Seminar Instructor - Assist.

Eliana Ionoaia, PhD E-mail:

elianaionoaia@yahoo.com

T.S. Eliot The Waste Land (1922)

1. Remember Eliots statements from Tradition and Individual Talent- how do
they apply to his poem Waste Land? (Historical sense and legacy, Tradition and
canon, Impersonality, Originality and individuality)

2. Consider the Formal Features of Modernist Poetry --- open form, use of free
verse, juxtaposition of ideas rather than consequential exposition, fragmentation,
cultured poems (borrowings from other cultures and languages, use of allusions and
multiple associations of words), recreation/defamiliarization, shifts in perspective, voice
and tone, intertextuality, stream of consciousness and interior monologue,
unconventional use of metaphor, use of visual images in distinct lines, importance given
to sound to convey the music of ideas (alliteration and assonance) --- how do they
enhance the experience of the reader in dealing with this text?

3. What does the title of the poem suggest to a reader who has not yet
started the poem?

4. What is the role of the epigraph? How can it be contextualized?

Epigraph: Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi/ in ampulla pendere,
et cum illi pueri dicerent:/ ; respondebat illa: .

From the Satyricon by Gaius Petronius. Eliot (1971) gives this translation: I saw with my
own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: Sibyl,
what do you want? she answered: I want to die.

5. Does the final line in the first canto You Hypocrite lecteur,mon semblable,
mon frre! suggest any particular role for the reader? Or is it simply an
accusation?

6. How is the post-World War I western world imagined in the poem?

7. How is modern identity constructed in the poem? Is it a coherent identity?

How is individuality constructed?

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 Seminar Instructor - Assist. Eliana Ionoaia, PhD E-mail:
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ALLUSION
An allusion may be defined as the mention of the name of a real person, historical event, or literary
character which is not simply a straightforward reference (as in 'Hercules was an ancient Greek hero') but
which conjures up some extra meaning, embodying some quality or characteristic for which the word has
come to stand. So, we can describe a miser as a Scrooge, a strong man as a Hercules, a beautiful woman
as a Venus.1

POLYPHONY and HETEROGLOSSIA

Bakhtins work on carnival continues in his Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, where he also developed
the concept of dialogism, or, double-voicing. Applying to language in general and specific instances of
literary expression, dialogism means the co-presence of two voices in one. Awareness of co-present voices
may come about through study of rich multiple context the texts heteroglossia or, through an
awareness of subtle shifts of the presentation of voices drawn from a particular discourse in a literary text.
In the latter case, Bakhtin suggests that dialogic language functions as if in quotation marks; in other
words, each dialogic expression foregrounds that it is in a self-aware relationship, or tension, with another
voice. A good example is that of irony, where not only does a statement have two competing meanings,
but this double-voiced structure is deliberately aimed at a listener or receiver. If a text presents multiple
voices, including the authors or the narrators, without placing them in a hierarchy, then Bakhtin
suggests that we experience polyphony. Such a text is perceived as more democratic than those that
order speakers or voices according to hierarchical systems or ideologies; Bakhtins ideal polyphonic writer
is Dostoevsky.2

PASTICHE
Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate mode of postmodernist
culture. 'Pastiche', he writes, 'is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language;
but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the
satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have
momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.' 3

INTERTEXTUALITY
Structuralism, a critical, philosophical and cultural movement based on the notions of Saussurean
semiology sought, from the 1950s onwards, to produce a revolutionary redescription of human culture in
terms of sign-systems modelled on Saussures redefinitions of sign and linguistic structure. This revolution
in thought, which has been styled the linguistic turn in the human sciences, can be understood as one
origin of the theory of intertextuality.
To cite Saussure as the origin of ideas concerning intertextuality is a move not without its problems,
however. It is as viable to cite the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin as the originator, if not of the
term intertextuality, then at least of the specific view of language which helped others articulate theories
of intertextuality. Bakhtin, as we will see, takes a very different approach to language and is far more
concerned than Saussure with the social contexts within which words are exchanged.
If the relational nature of the word for Saussure stems from a vision of language seen as a generalized
and abstract system, for Bakhtin it stems from the words existence within specific social sites, specific
social registers and specific moments of utterance and reception. Since neither Saussure nor Bakhtin
actually employs the term, most people would wish to credit Julia Kristeva with being the inventor of

1 Delahunty ,Andrew, Sheila Dignen, and Penny Stock, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of Allusions. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
10 2001. P. vii

2 Lane, Richard J., ed. Fifty Key Literary Theorists. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 11-12

3 Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". New Left Review. P. 146.

