Ryan Guan 2019 Mitra Scholar

2018-19 Mitra FAMILY GRANT Recipient “The Rattle of the Bones:” Reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as a Response to World War I Ryan Guan

“The Rattle of the Bones”: Reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Response to World War I

Ryan Guan 2019 Mitra Family Scholar Mentors: Dr. Ruth Meyer, Mrs. Meredith Cranston April 12, 2019

Guan 2 The dominant mode of poetry in 1910s England, called Georgian poetry after a series of verse anthologies published between 1912 and 1922, was initially seen as a progressive and significant poetic style. 1 The Georgian style embraced early 19th century Romanticism as a model, often featuring subjects like pastoral scenes and landscapes far removed from the alleys and businesses of the modern city, in a generally soothing and sentimental tone. 2 In the 1912 anthology, for example, poets wrote of “low emerald hills” and “ancient forests carpeted with flowers” and described “the light of laughter” and “jest and glitter” at teatime in a dining room. 3 The Georgians’ tendency toward meter, rhyme, and coherent and traditional narratives built upon a dedication to traditionalism among English poets in the 1900s. 4 This style rejected and rejected the more avant-garde poetic movements, the evocative, dreamlike essence of the Symbolists, and the attempts of the Impressionists to capture fleeting perceptions and experiences, that had arisen at the 19th century’s end and that continued, with less prominence, in 1910s movements like Imagism. 5 Shortly after the publication of the first volume of Georgian Poetry, the first declarations of war marked the start of World War I. In the first week of August 1914, Germany invaded Belgium, whose neutrality Britain was bound to defend due to the 1839 Treaty of London. 6 As a 1

David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1976), 203-06.

2

Perkins, 215-16, 226.

3

Harold Monro, “Lake Leman”, in Edward Howard Marsh, ed., Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 (New York: Putnam, 1914), accessed March 4, 2019, lines 2 and 24; Rupert Brooke, “Dining-Room Tea”, in Marsh, ed., Georgian Poetry 1911-1912, lines 8 and 12.

4

Perkins, A History, 61.

5

Perkins, 61-62.

6

“World War I,” in Europe since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction, ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter (Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006), 5.

Guan 3 result, Germany and Britain declared war against each other, and both powers quickly mobilized troops across Europe and elsewhere. 7 The American-born poet Thomas Stearns Eliot witnessed this deployment directly. Eliot had been living in Marsburg, Germany, in the course of pursuing a Ph.D., and following the outbreak of war he decided to leave on August 17, encountering people “on the lookout for bombs” and reservists on his train from Marsburg to Frankfurt. 8 After five days of travel, he arrived in London, where he began to study at Merton College, Oxford, and where he would remain for much of the rest of his life. 9 The war was initially met with confidence and patriotism from civilians on all sides, who believed that it would be short and easily won. 10 Likewise, the war did not change much in English poets’ technique in its first two years, besides promoting the publication of patriotic poems in traditional modes. 11 But by 1917, as the United States joined the war grinding into its fourth year and as peace efforts garnered more widespread support, the experiences of wartime had expanded the content and mood of much popular poetry. 12 Poets who served in the army, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, wrote of harsher subjects and feelings, “haggard and hopeless” troops among corpses or on the battlefield, that went unaddressed in the more placid scenes of the Georgians. 13 In this way, the war disrupted the initial poetic currents of the 7

“World War I.”

8

Thomas Stearns Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, rev. ed., vol. 1, The Letters of T. S. Eliot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 55-57.

9

Peter Howarth, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 62-63.

10

“World War I.”

11

Perkins, A History, 271-75.

12

“World War I”; Perkins, 271-75.

13

“Prelude: The Troops,” in Counter-Attack, and Other Poems, by Siegfried Sassoon (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1918), line 5.

Guan 4 1910s by accustoming a broader audience to the agitation, dissatisfaction, and horror of battlefield scenes in popular poetry. Importantly, this style of war poetry practiced by many veterans mainly exploited known poetic forms and techniques despite its less traditional content. 14 Meanwhile, Eliot, who had struck up friendships with other British poets embracing a modern style also different from that of the Georgians, published the collection Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917, including poems that he had begun to write before the war. The war made only fleeting appearances in this collection, with mention of a “squad-drill” in “Hysteria” and a dedication to a friend who had died in wartime. 15 In August 1918, Eliot applied for a position in the United States Office of Naval Intelligence and took time off from his job at Lloyds Bank to answer a summons from them in October. 16 After two weeks of bureaucratic uncertainty because the office that had sent for him did not have the authority to admit him, Eliot was not able to take on any military position and left America in early November. 17 Hostilities in the war were ordered to end that month, too, in a November 11 armistice for which Eliot wrote that he was “very glad.” 18 Eliot continued to write, stating in a November 1919 letter to John Quinn, a lawyer and patron of modernist poets: “I am now at work on an article ordered by The Times, and when that is off I hope to get started on a poem that I have in mind.” 19 The following

14

Howarth, The Cambridge Introduction, 195.

15

Eliot, “Hysteria,” in Prufrock and Other Observations, Project Gutenberg, line 3.

16

Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, xxvii-xxviii.

17

Eliot, 296-99.

18

Eliot, 300.

19

Eliot, 413.

