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Our citizenship is in heaven; yes, but that is the model and type for
your citizenship upon earth.
(T. S. ELIOT, Choruses from The Rock )1
Max Webers The City (1921) anticipates Eliots The Waste Land (1922) both
in its perception of the city as the center of Western civilization and its
attention to the social and political stratification of human identities that
have characterized the Occidental city throughout its history. Webers sociological history traces the evolution of the modern Western city through
forms of citizenship and economic entitlements, from ancient communities
to the corporation of citizens and thence to the increasing complexity of
the oppositions between citizens and noncitizens, slave and free labor,
unfree industrial workers and enfranchised semicitizens or metics.2 In
Eliots poem, forms of postwar citizenship and a new experience of
national illegitimacy in a postimperial and postwar Europe collide with
other fragmented identities from a Roman imperial past. While The Waste
Land shares some evident affinities with the depiction of urban alienation
and atomization in Georg Simmels Metropolis and Mental Life (1903),
at another level the poem takes a comprehensive view of history, time, and
I thank Kirk Melnikoff and Lara Vetter for their painstaking and immensely helpful readings of my essay. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to Lisa Ruddick, the associate editor of Modern Philology, for their valuable suggestions.
1. T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, in Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London:
Faber & Faber, 1969), 151.
2. Max Weber, The City (Glencoe: Illinois Free Press, 1958), 213. Weber defines the metic as
an enfranchised semicitizen who enjoyed a status that was distinctly different from that of the
slaves. Although free like the citizen, the metic had to pay taxes to enter into the economic life
of the city.
2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2011/10902-0004$10.00
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3. In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot argues that a democracy without the positive force
of Christianity was vulnerable to an easy transformation by totalitarianism: If you will not have
God you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin (T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society,
in Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of Culture
[New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940], 33). Christopher Dawson, a figure whose conservative
thought had a powerful influence upon Eliot, wrote in the Criterion about points of contact
between liberalism and totalitarianism: The essential principle of the Totalitarian State was,
in fact, asserted by Liberalism before Fascism was ever heard of (The Totalitarian State, Criterion 14, no. 54 [1934]: 3). Like Dawson, Eliot points out that liberalism was ultimately led by
forces of modernization into a cul-de-sac of mechanized or brutalized control and ends up
lending itself to philosophies which deny it (Idea of a Christian Society, 14).
4. Jeffrey Perl, Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and after Eliot (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989), 89.
5. Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 104.
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crucial aspects of his antiliberalism that have not been sufficiently examined.
In the first section, I analyze the older Anglican poets reaction against
liberal and totalitarian nationalism through his construction of an antiutilitarian identity that tries both to encompass and to bypass the nation-state.
In the second section I investigate The Waste Land s intersecting planes of
metropolitan temporality and European tradition, the latter primarily constituted by the works of Augustine and Dante, and suggest how we might
understand the enigmatic form of postwar identity that the poem places
before us. My intention is to offer a nuanced analysis of the multiple affiliations between Eliots poetic imagination of personal and political identity
in postwar Europe and the counters of religion, empire, and cosmopolitanism. All three, especially religion and the ideal of imperial infinitude, function as antidotes to nationalism in Eliots poetry and prose, yet they work
diversely in contradictory directions. An understanding of Eliots critique
of nationalism necessarily entails a reexamination of the nature and degree
of his imaginative and political investment in the ideologies of empire,
nation-state, and Christianity, each of which represents a different form of
allegiance and community. Critical assessments of the works of an Anglican
Eliot have usually pointed to the parallels that he sees among the authoritarian structures of nation-state, empire, and Christianity. However, studies
of The Waste Land s modernism have exclusively focused on its elegiac representation of Roman and British imperial cultures and have not analyzed
the poem as a site of religious imagination, believing the latter to be predominantly manifested in the works of an older, orthodox poet. Eliots aesthetic and political opposition to postwar nationalism enables us to move
beyond the traditional critical opinion of a nexus between an idealized
empire and Christianity in Eliots oeuvre and reinterpret the relations between the two. Specifically, this essay explores how Eliots approach to antinational forms of community can help us recognize multiple and conflictual relations between imperial ideology and Christian ethos in The Waste
Land and between Christian identity and national identity in Eliots later
prose. The great interest of Eliots work lies in the way in which, as Raymond Williams pointed out, it resists both the complacencies of liberalism and complacent conservatism.6 I hope to clarify the political and
historical structures in Eliots work that displace, embrace, and sublimate
hegemonic entities of nation and empire and to shed light on certain categories of political exclusion and inclusion that were entailed by twentiethcentury modernity.
6. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 17801950 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 243.
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Empire. . . . It remains an ideal, but one which Virgil passed on to Christianity to develop and cherish.11 For Frank Kermode, Eliots career, especially his work with the Criterion, attests to a belief that modern men
[ought] to be members of a larger polity than that of their own province
to accept their nationality yet aspire to membership of a more abstract
empire embodied in Latin Europe.12 The sentiment of nationalism thus
becomes a disruptive force that not only inhibits a citizen-subjects allegiance to a universal church and empire but also strips Christian subjects
of their rights within the states network of secular institutions, gradually
reducing them to the status of a tolerated minority.13
At the same time that he opposed nationalism, Eliot was also reluctant
to frame national identity in the light of the ethics of liberal cosmopolitanism or universalism.14 One of his pieces for the Criterion illustrates well the
particular nature of the universalism that Eliot reads into a Christian version of citizenship, something quite distinct from the secular humanist universalism espoused by institutional bodies such as the League of Nations in
postwar Britain. While Miller correctly notes that for Eliot it is only the
international dimension of Christianity that makes possible a civilized society outside the sphere of nationalism, the relationship between political
and philosophical elements in this version of humanist Christian citizenship still remains to be analyzed.15 In the January 1936 issue of the Criterion,
in an editorial on the subject of Italys invasion of Abyssinia, Eliot refers to
manifestos from the Right, the Left, and the Catholics in France. He offers a
qualified sympathy for the Rights disapproval of the inconsistency in Britain and Frances opposition to the mission coloniale of another great nation
of kindred culture. He also agrees with the charge of the Right that the
confused mixture of secular and spiritual motives of the League of Nations
has put higher and lower civilizations, superior and inferior nations on the
same level.16 Eliot ultimately reserves his approval for the Catholic manifesto: the French Rights high moral tone is ultimately empty, compromised by its material interests in colonialism; the Catholic manifesto, how11. T. S. Eliot, Virgil and the Christian World, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber &
Faber, 1957), 12930.
12. Frank Kermode, introduction to Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1975), 21.
13. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 18.
14. Ibid., 46. Andrew Miller, similarly, points out that Eliot ultimately proves unwilling to
accept any vision of social integration that rests upon post-Christian assumptions. He has little
use for secular theologies that imagine the world to be engaged in the process of transcending
all historically particularized forms of religious belief and to be steadily advancing toward a universal religion rooted in a common humanity (Eliot, Christian Pluralism, and the NationState, 25051).
15. Miller, Eliot, Christian Pluralism, and the Nation-State, 251.
16. T. S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion 15, no. 59 (1936): 26668.
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ever, represents for Eliot a higher morality singularly concerned with the
iniquity of the war of aggression. Unlike the Right, French Catholics are
not interested in identify[ing] Christianity with the maintenance of a particular social and political regime, or with the hegemony of Europe over
the rest of the world.17
Nevertheless, Eliots politics resist the abstract humanist aims of the
French Catholics. Eliot contradicts the Catholic doctrines at the same time
that he expresses agreement with them. Thus, humanist Catholicism errs
only when, like the League of Nations, it speaks of the equality of races:
There will probably always remain a real inequality of races, as there is
always inequality of individuals. But the fundamental identity in humanity
must always be asserted, as must the equal sanctity of moral obligation to
people of every race. All men are equal before God; if they cannot all be
equal in this world, yet our moral obligation towards inferiors is exactly the
same as that towards our equals.18 Eliot assumes that his perspective rises
above the expedient politics of both left-wing and right-wing factions. Ultimately, his view comes across as an interpretation of the philosophy of
F. H. Bradley, the Victorian antiutilitarian philosopherand the subject of
Eliots dissertationwho implied that one could believe anything about
temporal particularities as long as one also professed a belief in the union
of these particularities in the figure of the Absolute.19 This doctrine of racial
exceptionalism paradoxically becomes the condition for a metaphysical
inclusiveness. In Choruses from The Rock (1934) Eliot writes:
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.20
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Eliots affiliation with Anglicanism after 1927 bears witness to his antagonism to nationalism and to his fundamental opposition to liberalisms espousal of the nation as product and condition of the secular and collective
will of the people. A secular notion of cosmopolitan humanism is not an
ally of Eliots antinationalism but a provocation, an identity that Eliots
white British Anglicanism must overrule. The Waste Land responds to liberalisms theory of anti-imperial nationalism, a key principle in the Treaty of
Versailles (1919), which formed the basis for reconstruction of Europes
national borders. While critics tend to separate the earlier poet of The Waste
Land and the later Anglican poet, Eliots critical and creative output from
The Waste Land onward must grapple with imagining an identity that would
transcend postwar ideologies of national identity and nation-state. Like the
Anglo-Catholicism expressed in Eliots work after 1927, imperialism in The
Waste Land is represented as a constitutive part of European tradition
menaced and undone by postwar nationalism.23 The poems modernism is
shaped by a confrontation between universality, as represented in the works
of Augustine and Dante, and the territorial-political coercions of nationalist
identity. Eliots critique of postwar liberal nationalism results in an idealized
interpretation of the Roman empire as a transnational political formation,
which, in turn, is challenged by the poems adaptation of Augustines antiimperial stance in The City of God. A close attention to the complexities of
Eliots rejection of nationalism reveals that The Waste Land both accommo22. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 47.