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intertextuality. Kristeva, as we shall observe, is influenced by both Bakhtinian and Saussurean models
and attempts to combine their insights and major theories. 4

4 Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Pp. 11-12

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 Seminar Instructor - Assist. Eliana Ionoaia, PhD E-mail:
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The Waste Land

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere,
et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo. 5

For Ezra Pound

il miglior fabbro6

1. The burial of the dead.7

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing8
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
5 Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.9
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee10
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
10 And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,11
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch.12
5 Epigraph: For on one occasion I myself saw, with my own eyes, the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a cage, and when some boys said to
25 her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied, I want to die. This account is given by Trimalchio, a character in the Satyricon, by
Pentronius, a satirical novel written by the Roman writer Petronius in the first century A.D.

6 Dedication: the better craftsman in Italian. Eliot dedicates the poem to Ezra Pound with the phrase that registers Dantes tribute to
the Provenal poet Arnaut Daniel, who flourished between 1180 and 1200 in Purgatorio Canto XXVI from the Divina Commedia.

7 The Burial of the Dead: The Order for the Burial of the Dead prescribes the words and actions of a burial service within the Church of
30 England; the text appears in the Book of Common Prayer.

8 12: Critics often compare this account of April with the opening to the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
(1343?1400), which adopts a more conventional and cheerful treatment of spring.

9 7 [a little life]: Perhaps an echo from To Our Ladies of Death, a poem by James Thomson (18341882): Our Mother feedeth thus our
little life, / That we in turn may feed her with our death. The phrase is hardly unique since it occurs repeatedly in Christian writing
35 opposing the little life of man to the vast designs of God. In Thomsons, The City of Dreadful Night, the following lines make
reference to the same concept of corpses returning to the earth and feeding it, all of us being a part of the grand cycle of nature: This
little life is all we must endure, / The graves most holy peace is ever sure, / We fall asleep and never wake again; / Nothing is of us but
the mouldering flesh, / Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh / In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.

10 8 [Starnbergersee]: The German name for Lake Starnberger, located fifteen kilometers from Munich. Eliot visited the city in 1911.

40 11 10 [Hofgarten]: Court Garden in German, located in the heart of Munich and standing next to a tall arcade, the colonnade
referred to in line 9, beyond which one could find the Arcade Caf, situated within the Hofgarten.

12 12 [Bin gar keine Russin . . . echt deutsch]: I am not a Russian, I come from Lithuania, a real German (German).

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And when we were children, staying at the archdukes,

My cousins, he took me out on a sled,
15 And I was frightened. He said, Marie,13
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
20 Out of this stony rubbish? 14 Son of man,15
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images,16 where the sun beats,
17
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
25 There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),18
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;19
30 I will show you fear in a handful of dust.20
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
13 15 [Marie]: Eliot met the Countess Marie Larisch (18581940, illegitimate daughter of Ludwig Wilhelm, heir to the throne of
Bavaria, and Henriette Mendel, a commoner) who lived with Ludwigs sister, her aunt, who was Empress Elizabeth of Austria, thus
50 becoming a companion to the empresss son and heir to the throne, Archduke Rudolf.

14 1920 [What the roots . . . stony rubbish]: Perhaps an echo of Job 8:1617. He is green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth
in his garden. His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones.

15 20 [Son of man]: Eliots note cites Ezekiel 2:1. And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon they feet, and I will speak unto thee.
Thereafter son of man becomes the form in which God addresses the prophet Ezekiel.

55 16 22 [broken images]: Perhaps an echo of Ezekiel 6:4, in which God judges the people of Israel for worshiping idols: And your altars
shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols.