Guan 5 year, a series of trials (work on The Sacred Wood, a collection of essays; a search for housing; and a stomach abscess that afflicted the father of his wife at the time, Vivien Haigh-Wood) consumed Eliot’s life and prevented him from working any further on this poem. 20 He finally wrote part of the poem by May 1921 but suffered a breakdown in late September, causing a nerve specialist to order him to take time off work. 21 From October to December 1921, on his doctor-ordered rest in Margate, England, and Lausanne, Switzerland, Eliot finished a draft of the long poem that would become The Waste Land, and he revised and shortened it considerably with assistance from fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound. 22 His final version of The Waste Land was published in his own journal, The Criterion, in England and in The Dial in America, in October and November 1922, respectively. 23 One of the 20th century’s most famous poems, The Waste Land was a foundational publication for the burgeoning Modernist movement, which ultimately supplanted the Georgian poetry as the dominant and most influential poetic mode of the 1920s and 1930s. The Waste Land conspicuously lacks the clear narrator, easily understood plot and setting, or consistent style present in more traditional works, engendering a sense of fragmentation typical to the unorthodox high Modernist style. Few direct references to the war that had ended just four years before, appear in The Waste Land. Instead, Eliot references the war often and indirectly, through means of allusion or metonym, and serves as a kind of omnipresent emotional background. Eliot juxtaposes dismay and decay to portray the “waste land” of the postwar European city as coupled 20

Lawrence S. Rainey, ed., The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 16-17.

21

Rainey, 16-17.

22

Eliot, The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Michael North (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 69-71, digital file.

23

Eliot, xi.

Guan 6 with the trenches and trauma of the war. The Waste Land can be read as a coming to terms with World War I and its effects on British society in two main ways: as a personal, elegiac response to trauma, and as an attempt to demonstrate a more extensive discontent by presenting individual characters as emblematic of larger beliefs and trends. Grief and wartime trauma serve as one core motif informing the poem’s structure and content. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land responds to the trauma of World War I by expressing personal and societal grief.

Critical Interpretations of The Waste Land The Waste Land has been critiqued through numerous analytical lenses since its publication. The most general progression in scholarly interpretations of The Waste Land beyond immediate reviews and reactions includes the rise of and then shift away from 1930s New Criticism, which focused on close readings. 24 Cleanth Brooks’s 1937 article “The Waste Land: An Analysis” is a typical example of the New Critical approach of the 1930s to 1940s, an exhaustive close reading seeking to discuss mostly the text of the poem in itself. 25 Brooks does bring in a nominal discussion of social context when it comes to, for example, cities mentioned directly in the poem or notes to the poem where Eliot directly addresses the circumstances; however, New Critics generally preferred not to use outside biographical or social information. 26 In contrast, the late 1950s and 1960s marked a sharp decline in close analysis of The Waste Land as the New Critical approach was dismissed, with authors instead choosing to focus

24

Eliot, x.

25

Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 3-4, digital file.

26

Cleanth Brooks, Jr., “The Waste Land: An Analysis,” in The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Michael North (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 202, previously published in Southern Review 3 (1937): 10636, digital file.

Guan 7 on metacritical analysis and writing less about Eliot’s works. 27 Criticism was reinvigorated as authors published studies of Eliot’s prose, including his philosophical papers and essays, and different schools of literary thought emerged: for instance, structuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytical theories of interpretation. 28 In addition, Eliot’s widow, Valerie Eliot, published the original drafts of The Waste Land in 1971. 29 Valerie Eliot’s facsimiles of manuscripts of the poem allowed scholars a newfound insight into its composition and Ezra Pound’s editorial hand, and they brought about attempts to date the different fragments of The Waste Land. 30 Scholars agree that much of the poem was written in 1921; some have conjectured that a few fragments could have been written as early as 1918. 31 Reconsiderations of the poem have focused on making use of these new primary sources, discussing the poem from theoretical perspectives, or questioning whether The Waste Land must have any meaning at all, rather than what its meaning must be. 32 Thus, this analysis is not entirely modern itself. To be sure, one can argue that a more productive or useful approach to the poem is to interpret the poem within itself, to interpret the poem as an allegory for something besides the war, or to question why continued interpretation of a nearly century-old poem is necessary or was intended. Other scholars have interpreted The Waste Land’s poetic craft; what this reading offers is a synthesis of different analyses of the poem, oriented toward understanding how the poem reacts to Eliot’s personal and historical

27

Brooker and Bentley, Reading The Waste Land, 4-5.

28

Brooker and Bentley, 5.

29

Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971), digital file.

30

Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 1-2.

31

Rainey, 2.

32

Eliot, The Waste Land, x.

Guan 8 context. Reading The Waste Land in this way can shed light on how war affected Modernism more generally and how war can affect poets’ approach to poetic form.

The Waste Land and Personal Emotion T. S. Eliot once called The Waste Land "the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life," and indeed it paints life in postwar Europe with a detailed and keenly personal hand: it describes particular people in England’s dismal cities, settings rarely addressed by the more optimistic and agreeable poetry of the Georgians. 33 It is in these personal scenes that Eliot conveys a deep sense of individuals’ sorrow from losing friends and loved ones in the war.

The Waste Land makes reference to soldiers Eliot knew and portrays many distinct scenes of individuals’ disappointment, in an elegy for both his dead compatriots and for the peace and optimism of prewar life.

Private Life: The Soldiers Eliot Knew Eliot’s wartime letters demonstrate that he followed the experiences of friends and acquaintances who had joined the army. He notes that a fellow Harvard student, Francis Thwing, sought naturalization in order to join the British military; discusses Frederick Hawkes and John Legge Bulmer, two Merton College classmates who enlisted; reports worry about Martin Armstrong, a man he knew who was a captain in a volunteer army; tells of his Harvard roommate Harold Peters and classmate Leon Little “no doubt patrolling the seas” and his cousin George Parker “in camp”; and mentions his typist’s husband having earned a Distinguished Service Order medal. 34

33

James E. Miller, T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977; repr., University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 9.

34

Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 67; 80; 137; 193; 211.

