is certainly true as far as

Four Quartets is concerned, but does not necessarily apply in the case of “I” in The

Hollow Men, or Ash Wednesday, or “Journey of the Magi,” or “Marina” from Ariel

Poems. T. S. Eliot, like Pound, was seeking ways of “making it new.” Beginning with

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” Eliot shifted the

convention of lyric poetry filling it with “others’ utterances and others’ individual

words.”10 In “A Question of Speech” Anne Ridler just mentioned the problem of direct

quotations bluntly stating that “Eliot’s and Pound’s method of direct quotation is apt to be

disastrous one in other hands”11 without drawing any further conclusions (any method is

disastrous in the hands of a mediocre poet, not to mention the unskilled and the ungifted).

In my view, Ridler has overlooked I. A. Richards’s fruitful idea that “quotation performs

a work of concentration in The Waste Land, a poem which he says would otherwise have

needed to be of epic length.” Doubting that it is true, she concludes: “It seems a purely

personal technique, liable to degenerate in other hands into mere patchwork.”12 Had the

esteemed author been well-read in other literatures, she would have noticed that using

citation, allusion, and the speech of the other was a general tendency of Modernism that

could have been most certainly found in Borges or in Mandelstam, who “celebrates the

orgy of quotations,” as he put in “Conversation about Dante.” Claire Cavanagh compared

Mandelstam’s “craving for world culture” to Pound’s concept of “cross-fertilization

between different languages” and Eliot’s idea that poetry grows from “the struggle

between native and foreign elements.”13 The tradition of a quotation or allusion as a

dialogue in time and space with the predecessors goes back in Russian poetry to Pushkin,

whose Eugene Onegin is truly an “orgy of quotations” brilliantly ‘estranged’ or

5
“defamiliarized” (a term proposed by Viktor Shklovsky14 and akin to Pound's "making it

new") by the greatest Russian poet. In modern European poetry the use of allusions and

quotations can be found even in Rilke with his constant allusions to the Bible or High

Antiquity and Apollinaire, for instance, in the poem “The Synagogue” of the latter with a

quotation in Hebrew at the end. However, Pound and Eliot made this device dominant

and used it masterfully in their work. In “Prufrock,” epigraphs, citations, and allusions to

Hamlet or St. John break the monologue, “the Swan’s Song,” as Eliot called it.

Prufrock’s confessions are “estranged” by parody, irony, even sarcasm and remarks of

the visitors of a high-society salon (“They will say” in art means, of course, that “they”

are included in the dialogue); so are the words of the “one, settling a pillow by her head”

or “Turning toward the window: “That is not it all, / That is not what I meant, at all.”

From those remarks we learn as much about Prufrock as about unnamed ‘her.’ We do not

only see her, but we also actually hear her intonation, not just words. For, as Bakhtin

mentioned, “The expression of an utterance can never be fully understood or explained if

its thematic content is all that is taken into account. The expression of an utterance

always responds to a greater or lesser degree, that is, it expresses the speaker’s attitude

toward others’ utterances, and not just his attitude towards the object of his utterance.”15

In a note to that phrase Bakhtin says: “Intonation is especially sensitive and always points

beyond the context.”16 In poetry intonation is even more palpable and, I would say, more

important than in other speech genres, with the exception of drama perhaps. Further, the

intonation of the lady in Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” is much more distinct than that of her

counterpart in “Prufrock.” The dialogue moves through seasons and space. Moreover, it

is not just a dialogue, but a many-voiced lyrical drama and a musical piece, which

6
includes the voices of Marlow’s characters, Henry James’s irony, Laforgue’s ironic, even

sarcastic undertones juxtaposed with Chopin’s Preludes played by “the latest Pole” (I.

Paderevsky or Joseff Hoffman), “the windings of violins / And the ariettes / of cracked

cornets,” and, finally, by Arnold’s “buried life” put in the mouth of Eliot’s heroine. The

fusion of buried life with April sunsets will be further developed in “April is the cruellest

month” of The Waste Land. Thus even in the beginning of his work T. S. Eliot did not

only learn the art of using personae from Ezra Pound, but he also elaborated his own

forms of dialogism and polyphony in lyric poetry. It would be most illuminating to see in

this light how Eliot developed his method of “dialogic imagination” in the first draft of

the poem heavily edited by Ezra Pound. Although it certainly is a thrill to the connoisseur

to reveal all the hidden allusions and associations, I should note that we must not forget

that we are dealing with poetry, a “speaking picture, ” in Sir Philip Sidney’s dictum, or

rather time-space condensed in images and revealed in music. For it is music and

dialogism, not only the themes, as Frye presumes,17 that make Eliot’s longer poems

whole. Stephen Spender perceived the sonata form in "Ash Wednesday" as early as in

1935 and compared Four Quartets to the late quartets of Beethoven.18 Therefore, Frye

was right to compare The Waste Land to a musical piece.19 However, I would disagree

with Frye that “Eliot in all his longer poems is. . . essentially a poet of fragments. The

impulse by which he is able to see and organize his material as poetry is not very

sustained.”20 Like Ezra Pound, Eliot was a modernist and as a modernist, he was

concerned with “making it new,” i.e. not developing the plot, but shifting from scene to

scene, very much like Pound in The Cantos and Eisenstein, Vertov or Kuleshov in their

films.

7
 In essence, Eliot’s entire work is a dialogue with humanity. I intend to show how

the use of dialogism allows Eliot to develop the plot, to use implied narrators to reveal

themes and ideas, to shift in time and space, combining the epic past with the lyric

present, to create the music of the piece, to ‘defamiliarize’ reality and myth, making myth

real and the reality unreal, and as a result, to reveal the human drama as in Dante’s

Divine Comedy. I will limit my comments on the allusions, sources, references or

mythology to a minimum necessary to reveal dialogism in the poem and identify the

voices of this human drama, since, as Cleanth Brooks once stated, “To venture to write

anything further on The Waste Land <. . . > may call for some explanation and even

apology.”21

The fact that The Waste Land has been drawing attention of poets and scholars

alike, whether they have applied the approach of the New Criticism, Post-Structuralism,

or Deconstruction, as Ruth Nevo once practiced,22 explored the case of Modernism and

the new poetics, as was shown by Marjorie Perloff 23 and Jewel Spears Brooker,24 the

latter with Joseph Bentley explored the limits of interpretation and epistemological

approach25; Russel Elliot Murphy revealed ideas,26 Armin Frank extracted images

although almost ignoring the voices,27—all that proves that The Waste Land does not only

live reverberating with sound and meaning, but it also still disturbs the readers stirring all

kinds of reactions except indifference.

