The Waste Land, as everyone knows, is a collage of allusions to texts in other languages, ranging from Greek and Latin to German, French, Italian, and even Sanskrit in the poem's dramatic conclusion. But although the main allusions have long been identified and their thematic import endlessly explicated and discussed, there is one question that has been oddly overlooked: when and why does Eliot cite a line or passage in the original and when does he translate it? Line 307, for example – ‘To Carthage then I came’ – is footnoted by Eliot himself as referring to St. Augustine's Confessions: ‘to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.’ In Latin, this sentence from Book 3, Chapter 1, reads, ‘Veni Karthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago flagitiosorum amorum.’ Why did Eliot render Augustine's famous opening words in English when, in line 431, he reproduced the reference to Arnaut Daniel in Dante's Purgatorio, ‘Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina’ (‘Then he dived into the refining fire’), in the original?

What determines the decision to translate? If we include the epigraph and dedication, there are, by my count, thirteen instances in which Eliot retains the original line or passage – a rather small amount in a poem of 433 lines in which every other line contains an English-language allusion to one literary text or another? I propose here to look at Eliot's foreign-language citations – the distribution is Greek-1, Latin-2, Italian-2, French-4, German- 2, Sanskrit-2 – more closely so as to try to understand when and why the original is retained and how successfully these foreign phrases function in the poem.

The facsimile edition of the The Waste Land, with Pound's annotations, provides us with what are probably the most important clues. When Pound, himself the master of citational poetry, was going through Eliot's manuscript, he did not delete a single one of Eliot's foreign-language passages; indeed, the ending of Part V (‘What the Thunder Said’), whose last seven lines contain a bewildering sequence of colliding fragments – beginning with the ‘Poi s’ascose’ cited above, followed by lines from the Pervigilium Veneris, Gerard de Nerval's sonnet, ‘El Desdichado,’ Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad – was left entirely intact.

The opening poem of Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), the only volume of poems in English that Beckett published as a distinct collection.

In October 1915, four months after Eliot's precipitous wedding to Vivien Haigh-Wood in a London registry office, Bertrand Russell wrote to the poet's mother, evidently trying to allay her fears about Eliot's marriage and career prospects:

Russell's remark was more prescient than he could have known: the year 1915 did prove to be a turning point in Eliot's outlook on poetry and poetics. The ‘vorticists’ to whom Russell alludes were members of a short-lived avant-garde group of poets and visual artists, led by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound: the latter coined the term ‘vortex’ as the ‘point of maximum energy, the radiant node or cluster … from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’. The Vorticist painters fused Cubist geometry with a Futurist emphasis on bodies and machines in motion: in the first issue of Lewis's Blast (July 1914), a 12-inch by 9-inch periodical whose texts were printed in oversize bold black type and bound in bright puce-coloured wrappers, England is ‘blasted’ for its allegiance to a stultified Victorian past, not to mention the country's cursed climate and other evils.

Primarily a novelist – the author of Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), and other well-known novels – D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was also a highly original poet, whose early lyrics not only found a wide audience but won the praise of such unlikely fellow-poets as Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound, and Conrad Aiken. ‘Mr. Lawrence’, declared Pound in a review of Love Poems and Others (1913), ‘almost alone among the younger poets, has realized that contemporary poetry must be as good as contemporary prose if it is to justify its publication.’ The ‘prose’ in question – perhaps Lawrence’s own – was praised for its vivid imagery and uncanny accuracy of observation: Pound’s friend Ford Madox Ford, then editor of the influential English Review, remarked that only an especially ‘observant’ writer would call a short story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, for ‘The majority of people do not even know that chrysanthemums have an odour.’

