T.S. Eliot

Abstract

If Lewis’s visually grotesque bodies are a way of grasping the world beyond sight with the same intensity that vision confronts us with, then T.S. Eliot’s poems are grotesque for similar reasons. Eliot turns the human inside out, with visuality that Chao identifies as essential to poetry, laying bare the minds and lives of his modern savages, human-animals and marionettes. Despite this, Eliot has never been explicitly connected to the tradition of the grotesque. Criticisms have tended to portray him instead as an abstract, metaphysical and religious poet, interested in the soul, the fragmentation of the mind and the stream of experiences and memories within it. This absence of the grotesque, is surprising, given the considerable amount of critical material outlining Eliot’s interest in anthropological and degenerative bodies, both mythical and modern. Eliot has never been publicly viewed as a comedic or obscene poet, or indeed as a gothic poet, and criticism usually neglects these aspects of his work. His earlier poems, unpublished works and juvenilia nevertheless show a strong concern with embodied life—and the forces that control it—in much the same manner as Lewis. Clowns, marionettes and animal-human hybrids fill Eliot’s poems—bodies formed, in part, by his encounters with modern urban life. In this chapter, I argue that Eliot’s poetry employs the grotesque body to give voice to his uneasy position within the city as a faceless member of the crowd, produced by social and technological changes: an immigrant separated from his homeland and past.

Eliot’s “Juvenile” Poems and the Tradition of the Grotesque Body

If Lewis’s visually grotesque bodies are a way of grasping the world beyond sight with the same intensity that vision confronts us with, then T.S. Eliot’s poems are grotesque for similar reasons. Eliot turns the human inside out, with visuality that Chao identifies as essential to poetry, laying bare the minds and lives of his modern savages, human-animals and marionettes. Despite this, Eliot has never been explicitly connected to the tradition of the grotesque. Criticisms have tended to portray him instead as an abstract, metaphysical and religious poet, interested in the soul, the fragmentation of the mind and the stream of experiences and memories within it. This absence of the grotesque, is surprising, given the considerable amount of critical material outlining Eliot’s interest in anthropological and degenerative bodies, both mythical and modern. Eliot has never been publicly viewed as a comedic or obscene poet, or indeed as a gothic poet, and criticism usually neglects these aspects of his work.¹ His earlier poems, unpublished works and juvenilia nevertheless show a strong concern with embodied life—and the forces that control it—in much the same manner as Lewis. Clowns, marionettes and animal-human hybrids fill Eliot’s poems—bodies formed, in part, by his encounters with modern urban life. In this chapter, I argue that Eliot’s poetry employs the grotesque body to give voice to his uneasy position within the city as a faceless member of the crowd, produced by social and technological changes: an immigrant separated from his homeland and past.

I have elected to focus on works that trace the tradition of the body in Eliot’s works, the development of his use of the grotesque, how he employs grotesque bodies, the reasons for their repeated reoccurrence in his work, and how they change over the course of the First World War. Work done on The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Sweeney Agonistes,’ by Maud Ellman and Gabrielle McIntire for example, can be easily re-read in terms of the grotesque, whereas the ‘Bolo’ verses are instead classically grotesque, referencing traditional carnivalesque imagery rather than adapting it to modern(ist) uses. I will begin with Eliot’s early works, collected in Inventions of the March Hare (1909–1917, 1950), to discover how and why Eliot employs such bodies in his poetry. I will then move to Ara Vos Prec (1920) to discuss the ‘Sweeney body’ and its role in Eliot’s presentation of modernity and individuality, acting as a connection between the past and present, individual and the crowd. Finally, I will look at ‘Preludes’ (1917) and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1917), in which the city itself becomes a body upon which is marked the degeneration, collapse and mental disturbance Eliot perceived in urbanised life. Mind, body, crowd and city become interchangeable body-parts which illuminate Eliot’s dissatisfaction with contemporary (artistic) society, and the individual’s reduction to something disposable and replaceable within it.

We might first observe how Eliot imagines the body in two early poems—‘Convictions (Curtain Raiser)’ (written 1910), later collected in Poems Written in Early Youth (1950), and ‘Humouresque (After J. Laforgue),’ published in the Harvard Advocate in 1910 at the age of 22—to determine what he is doing with them. ‘Convictions (Curtain Raiser)’ begins by imbuing unliving marionettes with life, for ‘Among my marionettes I find / The enthusiasm is intense!’ (IMH, 11.1–2). Dead matter is given consciousness and personality by the Eliot-narrator. Yet their consciousness is his consciousness. ‘My marionettes’ (IMH, 11.1) become ‘my Paladins’ (IMH, 11.14): the repeated ‘my’ reinforces the narrator’s possession of both their physical bodies as ‘marionettes,’ and their personality as ‘Paladins’—which they gain only by partaking in the narrator’s narrative. Yet this possession is destabilised by the second-to-last line: ‘My marionettes (or so they say) / have these keen moments every day’ (IMH, 11.28–9). Eliot renders this line deliberately ambiguous by the line-break. The brackets may refer to the next line—implying hearsay from an unknown third party—or to ‘My marionettes.’ However, in both cases the sudden, playful and informal aside of ‘(or so they say)’ implies the narrator is either not privy to what his marionettes do, or that they may not really be ‘my’ marionettes.

Eliot’s poem thus works to undermine its own language of control and possession; the poem, like the marionette’s body, is given life by its puppeteer, but then exceeds that control by taking on a life of its own. By the poem’s fourth stanza, it is easy to forget that the ‘lady with a fan’ is a puppet at all:Verse

Verse […] the man! One who appreciates my soul; I’d throw my heart beneath his feat. I’d give my life to his control. (IMH, 11.23-6)

The stanza rhymes ‘soul’ and ‘control’ to draw attention to this “forgetting” of automatism. This marionette has no ‘soul’ to give, and has already found a ‘man’ to ‘give [her] life to his control’: namely, the puppeteer. This rhyming joke points out the lack of distinction between personality and impersonation; both people and puppets are automatons putting on a human act to serve a narrative. To use Bergson’s language, ‘our attention is suddenly recalled from the soul to the body,’ drawing attention to the mechanically-determined nature of human action and appearance.² Indeed, the line ‘Await an audience open-mouthed / At climax and suspense’ (IMH, 11.6–7) refers ambiguously to both the audience and the puppets. Both have mouths open in attention, hanging in ‘suspense’ from the puppeteer’s literal and narrative wires. But unlike Bergson, and much more like Lewis, there is no clear distinction drawn between the human body with a soul, and the marionette body without one. Powerful individuals manipulate both with ease.