Guan 9 Maurice Haigh-Wood, the brother of Eliot’s then-wife Vivien, also served in the war and provided Eliot with a close connection to battlefield life. 35 Eliot writes in a 1915 letter to his mother that Maurice spoke to them of rats in the trenches: Maurice was home for five days leave this week. It was really the first time I had seen anything of him, as he had been away, first at Sandhurst and then with his regiment [...] It seems very strange that a boy of nineteen should have such experiences – often twelve hours alone in his ‘dug-out’ in the trenches, and at night, when he cannot sleep, occupying himself by shooting rats with a revolver. What he tells about rats and vermin is incredible – Northern France is swarming, and the rats are as big as cats. His dug-out, where he sleeps, is underground, and gets no sunlight. 36 Similar images evocative of the war, including these rats, reoccur in The Waste Land juxtaposed with reflections of civilian life; war and its associated grief are intertwined with the gloomy landscapes of the modern city. The first mention of rats comes when a speaker in Part II says, “I think we are in rats' alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.” 37 Based on Maurice’s statements, the soldiers’ narrow trenches, and the site of many of their deaths, are passageways of and for rats. Notably, the speaker in this section of the poem believes that he and his conversation partner are in this same place. If the “alley” remains a trench on the war front, the speaker situates himself, and the anxious urban woman with him, there; if the alley refers to an infested city street, in the speaker’s perception or belief (“I think”) the bodies of soldiers were also maimed in those streets. The anecdote that Eliot recounts in his letter makes clear that the

35

Allyson Booth, Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 8.

36

Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 132.

37

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 115-16.

Guan 10 ambiguity in these lines connects urban characters with the suffering of the battlefield. Wartime violence, Eliot seems to say, is still embedded in postwar life. The city in The Waste Land has become a host to war’s violence and nerves, just as fallen soldiers’ family and friends were forced to grapple with bereavement in the wake of the war. The next and last two occurrences of rats in The Waste Land come in Part III, where Eliot writes: A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck And on the king my father’s death before him.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors [...] 38 It is unclear, as it often is in The Waste Land, whether the lines in this section necessarily occur in the same scene or are spoken by the same character. However, in placing them in the same stanza, Eliot again sets symbols of war and death in both natural and urban settings. The rat, already presented as an emblem of trench warfare, adulterates the riverbank’s natural habitat and the industrialized gashouse (a plant for producing coal gas, with coal delivered by river) with its low, “slimy” movement along the ground. The speaker tries to obtain nourishment in the form of 38

Eliot, lines 193-95.

Guan 11 fish from the lifeless city setting of a “dull canal” in “winter,” reflecting on the deaths of political leaders in his family. The image of bodies on the earth and dry, lifeless bones touched only by rats — as clear an image as ever in The Waste Land of soldiers’ corpses — gives way to presentday automobiles’ noises. Again, Eliot associates wartime death and violence with both the modern city and scenes of desolated nature, and he accents a sole speaker’s loss with images of dead soldiers and a setting of industrial decay. Personal grief comes repeatedly coupled with this death, violence, and desolation of the land.

Perhaps Eliot’s closest connection to someone who served in the war was Jean Verdenal, a French student whom Eliot met when they both lived in Paris in the 1910s. 39 Verdenal was killed while serving as a medic in the French military during the Gallipoli or Dardanelles Campaign, serving alongside Australian and New Zealander troops, in May 1915. 40 Possible references to Verdenal appear in The Waste Land many times, some oblique: for one, he recommended the operas of Wagner, including Tristan und Isolde, to Eliot in a 1912 letter, and Wagner appears repeatedly in The Waste Land. 41 Lines 31-34 quote Tristan und Isolde, and lines 277-78 quote the Rhine-maidens’ wail in Die Götterdämmerung, while line 202 quotes a sonnet that is by and large a paraphrase of Wagner’s Parsifal. 42 In addition, the poem’s first line labels April “the cruellest month”: April was the month Eliot wrote of Paris being in bloom when he lived there, the month Verdenal wrote him back describing how its spring landscape evoked

39

Claudio Perinot, “Jean Verdenal, an Extraordinary Young Man: T. S. Eliot's Mort Aux Dardanelles,” South Atlantic Review 76, no. 3 (2011): 35.

40

Sandra M. Gilbert, “‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy,” New Literary History 30, no. 1 (1999): 193.

41

Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 32.

42

Eliot, The Waste Land, 6; 12; 14.

Guan 12 Eliot to him, and the month the British army and its French division set sail for Gallipoli. 43 The exact circumstances of Verdenal’s death were unclear to Eliot, who dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations to Verdenal as “mort aux Dardanelles” (“died in the Dardanelles”) in 1917. 44 As a result of this phrasing, some critics have argued that Eliot believed Verdenal had drowned within the Dardanelles, instead of having been killed on the shores of the Gallipoli peninsula. 45 If Eliot believed Verdenal had drowned, the dead sailor in “Part IV,” whose bones are underwater, and constant motif of “death by water” could allude to his friend’s death. 46 In another indirect reference, a soldier called Stetson appears at the end of “Part I,” while the Stetson or slouch hat was a commonly recognized symbol of the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) soldier, like those whom Verdenal fought alongside. 47 This scene therefore also recalls the environment of Verdenal’s death for Eliot. The Waste Land provides a vessel to mourn for Verdenal, another indication of its grappling with individual grief.

Content: Emotion and the War Beyond these fragments interpretable as allusions to Eliot’s personal life, The Waste Land includes many vignettes focusing on just one or a few figures in varied locations and contexts. Usually pessimistic and including references to violence or a somber setting, these fragments each convey grief, disappointment, and dejection, and these characters can often be connected to experiences of the war and mourning. Several of these short passages emphasize

43

Gilbert, “‘Rats’ Alley,’” 196.

