TWL I. The Burial of the Dead

[Kyle]

I'm a bit late to this, but my first thoughts on "April is the cruelest month": Throughout European history, spring marked the start of the military campaigning season. By WWI, you did have some continuation of hostilities through the winter, but some of the really big offensives started in late March/April after a January/February lapse. So that's some pretty serious cruelty, and it also speaks to why winter was something of a sanctuary.

[Laurel]

Interesting. Kyle. Thanks!

[Kathy]

April 19: OK City bombing, Waco fire, start of the Revolutionary War
April 20: shootings at Columbine
Not to mention an annual uptick of crime in our neighborhood.
I have noticed for years that there does seem to be something about the weather warming up after a winter of hibernation that invites trouble.

[[deleted user]]

The Gallipoli campaign --in which Eliot's friend was killed-- began in April.

[Zippy]

Patrice wrote: "Wow! So he really was a plagiarist! ;-) You'd think that Joyce would not have wanted to share his work at least until publication!"

So, when is it plagiarism and when is it simply an allusion? He's taken the Rhinemaiden's song from Wagner and lines from Shakepeare, Dante, etc. but only when it comes to his contemporary do we accuse him of actually stealing?

[Theresa]

He borrows something from a friend who has trusted him with an unfinished work in progress that the friend wants an opinion on? I don't know if I'd call it plaigerism but it is kind of inappropriate.

Some writers just don't read during periods of their lives when they are writing.

[Thomas]

Theresa wrote: "He borrows something from a friend who has trusted him with an unfinished work in progress that the friend wants an opinion on? I don't know if I'd call it plaigerism but it is kind of inappropri..."

Ulysses was published in serial form in a literary magazine called The Egoist before the book was published as a whole in 1922. Eliot was an assistant editor at The Egoist, so he actually proofread Ulysses in a professional capacity as it was being published in the magazine. I think that's why Joyce was surprised when he read The Waste Land -- he didn't know Eliot as a poet, he knew him as an editor at the Egoist.

Later on Eliot founded The Criterion, another literary magazine, which published parts of Finnegans Wake. If Eliot were guilty of plagiarism I doubt Joyce would have tolerated it, let alone continued to let him publish his work. On the other hand, Eliot had to work with Joyce and deal with Finnegans Wake, so perhaps that was punishment enough. :)

[Laurel]

Thomas wrote: "Theresa wrote: "He borrows something from a friend who has trusted him with an unfinished work in progress that the friend wants an opinion on? I don't know if I'd call it plaigerism but it is ki..."

Thanks, Thomas. Great explanation, ending with a smile.

[Theresa]

Thomas wrote: "Theresa wrote: "He borrows something from a friend who has trusted him with an unfinished work in progress that the friend wants an opinion on? I don't know if I'd call it plaigerism but it is ki..."

I was going by something Adele posted in msg 90 of this thread:

Joyce also sent Eliot sections in manuscript. He found them ‘superb’, ‘stupendous’, ‘truly magnificent’. Of ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ he wrote, ‘I have lived on it ever since I read it’ and of 'The Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Circe’ he wrote to Joyce, in May 1921, ‘I have nothing but admiration; in fact, I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it.’

Maybe they weren't friends exactly, but there seems to be some sort of trust.

[Theresa]

Maybe plagiarism is too strong a word. Yet Eliot does seem to have stolen Joyce's thunder by publishing his poem the same year as Ulysses. I think there are some issues of intellectual honesty worth considering.

[Laurel]

I would put aside thoughts of plagiarism. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy could assume that their readers knew Schiller and that their characters were alluding to him. Eliot assumed that his readers would know at least some of the works he was alluding to and that he would be drawing from the great tradition. This is literature, not a junior high history paper. Literature, even when the author is trying to break with tradition, has a dialogue with that which has gone before. No one writing serious poetry in England would get away with true plagiarism. The English knew their poets.