17 23 [And the dead tree . . . no relief ]: Eliots note cites Ecclesiastes 12:5, describing the evil days that come when men are old and
declining into darkness: Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall
flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about in
60 the streets.

18 26 [Come in . . . this red rock]: Perhaps an echo of Isaiah 2:10: Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust, for fear of the Lord or
of a more consoling prophecy in Isaiah 32:2: And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as
rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

19 2829 [Your shadow . . . rising to meet you]: the title character in the play Philaster by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (written
65 around 16081610), a prince unfairly dispossessed of his kingdom who is in love with Arethusa, daughter of the king, who had
dispossessed him. Rumours seem to point to her betrayal and he believes the accusations, longing to travel to some far place / Where
never womankind durst set her foot, a place where he will preach to birds and beasts / What woman is and help to save them from
youthat is, from women in general. There he will deliver a homily to the animals which will show How that foolish man / That reads
the story of a womans face / And dies believing it is lost forever. / How all the good you have is but a shadow / Ith morning with you and
70 at night behind you, Past and forgotten. (III.ii.132137) Eliot strips the amorous and gender-bound context of the lines and applies to
humans in general.

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Wo weilest du?21
35 You gave me hyacinths22 first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
40 Living nor dead,23 and I knew nothing,24
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.25
Od und leer das Meer.26
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,27
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
45 Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

20 30 Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return, as in the funeral service. A Handful of Dust became the title of Evelyn Waughs
novel from 1934.

21 3134 [Frisch weht . . . weilest du]: As Eliot notes, his quotation is from the opera Tristan und Isolde (1865) by Richard Wagner
80 (18131883), I.i.58. Fresh blows the wind / To the homeland; / My Irish child, / Where are you tarrying? (German). The scene opens on
a ship that is transporting Isolde from Cornwall to Ireland, where she is to marry King Mark. She is accompanied by Tristan, the kings
nephew. From the ships rigging, a sailors voice resounds with a melancholy song about an Irish woman left behind, which includes the
lines transcribed by Eliot. Later in the opera, Isolde decides to kill both Tristan and herself with poison; but her companion, Brangne,
substitutes a love potion for the poison, and the two fall hopelessly in love.

85 22 35 [hyacinths]: In Greek myth Hyacinth was a beloved companion of Apollo. When the two engaged in a discus-throwing contest,
Apollos discus inadvertently killed his friend. Where drops of Hyacinths blood touched the ground, a purple flower miraculously arose,
resembling a lily. Apollo inscribed his grief upon the flower, which was said to have marks which looked like the letters AI, ancient Greek
for a cry of woe. The story is told in Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 162219.

23 3940 [I was neither / Living nor dead]: Perhaps an allusion to Dante, Inferno XXXIV, 25. Dante recalls his state of mind when he first
90 saw Satan at the very bottom of the Inferno: Com io divenni allor gelato e fioco / nol dimandar, lettor, ch i non lo scrivo, / per ch ogni
parlar sarebbe poco. /Io non mor, e non rimasi vivo. This can be translated as: How chilled and faint I turned then, / Do not ask, reader,
for I cannot describe it, / For all speech would fail it. /I did not die, and did not remain alive.

24 40 [and I knew nothing]: Compare Job 8:9: For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a
shadow.

95 25 Reminiscent of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness and the description provided by Marlowe for London at the beginning of the
novella. The initial epigraph for The Waste Land, discarded by Eliot as urged by Ezra Pound, was from the same novella The horror!
The horror!, the last words uttered by Kurtz.

26 42 [d und leer das Meer]: Desolate and empty the sea (German). From Wagners Tristan und Isolde, III.i.24. Tristan is lying
grievously wounded outside Kareol, his castle in Brittany, tended by his companion Kurwenal. He will die unless Isolde can come and cure
100 him with her magic arts. Tristan wakes from his delirium; he is clinging to life only so that he can find Isolde and take her with him into
the realm of night. For a moment he thinks that he sees Isoldes ship approaching; but a shepherd who is watching with him pipes a sad
tune: Desolate and empty the sea.