23. Frank Kermode provides a very helpful summary of the points of contact between
Eliots Christianity and his poetic incorporation of the ideal of empire after 1927. According
to Kermode, Eliots conservative-imperialist politics, like his Catholic Christianity, comes
to be eventually expressed in terms of a scholastic sense of the complexities of time and eternity (Kermode, introduction to Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 17).
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dates an affinity to the legacy of the Roman empire and yet resists this mode
of imperial representation when it consorts with an Augustinian vision of
Christian universality.
As Michael Levenson has observed, the poems representation of the
city as a site of political, economic, and imperial influences can also be
traced to Eliots internationalism between 1919 and 1921.24 Historians and
political scientists have generally viewed this as the high period of European nation building, marked by the resurgence of nationalist ideologies
across Central and Eastern Europe and the dismantling of the Austrian,
Ottoman, and Russian empires. The codification of liberal nationalism in
the postwar peace treaty of Versailles, that appalling document as Eliot
labeled it, led to the decisive displacement of empire by rapidly formed
nation-states in Europe after 1918.25 The Waste Lands internationalism lies
in its attention to the changing map of Europe that divides an imperial past
from a nationalist present and in a critique of postwar nationalism in Europe that, in effect, amounts to a rejection of the peace treatys vision of a
new Europe. Benedict Anderson views this new form of globalization, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and consolidated in the years following the First World War, as primarily constituted by the rising significance
of nation-states in global affairs. The ascendance of nation-states as the final
political form of universality takes shape in the aftermath of the postwar collapse of multiple European empires and the formation of the League of
Nations, which compelled remaining empires to masquerade as nation24. Michael Levenson, Does The Waste Land Have a Politics? Modernism/Modernity 6, no.
3 (1999): 113.
25. T. S. Eliot to Charlotte Eliot, February 22, 1920, in Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 18981922,
ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988). Liberal nationalism has its
roots in nineteenth-century classical liberalisms threshold principle for national self-determination, which recognized national sovereignty for a sufficiently large people who already
had a historic association with a state and territory ; smaller nationalities or communities
would eventually be absorbed or assimilated into larger nations (E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality [Cambridge University Press, 1990], 131). Following the war, liberal nationalism was defined as the alignment of territorial borders and homogeneous ethnic and linguistic communities to create postimperial independent nationstates for different nationalities. The Treaty of Versailles aligned the nineteenth-century idea
of national self-determination with a nationalist logic as it tried to ensure sovereign status
for minority and oppressed populations through its reliance upon ethnic and linguistic factors
to determine the composition of existing and new nation-states. Thus, the treatys enforcement of an anti-imperial principle of self-determination in order to create liberal nation-states
across Central and Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires, was obviously an attempt to recreate the foundational principle of fully developed Western nation-states of France and Britain that had successfully combined nationality and state, factors that had always remained separate in the multi-national
polities of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951], 231).
