Abstract
Even those critics suspicious of intermedia studies have come to acknowledge that the innovative aspects of T. S. Eliot’s poetry cannot be divorced from the changes that were occurring simultaneously in the visual arts. Recognition of that relationship has been slow to emerge, but from the 1960s onwards the broken images of his verse, its crabbed allusiveness, the disorienting contiguity of incidents disparate in time and space and connected only by mental association have come to be linked with experiments with collage in Cubist painting, with the juxtaposition of the incongruous in Surrealism, and with the provocative unconventionality of the Dadaists. The irony in his verse, as one critic defined it, ‘is due to a montage-principle of placing together statements having an entirely different poetic tone’, while a more recent study of Eliot is subtitled from skepticism to a surrealist poetic, the author seeing the sudden contrasts and unexpected transitions in his verse as paralleling the shock tactics of the Breton school.1 In all such forms of art, verisimilitude had been deserted in favour of cerebral affinities, objects no longer being considered as authentic in themselves but as elements interacting with other components, forming part of larger patterns or stimulating the connotative faculties of the viewer.
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Notes and References
Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in art and literature (New York, 1960), p. 284;
William Skaff, The Philosophy of T. S. Eliot: from skepticism to surrealist poetic, 1909–1927 (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 131f. Other early explorers of such intermedia connections include
Jacob Korg, ‘Modern Art Techniques in The Waste Land’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18 (1960), p. 456,
Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: the parallel between literature and the visual arts (Princeton, 1970), and
John Dixon Hunt, ‘Broken Images: T. S. Eliot and Modern Painting’, in A. D. Moody (ed.), ‘The Waste Land’ in Different Voices (London, 1974), pp. 163–84. Hunt noted in that essay how few critics had, until that time, explored or even commented on the relationship of Eliot to the visual arts.
Werner Haftmann’s classic study Painting in the Twentieth Century: an analysis of the artists and their work, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1965), 2:8–19, offers a valuable summary of the effects of modern physics and psychology upon painting. For certain aspects of science’s impact on literature in this period, see N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: scientific field models and literary strategies in the twentieth century (Ithaca, 1984), and her Chaos Bound: orderly disorder and contemporary literature and science (Ithaca, 1990).
There is an excellent account of the relationship of Eliot’s verse to the work of Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and James Joyce in Eric Svarny, The Men of 1914: T. S. Eliot and early modernism (Milton Keynes, 1988), a study which confirms how little Eliot was concerned with the visual aspects of Vorticism. The book focuses instead upon the shared intellectual élitism of this group, and its assimilation of Symbolist poetics. On élitism in both art and literature at this time, see Charles Harrison’s fine study, English Art and Modernism, 1900–1939 (New Haven, 1994), especially pp. 56f.
Allen Tate (ed.), T. S. Eliot: the Man and his Work: a critical evaluation by twenty-six distinguished writers (New York, 1966), pp. 37–8.
Although Eliot was acquainted with Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the friendship was never very close, as is recorded in Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford, 1977), pp. 77f.
T. S. Eliot, Letters, ed. Valerie Eliot (London, 1988), 1:363.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Thoughts After Lambeth’, in Selected Essays (London, 1949), p. 358.
George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot (New York, 1953);
A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit: studies in modern English and American poets (London, 1967), p. 27;
Eloise Knapp Hay, T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 48. Cf. also
D. W. Harding, ‘What the Thunder Said’, in A. D. Moody (ed.), The Waste Land in Different Voices (London, 1974), pp. 15f., who sees the poem as essentially secular in orientation, employing the Crucifixion solely in terms of Frazer’s fertility cycle.
Calvin Bedient, He Do the Police in Different Voices: ‘The Waste Land’ and its protagonist (Chicago, 1986).
E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (London, 1936), pp. 86–96;
Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return (New York, 1934), p. 124. For an account of the critical hostility aroused by the poem, see Grover Smith, The Waste Land (London, 1983), pp. 133f., which also acknowledges the widespread impact it had upon contemporary readers, stimulated by its vitality and tragic intensity.
I am of course deeply indebted here to Linda D. Henderson’s study The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, 1983), which recounts the emergence of hyperspace theory, together with details concerning the use made of it by painters. Her examination of the theory’s effect upon literature (which was never an aim of her book) is restricted, as in most later critical accounts, to the more obvious instances of indebtedness such as the science fiction stories by H. G. Wells and others, or the parody of the theory in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’.
