[1] For details about Eliot’s life during the composition of The Waste Land, as well as a more confessional reading of the poem, see “The Horror! The Horror!” in Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999.
[2] Wilson, Edmond. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. Intr. Mary Gordon. New York: Farar, Straus and Giraux, 2004. 90-91.
[3] Raine, Craig. T.S. Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 78.
[4] Bedient, Calvin. He Do the Police in Different Voices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 156, ix.
[5] Wilson. Op. cit. 88-89.
[6] See “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet” in Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. and Intr. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975.
[7] Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention & Method. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 10.
[8] Playbill. Lincoln Center Festival. “I’ll Go On.” July 19, 2008.
[9] Commenting on the section of the poem that begins “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow,” Bedient notes that the style is “not so much a pastiche of biblical style as a biblically shaded modern style, history-spanning.” Bedient, Op. cit. 43. Gordon goes further: “To reach through The Waste Land to the sermon that haunts it, transforms the reader—any reader. Literacy is not necessary, for it’s a poem best heard. The rhythms of the Bible beat behind it, speaking to us subliminally with prophetic power… .” Gordon. Op. cit. 149.
[10] Mayer, John T. “The Waste Land: Eliot’s Play of Voices.” Critical Essays on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Ed. Lois A. Cuddy and David H. Hirsch. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991. 274.
[11] “When appetites had been satiated and everything of value removed, the ruins of Carthage were leveled to the ground. A plough was then drawn over the site, salt thrown in the furrow and a curse pronounced that neither crops nor houses should ever rise again.” Bagnall, Nigel. The Punic Wars: Rome, Carthage, and the Struggle for the Mediterranean. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 320.
[12] Plutarch. Makers of Rome: Nine Lives by Plutarch. Trans. and intr. by Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: Penguin, 1965. 150.
[13] Raine. Op. cit. 82.
[14] Bedient. Op. cit. 70. My emphasis.
[15] United States Department of Health and Human Services. National Institute of Mental Health. Anxiety Disorders: Panic Disorder. National Institute of Mental Health. (NIH Publication No. 06-3879) Accessed online <http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/anxiety-disorders/nimhanxiety.pdf> [My emphases]
[16] Gordon. Op. cit. 171. My emphases.
[17] Miller, Jr., James E. T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. 304. [Emphasis in original]
[18] Ibid. 305.
[19] Ibid. 304.
[20] Eliot, T.S. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. and Intr. Lawrence Rainey. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale, 2005. 19.
[21] Ibid. 79.
[22] Ibid. 79.
[23] Ibid. 78.
[24] Frye, Northrop. “Unreal City.” Critical Essays on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Ed. Lois A. Cuddy and David H. Hirsch. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991. 141.
[25] Bedient. Op. cit. 29.
[26] Miller. Op. cit. 131.
[27] Ibid. 118.
[28] “In the various accounts that have been written about the attack on Galliopoli, the battle field was as much in the water as it was on land, especially when it became clear that the troops would have to be withdrawn. Verdenal might well have been tending the wounded as they were heading off the beaches that would carry them away.” Ibid. 119
[29] Ibid. 120, 128-31.
[30] Ibid. 135.
[31] Compare too the speculation that Emily Dickinson’s poem, Victory Comes Late—,was perhaps occasioned by the death of her family’s friend Frazer Stearns, “killed in battle on March 19, 1862, at Newberry, North Carolina (a Union Victory).” Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. 492. For a consideration of Dickinson’s poem in the context of the Civil War, see my essay “Enough of Your Yankee Bloodshed” in The Straddler. SpringSummer2008.
[32] Gordon. Op. cit. 148.
[33] Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Penguin, 2003. 108, n1.
[34] Maude, Aylmer. “The Later Work of Tolstoy.” The Bookman: A Journal of Literature and Life. Vol. XI, No. 1 (1900): 360. Accessed online <http://books.google.com/books?id=lE4DAAAAYAAJ&printsec= titlepage &source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PRA3-PA360,M1>
[35] Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. and Intr. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 25-26, n15.