Virtually everyone who wrote on The Waste Land has been interpreting the use of

myth and symbolism in it. However, very few, with the exception of George Williamson

and Spender28 perhaps, and later Max Nanny, Calvin Bedient, and Jo-Anne Cappeluti,

revealed the dramatic character of the poem. Williamson suggested that The Waste Land

8
“becomes a kind of dramatic lyric, in which the lyric themes are projected by characters

associated with the central experience, and the individual fortune becomes a general

fortune.”29 I would suggest that the poem is essentially dramatic, and it is dialogic

imagination embracing centuries and civilizations that makes the poem a human drama.

It is well-known that The Waste Land initially started with the epigraph from

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, finally omitted (but later Heart of Darkness reappeared in

“The Hollow Men” in a different form). The epigraph from Conrad emphasized “fear in a

handful of dust,” not the theme of a “buried life.” Then, an intensive, lavish dialogue “in

medias res” simultaneously defamiliarized and “made new” Dickens’s Our Mutual

Friend, as if placing its characters “hic et nunc.” Moreover, dialogism was perhaps more

emphasized in the original version, the first two parts of which had a subtitle “He do the

police in different voices,” thus not only alluding to Dickens’s novel, but also revealing a

polyphonic nature of the poem. Eliot’s own reminiscences of his life in Boston were

richly interpolated with songs from George Cohan’s Fifty Miles From Boston and from

other popular musical plays of the beginning of the nineteen hundreds. As a result, Eliot

merged the past and the present, made the past real. Since the title of the first movement

in the first draft was the same—“The Burial of the Dead,” alluding, as Grover Smith

observed, to the “majestic Anglican service”30 bearing the same name, and the first draft

starts with the first person plural “we,” very much like “Prufrock,” I would agree with

Frye that this is not the voice of Tiresias, as Smith presumes.31

Pound finally convinced Eliot that the opening of the first draft was excessive and

drew the reader out of focus, but the method was, nevertheless, productively at work.

Likewise, the cuts in other parts, especially in “The Fire Sermon,” as was shown by

9
Richard Ellmann and later by Joseph Militello,32 prove the tendency to exclude overt or

redundant fragments sometimes sacrificing skillful lines not only to achieve coherence or

emphasize the tragedy, but also to escape excessive didactic comments and thus to make

a truly modernist dialogic poem. The final version of 1922, The Waste Land as we know

it now, is a monument to Eliot’s genius and to Pound’s extraordinary ability to see the

text of the other (another facet of dialogism) and liberate the essence of sense from the

husk of words. It opens with the words of Trimalchio boasting that he has seen the Sybil

at Cumae who asked the gods to grant her eternal life but forgot to ask eternal youth.

Trimalchio quotes her telling the boys that her only wish is to die. As Russel Eliot

Murphy keenly observed, Sibyl’s words

are in a first-person report from a third person; and that third person,

Trimalchio, is himself being quoted by Encopius, himself the fictional narrator of

the Satyricon. <. . . > Furthemore, while Trimalchio’s report is in Latin, the words

he is reporting were said in Greek. Meanwhile, the entire first-century assemblage

introduces a poem written two thousand years later for an audience which speaks

English, itself partly derived from Latin and ancient Greek.33

Thus direct speech is at least four times transformed here: Sybil—to the boys—

Trimalchio—through Encopius —to the guests— Petronius to— Eliot, and the epigraph

immediately introduces the theme of an unnatural, buried life combining or rather

juxtaposing it with the revival of nature. Hence we have a dialogue between the two

writers evoked in several languages, and both Petronius’s Trimalchio and the Sybil at

Cumae are “estranged,” parodied, and included in a new work of art, in the dialogue or

rather a drama of The Waste Land.

10
 In his study of Seferis’s translation of The Waste Land into Greek, Nicholas

Bachtin (1896-1950), professor of Greek and Linguistics at Birmingham University,

England, the brother of Mikhail, was among the first (1938) to notice a dialogic nature of

The Waste Land as opposed to “essentially monological” Journey of The Magi or

Gerontion as well as to emphasize a dialogic nature of quotations:

They are not really “quotations”—that is, extraneous elements

incorporated into a unified poetic utterance; they coexist on equal terms with the

other elements of the poem. They too are voices among other conflicting voices: a

snatch of an Australian street-ballad or a line from Marvell, no less than the talk

in the public-house, the words of the hysterical woman, or the poet’s own voice <.

. . > which vanishes again as the others do, passing abruptly or imperceptibly into

another voice.34

“Citation is a cicada,” as Mandelstam said in “Conversation about Dante,”

emphasizing a truly dialogic nature of the appropriate quotation. Hence the citation from

Petronius does not only transform Eliot’s text, but the latter also transforms the former

creating a new meaning. This new meaning is further modified and transformed by an

allusion to The Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

And droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich liquor

Of which vertu engendered is the flour. . .

11
 Although Eliot’s allusion to The Canterbury Tales was mentioned by a number of

scholars, Dansby Evans, Wolfgang Rudat, to name a few,35 most of them limited their

comparisons to the two prologues, the motifs, or separate characters. Frank Perez found

striking similarities between Prufrock and Chaucer’s clerk of Oxford. Not less important

is that Perez reconstructed what he called “a backward evolution of literary allusions:

Prufrock to Hamlet to Polonius to Chaucer’s clerk.”36 In a note Perez connects this with

“Eliot’s concept of the ‘historical sense,’”37 while I would rather emphasize dialogism of

allusions which work exactly the same way as Petronius-Eliot allusion discussed above.

Evans, a medievalist and a scholar of Chaucer, was probably the only one to emphasize

the similarity of motifs, in particular, those of pilgrimage as spiritual quest and

salvation.38 Further, Evans correctly asserts, that following Chaucer, “Eliot partially

renders his pilgrims through reference to their perspective vocations and social status.”39

Therefore, Eliot did not only parody the motifs of reviving earth, roots, and flowers,

opposing draught and fog to rain and reviving nature, but he also parodied the characters

of The Canterbury Tales. Thus I presume that the Knight, who has fought in the

Crusades from the Mediterranean Cost, North Africa, Alexandria, to Prussia and Russia

is certainly parodied by Stetson (and earlier by Gerontion); his son, the Squire, an ideal

lover is opposed to all the failures in The Waste land; the Nonne, who “was cleped

madame Eglentyne,” an ironic character, a Prioress without a vocation, but with dogs and

jewelry, is replaced by Madame Sosostris; further, The Merchant and the Skipper re-

appear in The Waste Land as well (One-eyed merchant, Mr. Eugenides, and Phlebas the

Phoenician respectively); moreover, in my view, there is an allusion to certain characters

in Chaucer’s personages; thus, for instance, the fallen kings from the Monk’s tale,

12
especially, Croesus who was hanged, washed by Jupiter in snow and rain, is perhaps The

Hanged Man in Madam Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards.” Perhaps the cock “heet

Chauntecleer” from “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” who was crowing in church on Sundays is

an additional literary allusion to the rooster in the haunted chapel scene from “What the

Thunder Said” discussed below. In addition, the ability of the cock from “The Nun’s

Priest’s Tale,” who “By nature. . . knew eech ascensioun / Of th’equinoxial in thilke

town” might be an additional allusion to the Wheel. Thus Eliot is more than alluding to

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales using the motive of pilgrimage as spiritual quest and

salvation in a continuing dialogue with one of the greatest English poets, who was among

the first to introduce dialogism in poetry (my emphasis).