Marionettes in Eliot’s ‘Humouresque’ are therefore ‘haranguing spectres’ (CP, 237.14) with faces ‘Pinched in a comic, dull grimace’ (CP, 237.8), not unlike Lewis’s tyros.³ The laughter elicited by this mechanical body is ‘(Feebly contemptuous of nose)’ (CP, 237.18) which, I argue, aligns them with Eliot’s poetic conceptualising of the ‘audience’ of both his imagined puppet-shows, and of his poetry. This marionette is foolish and irrational, contemptuous of the materiality of the ‘nose’ even though, being a marionette, it is solely a material body itself. This puppet body, rather than commenting on human mechanism and controllability as in ‘Convictions (Curtain Raiser),’ instead possess ‘Logic a marionette’s, all wrong’ (CP, 237.21), alien to the puppeteer. The ‘dead’ (CP, 237.1) or ‘deceaséd’ (CP, 237.5) marionette can no longer be manipulated correctly—its broken, failed body resists its puppeteer’s direction. In the final lines of the original manuscript of the poem, the word ‘life’ draws attention to the marionette’s uncanny ability to “die” and haunt the narrator:Verse

Verse A life! – But where would it belong? And after all – what Masque bizarre! (IMH, 325.23-4)

These lines were later changed to:Verse

Verse A hero! – Where would he belong? But, even at that, what mask bizarre! (CP, 237.23-4)

By changing ‘life’ to ‘hero,’ echoing the ‘Paladins’ of ‘Convictions (Curtain Raiser),’ Eliot’s poetic language eliminates his earlier suggestion that marionettes are imbued with a vital life force, named ‘it.’ Through such absence of life, Eliot suggests that human beings are as much dead matter as the marionette, which has now become a more human ‘he’ through its constructed narrative persona as a ‘hero.’ Personality and humanity are edited to appear like hollow and mechanical constructs in this newer revision. Similarly, in changing ‘Masque’ to ‘mask,’ the positive connotations of the masquerade to manifest the human-animal body is stripped away, leaving only an act of disguise and subterfuge.⁴ The animated marionette thus represents humanity as a constructed façade, which very strongly resembles Conrad’s Razumov, whose disguise grows more real than his self. Humans, like puppets, take on narrative roles to meet the unthinking demands of material existence; but this role-play-impersonation threatens to supplant the puppeteering mind behind it. These two poetic images of self-possession and loss are intermingled, both derived from an anxiety over self-identity, as we shall see throughout Eliot’s corpus. His grotesque bodies trouble our straightforward understanding of self-identity and its (dis)connection from bodily identity.

Why did Eliot turn to the bodies of the puppet, clown and comedian to express these ideas? In 1906, Eliot went to study at Harvard, and his time in Boston introduced him to both civilised city life and the ‘primitive’ past.⁵ Eliot took an anthropology course by George Santayana, entitled ‘Ideals of Society, Religion, Art and Science in their Historical Development,’ demonstrating an early interest in the relationship between past and present human behaviour. His essays over the period express a distinctly anti-Darwinian, anti-progressivist view of human development, in which the primitive and ancient survive alongside—and even inside—modern society.⁶ During his undergraduate years, he discovered Arthur Symons’ book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which introduced Eliot to the flâneurs, dandies, lunar ladies and Pierrots of Jules Laforgue. In his later discussions of Marie Lloyd and Sarah Bernhardt, Eliot demonstrates a sincere interest in music halls, acting and ‘low-brow’ popular culture, all of which permeate his early Boston-era poetry. In translating the embodied, material style of the music hall into a highly bodily poetic form, Eliot found in popular and celebrity culture, and the low, folk, carnivalesque and comic bodies of the music hall, a microcosm of society; an embodied means of comprehending the unseen dynamics between the individual and society.

For example, during Eliot’s year abroad from 1910 to 1911, he attended Henri Bergson’s Paris lectures, which suggests at least his passing knowledge of Bergson’s theories of mechanical comedy. By 1913, however, his thought had evidently turned away from Bergson: in a 1913 paper on ‘Politics and Metaphysics’ Eliot describes Bergson’s ‘fluid psychological world’ as ‘living among shadows’ and states clearly that this ‘is not so.’⁷ Eliot implies that bodily life is ‘at least as real’ as subjective experience, demonstrating a turn towards the physical, bodily forms of social interaction that he saw in the music hall. Over this period, Eliot also discovered Baudelaire, who provided another explanation of the comedian’s ‘rôle.’ Employing a ‘superiority’ theory of laughter similar to that which Bergson would later propose—in which laughter is elicited by the incongruence between the subject’s perceived superiority over a fallible, weak object—Baudelaire suggests that laughter is a sign of ‘infinite wretchedness in relation to the absolute being, […] infinite greatness in relation to the beasts.’ Laughter is an ambivalent superiority, denied and haunted by humanity’s bestial, bodily origins. The comedian’s job is to expose ‘the moral degradation of fallen humanity,’ the incongruence between humanity’s rational mind and animal body, ‘depicting the human slide toward the bestial.’⁸ The comedian reflects the audience’s bodily existence back at them, making them aware of this fallibility through his observational awareness of his own body. Therefore, according to Baudelaire, the ‘grotesque [is] the Absolute comic,’ referring to both ‘Rabelais, who is the great French master of the grotesque’ and ‘Theodore Hoffmann.’⁹ The hybridisation of the thinking and unthinking, the human and the animal, the gothic and the carnival, is jointly humorous and unsettling in its revelation of base human nature.