[[deleted user]]

Fascinating discussion about the use of allusions and direct appropriation from earlier authors. I am sure that deconstructionists like Derrida are not in favor with this group, but I found myself wondering how they would respond. I think the discussion demonstrates how impoverished their reading would likely be.

At the same time, I think that, so far, the conversation slightly begs another question. Beyond the reader's recognition and appreciation of the allusion, don't we also need to ask why s/he feels it is the best choice at the moment? Why is quoting Schiller preferable to coming up with one's own image? And is there a difference between when it is a character doing it and when it is the author doing it? Lastly, how is it different when the overuse of an allusion renders it its own word or cliché--as in so many from Shakespeare?

There really should be a term for this technique so that we do not fall down the rabbit hole of plagiarism. [The preceding sentence being an example of a poor use of the technique.]

[Kyle]

Zeke wrote: "Fascinating discussion about the use of allusions and direct appropriation from earlier authors. I am sure that deconstructionists like Derrida are not in favor with this group, but I found myself ..."

I think the term for art that draws too heavily on another's work would be "derivative". Or just poor/lazy writing, if you like :). It is the intent to conceal/deceive that defines plagarism for me. A well placed allusion will evoke the emotions/imagery/whatever from the original in a pithy way. A good author can take that in several directions - to jar the reader by presenting the idea in a strange context, to create a deeper texture by layering several allusions, to tie into a culture tradition/norm, etc...

[Thomas]

Laurel wrote: "No one writing serious poetry in England would get away with true plagiarism. The English knew their poets. "

Yes, I think what we see here is not plagiarism but as Kyle puts it, "the well placed allusion." It reminds me of what jazz musicians do when they quote from other songs and composers in the process of improvising on a theme. It's assumed that the listener will recognize the quote; otherwise the significance of it is lost. Puccini quotes from Japanese folk melodies and even the Star Spangled Banner in Madame Butterfly -- surely this is not "plagiarism". I think Eliot is doing a similar thing.

[Mary]

Patrice wrote: How do we know that "to be or not to be" was Shakespeare's line? When I read Plutarch I was shocked by how much Shakespeare had taken from Plutarch. I think it's a complicated thing but probably insoluble.

Maybe this is a legal question! ;-) "

There are legal aspect to it, to be sure, but there are ethical questions above and beyond that.

[Clarissa]

As has been mentioned, there is a constant dialogue that goes on within the arts across history. I've always seen Eliot as someone who is openly using allusions to other works and referencing other writers, he is a craftman weaving them altogether to make his own unique statement.

In contrast in the modern art world I'm always a little confused by Damien Hirst who appears to have made a fortune by copying other people's ideas and claiming them as his own:

http://www.stuckism.com/Hirst/StoleAr...

[Clarissa]

Everyman wrote: "Laurel wrote: "Why is April cruel?"

I'm not persuaded by Eliot's argument, if you can call it an argument. He seems to be intentionally countering the usual assumption, as in Chaucer, that spring..."

The first lines are the only ones I think I understand!
The sense that life is beginning again, but you are left behind, there is no rebirth or regeneration on a personal level. The world keeps going but you just get further away from the youth and joy of spring (and I suspect within 'The Wasteland' the sexual activity associated with the period).

Writing after Eliot, Larkin expresses a similar sentiment in The Trees:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

[Laurel]

Clari wrote: "Everyman wrote: "Laurel wrote: "Why is April cruel?"

I'm not persuaded by Eliot's argument, if you can call it an argument. He seems to be intentionally countering the usual assumption, as in Cha..."

I like that, Clari.

[Laurel]

Here is a good list of the materials to which Eliot alludes.

http://www.shmoop.com/the-waste-land/...

[Don]

We can't assume that every voice in the poem is Eliot. Luiz raised the question of whether there is a central (continuous) consciousness in TWL. It may be what we have is steams of multiple consciousnesses with recalled fragments of ragtime songs and Shakespeare Dante.