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states.26 The Waste Lands response to the seismic shift from empire to
nations represents modernisms engagement with forces of global transformation.27
Simon Gikandi emphasizes a distinctive topology for reading that is
required for post-imperial sites of crisis, which are constituted by relations
between colonial pasts or imperial cultures and the unstable present of
a disappearing imperialism, that ill-defined space in which the experience
of empire and its long past seem to cast an aura which is also an anxiety over
contemporary culture.28 In The Waste Land, metropolitan borders cannot
be hermetically sealed off from postwar Europe, and a devastated and
ghostly London is a reflection both of the collapse of empires in Europe
and of the encroaching formation of national affiliations and homogeneous
nations across Europe. As a premature post-imperial polis29 haunted by
ghostly fragments of Europes imperial tradition, London is constituted as a
site of crisis by the violence of the passage from empire to nation making in
postwar Europe. The poems swarming hooded hordes30 underscore the
contested and spectral frontiers that accompany the reconstruction of territorial borders as empires transform into nation-states in Eastern Europe.
If The Waste Land consists in searching out the absence of the imperial
idea, as Marshall has noted, then surely its participation in the postwar
historical transition from a disintegrating transnational empire to insular
nation-state helps to explain the poems nostalgia for empire.31 David
26. Benedict Anderson, introduction to Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (New
York: Verso, 1995), 117.
27. Melba Cuddy-Keane points out that modernism contributes to an emerging global
consciousness in the early twentieth century and influences, as well as is shaped by, the transition from an era of hegemonic economic globalization to a modernity characterized by cultural globalization (Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization, Modernism/Modernity 10 [2003]:
540). A number of assertions have been made about the qualified nature of Eliots modernist
internationalism and its differences from cosmopolitanism. Sheldon Pollock regards Eliots
lifelong preoccupation with Virgils thought and poetry as a provincial vision of a European comprehensive universalism (Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History, in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol Breckenridge, Homi K. Bhabha, Sheldon Pollock, and Dipesh Chakrabarty
[Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002], 29). Rebecca L. Walkowitz points out that while
The Waste Land s wide-ranging cultural and literary coverage presents a certain internationalist
literary practice, the poem is devoid of a concern with those ethics of cosmopolitanism that
contest fixed conceptions of the local (Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation [New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006], 7).
28. Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 2.
29. Ibid., 9.
30. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 5.367, in The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism,
ed. Michael North (New York: Norton, 2001). All quotations of the original 1922 published
version of the poem are from this edition and are hereafter given parenthetically by section
and line number.
31. Marshall, England and Nowhere, 103.
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32. David Roessel, Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant, and Post-war Politics in The
Waste Land, Journal of Modern Literature 16 (1989): 171.
33. Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 189. In a similar vein, Anthony Julius points out that Eliot adopted antiSemitism to assimilate with European cultural and literary traditions: France showed Eliot that
a vigorous anti-Semitism could yet be thoroughly literary, and that it was compatible with cordial, salon relations with Jews. English anti-Semitism made available to Eliot a literary tradition
in which the adverse characterization of Jews was consistent with work of the highest quality
(T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form [Cambridge University Press, 1995], 16). In Burbank
with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism and the Idea of Culture, Modernism/Modernity 10 (2003): 126, Ronald Schuchard presents a contrasting view
about Eliots relations with anti-Semitism. Schuchard views anti-Semitic imagery in poems such
as Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar as primarily manifestations of the fragmented mind of Europe, its deracinated Jewish characters far removed from their Sephardic
origins and adrift in a post-Versailles diaspora (8). Schuchard reads the portrayal of Jewish
personages in Eliots poetry as evidence of Eliots awareness that the new foundations of postwar Europe were being laid on the corpses of Jews (10). Schuchards essay is part of a widely
publicized, two-issue debate in Modernism/Modernity on Eliots relations with anti-Semitism. See
Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 1 ( January 2003) and 10, no. 3 (September 2003).
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Eastern Europe. The Waste Land is populated with those troubled sites in
Europe whose material and cultural spaces can no longer be mapped in
terms of a prewar cartography. The poem moves from references to Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Switzerland, and Smyrna to the past and recent
empires of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna. London is represented through this critique of territorial nationalism; its spatial and temporal fixity is dismantled as fragmented inscriptions of classical European
pasts float across its surface. In his famous essay DissemiNation, Homi
Bhabha points out that a national feeling of oneness or citizenship within
the political society of a modern nation is fostered by the incessant mimeticism of the realist narrative in the novel that reflects the everyday life of
the nation.42 The thoroughly absurdist universe of the poem is replete with
spaces and landmarks of urban existence that have been wrenched from a
representational matrix of chronology and local and national community.