44

Perinot, “Jean Verdenal,” 33.

45

Jeffrey A. Arp, “Urban Trenches: War Poetry and the Unreal City of the Great War in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land” (master's thesis, Iowa State University, 2005), 26, accessed March 8, 2019.

46

Arp, “Urban Trenches,” 26.

47

Arp, 27-28.

Guan 13 the connection between modern life and the violence and resulting emotion of the war. In general, the poem’s settings, the land of The Waste Land, are described as “stony,” “unreal,” “dull,” and “arid,” adjectives that could also describe trenches and the war’s links to devastating violence and grief. 48 Diction emphasizes these links to suffering: professor Sarah Cole notes that “violet,” a word repeated four times in The Waste Land, is close to the word “violent” in spelling and often precedes acts of violence in the poem. 49 The text of The Waste Land begins with both no clear speaker and clear disheartenment among its many speakers, inextricably connected to violence or the experience of being alone. In the first lines of “Part I: The Burial of the Dead,” no “I” emerges. Rather, a group, a “we” and “us,” is kept warm by winter and surprised by summer. 50 Professor of English Michael Levenson argues that the perspective of this narrator comes from below the ground, or more precisely the view of someone who has been buried, because the speaker discusses the winter snow as a “covering” that warms “us” and places an emphasis on the underground “roots” and “tubers.” 51 This perspective, then, could be that of an interred corpse or of a soldier deep in a battlefield trench. The first singular narrators come in German and English, asserting personal identity, “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch” (“I’m not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, a true German”) and then emotion, “I was frightened.” 52 Although the pronoun “you” can be ambiguous about whether its referent is singular, plural, or all of mankind, several scenes

48

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 20; 60; 189; 424.

49

Sarah Cole, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, War, Literature,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1642-44.

50

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 1-8.

51

Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172.

52

Eliot, The Waste Land, line 12, line 15.

Guan 14 with an explicitly singular speaker or audience can be found in the following stanzas in the first part. It is the one “son of man” who experiences “a heap of broken images,” with the only relief in the shelter of a rock, and it is the one “I” who professes a hopeless limbo of being “neither / living nor dead” and knowing “nothing.” 53 These singular viewpoints come next to the line taken from Tristan und Isolde: “desolate and empty is the sea” by which Isolde will come to the injured Tristan. 54 This lack of sight or lack of knowledge linked with sure knowledge of mortality and desolation continues further into the section. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris is “forbidden to see” one of her cards and presents images of “death by water” as well as a warning about danger: “One must be so careful these days.” 55 The content of these fragments paints a world whose inhabitants find it confusing, lonely, and bleak, buttressed in form by jarring speaker and setting transitions.

How this connects to the war is foreshadowed not just by the underground perspective of the first speakers but also by the part’s title: “The Burial of the Dead,” the name of the burial service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which already calls to mind the funerary and the fallen. 56 The final stanza of “Part I” brings together these images of war and the city: Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

53

Eliot, lines 20-41.

54

Eliot, line 42.

55

Eliot, lines 43-59.

56

Eliot, 5.

Guan 15 Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, "Stetson!

"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! 57 Professor Carol L. Yang posits that this scene could have drawn from Eliot’s experiences of London in wartime: the crowd comprises either the young men going to the warfront or the older, weaker, or disabled men they left behind, making a normally bustling city appear empty, ghostlike, and “unreal.” 58 This stanza juxtaposes this crowd of disillusioned people with “death” and the “dead” sound of Saint Mary Woolnoth’s church bell. 59 This church faced Lloyds Bank, Eliot’s employer when he was composing The Waste Land, extending its personal connection to him. 60 Eliot depicts a crowd of effective corpses, men who are fundamentally alone, joined only 57

Eliot, lines 60-76.

58

Carol L. Yang, “The Waste Land and the Virtual City,” in The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective, ed. Joe Moffett (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 193, digital file.

59

Eliot, The Waste Land, line 67.

60

Yang, “The Waste Land and,” 193.

Guan 16 by their emotions and experiences with the war. Despite walking together with the others, each man “fix[es] his eyes before his feet” and sighs rather than speaking, having been “undone” by death. 61 Indeed, the only interaction comes when the section’s speaker addresses a comrade who he says had fought with him at Mylae, a town in Italy and the site of a battle in 260 BC in the First Punic War; the speaker discusses a “corpse” as aged to “last year” and as something that he had planted. The burial of a seed needed to plant it is akin to the interment of a corpse, and indeed Eliot refigures a line (“Oh keep the Dog far hence …”) originally sung in John Webster's The White Devil by a woman, Cordelia, preparing to bury her son. 62 The inclusion of this line suggests unhappiness and grief bordering on madness, like that of Cordelia, belying the routine tone the speaker conveys. 63 At the end of “Part I,” then, Eliot connects soldiers in a transitional state, the speaker and Stetson, to isolation and burial against an urban backdrop drawn from Eliot’s life in London.

“Part II: A Game of Chess” begins with a scene of vivid opulence with worrying notes interspersed throughout, such as the “troubled, confused / And drowned” effect of a woman’s perfume or a Cupid statue “hid[ing] his eyes behind his wing,” extending the linked motifs of uncertain and unseeing characters appearing in “Part I.” 64 This fragmentation ties to war and violence where Eliot appeals more directly to historical legend: the story of the mythical king Tereus’ rape of Philomela, a “barbarous” act, is one of many “withered stumps of time” on display in the woman’s room. 65 Cole notes that this comparison both recalls the battlefield and 61

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 63-65.