Although we cannot know exactly what Eliot read, he potentially references Baudelaire in ‘Suite Clownesque,’ written in 1910 while he was studying at Harvard. Although it was only published later in Poems Written in Early Youth (1950), the poem provides insights into Eliot’s fascination with carnivals, clowning and the music hall. This is accomplished primarily through the bodies of clowns, marionettes, and the Baudelairian flâneur comedian, the ‘firstborn child of the absolute / Neat, complete’ (IMH, 32.iii.21–2) in the poem’s words.¹⁰ The comedian, like Lewis’s Bestre, becomes an almost universal body: his ‘belly [is] sparkling and immense’ (IMH, 32.i.14), he ‘ponders’ with ‘legs apart’ (IMH, 32.i.13) as he ‘interrogates the stars / interrogates the audience’ (IMH, 32.i.16–17). Eliot imagines this Baudelairian comedian as having ‘the world at rights’ (IMH, 32.i.21), a giant like Pantagruel: enveloping the earth and stretching to heaven to ‘interrogate’ it physically with his body. The body exposes the world and heaven to the audience by acting it out, inscribing the abstract upon the body: a ‘self-embodied role, his soul / concentred in his vest and nose’ (IMH, 32.i.24–5).

This image of the ‘nose’ is evidently important to Eliot’s poetic imagery, for it is repeated constantly:Verse

Verse Here’s the comedian again With broad dogmatic vest and nose Nose that interrogates the stars, Impressive, sceptic, scarlet nose; The most expressive, real of men, (IMH, 32.i.5-9).

The nose is something which juts out from the human body, and thus seems to be independent of or exceed it, just as the male genitals do.¹¹ Indeed, the repetition within the stanza renders the nose self-sufficient by rhyming it with itself. Eliot uses rhymes to comically and unexpectedly call back to earlier parts of the text, altering previous meanings with new associations. This obscene ‘scarlet’ nose ‘interrogates the stars,’ a line repeated twice which does not rhyme with any other line in their respective stanzas. That the ‘stars’ do not rhyme with the ‘men,’ ‘nose,’ ‘comedian again’ or the ‘jellyfish impertinent’ isolates them from these ‘impertinent’ material body parts, representing the distance of idealism from the materialism Eliot imagines. The nose draws attention to its presence with its obscene bodily sounds and sights, performing a nasal assault on these high, isolated stars, replicated by the very sounds of the next line: ‘Impressive, sceptic, scarlet nose.’ The vowel sounds in this line produce a descending pitch, from the front, close ‘i’ sounds of ‘Impressive,’ to the more open and middling ‘e’ of ‘sceptic’ and ‘a’ of ‘scarlet,’ to the furthest back ‘o’ of the ‘nose.’ This front to back vowel movement acts out the obscene nose’s degradation of the heavens down to the body. The sibilance ties these vowel sounds together with the ‘stars’ and produces the comical hissing, sniffing, snorting sound of a stuffy nose. By making the nose obscene, Eliot defamiliarises it to the reader, forcing their contemplation of the body and reminding them of the forgotten nose between their eyes, ever-present in our vision but rarely acknowledged. Rather than producing an abstract idea of the body, the reader feels their own body reflected back at them by the vivid, obscene, attention-grabbing images of the comedian’s body.

In much the same manner as observational comedy, Eliot’s grotesque bodies draw attention to the strange, forgotten aspects of everyday life. The comedian becomes a point of connection between the bodily and abstract, ‘interrogating’ the audience’s assumptions of normality by exposing their unthinking, ever-shifting ‘jellyfish’ (IMH, 32.i.10–11) bodies and minds, constantly formed and reformed in response to external pressure. Eliot’s comedian is imagined as ‘all philosophy and art’ (IMH, 32.i.15) and, like both, his bodies challenge normality and common sense in a bid to reach a deeper, more meaningful and ‘real’ reality. Unlike the mindless marionettes who are ‘contemptuous of nose,’ the comedian’s nose interrogates our assumptions about subjectivity. By juxtaposing this uncensored, snorting and ‘scarlet nose’ with ‘The most expressive, real of men,’ Eliot builds a picture of a human who is made real, not by personality, but by physical expression and bodily motion. To be ‘expressive’ and ‘real’ is to be bodily. The only human thing is the human body: the mental realm is ephemeral, detached from human reality. Eliot’s comedian therefore acts in a similar way to his marionettes; as an attack on the reality of “personality”, suggesting we are nothing more than our bodies, acting out pre-ordained roles. Eliot's interest in this unthinking, material body persisted throughout his career, including in ‘Suite Clownesque.’¹²

That Eliot thought of himself as a philosopher-comedian has been well established. While at Harvard, Peter Akroyd argues he was often seen as possessing ‘a streak of buffoonery in his temperament, just as he sometimes displayed characteristics of both a clown and actor.’¹³ Eliot probably inherited his interest in puppets from Arthur Symons, who both introduced him to the highly influential Laforgue and published an essay entitled ‘An Apology for Puppets’ (1909) following in much the same tradition as the previously discussed Kleist. In August 1923, Eliot outlined what he found attractive in the marionette body in a letter to the playwright and puppeteer Alfred Kreymborg, a contemporary of Djuna Barnes also from New York’s Greenwich Village:

I have not yet told you how much I enjoyed the Secker puppet plays […] By the way, how do you make a puppet? As I think I told you, I want to build a small theatre […] and preordain every move and gesture and grouping. How do you make faces for the little devils?¹⁴

Eliot professes here a desire for absolute control over his actors as a means to express his own artistic vision. This is very similar to Lewis’s Vorticist views on machines. Indeed, when Eliot met Lewis in 1914, Eliot was in many ways already a Vorticist. ‘Suite Clownesque’ is echoed in Wyndham Lewis’s unfinished satire ‘The Crowd Master,’ published in the second edition of BLAST alongside Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and ‘Preludes.’ In the story, the American poet who writes ‘The Crowd Master’ shares many qualities with Eliot. Because America is ‘like all your Pasts and Present dumped into one age together,’ the American poet is thus ‘the vulgarest thing on Earth,’ whose imagination ‘sees caverns of savages. […] These nightmares are Reality.’ This was a statement apparently directed at Eliot’s anthropological, vulgar works, such as the ‘Bolo Verses,’ many of which Lewis refused to publish.¹⁵ For Lewis (and Eliot), the mindless crowd is a ‘gay Carnival of Fear, psychologically.’¹⁶ To join the crowd is to die, for ‘Death is, however, only a form of Crowd. It is a similar surrender,’ echoing the ‘dead’ matter of the ‘deceaséd’ (CP, 237.5) marionette, which surrenders its movements to the puppeteer, only to escape his control and impose its own movements upon him.¹⁷