27 43 [Madame Sosostris]: The name is obviously appropriate for someone who equivocates, or whose answer to every question is a
variant of so so. Not surprisingly, her friend is named Mrs. Equitone, a variant on the notion of equivocation. To learned readers the
105 name Sosostris may also recall the Greek work for savior, soteros, which survives in the English word soteriological, of or having to do
with the doctrine of salvation in Christian theology. For many years scholars also thought that her name was suggested to Eliot by a
character in Aldous Huxleys novel Chrome Yellow (1921), in which Mr. Scogan disguises himself as a gipsy fortune-teller named Sesostris
and,at the village fte, reads the fortune of a simple young girl whom he means to seduce. In a letter, dated 10 March 1952, Eliot had
said it was almost certain that he had borrowed the name from Chrome Yellow.

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With a wicked pack of cards.28 Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,29
(Those are pearls that were his eyes.30 Look!)
Here is Belladonna,31 the Lady of the Rocks,
50 The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant,32 and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
55 The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
60 Unreal City,33

115 28 46 [pack of cards]: The tarot deck consists of twenty-two cards, one unnumbered and the rest numbered through twenty-one, which
are added to a pack (British usage) or deck of fifty-six cards arranged in four suits (cups, wands, swords, and pentacles or pentangles).
Jessie Weston suggested that these suits were repositories of primeval symbols of fertility corresponding to the four Grail talismans, grail-
cup, lance, sword, and dish (From Ritual to Romance, 7779). Scholars have expended vast amounts of ink on establishing precise
connections between the tarot cards and Eliots use of them, even though Eliot, in his notes to the poem, admitted that he had little
120 familiarity with the tarot and had departed from it to suit [his] own convenience.

29 47 [the drowned Phoenician Sailor]: There is no such card in the tarot deck, but this passage is thought to anticipate part IV of The
Waste Land.

30 48 [Those are pearls . . . Look!]: From Shakespeare, The Tempest I.ii.399. The play begins with a storm scene and a shipwreck: young
Prince Ferdinand and others from the court of Naples come to shore on an unnamed island inhabited by Prospero, the former ruler of
125 Naples whose throne has been usurped by his brother Antonio, acting in concert with Ferdinands father, Alonso. At Prosperos behest the
storm has been created by Ariel, a magical spirit of the island who serves him. When Ferdinand laments his fathers supposed death he
is mistaken, for his father is still aliveAriel tries to comfort him with a song (396405): Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones
are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich
and strange. / Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell: / Burden. Ding-dong. / Hark! Now I hear themding-dong bell.

130 31 49 [Here is Belladonna . . . Rocks]: Belladonna is Italian for beautiful woman. There is no such card in the tarot pack.
Commentators have often urged that the phrase, the Lady of the Rocks, has overtones of a passage in the essay by Walter Pater (1839
1894) on Leonardo da Vinci in The Renaissance (1873). Pater discusses da Vincis painting La Gioconda, popularly known asthe Mona Lisa:
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secret of the grave; and
had been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants. But Eliot
disliked Paters prose style.
135

32 5152 [Here is the man . . . the one-eyed merchant]: The first two cards, the man with three staves and the wheel, are genuine tarot
cards, but the one-eyed merchant is Eliots invention.

33 60 [Unreal City]: The City is the name for the financial district in London, located just beyond the north end of London Bridge. The
140 area is home to the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, and the head offices or headquarters of Britains major commercial banks,
including Lloyds Bank in Lombard Street, where Eliot worked from 1917 to 1925. The London Bridge that Eliot knew was built between
1825 and 1831 to a design by John Rennie (17611821); it was dismantled in 1967 and replaced with the current structure. Eliots note at
this point invokes a poem by Charles Baudelaire (18211867), Les sept viellards (1859), which recounts a ghostly encounter in the
street that sets the pattern for the incident which follows in this portion of The Waste Land: Fourmillante cit, cit pleine de rves, / O
145 le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant! / Les mystres partout coulent comme des sves / Dans les canaux troits du colosse
puissant. John Goudge (1921 ) translates The Seven Old Men in Carol Clark and Robert Sykes, eds., Baudelaire in English (London:
Penguin, 1997): City swarming with people! City crowded with dreams! / Through the narrow back streets of this mighty colossus, / Like
the sap in a tree, a dark mystery streams, / And ghosts clutch a mans sleeve, in broad day, as he passes.