[36] Ibid. 15.
[37] Shaw, David W. Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 1. The epigraph which opens this volume is from Eliot’s essay “In Memoriam.”
[38] Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. and Intr. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 18-19.
[39] Gordon. Op. cit. 142.
[40] Balakian, Peter. Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields: The Evolution of His Poetry. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1989. 130.
[41] Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. and Intr. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 16.
[42] Chinitz, David E. T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 20.
[43] Ibid. 21-22. My emphases.
[44] Eliot, T.S. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. and Intr. Lawrence Rainey. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale, 2005. 72.
[45] Bedient. Op. Cit. 131.
[46] Indeed.
[47] Such a thing, of course, would not even be possible, as any number of literary scholars would be only too happy to point out while dozing. Even pre-modernist visions like those presented in Victorian novels are themselves not ever wholly synthesized and complete representations. Nonetheless, they do present less fragmentary, and more cohesive, representational manifestations.
[48] Eliot, T.S. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. and Intr. Lawrence Rainey. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale, 2005. 108.
[49] Not everyone agree with this interpretation, of course. See, for example Dodds, E.R. “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex.” Greece & Rome 13.1: April 1966. 37-49.
[50] Her tragedy, of course, arising out of the conflict between her duty to the state and her duty to her family. But Creon is a despot, and so there really is no conflict of duty. Her tragedy is simply the tragedy of so many others. Doing the right thing in the face of the state’s illegitimate proscriptions against so doing.
[51] Sophocles. Antigone. Eds. David Green and Richmond Lattimore. Trans. David Green. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 202.
[52] Ousby, Ian. The Road to Verdun: World War I’s Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. 7.
[53] Gilbert, Martin. The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006. xvii.
[54] Eliot, T.S. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. and Intr. Lawrence Rainey. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale, 2005. 108.
[55] Said. Op. Cit. 10. While not necessarily wrong in this case, Said is extreme in precluding other possibilities with this claim. That is, there is something funny and ironic about the mock-heroic use Joyce makes of the epic frame, even if he is not wholly lamenting a lost ideal. This issue deserves more discussion, but for my purposes, I will simply note that the strict equivalences Said sees in Ulysses (“Odysseus is like Bloom, Telemachus like Daedalus, Ithaca like Eccles Street, Chapter 18 like Chapter 1, and so on.”) is not of any particular use when thinking about Tiresias in The Waste Land, because, as I note elsewhere, Tiresias appears in The Waste Land. Tiresias as…Tiresias?
[56] “gossip, n.3” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. <http://dictionary.oed.com>.
[57] “camp2, v. tr.” American Heritage Dictionary. 4th ed. 2000. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 268. Follow too this labyrinthine and associatively evocative exploration of the term by way of the Oxford English Dictionary: “camp, v.3 a. trans. To make (something) ‘camp’ (see camp a.); esp. in phr. to camp it up, to use exaggerated movements, gesture, etc., to overact. b. intr. To be ‘camp’; to be or behave like a homosexual.” [OED’s emphasis] As for “camp, (a.) (and n.5),” The OED says this: “Ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. <http://dictionary.oed.com> [My emphasis]
[58] Bedient. Op. cit. 75.
[59] Esslin, Martin. The Field of Drama. London: Methuen, 1987. 84, 86-87.
[60] As if further evidence of The Waste Land’s dramatic appeal need be adduced, the actor-director team of Fiona Shaw and Debra Warner staged a one-woman production of The Waste Land in 1996 and 1997 in several cities including London and New York. The production was, for the most part, well-received, though The Financial Times wrote a cranky review which, while probably unfair in general, did evince a familiarity and knowledge of the poem when it complained of the production’s missing the “central voice of Tiresias.” See Macaulay, Alastair. “Out of Place in a Waste Land.” Financial Times 27 Dec 1997. Lexis Nexis Academic. <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/>
[61] Esslin. Op. cit. 28-29.