Eliot similarly views the music-hall audience as mindless bodies to be controlled. Where he differs from Lewis, however, is in his own relationship with that crowd revealed by ‘Suite Clownesque.’ In the poem’s second section, characters are ‘Perched on stools in the middle of the stage:—’ (IMH, 32.ii.8) where ‘they linger shaking a finger’ (IMH, 32.ii.7) at the audience. The middle rhymes of ‘linger’ and ‘finger’—seen also in ‘(Who would venture to be a dissenter)’ (IMH, 32.ii.4)—lend a sense of comedy to their movements and actions. These are farcical, simplistic and short limerick-like rhymes which compress and exaggerate the action of the poem. The internal rhyme makes these actions mechanical and repetitive by drawing the line back into itself, pulling the reader backwards. This mechanism suggests we might understand these characters as puppets. The play depicts ‘Seven little girls run away from school’ (IMH, 32.ii.11), performed ‘Each with a skirt just down to the ancle [sic] / Everybody is under age’ (IMH, 32.ii.1–2):Verse

Verse Now for a peek about the town. Here’s a street car—let’s jump in Oh see the soldiers—let’s descend. When you’re out for an afternoon Find somebody with money to spend. (IMH, 32.ii.9-16)

Akroyd suggests that, for Eliot, bodily actions were more important than introspection.¹⁸ The ‘girls’ debase the Laforguean flâneur—philosopher of the urban world—in their mechanical rigidity. They are concerned only with finding ‘somebody with money to spend,’ of seeing ‘the soldiers,’ of riding the ‘street car.’ Yet even these voices are not their own, but ventriloquised by a puppeteer who gives them personality and movement. There is little sense of intentionality in the bodily actions of this stanza. The “—” separating sight and action in the play conveys a sudden intrusion or change in thought, making the action seem rapid and impulsive. The dash thus embodies a literal ‘dash’ onto the street car and off to the soldiers, leaving little time for thought. The repeated ‘let’s’ creates an assembly-line uniformity of action. The girls ascend in the same manner they descend, on the spur of the moment, lacking intentionality.

The marionettes are quite literally ‘crowd-minded,’ for they must call upon the audience to make decisions on their behalf:Verse

Verse Hello people! Yes indeed we're fearfully vexed; People, hello! In trying to construe this text: ‘Where shall we go to next?’ (IMH, 32.ii.17-22)

The marionettes are ‘perplexed’ and ‘fearfully vexed’ because they are unable to understand the ‘text’ of the play—namely their own actions, their simplistic ‘-exed’ rhymes present the simplicity of their thoughts and actions—what Conrad calls ‘the text mouthed somewhere out of sight by invisible men.’¹⁹ Yet in the final stanza, this absence of thought spreads from the puppets to the audience. Both are merely ‘so many entities’ (IMH, 32.i.19) who ‘continue in suspense’ (IMH, 32.i.18) like marionettes from their strings, an image repeated from ‘Convictions (Curtain Raiser)’ (IMH, 11.6–7). In playing with the puppets, the puppeteers also play with their audience’s thoughts and feelings. The marionette embodies the relationship between the crowd, unable to appreciate their own individual actions and reliant on external forces to guide them, and the ‘crowd master’ who literally strings them along. In this way, we might understand how and why Eliot’s poetic imagination combines the role of the poet, comedian and puppeteer. The poem reveals Eliot’s interest in the role individuals play in shaping popular culture as a form of elitism or intellectual snobbery, presenting a disdain for the (working) masses that recurs throughout Eliot’s work. The comedian acts as puppet-master to his marionette audience, standing over them as ‘the most expressive, real of men’ (IMH, 32.i.9) while they remain unthinking automatons who must be made to see their materiality and hollowness, manipulated as they are by powerful individuals.

In the third section, the poem moves from the quotation marks of the puppet play to a first-person account of an unknown narrator’s flânerie around town. The narrator, ‘walking down the avenue, / Five o’clock in the afternoon’ claims ‘I may meet you / Very likely greet you / Show you that I know you’ (IMH, 32.iii.3–5). This echoes the comedian who ‘interrogates the audience’ (IMH, 32.i.17), but also comically repeats the comedian’s rhyming-repetition with his ‘you’ repetition and the limerick mid-rhyme of ‘show you’ and ‘know you.’ As Baudelaire suggested, the narrator-comedian’s job is to ‘show you that I know you,’ better than you (the crowd) know yourself. By repeatedly addressing the reader via ‘you,’ the reader is placed as the inferior subject of the narrator’s dictation and comedy, merged with the faceless audience due to its ambiguous plurality. ‘You’ also reminds the reader of the implied ‘I’ behind the poem, conflating the comedian’s first-person narration, the narrator’s free indirect narration, and Eliot’s own authorial voice. Eliot merges his comedian, his narrator and his self into one ambivalent entity, and blurs the line between his puppets, audience and readers. It is nearly possible to separate the various ‘I’s and ‘you’s of the poem. His ambiguous pronoun usage paints him as a celebrity, manipulating the puppet-like masses with his influential art, in line with his self-image as a philosopher-comedian.

Indeed, the narrator further stresses his separation from, and superiority over, the masses, claiming:Verse

Verse You may find me All the girls behind me, Euphorion of the modern time Improved and up to date—sublime Quite at home in the universe (IMH, 32.iii.8-12). But we're perplexed

And later:Verse

Verse If you’re walking on the beach You hear everyone remark Look at him! You will find me looking them over (IMH, 32.iii.15-18)

Not only are all eyes on him, the narrator’s words are all associated with universality and perfection. The masses can only stop and ‘look at him’: they lack agency, for it is really ‘me looking them over.’ His bodily presence and embodied look force an involuntary response in the other, just as the puppeteer dictates the movements of his marionettes. All people are made objects to his subjectivity, revealing himself to be the crowd’s puppet master, with ‘all the girls behind me.’ In this assertion of the superiority of the individual over the crowd, Eliot echoes his Symbolist predecessors who divided themselves from the crowds who misunderstood and rejected their work—a self-imposed isolation from the supposed ignorant masses. One could easily read this view of the crowd as highly elitist. Eliot, like his symbolist predecessors, configures the masses as stupid, formless, and lacking direction or intentionality without strong, authoritarian leaders. Like Lewis and LeBon, Eliot’s highly classist and anti-democratic crowds exist to produce great men to lead them.