Tom Gibbons, ‘Cubism and the Fourth Dimension’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 44 (1981), 130, adds little to her research.
Quoted in René Huyghe, La Naissance du Cubisme (Paris, 1935), p. 80.
Apollinaire’s lecture was published the following year as ‘Le Peinture Nouvelle’ in Les Soirées de Paris, April 1912, p. 90. The quotation from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme (Paris, 1912), p. 17, is from the translation in
Robert L. Herbert (ed.), Modem Artists on Art (Englewood Cliffs, 1964), p. 8.
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1929), pp. xv–xvi, delivered as the Gifford lectures in 1927 (emphasis added).
Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston, 1957, originally 1927), p. 455.
John A. Lester Jr, Journey Through Despair 1880–1914: transformations in British literary culture (Princeton, 1968), p. 21.
See, for example, Jewel S. Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading ‘The Waste Land’: modernism and the limits of interpretation (Amherst, 1990), especially pp. 20–33.
L. Revel, ‘L’Esprit et l’éspace: La Quatrième Dimension in Le Théosophe, March, 1911. In exploring this connection, we may recall that one of the first published responses to The Waste Land, F. L. Lucas’s antagonistic review in the New Statesman, dismissed it as ‘a theosophical tract’.
W. F. Tyler, The Dimensional Idea as an Aid to Religion (New York, 1910), especially pp. 32, 44.
Sanford Schwartz, in his excellent study The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and early twentieth-century thought (Princeton, 1985), examining the relationship between Modernist literature and such nineteenth-century thinkers as Nietzsche and William James, employs the term ‘conceptual abstraction’ to describe those mental concepts that censor or filter out sense impressions, and obscure the more valid ‘stream of consciousness’. His theme should be distinguished from the more general usage of the term (as employed here), referring to certain ‘abstract’ truths sensed as existing beyond the tactile world. His book will be discussed more closely in a later chapter.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and truth: selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1979), p. 83.
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: a contribution to the psychology of style, trans. Michael Bullock (New York, 1980), especially pp. 21, 28, 44. Although Eliot was not especially interested in the visual arts, he became aware of Worringer’s work through his admiration of Hulme, the latter incorporating Worringer’s theories into his own work and thereby encouraging the Imagists’ pursuit of the inorganic in verse, a cultivation of ‘hardness’ or objectivity in imagery. In connection with the religious undercurrent in Modernism, one may note how Hulme, although not a Christian, resuscitated the theme of Original Sin in his philosophy, arguing that the Renaissance humanist concept of man’s perfectibility, so influential throughout Western culture, was misleadingly shallow. He urged contemporary art and literature to come to terms with mankind’s ‘radical imperfections’ and to return to the concept behind Original Sin. See his Speculations: essays on humanism and the philosophy of art, ed. Herbert Read (London, I960, orig. 1924), p. 34.
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael Sadleir et al (New York, 1947), p. 29, the earlier quotation from his essay, ‘Über die Formfrage as translated by Kenneth Lindsay. For a close study of Kandinsky’s debt to Theosophy and of the mystical-religious elements in his aesthetic philosophy, see
Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: a study in the spiritualism of Kandinsky and the genesis of abstract painting (Abo, 1970).
Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: the development of an abstract style (Oxford, 1980), p. 111.
Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York, 1975), pp. 173f. The first Mondrian quotation is from
Robert P. Welsh and J. M. Joosten, Two Mondrian Sketchbooks, 1912–14 (Amsterdam, 1969), p. 33, the second from ‘No Axiom but the Plastic’, De Stijl, 6 (1924), 6–7.
Cf. Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (London, 1986), especially pp. 4–16. Rose correctly notes that, after the war, the Society lost much of its scientific prestige as it pandered to the widespread desire among the bereaved to establish contact with their lost ones. But in the earlier decades of the century it was essentially a movement of intellectuals.
Sheldon Cheney, Expressionism in Art (New York, 1934), pp. 313f.
The first extract is from Yeats’ Autobiography (New York, 1958), p. 77, the second from the autobiographical manuscript published in 1972, and the third quotation from his Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London, 1972). Yeats wrote to Ernest Boyd in 1915: ‘My interest in mystic symbolism did not come from Arthur Symons or any other contemporary writer. I have been a student of the medieval mystics since 1887. Of the French symbolists I have never had detailed or accurate knowledge.’ Ezra Pound’s interest in the occult is discussed in Alan Robinson, Poetry, Painting, and Ideas, 1885–1914 (London, 1985), especially pp. 150–81.
