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4 - This man's gift: Shakespeare in Eliot's poetry

from PART II - ELIOT'S SHAKESPEARE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Neil Corcoran
Neil Corcoran
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

ALLUSION

Discussing the way the lines ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’ in The Waste Land transform lines from Dante's Inferno, Christopher Ricks says that ‘a great allusion is a metaphor, created not only out of pertinent likeness but out of pertinent unlikeness’. Marjorie Garber pushes a comparable perception further in the direction of the uncanny in a study of Shakespeare. What she says about quotation generally is itself so pertinent to Eliot's allusions to Shakespeare as to require lengthy quotation:

the use of quotation is itself always already doubled, already belated, since it cites a voice or an opinion that gains force from being somehow absent, authority from the fact of being set apart. Used always ‘in quotation’, as there and not there, true and not true, the real thing and yet a copy, the quotation occupies the space of a memorial reconstruction in the present plane of discourse. Notice that we put ‘in quotation’ in quotation marks … Quotation … is a use of history, since in a quotation tradition and authority are simultaneously instated and put in question. In the same way, a quotation is a ghost: a revenant taken out of context, making an unexpected, often disconcerting appearance – the return of the expressed. Thus Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most assiduous modern collector of quotations, writes that ‘Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions’. […]

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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet , pp. 90 - 120
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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