Although this conceptualisation of the crowd permeates Eliot’s work, how he responds to this idea changes drastically over his career. We see early anticipations of this shift within ‘Suite Clownesque’ itself. Eliot’s identification with the individual who is ‘quite at home in the universe’ is not straightforward. The final lines of section three of ‘Suite Clownesque,’ which were excised from the notebook, add ‘—But say, just be serious, / Do you think that I’m all right?’ (IMH, 32.iii.25–6). The narrator’s appearance of comical levity and superiority is thrown off to ‘just be serious’ for a moment, asking for self-confirmation from the faceless ‘you’ he has just objectified and degraded. Similarly, the narrator is ‘Improved and up to date—sublime.’ Eliot imagines his narrator as having removable parts, like a car or some other machine, which can be swapped out for new and ‘improved’ models. This imagery undermines his proclamations of uniqueness and individuality, for it makes him just as mechanical and replaceable as the masses. His body appears without any sincerity or reality: a shiny new automaton, but an automaton nonetheless. Even the name ‘Euphorion’ is self-undermining. Although it combines classical Greek wisdom and philosophy with the ultimate pleasure of ‘euphoria,’ Euphorion is also the son of Goethe’s Faust, and the name of a plagiarist in George Eliot’s The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb. By this association, the narrator is thus painted as an imposter. He believes himself to have power, but this is only an illusion granted by the more powerful, dangerous forces of crowd psychology which actually control him. The crowds who give their bodies to him thus paradoxically grant him his power, and thus render him dependent on the bodies he controls.

The relationship between the puppeteer and marionette is thus inverted. The comedian-narrator relies upon his marionettes and crowds to validate his existence, the tool becoming more real than its master. In the final section:Verse

Verse The audience rises hat in hand And disdains To watch the final saraband The discovered masquerades And the cigarettes and compliments (IMH, 32.iv.6-10)

The half-rhyme of ‘disdains’ and ‘masquerades’ seems hesitant, as if the comedian’s self-assured philosophy has not fully come together, or that it has not had the effect on the audience he intended. Eliot suggests through this half-rhyme that the audience has ‘discovered’ the comedian’s ‘philosophy and art’ to be merely a pose or masquerade: something hollow or false, rather than a revelation of that hollow falseness within them. ‘Disdains’ recalls the ‘feebly contemptuous’ marionette of Humoresque, a haranguing spectre not possessed by any puppeteer. The bodily reappearance of the comedian as a ‘shadow dense, immense’ (IMH, 32.iv.12) who ‘explodes in laughter, spreads his toes’ occurs after the audience has risen, and is divided from them in his own stanza and by the ‘painted colonnades’ (IMH, 32.iv.11) within the poem. What emerges from these images of separation and disdain is a comedian who has a constantly shifting, aggressive and self-undermining relationship with his audience like Lewis’s Cornac. Indeed, as Eliot would later claim in his 1918 review of Tarr:

Humour (I am speaking only of real humour) is the instinctive attempt of a sensitive mind to protect beauty against ugliness; and to protect itself against stupidity. The older British humour is of this sort; in that great but decadent humourist, Dickens, and in some of his contemporaries it is on the way to the imbecilities of Punch.²⁰

Eliot aligns his understanding of humour with Lewis’s painful satire, but the pain seems to be directed primarily at himself. As John Soldo points out, this humour is a defence mechanism, a protection against what he sees as ‘stupidity.’ Eliot conceives of humour as a way of asserting his individuality but, in that assertion, he nevertheless remains aware of how precarious and fragile that individuality is.²¹ His grotesque bodies expose human automatism and mindlessness, and thus Eliot’s own dependence on material, external forces. Eliot’s vision of the philosopher-poet-comedian appears as posturing—a role-playing façade like the marionettes in defence against perceived challenges to his ego. His grotesque bodies thus emerge as a recognition of his attempts to balance a psychological need to be individual, and his desire to be accepted by and appeal to the masses.

As such, it is not surprising that imagery of living marionettes permeates Eliot’s early poetry. The marionette body, controlled from without, holds for Eliot a grotesquely dual significance: they are perfect bodies through which individuality may freely express itself, and a reminder that pretensions to genius are themselves simply unthinking poses or costumes disguising mindlessness. Eliot recognises the need for an audience, even as he disdains the loss of individuality that appealing to them entails: a simultaneous desire for and loathing of popularity. The puppet-puppeteer relationship embodies the crowd-leader relationship between self and other. Eliot sees in poetry the power to confront the mindlessness of human life through the grotesque body of the comedian-philosopher-poet. But we can see Eliot’s grotesquery beginning to develop a defensive and self-critical streak. His works reveal his own fear of hollowness and alienation from the masses, and how we are all brought into line by the unknowable, macroscopic, social forces of modern civilisation, at the cost of our self-identity. In the next section, I shall explore the more specific ways in which this plays out in Eliot’s poetry, and the reasons and ways in which Eliot employs the body as a metaphor for this negotiation between the self and the other: unthinking and oppressive, yet also necessary and even desirable.

History, Society and Impersonality in Sweeney’s Degenerate Body

Over the next six years, Eliot’s presentation of the body changed significantly, although its purpose in his work remained similar. Eliot’s poems over this period recount a loss of individuality, masculinity and control over material circumstances. When Eliot left Harvard in 1914 to study at Oxford, he was torn between his new life in England and his old life in America; thus, ‘he referred to Americans as “us” in a letter to John Quinn, […] in the same year referring to the English as “we”.’²² His finances and the outbreak of the First World War meant he could only visit his family once before his father’s death in 1919. Having published little in America, Eliot renounced his American citizenship, abandoned his Harvard degree and remained in London. Here, he published The Sacred Wood, which contained his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ the first expression of his theory of poetic impersonality, suggesting that the individual is not fully in control of their own work, but is instead a product of external literary traditions.