62

Eliot, 7.

63

Booth, Reading The Waste, 70-71.

64

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 88-89, 81.

65

Eliot, lines 99-104.

Guan 17 brings to mind an amputated limb. 66 Later scenes in “Part II” also reflect anxiety from the war, the blurring of boundaries between the living and the dead or between civilians and soldiers, and the disintegration of modern relationships. One speaker in a conversational section is preoccupied with death, particularly the death of soldiers: when his partner asks him to think, he thinks of “rats’ alley,” and when he is asked to “remember” he echoes that “those were pearls that were his eyes,” a statement earlier used to describe the “drowned Phoenician sailor” of Madame Sosotris’s tarot reading. 67 Next, in one of the most direct references to the war in the poem, a woman converses in a pub about her friend Lil, whose husband, Albert, has been “demobbed” or discharged from the army after serving for the full length of the war, four years.

The speaker asserts that if Lil doesn’t improve her appearance to give him a “good time,” Albert may leave her for another woman, like the speaker. 68 During the pub scene, the refrain of “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” interrupts the woman’s monologue, creating a sense of urgency as well as subjugation to an unseen, powerful force, similar to that felt during wartime. 69 These romantic relationships suffer when faced with the stress of death and grief in one case and the return of troops in the next. In one scene in “Part III: The Fire Sermon,” a clerk “assaults at once,” and his hands “encounter no defence,” but the woman he is with exhibits only “indifference.” 70 That this unsatisfying sexual encounter is presented with militaristic metaphors draws another connection between the war and discontent in the modern city. Finally, in “Part V:

66

Cole, “Enchantment, Disenchantment,” 1643-44.

67

Arp, “Urban Trenches,” 43.

68

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 146-51.

69

Eliot, line 141; Rainey, Revisiting The Waste, 107.

70

Eliot, lines 239-42; Rainey, 65-66.

Guan 18 What The Thunder Said,” war motifs continue in the trenchlike atmosphere evoked by the phrase “one can neither stand nor lie nor sit” and the soldier-like army of “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth / Ringed by the flat horizon only.” 71 This final section of the poem presents an allegory for both war and the city: in his Master’s thesis on The Waste Land, Jeffrey Arp asserts that the section is an internal meditation on the aridity and sterility of the wasteland as representative of the physical death and cultural shock of the war. 72 What Arp argues are the key lines connecting London and the trenches are: “And upside down in air were towers / Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours / And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.” 73 The towers mentioned, he observes, recall and invert London Bridge, the church of Magnus Martyr, and Saint Mary Woolnoth’s bells, all mentioned earlier in the poem, and the wells evoke the trenches and cities now “exhausted,” and bereft, of people. 74 Symbols evocative of wartime experiences thus pervade this arid wasteland of “Part V,” with links to both the battlefield and modern London. Using these individual vignettes, Eliot positions the disillusionment resulting from wartime’s violence as root causes of the decay and uncertainty of modern life in the city.

Structure: The Waste Land as a Fragmented Elegy Speaking broadly, an elegy is a poem of lament, and an elegy set in bucolic scenes is a pastoral one. 75 The first Idyll by Theocritus, an Ancient Greek bucolic poet, was the first

71

Eliot, line 340, lines 368-69.

72

Arp, “Urban Trenches,” 63-65.

73

Arp, 68-69.

74

Arp, 69.

75

"Elegy," in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene, et al., 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 397-99.

Guan 19 example of this form, an elegy for the death of the poet Daphnis. 76 Gradually, the “pastoral elegy” that the Idyll served as a model for became a distinct form with its own tropes, including appeals to Muses and guiding supernatural figures for solace, the use of pathetic fallacy (a personification of nature), and a tonal change from hopelessness to optimism. 77 University of Edinburgh Honorary Fellow Karina Williamson writes that the “pastoral” term was used to disparage the Georgian poets’ often overly sentimental, escapist, and ill-informed presentation of rural England. 78 However, some patterns common in conventional pastoral elegies also emerge within The Waste Land’s treatment of loss, in suitably fragmented or reversed form. Critic Sandra Gilbert asserts that The Waste Land exploits the traditional pastoral elegiac form, neither fully adhering to it nor rejecting all its trappings, in order to serve as a lament for soldiers like Verdenal in an innovative manner befitting the magnitude of their loss. 79 While The Waste Land’s settings are arid rather than pastoral, corpses are foregrounded in many passages, especially the corpses of soldiers and particularly that of Phlebas, the Phoenician sailor, who is the sole subject of “Part IV: Death By Water.” Drowning reoccurs in The Waste Land, with its many references to the shipwreck and presumed drowning of the king in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well. In particular, “Those are pearls that were his eyes,” a line from Ariel’s song to Ferdinand about the underwater transfiguration of Ferdinand’s supposedly drowned father, is repeated. This emphasis plays into the elegiac form in its emphasis on the body of the drowned. The soldier’s corpse is at once a site of injury, decay, loss, and 76

Karina Williamson, "From Arcadia to Bunyah," in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Chichester, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 118-120.

77

Williamson.

78

Williamson.

79

Gilbert, “‘Rats’ Alley,’” 193.

Guan 20 supernatural transformation. The speaker notes that “[a] current under sea / [p]icked his bones in whispers.” Phlebas is mentioned earlier in the poem juxtaposed with Ariel’s line. 80 The Waste Land is also an “anti-pastoral” elegy in that the likes of muses and nymphs that console the bereaved speaker are distorted: Madame Sosostris, an ill but “famous clairvoyante” and the gossiping speaker in the bar scene are both not idealized, wise, or mythic women. 81 That the speaker’s memory of the deceased is mixed with jarring scenes of decay and the battlefield itself both evokes and discards traditional characteristics of the pastoral elegy. In this way, the structure of The Waste Land can be interpreted as uniquely elegiac: it is an expression of mourning for male friends lost to the war, set in a barren land instead of a pastoral scene, guided by ordinary instead of magical muses, and fragmented in recollection, in order to represent the ubiquity of grief from the war.