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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.34
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,35
65 And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,36
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth37 kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying Stetson!
70 You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!38
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, thats friend to men,
75 Or with his nails hell dig it up again!39
You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!40

34 6263 [so many . . . so many]: Eliots note cites Dante, Inferno III, 5557: such a long stream / of people, that I would not have
thought / that death had undone so many. As soon as Dante passes through the gates of Hell, he hears first sighs, lamentations, and loud
155
wailings (III, 22), then strange tongues, horrible languages, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse (III, 2527). In the gloom
he discerns a long stream of people. He asks Virgil, his guide in the underworld, why these people are here, andVirgil explains that in life
these did neither good nor evil, thinking only of themselves; like the Sibyl in the epigraph to The Waste Land, they have no hope of death,
and so abject is their blind life that they are envious of every other lot (III, 4648).
160

35 64 [Sighs . . . ]: Eliots note cites Dante, Inferno IV, 2527: Here, as far I could tell by listening, / Was no lamentation more than
sighs, / Which kept the air forever trembling. Dante has entered the first circle of Hell, or Limbo, and describes the sound that emanates
from those who died without being baptized, and who therefore must live forever with the torment of desiring to see God, yet knowing
that they never will.

165 36 66 [King William Street]: The thoroughfare (see Fig. 5) which runs from the north end of London Bridge directly into the City, or
financial district, of London.

37 67 [St. Mary Woolnoth]: The church, a neoclassical work designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (16611736), who was a prominent
architect in the early eighteenth century, was erected from 1716 to 1724 (see Figs. 6, 7). It is located at the intersection of King William
Street and Lombard Street; Eliot worked in the Lombard Street head office of Lloyds Bank (see Fig. 9), and to reach work had to pass St.
170 Mary Woolnoth every morning. By his time the church had already become a relic, isolated and dwarfed by the larger office blocks of the
Citys banks, since people no longer resided within the City and the church had lost its parishioners.

38 70 [Mylae]: A city on the northern coast of Sicily, now called Milazzo, off the coast of which there occurred a naval battle between the
Romans and the Carthaginians in 260 b.c., the first engagement in the first of the Punic Wars. The Romans won, destroying some fifty
ships, an early step in their battle for commercial domination of the Mediterranean.

175 39 7475 [Oh keep the Dog . . . again!]: Eliots note directs the reader to The White Devil (1612), a play by John Webster (c. 1580c.
1635). It dramatizes numerous acts of political and sexual betrayal, among which Flamineo murders his own brother Marcello. Their mother,
in act V, scene iv, sings a dementeddirge over Marcellos body (her song is given in italics, her spoken words in roman): Call for the robin-
red-breast and the wren, / Since oer shady groves they hover, / And with leaves and flowers do cover / The friendless bodies of unburied
men. / Call unto his funeral dole / The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole / To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm, / And (when gay
tombs are robbed) sustain no harm. / But keep the wolf far thence, thats foe to men, / For with his nails hell dig them up again. / They would
180
not bury him cause he died in a quarrel, / But I have an answer for them: / Let holy church receive him duly / Since hee paid the church
tithes truly. / His wealth is summed, and this is all his store: / This poor men get; and great men get no more. / Now the wares are gone, we
may shut up shop. / Bless you all, good people.

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190 40 76 [hypocrite lecteur! . . . mon frre]: Eliots note cites Au Lecteur (To theReader) (1855), the first poem in Les Fleurs du Mal
(Flowers of evil, 1857), by Charles Baudelaire: Cest lEnnui!loeil charg dun pleur involontaire, / Il rve dchafauds en fumant son
houka. / Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre dlicat,/ Hypocrite lecteur,mon semblable,mon frre!The South African poet Roy Campbell
(19011957) offered this translation of To the Reader in his Poems of Baudelaire: A Translation of Les Fleurs du mal (New York: Pantheon,
1952): Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams / Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother. / You know this dainty monster,
too, it seems / Hypocrite reader!You!My twin!My brother!
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