Here, Eliot produced the Gothic, uncanny figure of ‘Sweeney,’ an embodiment of the London crowds, to express his new perspective on urban life. In these ‘Sweeney bodies,’ we encounter something like Eliot’s early marionettes: unliving matter given movement by external forces. Sweeney, however, inverts this image: a human stripped of all personality, consciousness and voice. Conrad's ‘invisible man’ that puppeteers the body is silenced, revealing the naked, automatic, bestial reality of modern human existence. Although he is rarely called grotesque, critics frequently depict Sweeney in grotesque terms. Michael Tratner views Sweeney as a puppet, although acknowledging that the forces controlling that body are no longer human, but abstract social and economic forces which have escaped and turned on the humans that produced them.²³ I argue that Eliot shifts to this poetic presentation of the body to produce an embodied metaphor for an individual who had suddenly been swept up by the unknowable forces of society and material necessity. Sweeney’s body is no longer a means for Eliot to assert himself over the mindless masses, but an attempt to make visible the socio-economic forces he perceived as suppressing him, a theme permeating all of his work until he left Lloyds Bank in 1925. The grotesque body becomes Eliot’s means of representing the fragmented modern world, fabricating a new body, a history and society, to impose order on that chaos.

‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales,’ published first in The Little Review in 1918, then collected in Poems (1920) in New York and Ara Vos Prec (1920) in London, builds upon Eliot’s earlier bodily imagery.²⁴ Notably, almost every movement of the poem is accompanied by its opposite: Sweeney, ‘Swelling’ with laughter, later ‘Contracts and concentrates, withdraws’ (CP, 51.22), he ‘Leaves the room and reappears’ (CP, 52.29). This produces a circular effect, which, combined with present tense verbs like ‘Tries to sit,’ ‘Slips and pulls,’ ‘Overturns,’ ‘yawns and draws,’ produces a freeze-frame image of the present in a manner akin to Vorticism: a modern moment in which nothing new can occur. The characters of the poem exhibit no human characteristics. The humans of the poem seem ‘indistinct’ (CP, 52.33), deprived of identity and personality, imagined only by their ‘Spanish cape’ or ‘mocha brown’ clothes, or through inhuman and animalistic metaphors of their ‘Apeneck’ and ‘paws.’ In contrast to Eliot’s marionette poems, where the puppets speak in the (ventriloquised) first person, Sweeney does not speak: ‘the man with heavy eyes / Declines the gambit, shows fatigue’ (CP, 52.27–8). He communicates silently through his bodily ‘heavy eyes’ which ‘show fatigue’: he is the ‘silent vertebrate in brown’ (CP, 52.21), the ‘silent man in mocha brown’ (CP, 51.17), who only ‘gapes.’ This is highly reminiscent of Lewis’s ‘Bestre,’ which Eliot’s work was published alongside in The Tyro (1922). Both contain bodies that are ‘silent,’ their movements betraying no trace of an intellect behind them. Sweeney is named three times in the first three stanzas, and then becomes a faceless ‘golden grin’ (CP, 52.32). This absurd exaggeration of one specific element of the face by the poem serves to flatten Sweeney’s character as it does for Bestre, who is similarly reduced to his eyes. With only one exaggerated facial feature, his face is made an inhuman ‘comic mask’ which conceals all trace of mental activity.

According to Craig Raine, Eliot’s poem ‘“Mr. Apollinax” is […] about the unsettling effect of laughter’; Eliot’s moments of comedy are ‘not only surprising, out of left field, unpredictable: they are, in fact, inappropriate.’²⁵ This idea of inappropriate humour is a key source of bodily grotesquery in the ‘Sweeney’ poems. ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’ opens with a bodily depiction of Sweeney’s laugh:Verse

Verse Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate giraffe. (CP, 51.1-4)

The reader’s initial portrait of Sweeney is entirely of an obscene body, absurdly exaggerated to the point of unreality. Sweeney’s laughter physically moves his body, ‘spread[ing] his knees / Letting his arms hang,’ ‘swelling to maculate giraffe.’ The poem’s presentation of laughter distorts and bloats the human body into something unrecognisably animal. In addition to the numerous animal adjectives, ‘zebra stripes,’ ‘Apeneck’ and ‘maculate giraffe’ used to modify Sweeney’s bodily movements into something bestial, the rhyme of ‘laugh’ and ‘giraffe’ associates the act of laughter itself with the animalistic. Eliot converts laughter into a ‘swelling’ deformation which causes the body to expand beyond its normal, civilised shape—sexually, in the phallic ‘swelling’ of the ‘giraffe’s neck. This bodily laughter is not a straightforward, easily understood response to a joke, but something unknown and potentially violent, like an allergic reaction or infection.²⁶ We expect laughter to be enjoyable, and Eliot’s laughter is, in an erotic sense, but the poem’s imagery makes it painful for both subject and reader alike. Laughter is a reminder of humanity’s animal heritage—an irrational, bodily phenomenon, aimed at nothing recognisable. Speaking of Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1919), Raine claims that Grishkin’s ‘concrete force is such that abstract ideas take evasive action,’ and this is true of almost all bodies in Eliot’s work.²⁷ The physical presence of the body during laughter draws us out and forces our engagement with the real, material world, rather than our imagining of it: to realise the instinctual, natural forces that impose on and manipulate our (embodied) consciousness.

As we saw in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, the disappearance of the mind into the body demonstrates the gothic heritage of Eliot’s ‘Sweeney’ poems. This is expressed directly in ‘Sweeney Erect,’ published first in Arts and Letters in 1919 and then in Poems. These works expose Eliot’s debt not only to the mythic past as an organising principle, but to the more recent gothic past to conceptualise the roots of degenerate modernity.²⁸ ‘Sweeney Erect’ establishes a hybrid time by comparing Sweeney and the woman on the bed to ‘Nausicaa and Polypheme’ (CP, 36.10). The comparison with the Cyclops Polyphemus, a savage man-eater who is outwitted and blinded by Odysseus, just as Sweeney is ‘Slitted below and gashed with eyes,’ presents the modern Sweeney as both a mythic figure of the past, and a cannibalistic savage. These Greek myths act to organise the present by turning Sweeney into a mythic figure, a symbol which can stand in for the modern age, just as Polyphemus stands in for the pre-sentient age for the Greeks of the Odyssey.