I have fragments passing through my mind, most notably songs, and I have learned to check these fragments to see if they somehow comment on my life. And maybe part of the torment of the people in TWL is that the fragments don't add up to, say, a meaning of life.

[Mary]

Remember that Eliot's working title was "He do the Police in Different Voices."

(That's a quote. From Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.)

[Laurel]

Mary wrote: "Remember that Eliot's working title was "He do the Police in Different Voices."

(That's a quote. From Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.)"

Right. I love that!

[Clarissa]

Don wrote: "We can't assume that every voice in the poem is Eliot. Luiz raised the question of whether there is a central (continuous) consciousness in TWL. It may be what we have is steams of multiple consc..."

Someone told me that you can't read 'The Wasteland' as a continuous work, it is, as you say, fragments of different voices. The question is whether you can find a uniting theme?

[Suzann]

Mary wrote: "Life and hope only bring comfort if you can take their demands. If you just wan..."

Could it be that man is out of sync with nature?Is the wasteland a representation of the sterility of man's spiritual life--distracted by materialism and oblivious to his/her interdependence with nature? Are any of the characters in the poem atuned to nature except the hyacinth girl? Her partner cannot speak and is "neither living or dead". He does not/cannot respond to the beauty of the hyacinths. Hyacinths, spring, love is a reminder of his failure, a cruel reminder. Tristan, wounded in a garden of flowers, lies unaided by late-arriving Isolde. Lacking the healing power and love of Isolde, Tristan contemplates his failure among the flowers, symbols of love and union, a cruel (April?) irony.

[Nemo]

Suzann wrote: "...Is the wasteland a representation of the sterility of man's spiritual life--distracted by materialism and oblivious to his/her interdependence with nature?"

Yes, there is that. The sterility of the Fisher King causes his land to be barren, just as the environmental problems today are a reflection of the human society.

[Ashley]

Thomas wrote: "Laurel wrote: "“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!."

Why is "Dog" capitalized?"

I wanted to look at this again:
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep that Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

In scrawled handwritten notes in my margins I have written that this is a reference to a mandrake, or a god that is only safely pulled out of the ground by a dog. Now, This dog is a friend to men who would be digging up the corpse of the hyacinth girl. So, I see the dog (or god, yes, because of the capitalization) as an opportunity for a second chance. Yet second chances can be cruel for those like myself and Prufrock. Afraid to disturb the universe, afraid to eat a peach.

[Kathy]

Clari wrote: "Writing after Eliot, Larkin expresses a similar sentiment in The Trees"

I love this, Clari. Though, interestingly, this doesn't answer the question either, does it:
"Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too"... So not that, but what it *is* is never addressed.

[Kathy]

Zeke wrote: " I am sure that deconstructionists like Derrida are not in favor with this group, but I found myself wondering how they would respond. I think the discussion demonstrates how impoverished their reading would likely be."

I'd like to hear more about this, Zeke. In what way do you think their reading would be impoverished?

[Clarissa]

Ashley wrote: "Thomas wrote: "Laurel wrote: "“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!."

Why is "Dog" capitalized?"

I wanted to look at this again:
"That corps..."

Eliot is referencing a line in John Webster's 'The White Devil' (a revenge tragedy about corruption) a character is lamenting 'the friendless bodies of unburied men' and says 'But keep the wolf far hence, that's foe to men,/For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/we...

And possibly it alludes to “Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.” Psalm 22 verse 20.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...

The reference to the play reflects the selfishness of men that Eliot sees all around him, Webster's work is full of the evil core of humanity and how it pervades all society.

Psalm 22 fits the poem, as it is details David's suffering, how people abuse him because of his faith, and possibly is a prophecy of Jesus's death on the cross. So would continue with the themes of rebirth and redemption, but paired with the horrible image of dog's eating corpses, which makes it all more complex and creates the sense that our bodies (and our souls?) are not safe even after we've died.