The first impression of the opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead” is that it is

narrated in the third person, but then we encounter “us” in the eighth and “we” in the

ninth lines, while the first person plural, in its turn, is replaced by the first person singular

—in German. As a result of inserting the words of Countess Marie Larisch, Eliot shifts in

space and time, combining the present and the past. “Speaking in tongues,” polyglossy

or, in Bakhtin’s dictum, “heteroglossia,” is another lesson of Pound creatively adopted by

Eliot. The dialogue of characters is also the dialogue of languages and vice versa. The

words of the countess (and her cousin) are then dissolved in a mighty and frightful ‘bass

profundo’ of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. As was observed by Williamson, “the speaker

also is the ‘son of man,’ his inheritor; and this inheritance is the lot of the Fisher King,

whose experience he repeats.”40 After the crescendo “I will show you fear in a handful of

dust” the only logical continuation could be switching to a completely different tonality,

which has been initially found by Eliot, who introduced new voices and new characters—

13
those of Tristan and Isolde. It also includes the medieval romance and the music of

Wagner in the “speaking picture” of the poem. Thus the theme of a tragic love is

juxtaposed with the theme of a loveless buried life. The theme of “a hyacinth girl,” which

is perhaps an allusion to Tennyson’s Mariana, links the medieval romance and Wagner’s

opera with modern times, reinforcing “the chronotope of love,” in Bakhtin’s dictum,41

and introducing a new character. The motif of hyacinth does not only remind us of “the

slain Hyacinth,”42 thus bringing back the theme of a dying and reviving God, but it also

“carries as much of the weight of “memory and desire” as does the lilac in The Waste

Land.”43 However, I would argue that it is not simply an implication of “a male-male love

ending in tragic loss,” as Query maintains,44 but it also suggests the desire to bring

spirituality into stale female-male relationships of the poem, especially that of “The

Game of Chess.” Hence the connection to “the hyacinth garden” in the manuscript,45

which was removed from the final version since Eliot was especially meticulous in

avoiding any overt biographical connections and allusions. The intermediate resolution

leads us to “the heart of light, the silence,” since silence is not the absence of speech but a

pattern of music allowing the poet to switch between the planes, for “words, after speech,

reach / Into the silence” (“Burnt Norton” V). Shifts in space and time allow the poet to

lead his reader to London of 1920s and introduce a new character, Madame Sosostris,

who is a complex, fused character herself: a parody and a counterpart of Sybil and, as it

has been until recently believed, a hidden citation or an allusion, as Grover Smith noted,

to Huxley’s Crome Yellow (uniting, in an androgynous manner, Mr. Scogan, the sorceress

of Ecbatana, king of Egypt Sesostris, and Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias).46 In

his recent studies Revisiting The Waste Land and The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s

14
Contemporary Prose, based, in part, on the analysis of the three typewriters used in The

Waste Land drafts, Lawrence Rainey asserts that Eliot “had probably drafted the scene

with Madame Sosostris by early February 1921 and had certainly completed the

typescript of parts I and II somewhere in mid-May, while Huxley, who was living in

Italy, did not even begin to write his novel until the beginning of June.”47 Nevertheless,

Rainey tells the entire story of Mr. Scogan disguised as a gipsy fortune-teller named

Sesostris, which since 1954 Smith’s essay in American Literature 25 (1954): 490-492,

mislead generations of scholars.48 Although Rainey maintains that Eliot’s letter of 1952 to

Smith was a kind of mystification, Rainey does not put forward his own hypothesis why

Madame Sosostris is introduced as an androgynous counterpart of Tiresias. True, the

statue of Sesostris III is in The British Museum, and the Paraoh was mentioned by

Herodotus (ii. 102-II), Diodorus Siculus (1. 53-59), and Strabo (xv, 687), yet the cause of

a striking resemblance between the two fortune-tellers is not clear. One might even

assume that Huxley, as he did before, borrowed the character from Eliot, not the other

way round.49 Huxley even intensified the elements of carnival and Menippean satire.

Madame Sosostris’s mentioning Mrs. Equitone and the remark “One must be so careful

these days” brings us back to reality—but that of the “Unreal City,” which in this case is

not limited only to the Financial District of London, as Rainey presumes, thus making

present unreal and the myth real. Although drama and myth are parodied and

downplayed, the effect is, nevertheless, achieved: the themes of wandering, of fate and

death, the chronotopi of the road and of quest are uniting myth and reality, antiquity and

modernity.

15
 In the following 17 lines Eliot blurs the boundary between the past and the

present, showing the burial of the past (or the memory, as Leavis and Matthiessen

suggest) and an unreal present. Brooks believes that Dog with the capital “D”

symbolizes “Humanitarianism and the related philosophies which in their concern for

man extirpate the supernatural—dig up the corpse of the buried god and thus prevent the

rebirth of life.”50 Smith connects the dog with the Dog Star, with Stephen Dedalus’s joke

about the fox and his grandmother in Ulysses, and, finally, with Frazer’s Folk-Lore in the

Old Testament.51 Perhaps it would be less dangerous, lest one can be drowned in

sometimes contradictory details, to see the image of the dog as a symbol of cynicism and

disbelief and the meaning of the entire “Unreal City” passage as “the lack of purpose and

direction, the inability to believe really in anything and the resulting ‘heap of broken

images’ that formed the excruciating contents of the post-War state of mind.”52 In a short

passage Eliot unites the battle at Mylae with WWI (also observed by Brooks53) by the

implication “I had not thought death had undone so many” (echoing Pound’s “Hell

Cantos”) and makes Stetson a universal character. Smith presumes that Stetson is a

modern representative “of him who from cowardice made the great refusal” (Inferno, III)

and is a counterpart to the quester. The corpse he has planted in his garden is the dead

god, of whom he has knowledge, but whose life he rejects, choosing to remain a

‘trimmer.’”54 The last two lines fuse the “estranged” quotation from Webster,

transforming “the wolf . . . that’s a foe to man” into a “friend to men,” and a quotation

from Baudelaire, thus making Stetson “every man including the reader and Mr. Eliot

himself.”55 Moreover, as was mentioned by Andrew Ross, Stetson is an anagram of

“tsetse,” Eliot’s Harvard nickname, thus adding not only satirical, but self-critical