The Waste Land and Societal Grief Eliot ultimately goes beyond individual grief and desolation: he extends his depictions of personal mourning to represent the mourning of many people, connected between places and contexts, and societal disillusionment with life after the war. Throughout The Waste Land, Eliot positions individual senses and emotions as inextricably parts of a larger whole, in order to create an atmosphere of more general social discontent and loss.

Content: “Melt,” Tiresias, and the Unreal Cities Eliot’s contemporary letters about the war mirror this extension of an individual emotion to the whole. Writing to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley in September 1914, soon after the start of the war, he described his experience of “the great moral earnestness on both sides” as having made

80

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 315-16.

81

Eliot, lines 44-45; Gilbert, “‘Rats’ Alley,’” 194.

Guan 21 “a very deep impression” on him. 82 In a 1917 letter to his father, he wrote: “everyone’s individual fortunes lives are so swallowed up in the one great tragedy, that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant!” 83 Because the war pervaded so much of life for both soldiers and civilians, if these views extend to the content of The Waste Land, the personal trauma and grief experienced by his individual characters are symptoms of the larger sense of grief and disillusionment that the war begot.

Eliot makes this connection most clear by equating or comparing characters within The Waste Land, presenting each vignette or single experience as typical of the experiences of many in the poem. In a footnote to the poem, Eliot wrote: “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character,’ is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias.” 84 The blind prophet Tiresias appears in many works of Greek mythology, including tragedies like Oedipus Rex and Antigone. 85 In The Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote that Hera transformed Tiresias into a woman for seven years in return for hitting two mating snakes. 86 Later, in one account of the source of his blindness, Hera called upon Tiresias to rule in an argument about whether men or women found more pleasure in sex; when Tiresias

82

Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 62.

83

Eliot, 242.

84

Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, rev. ed., vol. 2, The Letters of T. S. Eliot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 23.

85

Judith Roof, "Tiresias," in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 4:1465-66.

86

Roof.

Guan 22 said that women enjoyed sex more than men, Hera blinded him out of anger at losing the argument, and Zeus gave him the gift of clairvoyance. 87 Additionally, Odysseus visited the dead Tiresias in The Odyssey to seek his guidance in the underworld. 88 This mythological context explains his role in The Waste Land as a central figure, connecting other characters and emphasizing existing themes of dismay. Tiresias, who Eliot describes as “throbbing between two lives,” serves to link characters between times, places, and genders. 89 Another important element of Tiresias’ capacity to connect The Waste Land’s characters is his familiarity with death, as the one who has “foresuffered all” and “walked among the lowest of the dead,” a reference to his lucidity in the underworld. 90 Tiresias’s capability to serve as both an all-seeing prophet and a guide for the dead inflects his narration of the encounter between the typist and young man in “Part III: The Fire Sermon” to emphasize Eliot’s message about postwar society. Tiresias’ mythic claim that women find more pleasure in sex than men comes in contrast to his vision of the woman in The Waste Land as “bored and tired” and the advances as “undesired,” emphasizing the unhappiness of the scene. 91 Meanwhile, his descriptions, despite his clairvoyance, remove the figures’ personalities and distinguishing factors: both are described with few physical attributes and “indifference.” 92 They could be anonymous, unidentifiable corpses for the little description they receive. In fact, very few characters in The Waste Land

87

Booth, Reading The Waste Land, 143-44.

88

Roof, 4:1465-66.

89

Eliot, The Waste Land, line 218.

90

Eliot, line 243, line 246.

91

Booth, Reading The Waste Land, 144-45.

92

Arp, “Urban Trenches,” 56-58.

Guan 23 have names: people such as the hyacinth girl, the woman on the throne, the speaker in the pub, the wife and husband conversing, and the Thames-daughters are never named or given identifying physical characteristics, and actions are often attributed to body parts rather than people themselves. 93 With a shifting narrator but parallels between scenes, these anonymous characters, such as the high-class woman on the throne and the low-class crowd in the pub in “Part II: A Game of Chess,” all come to represent parts of the same pessimistic archetype, in a society full of dread and dismay. Because Eliot portrays the dissatisfaction of these individuals as subsumed into a greater whole both represented and seen by Tiresias, he also presents the characters’ angst as symptomatic of larger society’s general disillusionment and dissatisfaction.

Eliot extends another personal experience of grief when he connects his “unreal city” both to the corpses and trauma of the battlefield and to many cities, connecting the war’s repercussions internationally. A passage from “Part V” reads: What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal 94 This rapid listing connects the first three European cities, ancient cultural and academic centers, directly with the modern two that follow. The passage presents all five as one “Unreal” city that “[c]racks and reforms and bursts,” a phrasing that evokes bombing and rebuilding. Vienna and

93

Rainey, Revisiting The Waste, 108.

94

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 371-76.