Eliot had been reading and annotating a copy of Darwin’s’ The Descent of Man—a new edition had just been released in 1913. His grotesque bodies mythologise the idea of modernity as both civilised and savage, undermining the narrative of progressivist Darwinian evolution with a grotesque narrative of hybrid time:Verse

Verse (The lengthened shadow of a man   Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette   Of Sweeney straddled in the sun). (CP, 37.25-28)

This quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests human progress towards perfection is embodied in the work of ‘a man,’ or single great individuals. This idea is mocked by Sweeney’s bodily presence, rendered a ‘silhouette’—a shadow that is also a body—suggesting Sweeney both embodies the mass of human history, and has no history of his own. Eliot uses Sweeney’s animal body to state that the pinnacle of civilisation has become savagery. The word ‘straddled’ is both temporal—for Sweeney straddles all of time—and sexually charged. That Sweeney is ‘straddled in the sun’ debases the metaphysical symbol of enlightenment by yoking it to naked, obscene materiality. Even the rhyme is sarcastic, half-rhyming ‘Emerson’ with ‘in the sun,’ as if Sweeney is exposing himself to Emerson, mocking his lofty vision of human progress with his animal, obscene and distinctly modern body. Even the title of the poem, ‘Sweeney Erect,’ draws on the interplay of obscene exposure and scientific advancement. Sweeney’s body is made a-historical in recalling ‘homo erectus,’ which had first been discovered and popularised by Eugène Dubois’s discovery of ‘Java Man’ in 1891. This not only helped popularise the Darwinian view that mankind was descended from animals, it also sparked a wave of interest in human fossils: ‘Peking Man,’ another homo erectus, was discovered by Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1921, only two years after ‘Sweeney Erect’ was first published.

Humanity’s relationship to its animal past was still a talking point in the West. Following the war, numerous artists and authors, including Lewis and Eliot, became interested in the Classical era, especially Greek myths, as a means of recovering a ‘human past’ In his 1923 article ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth,’ Eliot argues that the mythic past can be used to provide a means of ‘controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.’²⁹ The past, believed to have been destroyed by war and rapid changes in technology and social structure, had replaced myth and religion with a scientific, animal past, devoid of metaphor, art and meaning. Eliot’s use of myth has been much commented on. In 1913 he delivered a paper entitled ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,’ in which he attacks the idea of a positivist, scientific means of interpreting primitive rituals by E.B. Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl. Eliot evidently rejected the idea that savages were somehow distinct from civilised people, or that they possessed insight civilised people did not. His refusal to see myth and art as reducible to scientific analysis expresses a dual fascination and revulsion at the idea of modern man’s closeness to savagery, and the futility of using science to evade this fact. Eliot’s grotesque a-temporal poetic structure and animal bodily imagery can thus be read as attempts at manufacturing a new ‘contemporary history’ for an era that had lost its past, and therefore its sense of direction, making it impossible to tell ‘progress’ from ‘regression.’ Grotesquery reveals the failure of conventional understanding to describe a changing modernity, and thus modern society’s contingency and its arbitrary imposition of limiting values. Eliot’s modernism uses this revelation to organise these fragmented values into a new, whole—if strange, ambivalent and unrecognisable—social body that better represents modern narratives.

Sweeney’s body can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to confront modernity, and our contingent, fallible view of it, in material reality. He is coded as savage and animalistic, constructed of many individual parts, for he, with ‘Gesture of orang-outang / Rises from the sheets in steam’ (CP, 36.11–12). Like Lewis, Eliot performs a degradation of the eye, for Sweeney is ‘Slitted below and gashed with eyes,’ bearing significant similarity to the denigration of sight performed by Bataille and the Surrealists. The ‘gashed’ eye, for example, anticipates Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929), which also features an eye grotesquely cut open. The inside of the eye, normally impossible to see, is exposed, revealing sight as embedded in the world it observes. Such imagery is uncomfortable and repulsive because it compels the audience to imagine their own eyes being cut, and thus makes them aware of the materiality of their own gaze. Sight is not objective, rational and abstracted because it can be physically harmed, distorted and removed. Indeed, the rest of Sweeney’s body-parts seem to belong more to the material world than to him:Verse

Verse This withered root of knots of hair   Slitted below and gashed with eyes, This oval O cropped out with teeth:   The sickle motion from the thighs Jackknifes upward at the knees   Then straightens out from heel to hip Pushing the framework of the bed   And clawing at the pillow slip. (CP, 36.13-20).

The narrator states that ‘Morning stirs the feet and hands’ (CP, 36.9) which are only associated with ‘(Nausicaa and Polypheme)’ (CP, 36.10) in an aside, cut off by brackets, as if their ownership of these body parts is unimportant. They belong to no-one and are moved automatically by the pre-programmed ‘morning’ routine. The human behind Sweeney’s bodily awakening disappears entirely: his movements are jerky and violent. The depiction of ‘the sickle motion from the thighs / Jackknifes upward at the knees,’ strips Sweeney of intentionality: the ‘motion’ from the ‘thighs’ is carried directly into the ‘knees’ and then ‘straightens out from heel to hip.’ The stresses in these lines fall precisely on the body parts and their respective motions. This produces motion like that of a clockwork mechanism, moving staccato from one body-part to another without returning to the mind. The body then begins ‘Pushing the framework of the bed,’ which also becomes continuous with the body as a lever, transferring force as part of the same mechanical ‘framework.’ Sweeney is reduced to the ‘withered root’ from which the masses of tangled ‘knots of hair’ grow—a ‘withered’ mind which the automatic body supplants. He is not merely an animal ‘clawing at the pillow slip,’ but an automaton whose movements are entirely pre-conditioned.