16
dimension to the poem.56 The second person ‘you’ literally involves the reader in the

dialogue, though, as Smith mentions, “Eliot’s quotations from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du

mal was an insulting one.”57 This is another perfect example when citations speak in a

literally dialogic manner. Moreover, here Eliot introduces parody as a constructive

device of plot and genre formation, not as a stylistic device, on all levels: In The Waste

Land Eliot parodies citations, epigraphs, classic meters and popular songs, myth, and

finally shifts the convention of the genre, that of a lyric poem, to create a new genre, that

of a dialogic or a dramatic long poem. Such understanding of parody was proposed by the

Russian scholar Tynianov in "Dostoyevsky and Gogol,"58 while the differentiation

between the plot and the story (narration) was first proposed by Shklovsky.59

“A Game of Chess” adds a new facet to dialogism since it introduces Eliot’s use

of Ut Pictura Poesis: the change of Philomel is literally a speaking picture, and the

nightingale physically cries. As Hugh Kenner pointed out, that cry might have derived

from John Llyly’s song, which adds to dialogism of quotations and allusions.60 Before the

woman actually speaks, we hear many voices—of myth and of the past as well as of

implied literary characters—from Cleopatra to Imogine to Bianca raped by the duke in

Middleton’s Women Beware Women and back to Shakespeare’s Ferdinand and Miranda,

which is all “Shakespeherian Rag,” as the male character states. Beladonna, as was

observed by Nanny, means both “a fair lady” and a deadly poison. As Nanny asserts,

Eliot is simultaneously hiding and revealing his personal drama and uneasy love-hate

relationship with Vivien beyond the Tarot cards, masks, and the dramatis personae.

Therefore, Nanny concludes, the client of Madame Sosostris might very well be Eliot

himself, a querrent and an alter ego of the quester.61 This statement is proved by Richard

17
Ellmann’s analysis of the first Waste Land suggesting that not only Beladonna and,

therefore, her interlocutor, might be Vivien and the poet themselves, but also the Fisher

King might bear resemblance to T. S. Eliot62. Thus a “wicked pack of cards” alongside

“impersonal poetry” does not only help Eliot to elevate himself beyond his personal

discontent, but also to reveal an archetypal tragedy of the time, which “is out of joint,” to

quote Shakespeare. In addition, there are masculine voices—those of King Lear and of

Ariel’s song from Act I of The Tempest “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” as was

observed by Smith. The woman whose desperate cry is akin to that of Philomel

symbolizes a passion of the one lost in a loveless love. Whether her interlocutor actually

speaks or not, we hear him. Perhaps he is not literally blind and deaf, but he is spiritually

dead, and they both aimlessly wait in fear and hope for the final “knock upon the door.”

We as readers doubt whether something comes out of nothing since the marriage is

loveless and sterile and the land is still bare and waste. As the scene moves on, the

upper-class characters are replaced by the low middle-class Bill, Lou, May, Albert and

Lil. Those are the little simple folk who do not even think of Shakespeare or of higher

matters; neither can they express themselves in a sophisticated manner of the man and

woman of the previous scene. Here again Menippean satire is at work. Although there is

a stark contrast between the exquisite chamber of Belladonna and a London pub, the

motif of sterility and of a waste life prevails. The land is barren; the City is unreal. It is

notable that the actual speakers in the second part are mostly women. The proprietor’s

words—or perhaps parodied ‘eternal’ call: “Hurry up Please It’s Time”—remind us of

the final “knock upon the door.” Hence Ophelia’s farewell is interwoven in the parting of

the pub’s visitors. Like Phlebas the Phoenician, Ophelia also died by water. Thus Ophelia

18
introduces the Thames-daughters and their counterparts, the Rheintöchter of “The Fire

Sermon.” The main motifs of this chapter are those of water and fire, both of death by

water and fire and, perhaps, death of water and fire, as in the second movement of “Little

Gidding.” Such an interpretation can be justified by Helen Gardner's subtle observation

that Eliot's poetry

is extraordinarily self-consistent, and there is almost nothing he has

published that does not form part of his poetic personality. One of the results of

this integrity is that his latter work interprets his earlier, as much as his earlier

work does his later, so that criticism of “The Waste Land” today is modified by

“Ash Wednesday”, and “Ash Wednesday” is easier to understand after reading the

“Quartets”. 63

Gardner proposed to interpret The Waste Land not simply as "the disillusion of a

generation," but "as an Inferno which looked towards a Purgatorio.”64

The scenery of this Inferno represents a vast and devastated bank of the river that

suddenly flows into the waters of Leman, which, in its turn, merges with the river Chebar

in Babylon. Hence the voice of Ezekiel joins the song of the daughters of the Thames.

Thus Eliot removes the border between past and present chronotope uniting history and

myth in the present—here and now. “The rattle of the bones” intensifies the comparison

of the scenery with the dessert alluding to the “son of man” of the first movement and

anticipating the wanderings in the desert of the fifth movement (and perhaps the scenery

and the chirping of the bones in “Ash Wednesday” II). The “nymphs” of Spencer’s

“Prothalamion” appear to be the girlfriends of “the loitering heirs of city directors.” The

nymphs will reappear later as the voices of the deceived lovers and will speak for

19
themselves. Likewise, the allusions to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and to Day’s

“The Parliament of Bees,” noticed by a number of scholars,65 have been defamiliarized,

placed in a contemporary London setting and thus sound modern allowing the poet to

shift in time and space and juxtapose the voices of Ezekiel, Marvell, and Day with the

quester, whose is the leading voice, the solo, so to speak, for the poet, as was stated by

Bakhtin, “makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to unmediated

power to assign meaning (as it were, ‘without quotation marks’), that is, as a pure and

direct expression of his own intention.”66

As was observed by Brooks, in Weston’s book “the title ‘Fisher King’ originates

from the use of fish as fertility or life symbol”67 associated with many of the later Grail

romances, but Eliot “reverses the legend,” as Brooks put it, or, I would say,

defamiliarizes the myth. Further, as Brooks showed, the ‘Fisher King’ also refers to

Prince Ferdinand of The Tempest and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.68 The king,

though, is impotent and unable to set his “lands in order.” Hence the triumph of Apeneck

Sweeney, an anti-quester, brought to anti-Diana Mrs. Porter by lust. Mrs. Porter, a

character of the Australian ballad sung by Australian soldiers in Gallipoli in 1915, as was

observed by I.A Bowra,69 is another mundane voice juxtaposed with the pure voices of

children from Verlain’s “Parzival.” Purity and chastity, however, are unattainable in the

‘Unreal City’ and, therefore, the voice of Philomela sings of violence and rape again.