Guan 24 London, the former capital of Austria-Hungary and the capital of England, were key cities in World War I as viewed from Britain. Arp, in his thesis, argues that this passage presents the speaker as afflicted with “civilian shell-shock,” unable to cope with great sorrow over the fallen soldiers and toppled towers of the war, and presents London as “the city”: the central location that exemplifies the power, industrialization, and globalization of early 20th century Europe as well as the unthinkable violence visited upon it in the war. 95 Here, Eliot depicts the war-stricken London of Stetson and Lil as emblematic of other cities affected by the war, and the grim experience of his characters throughout the poem as emblematic of experiences and emotions in the other cities as well. “I wonder if America realises how terrible the condition of central Europe is … I can never quite put Vienna out of my mind,” Eliot wrote in a 1920 letter to his mother, evidencing some desire to connect the two places in understanding. 96 Eliot’s image in The Waste Land of other cities dealing with the “unreal” aftermath of the war, just as London was, demonstrated his idea that the trauma and grief of war extended across Europe.

Structure: Polyphony and Fragmentation At the same time, it is not adequate to fully embrace Tiresias as the one narrator or the Unreal City as the one setting of the poem, just as it is not adequate to address all of Eliot’s characters or settings separately without considering how they are juxtaposed. The populations of Europe too expressed different perspectives and reactions, which could not be captured without also capturing their interplay, toward the violence, shock, and horror of World War I. Eliot professed, in a 1956 lecture, to have expanded the footnotes to a “remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship” in order to add length to the poem for its publication, so his footnotes’

95

Arp, “Urban Trenches,” 67-68.

96

Eliot, Volume 1: 1898–1922, 428.

Guan 25 placement of Tiresias may be suspect. 97 The voices in The Waste Land cannot be joined by one sole, overarching narrator who explains all perspectives present. Instead, they must be taken as they are presented: a combination of many voices. It is this uncertainty and disarray of voice that emphasizes The Waste Land’s striking power to convey the effects of war.

This inability to attribute all of The Waste Land to a single voice becomes apparent from its first stanza. The pattern initially established by the participles ending the first three lines ("breeding," "mixing," "stirring") abruptly cuts off and gives way to different patterns, such as the use of German ("Starnbergersee," "Hofsgarten," "Bin gar keine Russin") or the repeated use of the word "and." 98 Even though these lexical elements connect the different lines, professor Michael Levenson posits that the "heterogeneity of attitude" within this first stanza — changes in voice, in language, and in theme from collective statements to a personal story — demonstrates a shifting between voices and personalities that cannot be resolved into one speaker. 99 The pronouns "we" and "us" seem to have unstable referents, evidencing a lack of a sole consciousness expressing the poem’s statements: despite the repetition of personal pronouns, each “I” shifts between diction and tone or admits unique experiences compared to the other speakers. 100 At the very end of the poem, the line “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” appears amid a series of quotations. 101 Levenson argues that this non-allusive line

97

Rainey, Revisiting The Waste, 125.

98

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 1-16.

99

Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 170-71.

100

Levenson, 171.

101

Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 426-32.

Guan 26 demonstrates a consciousness of these constant shifts, surpassing the individual perspectives of the quotations. 102 The differences between successive passages, preventing a reader from establishing a continuous narrative or lyrical throughline, demonstrate how The Waste Land treats reactions to war both on their own and as connected to each other. Eliot also introduces another voice, the allusions present throughout The Waste Land, to recontextualize and reclaim tradition after the cultural shock of the war. As modern Europe faces a different paradigm from the time of classical narratives, Eliot repositions those narratives in the present in order to reconnect with tradition: Philomela's scene takes place on a city mantlepiece; Tiresias watches a modern London. 103 Wartime emotions both unite soldiers and civilians and are, ultimately, deeply personal, in the same way that the voices experiencing Eliot’s modern wasteland-battlefield must have their similarities to each other acknowledged and yet cannot be totally described or captured by one character or speaker. The Waste Land gives grief not just one voice but many shifting voices, presenting a polyphony that allows the reader to understand the magnitude and variety of the war’s effects.

The Waste Land abounds with allusions and interplay between its numerous fragments.

While The Waste Land cannot be interpreted solely as a response to World War I, the personal and social mourning provoked by the catastrophic violence of the war prove useful as one means to make meaning of the poem. Moreover, reading The Waste Land as a response to the war in form and content provides an understanding of one way in which poets can respond to traumatic and devastating violence more generally. Eliot uses cathartic references to his private life and an

102

Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism, 192-93.

103

Arp, “Urban Trenches,” 52-53.

Guan 27 innovative fragmented structure to contain the earth-shattering violence referenced by his content. To demonstrate grief on an individual level, Eliot makes reference to soldiers he knew, juxtaposes scenes intertwining the bleakness of modern life with the aftershocks of the war, and exploits the traditional form of pastoral elegy. To grapple with the grief of larger society, he introduces Tiresias and the "Unreal City" to connect his other characters between time and place while presenting irreconcilable voices to ultimately express the multitude of voices and perspectives on the war. The Waste Land wrestles with war by capturing not the warfront itself but the insidious repercussions of grief beyond the battlefield, into the modern city, through fragmentation. Of course, these fragments also shore up ruins, and The Waste Land concludes with a prayer for “the peace that passes understanding�: a prayer, perhaps, for recovery from the trauma of this war.

Guan 28 Bibliography Arp, Jeffrey A. "Urban Trenches: War Poetry and the Unreal City of the Great War in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land." Master's thesis, Iowa State University, 2005. Accessed March 8, 2019. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1180.

Jeffrey A. Arp completed a Master of Arts in English Literature at Iowa State University in 2005. Arp's thesis examines many aspects of The Waste Land's relation to World War I, discussing Eliot's relationship to Jean Verdenal and close reading several sections throughout the play as references to the war. Arp also provides useful background information about Eliot's life during the war and readings of The Waste Land.

Booth, Allyson. Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom up. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Allyson Booth is a Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy with research interests in modern British poetry. In this book, Booth expands on the poem's references; most usefully, she presents an elucidating section about Eliot's views on the war and relationships to soldiers. This book also discusses the poem's various allusions in great detail.