Why dog is capitalised must be mixed in with the allusions, but it is difficult to know why, I think all we can do is throw a few ideas around and see which we like best!

So the capitalisation of unusual words is used to indicate a concept, for emphasis, as a sign of respect, for stylistic reasons, or to give a common noun the value of a proper noun.

Doing a little bit of reading I've come across both the idea that it is capitalised to indicate that it refers to all dogs in general, and also that it shows that Eliot had a specific dog in mind, so take your pick.

Looking at this section the other unnecessary capitalisation I found is some of the Tarot cards, the Phoenicam Sailor and 'Unreal City'. All these are important to the themes throughout the poem and are repeated motifs.

Do you think the image of the Dog is central to what Eliot is trying to communicate?

He has capitalised the change of wolf to Dog from the Webster quote, maybe to emphasise the fact that in the modern world what was a wild animal associated with forests, is now a pet bred and domesticated by man, but still it digs up our bones. So it could be a symbol of how man's 'civilization' has failed, how our friend is still our enemy, because humanity is adrift in a spiritual waste land and cannot differentiate the good from the bad.

I hope some of this helps!

[Laurel]

Clari wrote: "Ashley wrote: "Thomas wrote: "Laurel wrote: "“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!."

Why is "Dog" capitalized?"

I wanted to look at this agai..."

Good thoughts, Clari! Perhaps also Dog is a personification of Nature red in tooth and claw.

[Thomas]

Clari wrote: "Psalm 22 fits the poem, as it is details David's suffering, how people abuse him because of his faith, and possibly is a prophecy of Jesus's death on the cross. "

Interesting stuff, Clari. This is an incredibly evocative section of the poem, but I keep coming back to the theme of resurrection. One reading of the "nails" is that they are the nails of the cross. Dog (God) with his nails (the cross) will dig up the corpse (Jesus, or perhaps Lazarus, or perhaps all of us) and it will sprout again to new life.

As Ashley said @138, "So, I see the dog (or god, yes, because of the capitalization) as an opportunity for a second chance."

[Don]

Laurel wrote: "Clari wrote: "Ashley wrote: "Thomas wrote: "Laurel wrote:"

Why is "Dog" capitalized?""

This could be a reference to the Egyptian god Anubis, with the head of a jackal. Though the son of Seth, he helped Isis, Osiris, and Horus in their struggles against Seth. Eliot recommends the Osiris books of The Golden Bough to explain the poem's symbols.

Osiris is murdered by Seth; Isis then finds the body, but before she can give it a proper burial, Seth steals the body and cuts it into 14 pieces which he hides all around Egypt. With helpers, including Anubis, Isis finds all the parts but the penis. She reassembles the body with a wooden penis, revives Osiris for a day and a night, and concieves Horus with him. Osiris becomes ruling god of the dead, and Anubis god of mummification. Isis and Osiris were absorbed into the Greek mystery religions.

Complicated, but it has the themes of burial of the dead, impotence, resurrection, and fruitfulness. Also, a mummification is a way to make a corpse not biodegradable, so that it will not sprout.

On a lighter note, I love the "different voice" Eliot uses in reading this section--reminds me of Monty Python.

[[deleted user]]

I enjoyed all those lines of thought.

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
(Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother!” )

And the quote Cheri posted: “Eliot is referencing a line in John Webster's 'The White Devil' (a revenge tragedy about corruption) a character is lamenting 'the friendless bodies of unburied men' and says 'But keep the wolf far hence, that's foe to men,/For with his nails he'll dig them up again”


I was leaning towards it being a condemnation of civilized man… since that last line is from the poem “The Flowers of Evil--- about sex and death and melancholy and corruption.