Her desperate voice is immediately followed by a “demotic French” of another character,

Mr. Eugenides, a parody of a Phoenician sailor and a one-eyed merchant of Madame

Sosostris’s “wicked pack of card,” who introduces another trap for the quester,

homosexuality, that will by no means undo the curse and make the barren land fertile.

20
The reader then is led to the apartment of a typist, a contemporary Philomela, another

victim of a loveless love. The entire scene is described by Tiresias, a seer and an

androgen (I am not sure that “the young man carbuncular” is a quester, as Smith

presumes; he is rather another counterpart to the quester). Although there is a sharp

contrast between the description of the typist’s apartment and an exquisite chamber of the

opening of “A Game of Chess,” the essence is the same—a loveless love, almost a rape.

Hence both scenes are accompanied by a desperate voice of Philomela. It is a well-

acknowledged fact that Eliot subtly uses myth to reveal the timeless in contemporary life

and to juxtapose profane with sacred. Eliot himself emphasized the impact of Weston’s

book From Ritual to Romance and Sir Frazer’s The Golden Bough on his poem in his

“Notes on The Waste Land.” Eliot orchestrates the myth, so to speak, or even transposes

and transforms it bringing Tiresias to the apartment of a London typist to witness and

comment on the contemporary loveless love that is difficult to distinguish from rape. On

the contrary, in Pound’s Canto I, for instance, the protagonist, Odysseus, is descending to

the underworld to hear Tiresias, which is still very much in the spirit and letter of Homer.

The reader has to follow the narrator and the protagonist. Eliot defamiliarizes the myth

and brings Tiresias to the reader, thus making the Greek seer both the narrator and the

actor. We actually see and hear Tiresias as if he were on stage, but The Waste Land is

neither a play nor a medieval mystery, yet it is a human drama. Nevertheless, I would

argue, that all ‘the three voices’ from Eliot’s later essay, that is lyric, epic/narrative and

dramatic, are present in The Waste Land.70 Eliot combines historical and mythological

time, which enables the poet to juxtapose different phenomena. History acquires a

mythical character of permanently repeated denominator, and vice versa, myth becomes

21
real. Myth, therefore, becomes an instrument of searching reality. As was pointed out by

Smith, “through myth art may express a sense of the present; but it must be remembered

that the artist’s point of view is personal, not social.”71 It is necessary at this point to

clarify my usage of the term “myth.” Myth, in my view, is not limited either to “the

things that are spoken in ritual acts” (la legomena epi tois dromenois), as was understood

in Greece, or to retelling of mythological plots and images, or even to symbol and

archetype. Neither should it be limited only to anthropological studies of dying and

reviving god or to “anthropological studies of vegetation myths,” as was stated by

Spender.72 It is rather a way of poetic thinking that enables to reveal in the symbol and

the archetype an approach towards being as becoming to show such a perspective of time

and space, in which the entire picture of the world of the beginnings is evoked. To quote

Smith, “The substance of a poem forms a myth, something wholly new, generated by that

mind in the semblance of a timeless point of view of continuum, filled with images and

echoes and diverse voices”73 Eliot’s mythological imagination is a bridge joining

contemporary and ancient, individual and universal, sacred and profane, while a spiritual

quest is aimed at the restoration of wholeness of human consciousness and faith. Like

Joyce and Pound, Eliot defamiliarizes the myth “making it new.” While reviewing

Ulysses in The Dial (November 1923), Eliot himself acknowledged his indebtedness to

Joyce:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between

contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing the method which others

must pursue after him. They will not be imitators any more than the scientist who

22
 uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further

investigation.”74

Mythological consciousness, alongside dialogism, allows Eliot to shift freely in

time and space combining Tiresias’s words “I who have sat by Thebes below the wall/

And walked among the dead,” with allusions to Tennyson’s and Swinburn’s “Tiresias,”

as was observed by Smith, and to Goldsmith’s “When lovely woman stoops to folly.”

The reader is led between the two planes, like Tiresias between his two lives, while the

line “ this music crept by me upon the waters” alludes both to Prince Ferdinand in The

Tempest and to the brother of the Fisher King, who observed “A rat crept softly through

the vegetation.” Thus the poet again unites sacred and profane: “a public bar in Lower

Thames Street” and “Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold” of the church of

Magnus Martyr at the foot of London Bridge. As was observed by Smith, St. Magnus

“was especially the fishermen’s church, erected, in fact, on Fish Hill, opposite the site of

the Fishmonger’s Hall. ‘Fish,’ ‘Martyr,’ and vestmental ‘white and gold’ form a complex

link with the Saviour and the Ritual of Easter.”75 The movement also links Buddhist “Fire

Sermon” with St. Augustine, thus uniting Eastern and Western ideas in a dialogic

manner. The image of the river brings the theme of human, local time and history, as in

the first movement of “Dry Salvages,” in which the voices of the river and the sea are re-

enacted in a kind of a dialogue revealing the images of local time and eternity, if we

apply Helen Gardner’s approach quoted above. The river brings back the themes of filth,

lust reinforced by mentioning of the Dog of Isle, passionate, promiscuous but sterile

relations between Queen Elizabeth and Earl Leicester that resemble both couples from “A

Game of Chess” as well as of a typist and a clerk from “The Fire Sermon” while the song

23
of the daughters of Rhine is juxtaposed with the song of the deceived daughters of the

Thames, the nymphs from the opening of the chapter. The latter evoke the real human

drama and defamiliarize the song of the former. As a result, we simultaneously hear two

triads, so to speak, as in an ancient tragedy. The words of St. Augustine at the closing

emphasize the necessity of purification of desires and love as if anticipating “the crowned

knot of fire” from the end of “Little Gidding.” Here again a citation from the Confessions

is included in the poem in a dialogic manner, and St. Augustine himself becomes a

character of the poem thus uniting time and history. The theme of fire, though, is

quenched by water, which symbolizes oblivion and death. The sea swell disregards petty

human considerations of “the profit and loss.” As Smith put it, “The Death of Phlebas

writes the epitaph to the experience by which the quester has failed in the garden.”76

Driven by lust and greed, the Phoenician, “who was once handsome and tall,” was finally

sucked into the whirlpool. At this point the narrator shifts from the third person to the

second addressing the reader “on the level of familiar experience,” as Spender put it,

reminding “Gentile or Jew”—everyman, in fact, of a tragic outcome of neglecting higher

principles of life.

