Opening Acknowledgments: Eliot’s Endnotes
0.2. TSE: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.”
ELIOT’S ENDNOTES will be interspersed throughout these annotations as they occur, without headings except to credit TSE. Some of these 52 endnotes are terse, begging for more reference, and some expository, offering more immediate assistance. This first note sheds light on two big anthropological influences, Jessie Weston and, more opaquely, James Frazer.
JESSE L. WESTON serves as a guide to the Grail Legend through two books, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge, 1920) (0.2, 46, 321.5, 378, 388, 425) and The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913) (0.2, 34). She also is credited as a Tristan and Isolde translator (76.5)
JAMES G. FRAZER, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic & Religion, 3d Ed (1914) (0.2, 0.4, 0.5, 46, 55, 98, 247, 378) is Eliot’s primary source for his interest in renewal and restoration. See also Pausanias, Description of Greece (180 CE, tr. Frazer 1898), for more on Eliot’s epigraphic muse, the Sibyl at Cumae (0.5).
ANTHROPOLOGY, the study of humanity across cultures and time and discipline, was reaching a new level of appeal in the early 1920s, thanks in part to the works Eliot cites here. Eliot will refer to anthropology again in his introduction to Tiresias (218).
THE GRAIL LEGEND (8, 31, 46, 201, 209, 266, 388 and 425) is best summarized by Weston herself. In Quest, she wrote: “In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life) has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions about the Grail.” This is expanded upon in Ritual: “...the story postulates a close connection between the vitality of a certain King, and the prosperity of his kingdom; the forces of the ruler being weakened or destroyed, by wound, sickness, old age, or death, the land becomes Waste, and the task of the hero is that of restoration.”
RENEWAL AND RESTORATION, through revegetation and the effects of spring, is the theme of Frazer, Golden Bough, which considered how ancient fertility cults and ritual sacrifice have influenced our modern culture. Volumes V & VI of this work, which Weston, Ritual also gave a nod to, offers a two part study of Adonis, Attis and Osiris, respectively the Greek, Phrygian and Egyptian gods of vegetation who were said to live and die annually. This theme will be revisited generally (1, 2, 51, 71, 141, 185, 197, 210 and 266) and more specifically through the Grail legend’s focus on the Fisher King, named in two of Eliot’s endnotes (46, 425) and making several other implicit appearances within the poem (182, 425).
ELUCIDATION, a term used twice in Eliot’s first endnote, alludes to a poem briefly referenced in Ritual called The Elucidation, anonymously written as a prologue to Chretien de Troyes, Perceval, le Conte de Graal (ca 1190). The poem, just over 400 lines in length, is about the Grail legend generally, with similar focus on the Waste Land and the Fisher King. Dateline: 1922
Dateline: 1922
0.3. 1922 is the year of The Waste Land, and Eliot insisted on adding this as an unparenthetical part of the title in publications after the first year runs. We are, therefore, urged to consider the times: the world was still hurting from its first Great War (61), yet moving swiftly towards modernization (256). It was a working world (66) and an urban world (376) with a growing population (56) that seemed to struggle to maintain its grasp of history (264), art (419) and even reality (60). It was also an increasingly global culture, with east and west starting to move closer together (308).
PUBLICATION: The Waste Land made its debut in three rounds in 1922, first in October in the inaugural issue of The Criterion, a British magazine founded by Eliot, then in The Dial, an American periodical, and then as a U.S. book published in December by Boni & Liveright. It appeared in book form in the U.K. in September 1923 through Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.
REVISIONS: The poem went through minor edits with each publication. It is set here to the revised text of T.S. Eliot, Poems, 1909-1925 (Faber) with only a few departures. A miscount on the reference lines has been corrected (347), and two typographical fixes have been made, both which would be reflected in later editions: a superfluous quotation mark has been deleted (131), and the German word Od’, sans umlaut, has been changed to Oed’(42).
NOTHINGNESS, EMPTINESS AND BROKENNESS is the pervading tone of The Waste Land (22, 40-42, 119-126, 123, 173, 177, 303-305, 385, 389, 409, 410, 417 and 427), and the scrivener’s attention to “Oed,” or “Öd” is significant: taken as part of a line from Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (42), the German word means “waste,” one of many variant echoes of the poem’s title. And yet, even in a waste land, there is the chance for redemption and rest. Consider Isaiah 34:9-14 (tr. John Nelson Darby, 1890), which may have been an additional influence to the poem’s title:
“And the torrents thereof shall be turned into pitch, and its dust into brimstone; yea, the land thereof shall become burning pitch: it shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; ...And he shall stretch out upon it the line of waste, and the plummets of emptiness. ...And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in her fortresses; and it shall be a dwelling-place of wild dogs, a court for ostriches. And there shall the beasts of the desert meet with the jackals, and the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; the lilith also shall settle there, and find for herself a place of rest.”
THE WORK AT HAND: Work on this annotated edition began in 2012, initially in internet blogs in various installments and in evolving form, but this is the first print publication. It has been, it seems, endless work, with new allusions and possible influences revealing themselves at every turn. Readers are invited to give the editor no rest: send in any comments or revelations to javold@aol.com. That said, while discussions may abound and are certainly encouraged about the ongoing impact of The Waste Land, the present effort is purposefully limited to considerations of what may have inspired the poet, and not what his work inspired thereafter. That, indeed, might be an endless project.
0.4. ANNOTATIONS in this book are presented and cross referenced by line number, with interim numbers (e.g., 0.4) given to the title and sectional headings. All sources are cited in full in the first entry and by an abbreviated, italicized reference to the first cite in all subsequent entries. If not otherwise stated, “Eliot’s Main Library” (0.1) is the cross reference for the abbreviated cites. To all extents possible, sources requiring translations follow those that would have been available to Eliot in 1922.
OTHER EXPLANATIONS come from Eliot himself, through the endnotes he offered (0.2); through Letters he had written before and after the poem’s publication, as compiled in Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988) and Valerie Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923-1925 (2011); through the poem’s manuscripts and drafts, as compiled by T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, a Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot (1971) (referenced as F&T); and also through some of his own literary essays, identified as we go.
THE ESCORT CYCLE of Aeneas’s Sibyl, Virgil’s Aeneas and Dante’s Virgil, to which we might add Eliot’s Dante and our Eliot, was introduced by Frazer, Golden Bough, predicated with an illustration of J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834). Frazer called Turner’s painting a “sylvan landscape,” referring to John Milton’s “silvan scene” perspective of Satan viewing Eden (98). The painting, also featured in the 1856 H. Graves & Co. edition of Virgil’s Aeneid, is a scene taken from Aeneas’s search for a new home after leaving his war-torn city of Troy. Along the way Aeneas encounters the Sibyl, who agrees to act as his escort into hell. He hopes to find the ghost of his father there, but to enter he first must give Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, the bough of a golden tree that replenishes itself as branches are taken from it. Compare Virgil escorting Dante through the circles of hell in Inferno 1.130-135, and see also Shakespeare’s young prince following the ghost of his father in Hamlet 1.1.127-138.
WRITE NOT, BUT RELATE: Dante would indeed be one of Eliot’s prominent escorts, yet it is the Sibyl, not just by the epigraph (0.5) but by these words from Aeneid 6.116-119, who may have more immediately guided the poet:
“...Commit not thy prophetic mind
To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind,
Lest they disperse in air our empty fate;
Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate."
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| J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834) |
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* see note 0.1
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