Brooker, Jewel Spears, and Joseph Bentley. Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Digital file.

Jewel Spears Brooker is a T. S. Eliot scholar and Professor Emerita of Literature at Eckerd College, while Joseph Bentley is a ____________.

Brooks, Cleanth, Jr. "The Waste Land: An Analysis." In The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Michael North, 185-210. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Previously published in Southern Review 3 (1937): 106-36. Digital file.

Cleanth Brooks was a prominent contributor to the New Critical movement, which this analysis of The Waste Land exemplifies. Brooks's close reading of the poem both indicates important areas of interest, to Brooks and to later scholars, and serves as a counterpoint to my reading, which brings in historical elements.

Cole, Sarah. "Enchantment, Disenchantment, War, Literature." PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 163247. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614389.

Sarah Cole, the Dean of Humanities and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, specializes in British literature particularly of the modernist period, and her research interests include war, violence, history. In this article, Cole dissects modernist works as being "enchanted" and "disenchanted" with war — either viewing war as possessing a magical or transformative power or denying that it does. She includes a useful reading of The Waste Land as a poem related to war.

"Elegy." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, 397-99. 4th ed.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harker-ebooks/reader.action?docID=913846.

Guan 29 Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Volume 1: 1898–1922. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. Rev. ed. Vol. 1 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harker-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3420733.

———. Volume 2: 1923–1925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. Rev. ed. Vol. 2 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harker-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3420733.

———. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Edited by Valerie Eliot. San Diego: Harcourt, 1971. Digital file.

———. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Michael North. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Digital file.

T. S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land is a landmark work among post-Great War English modernist poetry. North, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, provides indispensable context for The Waste Land, including information about the poem's composition, source material for Eliot's allusions, a thoroughly annotated version of the original text including Eliot's own notes to and writing about the poem, and a useful selection of criticism about the poem published both in its time and later.

Gilbert, Sandra M. "'Rats' Alley': The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy."

New Literary History 30, no. 1 (1999): 179-201. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057529.

Sandra Gilbert is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis. In this article, Gilbert examines the elegiac nature of The Waste Land in addition to other war poems. She presents The Waste Land as demonstrating a unique resistance to pastoral modes and inspects the idea of "traditionalism" in contemporary works. Gilbert's reading of The Waste Land as an elegy relating to the war is most useful.

Howarth, Peter. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Howarth, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the Queen Mary University of London, discusses trends and movements within the umbrella of modernist poetry, including chapters on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and sections on war poetry.

Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 19081922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

A Genealogy of Modernism describes the foundations of English modernist literature and traces its complex development in the first three decades of the 20th century. The information in this text offers important social and literary context to the work of English modernist poets in the wake of the Great War, including specific discussion of the role of the war in shaping the English avant-garde and of tradition and disintegration in The Waste Land. Michael H. Levenson is William B. Christian Professor of English at the University of Virginia and has published several books on modernism.

Guan 30 Marsh, Edward Howard, ed. Georgian Poetry 1911-1912. New York: Putnam, 1914. Accessed March 4, 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9484/9484-h/9484-h.htm.

Miller, James E. T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. 1977. Reprint, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

James E. Miller was the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His reading of The Waste Land in this book analyzes its early drafts in conversation with the death of Jean Verdenal, presenting the poem primarily as an elegy for a close male friend.

Perinot, Claudio. "Jean Verdenal, an Extraordinary Young Man: T. S. Eliot's Mort Aux Dardanelles." South Atlantic Review 76, no. 3 (2011): 33-50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43739122.

Perinot provides an in-depth biography of Jean Verdenal, a French friend of Eliot; some critics posit that Verdenal's death in the Great War was a key impetus for Eliot to write The Waste Land.

Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode.

Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1976.

David Perkins is James P. Marquand Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus, at Harvard University. Perkins's chronicle of poetic forms and styles from the 1890s to the 1920s is particularly valuable for its in-depth discussions of how World War I influenced different groups of poets and how modernist styles developed in these decades.

"Prelude: The Troops." In Counter-Attack, and Other Poems, by Siegfried Sassoon. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1918.

Rainey, Lawrence S., ed. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose. 2nd ed.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harkerebooks/reader.action?docID=3419857.

———. Revisiting the Waste Land. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harker-ebooks/reader.action?docID=3420039.

Roof, Judith. "Tiresias." In Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, edited by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, 1465-66. Vol. 4. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. http://link.galegroup.com.puffin.harker.org/apps/doc/CX2896200641/GIC?u=harker&sid =GIC&xid=b9a54db9.

Williamson, Karina. "From Arcadia to Bunyah." In A Companion to Poetic Genre, edited by Erik Martiny, 118-34. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Chichester, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harker-ebooks/reader.action?docID=4041678.

Karina Williamson is an Honorary Fellow in the University of Edinburgh's Department of English Literature. Williamson's entry in A Companion to Poetic Genre discusses the

Guan 31 poetic form of pastoral elegy, providing background information and common characteristics that help to illuminate Eliot's exploitation of the form.

"World War I." In Europe since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction, edited by John Merriman and Jay Winter, 2751-66. Vol. 5. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3447000917/WHIC?u=harker&sid=WHIC&xid=3 3e4750c.

Yang, Carol L. "The Waste Land and the Virtual City." In The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective, edited by Joe Moffett, 187-216. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Digital file.

Carol L. Yang is an associated professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. In this essay, she examines the relationship between The Waste Land and a view of the modern city as a metaphysical and cosmopolitan space. Her writing is most useful in its analysis of the descriptions of the cities in The Waste Land, particularly the city as a confluence of ideas from different times and places.

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