After death by fire and death by water, the quester returns to the desert and to the

red rock, where there is still no water. The round is almost completed, and the wanderer

returns to the wilderness, but the spiritual thirst has not been quenched, the land is still

bare and waste, and even the thunder is sterile. After all, it took Moses forty years to take

his people from captivity to the blessed land, and he spent most of his life in the desert

without seeing the Promised Land. Following the same route, like Pound in his Cantos,

Eliot spent his lifetime searching the way out of the dead-end of spiritual death-in-life

24
“lost in living” (Choruses from “The Rock”) of human sterile activities filled with “profit

and loss.” It would take the poet twenty more years of intensive spiritual quest, and in the

middle of another world war his lyrical hero would be still wandering in wilderness,

where

There are flood and drouth

Over the eyes in the mouth,

Dead water and dead sand

Contending for the upper hand.

(Little Gidding II).

The son of man returns to the beginning of his wandering—under the red rock to

see “fear in the handful of dust.” The movement begins, as was stated by almost

everybody who wrote about The Waste Land, with the agony of birth and rebirth of

Crucifixition narrated, or rather performed, like a chorus in an ancient or a medieval

tragedy or in Bach’s Passions, most probably by the disciples of Jesus Christ – hence the

first person plural “we”:

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With little patience.

Quoting the same lines, Spender correctly presumes that the entire movement

“consists of a number of visions in the desert of the world without God, dominated by the

absence of Christ, the God, who has not risen and whom the disciples cannot see.”77

However, Spender is concerned mainly with the theme, visual images, and “the voice that

25
says “I” or the I of the lyrist,” as he puts quoting Nietzsche,78 disregarding other voices.

In my view, even the change of rhythm in the following passages suggests different

thirsty voices. While Brooks connects the passage beginning with “Who is the third who

walks always beside you?” with the Journey to Emmaus,79 Smith also suggests “a parallel

to a Buddhist legend in H.C. Warren’s Buddhism in Translation.”80 If so, this is another

case of polyphony and dialogism involving allusions. Based on Eliot’s notes, both

Matthiesen and Smith connect “the Murmur of maternal lamentation” with the ‘decay of

Eastern Europe.’”81

Unknowingly, Matthiesen was even more right than he meant to say, so to speak,

when he presumed that “the ‘shouting and the crying’ re-echo not only from the mob that

thronged Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, but also, as is made clearer in ensuing

lines, from the ‘hordes swarming over endless plains’ in revolt in contemporary

Russia.”82 Alluding to such a well-known historic event as the Bolshevik revolution of

October 1917, Eliot has made unintentional but, nevertheless, archetypal allusions to the

poems of three prominent Russian symbolist poets—Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949),

who wrote “Tread on their Eden, Atilla!”, Valerii Briusov (1873-1926), who took the

above line from the former as the epigraph to his poem “The Coming Huns” (1905), and

Alexander Blok (1880-1921), the author of “Scythians” and “The Twelve” (1918). In

“The Coming Huns” Briusov anticipates and greets the coming of barbarians although

they will destroy both the civilization and him:

Where are you Huns who are coming,

Who cloud the wide world with your spears?

26
 I hear your pig iron tramping

On the still-undiscovered Pamirs.

Like a drunken horde from dark field-camps

Fall on us in a clamorous flood. . .

To revive our too-soon-grown-old bodies

With a fresh surge of burning blood.

.............................................

Perhaps all that is our own will perish

And leave no trace that men’s eyes can see. . .

Still I welcome with a hymn of greeting

All of you who will destroy me.83

(Fall 1904; 30 July—10 August 1905.)

The poem was finalized in the time of the first Russian revolution of 1905. Thus

the fall of civilization, not only the decline of the West, was anticipated by the Russian

poets much earlier than by Spengler. Unintentional as it is, Eliot’s dialogue with his

Russian contemporaries was nevertheless in the context of the epoch, although Eliot has

never hailed the destruction of civilization trying to save the fragments of it, as in the

final verses of The Waste Land. Moreover, by showing “falling towers” and making the

cities that once were centers of world civilization as unreal as London, Eliot shows a

decay and fall of the archetypal city and of the entire civilization. Hence Eleanor Cook,

27
alluding to Hugh Kenner, maintains that this archetypal city is Rome stating that all the

“great cities in Part V. . . were also capitals of great though very different empires:

‘Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, / Vienna, London.’. . . Eliot preserves the chronological

order of the flourishing of each empire.”84 Cook suggests that Dante’s map of the

inhabited world is a key map to Eliot’s poem and the maps of Europe and the

Mediterranean should be added to the map of London.85 We, therefore, come to an

inevitable conclusion that in The Waste Land the image of space evokes time and history.

Almost everyone who wrote about The Waste Land correctly connected the scene

in the perilous chapel with Weston’s book, the Grail Legend, the rite of initiation, and the

decent to the underworld, but Smith also emphasized that “the imagery of the lines

(II.379-84) was partly inspired, according to Eliot, by a painting from the school of

Hieronymus Bosch,”86 which again, as in “The Game of Chess,” involves Ut Pictura

Poesis and visual dialogism and makes the description of decay “a speaking picture,”

whereas “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” include, in addition

to Eccles. 2:6, and Jer. 2:13, mentioned by Smith, Jer. 2:7, 20:2, 32: 3, and most

importantly, Jer. 38:6, which narrates that Jeremiah was cast into the dungeon, “where

there was now water, but mire. So Jeremiah sank in the mire.” In the notes, Smith also

adds that “in Wilde’s Salome the prophet speaks from the cistern.”87 Evidently, the

voices of prophets, especially Jeremiah’s, to whom Eliot alludes from part I through V,

almost quoting him in “The Burial of the Dead,” intensify the unveiling of human drama.

Other voices and sounds include the singing of the grass, the swinging of the door, the

gust of the wind, the clicking of the dry bones, and the crowing of the cock

(enigmatically in Portuguese, as was observed by Smith). Smith and Brooks both state

28
that “the cock in the folk-lore of many people is regarded as the bird whose voice chases

away the powers of evil,”88 and although Smith suggests that the cock’s crowing alludes

to Hamlet while Brooks supposes that “the cock has connection with The Tempest

symbols”89 and quotes the lines from the first song, which Ariel sings to Ferdinand, and I

suggested above the connection between the roosters in The Canterbury Tales and in The

Waste Land, the crowing is another voice included in the “speaking picture,” thus

connecting myth, literature, and contemporaneity. Finally, the voice of the thunder,

which again connects the Buddhist wisdom of the Upanishad with the Western tradition

as in “The Fire Sermon,” is actually a dialogue of civilizations, a spiritual quest of the

entire humanity, not only of one part of it. As elsewhere in Eliot’s work, here allusions

are at work. The three calls “Da Da Da,” meaning “give, sympathize, control,” receive

three negative answers and include new allusions, associations, and quotations in the

polyphonic poem. A dialogue of the final citations brilliantly analyzed by Smith (97-98)

and by Brooks (30-32) after the return of the quester, the heir of the devastated kingdom

and the waste land to the shore (I am reluctant, though, to associate him or the lyrical

hero only with Tiresias, as Smith does), is again a subtle use of parody as a constructive

device of plot and genre formation. Eliot defamiliariazes the myth and weaves together