I thought Eliot was saying that man, like the wolf, by nature , is uncivilized. I thought Eliot was saying that modern man thinks he’s better, thinks he has tamed this nature, buried it deep, put it on a leash, like a dog, made it his friend. Even sex. All nicely civilized now. I thought he was saying that our wolf-nature isn’t buried very deep. That our surface, civilized dog-nature, if let go, would dig it up. I thought he was calling us all hypocrites.

[Don]

Adelle wrote: "I enjoyed all those lines of thought.

“I thought Eliot was saying that man, like the wolf, by nature , is uncivilized."

And what tames (not obliterates) nature is nurture, culture. Flashing-forward to the end, it is the fragments of our culture that he shores against his ruin.

And he has found a way to make the fragments, the fragmented state we live in, the hypocrisy, the sterility, the vulgarity, into a work of art, a whole, that has lasted at least 93 years.

[Nemo]

In other words, he/it has been mummified.

[Laurel]

Thomas wrote: "Clari wrote: "Psalm 22 fits the poem, as it is details David's suffering, how people abuse him because of his faith, and possibly is a prophecy of Jesus's death on the cross. "

Interesting stuff, ..."

So here's the resurrection we were looking for!

[Lily]

Thanks for all the insights, fellow readers! After a hiatus (vacation?) largely beyond the reach of Internet service and with the inter-library loan book retrieved before disappearing back to the offering library, I offer up on this altar to Eliot the following pigeon:

"The opening lines of 'The Burial of the Dead' contrast with the title in a way that alerts us at once to paradoxes of death and life that are to recur throughout the poem. The note is harsh but vital, the deployment of line and syntax accentuating the feeling of painfully stirring life: not 'April is the cruellest month, / Breeding lilacs out of the dead land, / Mixing memory and desire,' but

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring...

"'Winter kept us warm': the 'us' is general, all of us, and the next lines make it sound as if 'we' are vegetable life as much as human. But

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain;

- the 'us' is here suddenly human and particular (a particular group of people in Munich), suddenly and 'surprisingly': the reader is reoriented with a sudden enlivening shift. And the description that follows gives us European social life and a snatch of talk from a nostalgic aristocrat talking about her childhood and her nervous adult life (the nervousness there in the tone as well as in 'I read, much of the night'). It has been said that reading The Waste Land is like turning the tuning-knob on a powerful radio receiver and catching a succession of different voices (English, French, German, Italian, and later even Hindu) - voices out of Europe and the world; and though that exaggerates the fragmentariness it suggests something of the effect. But it also soon becomes clear that the voices all speak with variations of the same accent of despair." pp. 109-10

From: T. S. Eliot: The Poems by Martin Scofield

I especially like the first lines of the above, which demonstrate how just the parsing of the words into lines matters so much.

Also, while I am not certain about English spelling, as I transcribed this, I noted we are given "cruel-lest" rather than "cruelest".

[Clarissa]

Lily wrote: "Also, while I am not certain about English spelling, as I transcribed this, I noted we are given "cruel-lest" rather than "cruelest".e ..."

In British spelling it is 'cruellest', which is an interesting thing to pick up on for the American born Eliot to use. To you think there is any significance, Lily?

[Lily]

Clari wrote: "In British spelling it is 'cruellest', which is an interesting thing to pick up on for the American born Eliot to use. To you think there is any significance, Lily? ..."

Probably not, but with Eliot's layered use of language, who knows?

Sometimes these things are just fun for playing.

Postscript: Consider this re "tubers":

"Crawford even manages to track down the moments when Eliot first discovered images and individual words he would later employ in his verse. As a junior, for instance, he took a class on the Roman novel that included Petronius’s Satyricon; years later, the novel’s image of an undying Sibyl appeared in the epigraph of 'The Waste Land.' In Eliot’s own annotated copy of the novel, which Crawford examines, the poet glossed the Latin word for mushrooms, tubere in the text—a word that returns in 'The Waste Land,' where he writes of winter 'Feeding/a little life on dried tubers.'"

I posted a longer quotation from the article under resources. The source is there.