[62] For a brief discussion of the transforming (and, perhaps, transformative) architecture of the London of Eliot’s time, see the paragraph in Rainey’s introduction in Eliot, T.S. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. and Intr. Lawrence Rainey. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale, 2005. 11.
[63] Cf. “[P]oets had to negotiate not only revolutions in aesthetic representation, but were also intensely aware of the literal bodily disfigurements and psychological traumas caused by the First World War… .” in McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 10.
[64] Bedient. Op. cit. 121
[65] Sanders, Charles. “The Waste Land: The Last Minstrel Show?” Journal of Modern Literature 8.1: (1980). 27-30. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/38313087>[My emphasis]
[66] Sanders, Charles. “The Waste Land: The Last Minstrel Show?” Journal of Modern Literature 8.1: (1980). 27-30. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/38313087>[My emphasis]
[67] Ibid. 30.
[68] Ibid. 34-35. [Sanders’ emphasis]
[69] Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” Critical Inquiry 9.4: Jun 1983. 686, 688-89. 15 Aug 2008 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343378>
[70] Chinitz. Op. Cit. 44-45.
[71] A term I take from Wilson, who used it to describe how literary movements thrive “in the teeth” of their predecessors. Wilson. Op. Cit. 10. (The precise quote is: “What really happens, of course, is that one set of methods and ideas is not completely superseded by another; but that, on the contrary, it thrives in its teeth… .”)
[72] Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Vintage, 2004. 223-25.
[73] Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1990. 86.
Esslin. Op. cit. 232-33.
Esslin. Op. cit. 232-33.
[74] On women, see, for example, Gordon or Bedient (or even McCabe). Op cit. Or just about any work on Eliot. On Jews, see, most famously, Julius, Anthony. T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, where Eliot’s prejudice is baldly presented. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003. But see too, Strauss, Walter A. “The Merchant of Venom? T.S. Eliot and Anti-Semitism.” South Central Review, 13.3/4: Autumn-Winter, 1997. 31-44. <http://jstor.org/stable/3190206>. Strauss, while acknowledging and lamenting Eliot’s anti-Semitism, argues that it should not been seen to have “shape[d]” the entirety of his “artistic quest.” That is, Julius has a lot of valid things to say about Eliot’s anti-Semitism, but he overreaches in his depiction of the entire Eliot oeuvre as its product. A very favorable review of Julius’ book by Michiko Kakutani makes a similar point: “[I]in trying to suggest that anti-Semitism somehow overshadows or infects Eliot’s entire oeuvre…Mr. Julius oversteps himself.” Kakutani, Michiko. “Was Eliot Anti-Semitic? An Author Says he Was,” New York Times 04 Jun 1996. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res= 9401E7DB1F39F937A35755C0A960958260>
[75] Gordon. Op. cit. 188.
[76] Engle, Gary D. This Grotesque Essence. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1978. xxvi-xxviii.
[77] “’For on one occasion, I myself saw, with my own eyes, the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a cage, and when some boys said to her, “Sybil, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.”’” Eliot, T.S. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. and Intr. Lawrence Rainey. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale, 2005. 75.
[78] See, for example, and perhaps most famously, Said. Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness.” Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. 19-30.
[79] Eliot even sends up Tarot cards, burlesquing and inventing new ones (the drowned Sailor and the blank card) for his purposes. Bedient. Op Cit. 54, n60 (citing Grover T. Smith).
[80] “We feel in…writers like Eliot a desire to believe in religious revelation, a belief that it would be a good thing to believe, rather than a genuine belief. The faith of the modern convert seems to burn only with a low blue flame.” Further, “[h]is moral principles seem…stranger and more authentic than his religious mysticism—and his relation to the Anglo-Catholic Church appears largely artificial.” Wilson. Op. cit. 101, 102.