Jayme Stayer is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago (USA) and has published in the fields of rhetoric, music, and modernism. His most recent books are Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in “Inventions of the March Hare” (Johns Hopkins 2021) and The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. V: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939, co-edited with Ronald Schuchard and Iman Javadi (Johns Hopkins, 2017), winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition. He is the past president of the International T. S. Eliot Society. For the academic year 2022-23, he is Visiting Fellow in Religion and Literature at Campion Hall, Oxford University, where he is researching his next book on Eliot and religious culture.

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Translating Gautier and Corbière into Eliot:

The Bridge Between “Prufrock” and the Quatrain Poems

 

My recent book, Becoming T. S. Eliot, uses a rhetorical methodology to explain how Eliot developed into a major poet, the author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In this talk, I extend the same rhetorical tools to the next stage of his development: the quatrain poems.

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The problem:  In 1913, Eliot stumbled across a rhetorical predicament in his poem “I am the Resurrection” (1913-14). He begins this poem with allusions to the Gospel of John. The poem continues, however, not in a scriptural vein but with a series of paradoxes: “I am the things that stop, and those that flow.” While not obvious allusions for Western readers, such paradoxes might be understood as familiar patterns of juxtaposition in lyric poetry. The inescapable problem does not assert itself until the final line: “I am the fire, and the butter also.” Given the domestic banality of butter in American homes, this final image seems to veer into Laforguean irony, but in reality, it is a serious allusion to a Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, which details the ritual practice of offering oblations with fire and ghee (clarified butter). Editorial notes have explained these facts since the poem’s first publication in The Waste Land Facsimile (1971), but Eliot’s 1913 draft has no such editorial apparatus. And so, in the gap between this tonal uncertainty and the author’s intention (is butter funny or serious, trivial or sacred?), a new and vexing rhetorical problem opens up. How does a poet cue an audience to recognize the import of an obscure allusion?

 

The solution:  For readers of The Waste Land, the solution is retrospectively obvious: there, multiple allusions to Western and Eastern sources, both obscure and obvious, are thrown together in the poem. And the Notes—now a canonical part of the poem itself—offer one way of tracking those sources, while scholarly annotation offers another way of making sense of obscure allusions. But how Eliot the poet (not Eliot the Notes-writer) got from the paralyzed stumble of “I am the Resurrection” to the assured coterie-style of The Waste Land requires a careful look at the years in between “Prufrock” and The Waste Land, namely the quatrain poems written in 1916-19. Here is where Eliot forged a new style indebted to Théophile Gautier and Tristan Corbière.

As is well known, Eliot adopted these French authors’ tight rhyme schemes, measured lines, and self-contained quatrains for his own poems of the late teens. More importantly for the later success of The Waste Land, Eliot embedded within his quatrain poems dizzying references that leap beyond any allusive trickery he had attempted before. What is less well understood about the quatrain poems is how Eliot managed to leave his audience behind. What enabled his former use of allusion (to well-known Western sources, such as Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible) to transform into an obscure use of allusion (not dependent on whether his audience would recognize the source). Without a clear understanding of this bridge period, we cannot understand how Eliot moved from the narrative-monologue form of “Prufrock” to the fragmented, allusive style of The Waste Land.