In one of the poems most vivid instances, the portrayal of London Bridge
as a daily thoroughfare for crowds undone by death, and as the site of a
conversation about a planted corpse expected to bloom and sprout,
amounts, as Franco Moretti brilliantly suggests, to a radical devaluation
of the realist conventions of an emplotment of the nation and its community.43 The surreal transformation of the commonplaces of community
and nation, such as a mundane conversation or the daily journey to work
(A crowd flowed over London Bridge [1.62]), collectively mark a setting
in which the alienated consciousness resists homogeneity and insularity.
The opening sequence of The Waste Land invites a political reading, as it
challenges the treatys principles for designating nationality, which had
created new and untenable political identities:
we stopped in the colonnade
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch
(Im not a Russian woman at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German).
(1.1014)
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nition be true, there never was a Roman republic, for the peoples weal was
never attained among the Romans. For Augustine, Ciceros De republica
grounded citizenship in the community of interests fostered by a common acknowledgment of true justice, which would turn a promiscuous
multitude into a people (19.21).48 This definition of citizenship could be
adapted by Augustine to understand fellowship in the city of God beyond
the citizenship conferred by shared territorial identity. Augustine mingles
the secular postulates of Republican citizenship with biblical testimony
on the spiritual experience of citizenship in the city of God.49 He cites
scriptural texts that testify to the existence of the heavenly city: In
another psalm [86:3] we read, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised
in the city of our God, in the mountain of His holiness, increasing the joy
of the whole earth. . . . From these and similar testimonies, we have
learned that there is a city of God, and its Founder has inspired us with a
love which makes us covet its citizenship (11.1).
In What the Thunder Said, the godly city in the mountain is juxtaposed to a postwar Europe enveloped in chaos, nationalisms curse of exile,
homelessness, and imperial disintegration, all mingling with Augustines
own categories of citizen and alien in the city of God: Who are those
hooded hordes swarming / . . . What is the city over the mountains / Cracks
and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers (5.36770). Eliot
is drawn to The City of God not simply because it presented an ethic of citizenship that helped him to expose the fragility of national identity. Augustines work, in its rapt portrayal of the distinctions between the city of spirit
and the city of material lusts, figures forth a connection between heavenly
citizenship and earthly exile that becomes the basis for human allegiance
to the city of God. As we shall see, Eliot adapts this very correspondence
between alienation upon earth and community in the city of God to represent both the dark repercussions of postwar nationalism in the Unreal
City (1.60) and what might constitute citizenship in the transcendent city.
It is important to take note of the account that Augustine provides of
the relationship between the civitas Dei and civitas Romae in order better to
understand The Waste Land s preoccupation with Augustines work. In the
first version of The Waste Land, an imagined identity that transcends the
limitations of territorial boundaries is captured in a line from Platos Republic : Glaucon / Not here, O Ademantus, but in another world.50 In the
48. Henry Bettenson and Gillian Rosemary Evans (introduction to Augustine, Concerning
the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Scowcroft Bettenson [New York: Penguin, 2003])
point out that Augustine adapts a Ciceronian definition of a commonwealth to make it fit a
Christian context (xlv).
49. Ibid., xliv.
50. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the
Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 31.
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cal infinitude of the city of God, which represents a challenge to nationalisms territorial imperatives.
Of the correspondence between the two cities, Augustine writes, the
heavenly and earthly, which are mingled together from the beginning
down to the end. While the earthly city worships false gods, she which
is heavenly, and is a pilgrim on the earth . . . is herself made by the true
God, of whom she herself must be the true sacrifice. The citizens of both
cities lead similar mortal lives amidst good and evil, until separated by the
last judgment (18.54). The parallel courses of the two cities signify that
Gods city lives in this worlds city, as far as its human element is concerned; but it lives there as an alien sojourner.54 The Waste Land attempts
to capture this Augustinian sense of the ordinary mortal who forsakes citizenship in the earthly city, becomes a stranger and pilgrim in it, and is
rendered a member of a heavenly society. The famous last stanza of Eliots
poem powerfully and eloquently captures the alien voices that try to transcend the coercive identities of a postwar world:
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi sascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidonO swallow swallow
Le Prince dAquitaine a` la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymos mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
(5.42633)
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gatorio, provide a remarkable basis for Eliots own emigre-pilgrim voice that
is shaped by forging connections with dead European poets who are closely
associated with the cultural imaginary of empire. Dantes gift of a double
vision of the temporal and the eternal is also owned by the speaker in
The Waste Land. However, the latter testifies to the disintegration of this
ideal of a universal imperial Christian culture in Europe. The Christianimperial cosmopolitanism expressed by Virgils vision of the temporal and
the transcendent is not the legacy of the speaker in Eliots poem, who
admits, I can connect / Nothing with nothing (3.3012). Something of
the same evaluation motivates The Waste Land s reference, in its last section, to the non-Italian poet Arnaut Daniel, who speaks with Dante and Virgil in his native Provencal tongue in canto 26 of Purgatorio : Poi sascose
nel foco che gli affina (5.427). Eliot was attracted to the cultural diversity
entailed in a meeting between poets of different linguistic traditions, and
he returned again to this scene of reunion in his essay Dante.