Yet by the time of Lawrence’s untimely death from tuberculosis in 1930, the reaction had set in. In 1927, T. S. Eliot, who denounced Lawrence’s treatment of sexual love, declared that ‘Mr. Lawrence is … a natural and unsophisticated demoniac with a gospel … [his characters] seem to reascend the metamorphoses of evolution, passing backward beyond ape and fish to some hideous coition of protoplasm.’ And by 1935, the American critic R. P. Blackmur characterized Lawrence’s poetry as suffering from the ‘fallacy of expressive form’ – the fallacy that ‘if a thing is only intensely enough felt its mere expression in words will give it satisfactory form, the dogma … that once material becomes words it is its own best form’. This charge – an absence of adequate form to contain the poetry’s often overwrought, if not hysterical, content – has continued to dog Lawrence ever since.

On June 15, 1915, a sweltering day in Manhattan, Marcel Duchamp, then twenty-eight, arrived in New York on the SS Rochambeau. “I am not going to New York, I am leaving Paris,” he announced to his American artist-patron Walter Pach. Like a number of other European avant-gardists, Duchamp was escaping the Great War - a war in which both his artist brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, were already serving and in which the latter was to be killed in 1918. Duchamp himself was exempt from military service because of a heart murmur, but the very idea of war struck him as insane: “I must say,” he later told an interviewer, “I admire the attitude of combating invasion with folded arms.”

But it was not only the war that brought Duchamp to America. Increasingly, he had come to dislike the Bohemian “artistic life” of Paris, where scores of artists worked in small suburban studios vying to emulate the great Cubist painters. America, as he told an interviewer in September 1915, was different:

In 1915, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had enlisted in the cavalry in late 1914, wrote a poem called “Guerre” (”War ”), which begins:

To Anglophone readers, whose touchstone for the poetry of the GreatWar is the lyric of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, or Siegfried Sassoon, the apocalyptic sentiments expressed in Apollinaire’s “War” must seem all but incomprehensible. Did les jeunes de la classe 1915 really believe that the war would provide entrance to a Brave New World in which the heights of the heavens and depths of the earth would be sounded?

Surveying the items listed in Derek Slade's excellent bibliography of Roy Fisher, one cannot help speculating as to the curious turn in this poet's American reception. Why, to put it baldly, has Fisher's poetry, published and praised as it was in American avant-garde little magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, all but disappeared from their counterparts of the 1980s and 1990s? Does this disappearance mean that Fisher has become an Establishment figure or that his work is too insular for an American audience? Surely not, for as John Kerrigan observes in his review of Fisher'smost recent collection, The Dow Low Drop (1996), ‘His refusal to strike marketable postures … has kept himrelatively unknown’ in England as well. But if Fisher is, as Kerrigan suggests, an experimental, antithetical poetic figure,why hasn't his work caught on in such successors of Kulchur (which published ‘Then Hallucinations’ in 1962) or Montemora (which brought out ‘Diversions’, 1-20 in 1977), as Sulfur or Temblor or Talisman, or in the countless little magazines, both in the US and in Canada, associated with Language poetry?

The American response would not be especially significantwere it not that it had been so enthusiastic. Reviewing six Migrant pamphlets for Kulchur (Summer 1962), Denise Levertov declares that ‘what English poetry desperately needed was a shot in the arm from American poetry…. Now at last something is happening’ (pp. 4-5). And she singles out Fisher along with Michael Shayer as ‘England's hope’. Fisher's City is compared to William Carlos Williams's Paterson and praised for its comparable ‘nakedness’, its ‘directness of feeling’ (p. 8). Again, in an interview of 1977, Jed Rasula compares The Ship's Orchestra to John Ashbery's Three Poems: ‘Both books,’ he remarks, ‘… have an extreme sort of concentration which is like wringing water out of a wash cloth’. And the discussion moves on, as is typical of Fisher commentary in the 1970s, to the question of the poet's relationship to the American ‘open form’ poetics of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and Black Mountain.

The link between Fisher (along with Tom Raworth, Gael Turnbull, Michael Shayer and a few others) and American counter cultural poetics was first made by Donald Davie in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972), although Davie subordinated that link to what he took to be a more powerful, if subconscious, similarity between Fisher and Philip Larkin and, via Larkin, to Hardy.