Old Testament (Isaiah, 38:1), eastern and western spiritual aspirations and beliefs, which

symbolize destruction and a call for renewal, hope and despair (the swallow from the

myth of Philomel is joined by Pervigilium Veneris simultaneously alluding to Tennison’s

The Princess, as was noticed by Smith (314). An “orgy of quotations” and a magnificent

dialogue involving Isaiah, Dante, Marlow, Nerval and their characters, including the

prince of Aquitaine beholding a broken tower, two broken kings, Hezekiah and Fisher

29
King, two prisoners, Ugolino and the one from the folk song “Take the key and lock him

down”—all dissolve in the final wisdom of the Upanishads: this world is beyond our

understanding. Brooks stated that “the basic method used in The Waste Land may be

described as the application of the principle of complexity”90 and observed the double

play of irony and parallelisms (what I call defamiliarization and parody). I would say,

though, that the basic principle of the poem is dialogism and would be reluctant to

interpret the meaning of the poem either in Morton’s or even Edmund Wilson’s way, in

other words, to see only despair and destruction as the theme of the poem. Neither would

I accept the interpretation of Smith, who wrote that “the very fact of recognition, the

deliberate acknowledgement of humility, points toward ultimate triumph, if not for

society, nevertheless for himself. He can expect, if not the joy of Ferdinand, then at any

rate the liberation of Prospero.”91 I would rather agree with Brooks that the poem is

ambiguous (another characteristic feature of modernism), and if it were clearer, it “would

be thinner, and less honest.”92 It is rather Eliot’s Inferno pointing to Purgatorio, if we

apply Gardner’s method quoted in the beginning.

To me Eliot is not only the poet of archetypes but he is also an archetypal poet, as

was in time, when prophets were poets and poets were prophets. As an archetypal poet,

Eliot spent his lifetime in search of the way out of a spiritual dead-end. From the

‘Inferno’ of “Prufrock,” “The Waste Land” and “Hollow Men” to the ‘Purgatorio’ of

“Ash Wednesday”, “Choruses from “The Rock,” Murder in the Cathedral and Four

Quartets, he leads his reader to the Promised Land. Perhaps like Moses himself, Eliot

died without seeing it, without creating his Paradise Regained. However, he did

30
resurrect the Word and did “purify the dialect of the tribe.” He never flattered his readers;

nor did he console them:

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

(Little Gidding V).

In essence, Eliot’s entire work is a dialogue with humanity. The use of dialogism

allows Eliot to develop the plot, to use implied narrators to reveal themes and ideas, to

shift in time and space, creating the ‘chronotopi’ of love, of the road, of quest and

combining the epic past with the lyric present, to create the music of the piece, to

‘defamiliarize’ reality and myth, making myth real and the reality unreal, and as a result,

to reveal the human drama as in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

31
Notes

32
1
Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsly’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson. (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Quoattions here and below from Mikhail Bakhtin, Literary Criticism

(Moskva: Hudoshestvennaia Literatura, 1986), 51 and 126 (Bakhtin's emphasis; the translation is mine).
2
Ibid., 76.
3
Ibid., 76 and 127 (translation is my own).
4
Mikhail Bakhtin, Literary Criticism (Moskva: Hudoshestvennaia Literatura, 1986), 362.
5
See Max Nanny, “The Waste Land: A Menippean Satire?” English Studies 66, no. 6 (1985):

526-27, 534-35.

6
Calvin Bedient, He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its

Protagonists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 8 (Bedient’s emphasis).

7
Donald Wessling, Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell

University Press, 2003); Omri Ronen, “Lexical Repetition, Subtext and Meaning in Osip Mandelstam’s

Poetics” [Leksicheskii povtor, podtekst i smysl v poetike Osipa Mandestama], Slavics Poetics, essays

in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. Roman Jakobson, C. H. van Schooneveld, and Dean S. Worth (The

Hague-Paris, 1973), 367-89; Iuri Lotman, On Poetry and Poets [O poetah i poezii] (St. Petersburg:

Iskusstvo [Art], 1996), 177. Iu Tynianov, Poetics. History of Literature. Film [Poeziia. Istoriia

literatury. Kino] (Мoscow: Science [Nauka], 1977), 51.

8
Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot, (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), 97.
9
Northrop Frye, T. S. Eliot: An Introduction (1963. Reprint, Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1981), 48.

10
Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. by

Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92.
11
Anne Ridler, “A Questions of Speech.” T. S. Eliot. A Study of his Writings by Several
Hands, ed. Balachandra Rajan (London: Dobson, 1947. Reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1964),

108.
12
Ibid., 108-109.
13
Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1995), 22.

14
A term proposed by Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Device” (1916). He considered “the device

of defamiliarization” or estrangement as one of the main devices in literature aimed at a ‘shift’ of

meaning and perception in order to deautomotize them. According to Shklovsky, D. worked on all

levels: sound, meter, form, syntax, convention, and genre. The final purpose of D. is to deautomotize

aesthetic perception, as was expressed in one his latest books, Tyetiva [A Bow-String], (Moscow:

Sovetskiy Pisatel’ [Soviet writer] 1970). Shklovsky’s idea was further developed by Brecht

(“alienation”) and by the structuralists of the Prague school (“deautomatization”).

15
Bakhtin, Speech Genres 92 (Bakhtin’s emphasis).
16
Ibid.
17
Northrop Frye, T. S. Eliot: An Introduction (1963; reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago,

1981), 107.
18
See Spender, 161.
19
Frye, 108.
20
Ibid., 107.
21
Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land: An Analysis.” T. S. Eliot. A Study of his Writings by

Several Hands, ed. Balachandra Rajan (London: Dobson, 1947. Reprint, New York: Haskell House,

1964), 7.
22
Ruth Nevo, “The Waste Land: The Ur-Text of Deconstruction,” New Literary History 13, no.

3 (1982): 453-61.
 23
Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism. The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 7-

43.
24
Jewel Spears Brooker. Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

25
Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley. Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the

Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).

26
See Russel Elliot Murphy. “’It is impossible to say just what I mean’: The Waste Land as

Transcendental Meaning,” T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting: Centenary Essays, ed. Shyamal Bagchee

(London: Macmillan, 1990), 51-67.

27
See Armin Paul Frank. “The Waste Land: a Drama of Images.” T. S. Eliot: A Voice

Descanting: Centenary Essays, ed. Shyamal Bagchee (London: Macmillan, 1990), 28-50.
28
I mean here Spender, 132-149, first published as a chapter in his The Destructive Element

(Boston and London: Houghton Mifflin/Jonathan Cape, 1936), and in Williamson’s A Reader’s Guide

to T. S. Eliot (New York: Noonday Press/FSG, 1966).