Ezra Pound quoted this remark with approval in ‘The New Sculpture’, Egoist, 16 February 1914, attributing it to an anonymous speaker at a meeting of the Quest Society. For his belief in a ‘Theos’ and for a more detailed account of such esoteric interests, see Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: poetry and the occult (Ithaca, 1995), pp. 71f.
T. S. Eliot, doctoral thesis, (written 1911–14), Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London, 1964), pp. 147–8. On his vein of scepticism allowing for such adaptation of viewpoint in his response to other rites and religions, see
C. M. Kearns, ‘Religion, Literature, and society in the work of T. S. Eliot’, in A. David Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge, 1994).
Robert Klein, Form and Meaning: writings on the Renaissance and modern art (Princeton, 1981), pp. 184f.;
J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: six twentieth-century writers (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 9.
The first extract is quoted in Athena T. Spear, Brancusi’s Birds (New York, 1969), p. 21, and the second in Paul Morand’s preface to the catalogue he prepared for the artist’s first one-man exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, New York, December, 1926.
Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality (London, 1987), discusses this aspect of Eliot and Pound, attributing its origin primarily to Berg-son’s claim for the fugitive quality of the individual self.
The principle was explored in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: a theory of poetry (New York, 1973), his A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975) and his Agon: towards a theory of revisionism (New York, 1982). In these he counters what he terms the nihilism of deconstructionism by an assertion of the active force of poet or writer, applying in the interpretive reading a conscious ‘misprision’ of Freud’s Oedipal theory, with the powerful author-predecessor viewed as a father figure whom the later author must resist and overpower.
Mary Hutchinson’s comment, recorded in Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diaries of Virginia Woolf (New York, 1978) 2:178.
Eugène Jolas, in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929).
T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, The Dial, 75 (1923), 480. See also the discussion of this aspect in
David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: metaphor, metonymy, and the typology of modern literature (Ithaca, 1977), pp. 138f.
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: essays in the sociology of literary forms (London, 1988), pp. 220f. Morettt’s argument leads him to the conclusion that the process fails in this poem, producing myth rather than poetry: ‘The Waste Land is a cultural milestone precisely because it is no longer literature’ (p. 236).
The passage can be found most conveniently in the abridged one-volume edition of James Gordon Frazer’s, The Golden Bough (London, 1960), pp. 418–19. The original work appeared in twelve volumes, issued between 1890 and 1915.
T. S. Eliot, in The Dial, 75 (December 1923), 597.
His reservations concerning Frazet’s theory appear in Criterion, 5 (June, 1927), 283. Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford, 1922) was among the first to recognise the value of using Jung’s theory as a critical tool for exegesis, and offered a brief analysis of The Waste Land in those terms. But she made no suggestion that in composing the poem Eliot himself had been employing Jung’s perceptions.
Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity: a theme in modern literature (New York, 1977), p. 98.
C. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and C. F. Baynes (New York, 1934), p. 215. Although this passage was published in 1933, after the appearance of The Waste Land, its principles were of course implicit in Jung’s earlier work.
D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died (New York, 1960, orig. 1922), pp. 188, 124. The quoted passages are not contiguous in the story, but their juxtaposition here is in full accord with the story’s theme and message.
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (London, 1933), pp. 9–10.
Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, op. cit., especially pp. 121f. There is a helpful discussion of this point in William Skaff, The Philosophy of T. S. Eliot: from skepticism to a surrealist poetic, 1909–1927 (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 115–16.
Quoted in Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1965) 1:179–80. The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street was in fact painted in 1914, before the foundation of the scuola metafisica, but the principles of that school were clearly based on the kind of work De Chirico was producing around that time.
Quoted in Hyatt Waggoner, American Poets (Boston, 1968), p. 508.
Cf. Balachandra Rajan, The Overwhelming Question: a study of the poetry of T. S. Eliot (Toronto, 1976), p. 12, which recognises this phrase as a call for commitment.
A. Walton Litz (ed.), Eliot in His Time: essays on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of ‘The Waste Land’ (Princeton, 1973), p. 7.
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Roston, M. (2000). T. S. Eliot and the Secularists. In: Modernist Patterns. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389403_3
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