General Editor’s Note

In 1975, a contributor to the short-lived T. S. Eliot Review characterized the state of Eliot scholarship as an incomplete mosaic, with “the primary materials for research … either in jumbled disarray or missing entirely.” While a glut of memoirs “written by men Eliot assiduously avoided” flooded the literary marketplace, serious scholars lacked the “fundamental research tools” to fill in the gaps in the fragmentary tableau: “No ...

Aristophanic Structures in Sweeney Agonistes, “The Hollow Men,” and Murder in the Cathedral

When T. S. Eliot began his foray into drama in the early 1920s, he wrote according to a schema derived from F. M. Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy. Thus, Sweeney Agonistes is subtitled “Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama.” While scholars often mention Cornford’s book, it has rarely been consulted in-depth. Structural clues from “The Fragrment of an Agon” in conjunction with Cornford’s ideas suggest that Doris, and not Sweeney, is the protagonist of the play. An underexplored aspect of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is its interrelated genesis with Sweeney Agonistes and what this might suggest of an Aristophanic structure for “The Hollow Men.” Richards performs this thoroughgoing analysis and argues that Attic Old Comedy as delineated by Cornford remained with Eliot into the 1930s. Richards then applies Cornford to explain otherwise enigmatic structural elements of Murder in the Cathedral.

T. S. Eliot, Phenomenologist

In the middle of the twentieth century, British idealist philosophy was facing a slow but unmistakable decline in popularity. It would be replaced with a hard-nosed, literalist form of language philosophy. One could no longer take The Idea for granted; an analysis of form was required to defend metaphysical claims. Early twentieth-century philosophy had circumnavigated questions of form: How did language attach itself to the world? How did meaning ...

Prufrock, Belated

“Prufrock” is justly celebrated as a revolutionary poem. But as I was rereading John Berryman’s claim—in “Prufrock’s Dilemma” (1960)—that modern poetry begins with its famously jarring third line, I found myself wondering: What about the first couplet? Did the revolution in modern poetry arrive two lines late?...

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

The presence of Virgil in The Waste Land is at least as pervasive and important as that of Dante. Although the poem has no overarching structure or narrative, it has a world, a geography, a cast of characters, and a sense of human experience that is most like the world of Virgil: it begins and ends in the world of The Aeneid, overlaps with Eliot’s own experience during World War I, and incorporates—in its images—a background of Roman and Carthaginian history. While Eliot wrote little on Virgil until his late major essays, “What is a Classic” (1944) and “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951), The Aeneid is present much earlier, in The Waste Land, as a journey with sorrow, loss, betrayal, and war. The Waste Land is not only more Virgilian than is still usually acknowledged, it reveals very early Eliot’s lifelong developing conception of a Latin Europe.

Transmuting F. H. Bradley: T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

The second essay cluster examines the annotations made in books from Eliot’s personal library, recently made available to researchers for the first time. In the first essay, Callison offers the first extensive reading of Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Callison notes a stylistic shift in Eliot’s critical prose, particularly in the philosophical essays written at Harvard and during Michaelmas term 1914 at Oxford, while he was studying and annotating Bradley. In addition to examining Eliot’s annotations and their relevance to his developing philosophical mind, Callison uses these annotations to explain Eliot’s retrospective assessment of Bradley’s “style” as the means by which the philosopher most indelibly influenced the literary and cultural critic. In the second essay, Pierce offers a phenomenological reading of Eliot’s view of language, showing that a phenomenological “suspension” of definite reference is central to his poetic style. Examining annotations from Eliot’s library, Pierce attributes this tendency to Eliot’s reading of Edmund Husserl.

Poetry (June 1915)

The cover of Poetry (June 1915) named eight contributors. Their names took markedly different forms. In order of appearance: Ajan Syrian, Arthur Davison Ficke, Bliss Carman, Dorothy Dudley, Georgia Wood Pangborn, William Griffith, Skipwith Cannéll, and T. S. Eliot. The last of these namings is more than distinctive, it is unique....

The American Legacy of “Prufrock”

The essay cluster brings together leading Eliot and modernist scholars to commemorate the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Together, they reexamine the circumstances surrounding the poem’s original publication, recontextualize its allusions, and reconstruct its reception over the past century. Patterson examines the American roots of Eliot’s ironic love song, often considered through the lenses of European poetry and philosophy. Dickey returns to the poem’s early reception to challenge the now established narrative that “Prufrock” shocked early readers, showing how often his contemporaries associated the poem with Decadent or Aesthetic precedents. Ricks returns to the poem’s first publication in Poetry Magazine to understand how the poem’s first readers would have encountered the text and how this context would have mediated the reader’s experience. Cuda situates Eliot’s poem vis-à-vis current discourses on late modernism and demonstrates how lateness and belatedness feature centrally in the poem. Finally, Schuchard examines Eliot’s literary and religious allusions, showing that his allusive method is in full force even in his first poetic masterpiece.

Dull Tom-Tom’s Absurd Prelude: Ludic Modernism in Early T. S. Eliot

This article argues for a new understanding of the poetry that Eliot wrote under the influence of Jules Laforgue. The author qualifies the critical consensus on the play of Laforguian irony by tracing Eliot’s development of a more complex view of the ludic, one that anticipates the contemporary theorist Mihai Spariosu’s description of play as alternately “rational” or “prerational.” This article examines select poems written from 1909 to 1912, culminating with “Portrait of a Lady” (eventually published in 1917), showing how Eliot mimics Laforgue’s rational play, only to qualify it against a nascent conception of its prerational counterpart. The paper elucidates Spariosu’s schema as it argues that Eliot’s recognition and exploitation of rational and prerational play is both a strategy of a specifically “ludic modernism” and also a ground for Eliot’s later poetry.

Astride the Dark Horse: T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department

In his official resignation from Lloyds Bank, Eliot expressed to his employer one regret: “I should have liked to see the Intelligence Section a reality—it has never been more than an aspiration of a few persons, including myself.” The foremost duty of the Intelligence Department was the production and distribution of Lloyds growing stable of internal publications. In this essay, Seybold introduces and analyzes a subset of these publications, including the geopolitical collage that Eliot compiled from 1922 to 1924 and a monthly staff magazine called The Dark Horse. These publications offer an explanation for why Eliot remained with Lloyds against the wishes of his peers and patrons, and are fossils from what was, at least temporarily, a symbiotic relationship between the ethos of literary modernism and interbellum finance capitalism.