29
Williamson, 124.
30
Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (1956; reprint,

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 72.

31
Frye, 105-107.
32
Richard Ellmann, “The First Waste Land.” T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Modern Critical

Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 55-66; Joseph Militello, “T. S. Eliot’s

Fire Sermon” as a Modernist Work in Progress. ” Yeats Eliot Review 16, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 32-39.
33
Russel Elliot Murphy, “‘It Is Impossible to Say Just What I Mean’: The Waste Land as

Transcendental Meaning.” T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting: Centenary Essays, ed. Shyamal Bagchee

(London: Macmillan, 1990), 56.

34
Bachtin, Nicholas. “English Poetry in Greek: Notes on a Comparative Study of Poetic Idioms.”

Poetics Today 6, no. 3 (1985): 336.

35
Dansby Evans. “Chaucer and Eliot: The Poetics of Pilgrimage.” Medieval Perspectives 9 (1994): 41-

47; Wolfgang Rudat, “T. S. Eliot's Allusive Technique: Chaucer, Virgil, Pope.” Renascence 35, no. 3 (1983):

167-82.
36
Frank Perez, “Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford: A Prototype for Prufrock?” Yeats Eliot Review 17,

no. 2 (Spring 2001): 4.

37
Ibid., 5.
38
Evans, 42.
39
Ibid., 42-43.
40
Williamson, 124.
41
Although Bakhtin showed the development of the forms of chronotopos only in the novel, time-space

or chronotopos is perhaps even more important in poetry, even in lyric poetry, than in prose since poetry is

much more condensed than prose: poetry can be as well defined as time-space condensed in images. Jakobson

proved that time is even more important in poetry than in prose long ago. In Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal

Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) he wrote: “I am convinced that the most effective

experience of verbal time occurs in verse, and this holds just as true for oral, folkloric verse as it does for

written, literary verse. Verse, whether rigorously metrical or free, simultaneously carries within it both

linguistic varieties of time: the time of the speech event and that of the narrated event. Verse pertains to our

immediate experience of speech activity, both motor and auditory. At the same time, we experience the

structure of the verse in close connection with the semantics of the text —and in this way the verse becomes an

integral part of the developing plot. It is difficult even to imagine a sensation of the temporal flow that would

be simpler and at the same time more complex, more concrete and yet more abstract" (21-22, emphasis added).
42
Williamson, 134.
43
Patrick Query, “They Called Me the Hyacinth Girl.” T. S. Eliot and the Revision of

Masculinity.” Yeats Eliot Review 18, no. 3 (February 2002): 17.

44
Ibid.
45
Ibid., 13.
46
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 76.
47
Lawrence Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2005), 80.

48
Ibid.
49
According to Bernard Bergonzi, who compiled and edited 1969 Harper's Great Short Works of A.

Huxley, the two were in touch long before that, and Huxley 'borrowed' from “The Preludes,” when Denis

thinks of the lines “My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched/ Over a bubbling cauldron” (Cf.: “His

soul was stretched tight across the skies /That fade behind a city block”), and Denis Stone in general resembles

Prufrock. Later Bergonzi writes: “Soon after Crome Yellow appeared, Eliot put himself in Huxley's debt:

‘Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante’ of The Waste Land is an adaptation of ‘Sesostris, the Sorceress of

Ecbatana’” (“Aldous Huxley: ‘a Novelist of Talent and an Essayist of Genius.” Great Short Works of Aldous

Huxley [New York: Harper & Row, 1969], viii).

50
Brooks, “Analysis,” 14.
51
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 79.
52
F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. 1935, third edition, with a chapter on T. S.

Eliot's later work by C. L. Barber (New York: Oxford University Press 1958), 21.
53
Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land: Analysis.” T. S. Eliot. A Study of his Writings by Several Hands,

ed. Balachandra Rajan (London: Dobson, 1947; reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1964), 13.
54
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 78.
55
Brooks, “Analysis,” 14.
 56
Andrew Ross, “The Waste Land and the Fantasy of Interpretation,” Representations 8 (1984):

142.
57
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 79.
58
See Dostoyevsky and Gogol: Texts and Criticism, ed. P. Meyer and S. Rudy (Ann Arbor: MI

Slavic Publications, 1979).

59
See “The Connection between Devices of Syuzhet Construction and General Stylistic

Devices” Russian Formalism, ed. Stephen Bann and E. Bowlt (Edinburgh, 1973).
60
Hugh Kenner, “The Death of Europe.” T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Modern Critical

Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 10-11.

61
See Max Nanny “‘Cards Are Queer’: A New Reading of the Tarot in The Waste Land,”

English Studies 62, no. 4 (1981): 340-41.

62
Richard Ellmann. “The First Waste Land.” T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Modern Critical

Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 55-66, esp. 61-63.
63
Helen Gardner, "Four Quartets: A Commentary." T. S. Eliot. A Study of his Writings by

Several Hands. Ed. Balachandra Rajan (London: Dobson, 1947. Reprint, New York: Haskell House,

1964), 59.
64
Ibid., 60.
65
See, for instance, Brooks, “Analysis,” 20, and Smith, Poetry and Plays, 84.
66
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 285.
67
Brooks, “Analysis,” 19.
68
Ibid., 20.
69
I. A. Bowra, The Creative Experiment, 282, quoted by Smith, 86.
70
T. S. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets ( New York: Farrar, Straus,

and Cudahy, 1957), 89.

71
Grover Smith, “The Structure and Mythical Method of The Waste Land.” T. S. Eliot's The

Waste Land.Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 110.
72
Spender, T. S. Eliot, 99-100.
73
Smith, Mythical Method, 102.
74
T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. The Centenary Edition, ed. Frank Kermode (New York:

Harcourt Brace/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 177.

75
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 89.
76
Ibid., 91.
77
Spender, 116.
78
Ibid., 117.
79
Brooks, “Analysis,” 26.
80
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 94.
81
Ibid., 26.
82
Matthiesen, 38
83
From Modern Russian Poetry. An Anthology with Verse Translations, ed. Markov Vladimir

and Merill Sparks (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966; reprint, Indianopolis-Kansas City-New York:

Bobbs-Merill, 1971).
84
Eleanor Cook, “T. S. Eliot and the Carthagenian Peace.” T. S. Eliot's The

Waste Land. Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 83.
85
Ibid., 81-2.
86
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 95.
87
Ibid., 314.
88
Brooks, “Analysis,” 28
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid., 32
91
Smith, Poetry and Plays, 98.
92
Brooks, “Analysis,” 34.