The political value of this aesthetic becomes clearer in Four Quartets,
where Eliot uses the theological framework of Dantean universalism to
represent England in terms of a universal design outside time.63 However, in The Waste Land, the fragments from Dantes texts should not be
confused with a totalizing transcendent imagined community. Rather, they
represent disembodied presences that intensify the poems defamiliarized
landscape of alienation, thus contradicting a nationalist impetus toward political or cultural or ethnic community. As we have seen, Eliots prose and
poetry repeatedly point to a correspondence between Dantes poetry and
antinationalism. The tensions between a representation of the transcendent value of Roman classicism, as a critique of liberal nationalism, and a simultaneous portrayal of its vulnerability and destruction, in the context of
postwar nationalism, point us toward the most interesting paradox of The
Waste Land. The modernist Eliot who had learned his philosophical lessons
from the neo-Hegelianism of F. H. Bradley was not content merely to show
how a mythical and classical European tradition threw light upon the contemporary. In other words, the poems portrayal of an extreme fragmentation of the classical mind of Europe also gives space to the very possibility
of an enduring European tradition that the larger structure and movement
of the poem attempts to counter.64
63. Paul Stevens, England in Moghul India, in Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations, 15001900, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 67.
64. In a similar account of The Waste Land, Michael North observes, It is as if Eliot could
only approach peace through conflict, as if he could only grasp linguistic unity as an implication of linguistic disorder, and, finally, as if he could imagine social solidarity only by extension
of social chaos. Disorder thus becomes not a fault to be overcome, but a necessary moment in
the process of arriving at order (Political Aesthetic, 104).
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Like the poems use of myth and classical allusions, the presence of the
self-conscious voice of the emigre poet challenges the sense of unitary identities fostered by nationalism. In a penetrating analysis, Rabate refers to
Eliot as a metic with a status distinct from that of the citizens whose voices he
attempts to record at the end of The Waste Land. No wonder that the
metic has not turned into a mimetic capable of imitating all the citizens
voices!65 Rabates employment of the term metic is highly appropriate
insofar as it focuses on the city as a locus of the metic s being and significance.66 However, the distinction between metic and citizens that Rabate
sees as applicable to The Waste Land as a whole is in fact undermined by the
poem, as we have seen in the context of Eliots use of The City of God.
The concept of polis, if we apply it to the sociocultural space denoted by
the poem, leaves a trail of confusing options. Does the poems polyphony
imbue the polis with an acknowledgment of differences made up of a collectivity of metics just like the poet? Or does the poem, precisely in recording
fragmented voices across eras and cultures, aspire toward a transnational
universalism like that of Augustines heavenly city? Although the poem prevents any central definition of universalism as symbolic of the Roman
empire, its universalismas signaled by the crowding of truncated European subjectivities67 from past and present in the city of Londonis both
a reminder and a distortion of the classical ideal of a universal empire.
Eliots position as a self-conscious metic acquires a particular significance in
light of the last stanza of the poem. The voices in the poems finale belong
to those who, despite their European heritage, are also metics unable to
read each other, rendered foreign by the political alienation of European
nations from one another. The disunified consciousness is that of Europe, and the poet is one metic among countless others. In the chaotic present of Europe, universalism and otherness cannot be separated, an echo of
Augustines vision of citizenship in the city of God during the disintegration
of the Roman empire. The poem thus approaches a state of universal
otherness68 in which citizen, foreigner, and metic are difficult to distinguish from one another.