Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Where is the real T. S. Eliot? or, The Life of the Poet
- 2 Eliot as a product of America
- 3 Eliot as philosopher
- 4 T. S. Eliot's critical program
- 5 The social critic and his discontents
- 6 Religion, literature, and society in the work of T. S. Eliot
- 7 “England and nowhere”
- 8 Early poems
- 9 Improper desire
- 10 Ash-Wednesday
- 11 Four Quartets
- 12 Pereira and after
- 13 “Mature poets steal”
- 14 Eliot's impact on twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry
- 15 Tradition and T. S. Eliot
- 16 Eliot
- 17 Eliot studies
- A Select Booklist
- Index
9 - Improper desire
reading The Waste Land
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Where is the real T. S. Eliot? or, The Life of the Poet
- 2 Eliot as a product of America
- 3 Eliot as philosopher
- 4 T. S. Eliot's critical program
- 5 The social critic and his discontents
- 6 Religion, literature, and society in the work of T. S. Eliot
- 7 “England and nowhere”
- 8 Early poems
- 9 Improper desire
- 10 Ash-Wednesday
- 11 Four Quartets
- 12 Pereira and after
- 13 “Mature poets steal”
- 14 Eliot's impact on twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry
- 15 Tradition and T. S. Eliot
- 16 Eliot
- 17 Eliot studies
- A Select Booklist
- Index
Summary
When Ezra Pound read the manuscript of The Waste Land at the end of 1921, he objected to Eliot's epigraph from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899):
“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath -
”'The horror! the horror!'”
Pound argued that Conrad was not “weighty” enough for an epigraph, while Eliot, unsure about whether Pound objected to this quotation or to Conrad himself, responded that the passage was the most “appropriate” and “elucidative” he could find (Letters 1, pp. 497 and 504). Pound won out in the end, for Eliot replaced this quotation with the present epigraph from Petronius' Satyricon, a passage in Latin and Greek which in its ancient and mythic references could be said to present the reader with a much weightier, indeed, intimidating opening to the poem:
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σβνλλα τί θέλϵƪς; respondebat ilia: άΠοθανĭν θέλω.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot , pp. 121 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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