The source of this body has been pointed out by multiple critics to be Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) (MRM). Poe presents a story in which human intent and action is made indistinguishable from ‘something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action,’ rendering the fantastical in disturbing detail.³⁰ The story portrays ‘a woman strangled to death by manual strength, and thrust up a chimney, head downwards’ (MRM, 141), whose murder is only solved by investigator Dupin’s analysis that it has been perpetrated by ‘the large fulvous Ourang-outang’ (MRM, 143). The uncanny power of this story derives not from the fact that the grisly murder bears ‘the mark of no human hand,’ but that it is committed by an animal impersonating—and surpassing—the human mind. In much the same manner as Frankenstein’s monster, who learns to imitate humanity and ‘sympathised with their joys’ (F, 88) by observation, the orangutan was ‘attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet’ (MRM, 148).

Thirty years before Poe, Kleist had imagined a similar set of uncanny circumstances. In On the Marionette Theatre, Kleist relates a story of a circus bear trained to fence:

The bear made a slight movement of his paw parried the blow. […] Not only was the bear able to parry all my blows like some world champion fencer, but all the feints I attempted – and this no fencer in the world could duplicate – went unnoticed by the bear.³¹

As previously argued, Kleist shows a modernist interest in the ability of automatons to supersede the human. The bear, like Poe’s orangutan, performs human actions more perfectly and precisely than any human because every ‘feint,’ deception and façade—in essence, personality—goes ‘unnoticed’ by the unthinking bear. Both animals lack not only the distractions of thought and feeling, but reason itself, which limits and restrains action to what is ‘reasonable.’ Thus, in Dupin’s words, what makes this tale—and Kleist’s—a ‘grotesquerie’ is that what appears ‘absolutely alien from humanity’ is rendered indistinguishable from it through an animalistic recontextualisation and defamiliarisation of human behaviour. The sudden subversion of our expectations as to the culprit’s humanity forces our reassessment of what actually constitutes humanity. If even a ‘wild’ (MRM, 143, 149) orangutan can impersonate reason perfectly, performing feats of superhuman strength and dexterity, the superiority of human reason is thrown into question. Minds only make us more predictable and fallible, and in the end seem wholly unnecessary in the face of animal and machines. Both animals, like Eliot’s Sweeney, embody a fear that what traditionally defined the human—reason, thought, consciousness—may be entirely superficial, and can be stripped away not only with no obvious difference, or with a marked improvement in action and expression. The infallible automaton tool supplants the fallible human.

Joseph McLaughlin has argued that ‘Eliot’s vision of the poet is like Holmes’s definition of the consulting detective as an “automaton” or “calculating machine”,’ a ‘disinterested collector, a banker, an ethnographer, and a detached supercultural observer […] who remains impervious to the milieu (the urban jungle) to which he seeks to give form,’ but this seems only partly true.³² I would suggest it is Poe, not Conan Doyle, who provides an explanation for Eliot’s impersonality. Eliot is perhaps thinking of Dupin in Rue Morgue, a human calculating-machine who observes the material world and outputs a comprehensible narrative. The narrator begins with a long examination of the idea of the ‘analyst’ who ‘so glories […] in that moral activity which disentangles’ (MRM, 116). Dupin performs an uncanny act of ‘body-reading’ on the narrator:

He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin […] A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation — all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. (MRM, 118)

The narrator’s subjective experience is reduced to observable, bodily signs, by which Dupin ‘retrace[d] the course of your meditations’ (MRM, 122). Even vision is embodied and uncontrollable, for ‘you could not avoid casting your eyes’ (MRM, 123). Eliot’s focus on bodily parts and movements in his ‘Sweeney’ poems bears great similarity to this. It is through Sweeney’s ‘Gesture of orang-outang’ (CP, 36.11)—also whilst shaving—that Eliot exposes the bestial reality of modern life, producing a modern man who is indistinguishable from a savage animal. Eliot, like Dupin, takes these fragmentary bodies, sounds, movements and assembles them into the bodily collage of Sweeney: a coherent substitute for the confusing world of abstract social and mechanical forces.

Eliot repeatedly employs Rue Morgue’s imagery in ‘Erect.’ Alongside the ‘Gesture of orang-outang,’ the ‘withered root of knots of hair’ recalls the murdered woman’s hair, ‘torn out by the roots.’ Indeed, the entire poem ‘Might easily be misunderstood’ (CP, 37.38) as a murder:Verse

Verse Tests the razor on his leg   Waiting until the shriek subsides. The epileptic on the bed   Curves backward, clutching at her sides. (CP, 37.29-32)

It is ambiguous what the ‘hysteria’ in Sweeney’s room is, only that ‘It does the house no sort of good’ (CP, 37.40). Eliot takes Poe’s murder scene and inverts it into an absurd, sexually charged farce, sarcastically juxtaposing the disinterested comments of the women with the violent ‘shriek’ of the ‘epileptic on the bed’ as Sweeney ‘tests the razor.’ The inversion of the iambic tetrameter in ‘Waiting until’ disturbs the comic rhythm, just as the shriek disturbs the comedy of the poem. But the violent moment of ‘Curves backward’ is, in turn, unhinged by the comical rhyme of ‘subsides’ and ‘her sides,’ which barely modifies the rhyme and so pulls the reader’s attention back to the previous line, halting the poem’s progress into expected horror. What Eliot adds to Poe is this joint use of humour and horror. The reader is not allowed to feel straightforwardly shocked or amused at this image of animal humanity.

Eliot also more directly modifies Poe’s orangutan into something humorously horrible using Sweeney’s body:Verse

Verse Sweeney addressed full length to shave   Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base, Knows the female temperament   And wipes the suds around his face. (CP, 37.21-24)

Where the hairy orangutan becomes human by impersonating human acts of shaving, Sweeney appears pre-shaved, ‘pink from nape to base,’ and becomes ‘apeneck’ by the (supposedly) everyday human act of shaving. The very mundane, veiled reference to the orangutan’s murder in ‘Knows the female temperament,’ comically wraps disturbing violence in everyday language. While Poe is concerned that humanity might only be a mask worn by an animal—that being human is only acting human—Eliot, in contrast, presents man sliding backwards into animality; the progress of science has severed humanity’s organising mythic past, rendering them merely a type of animal, fallible and superfluous to the work of machines. Not only does Sweeney’s body collapse the past and future into one-another, Eliot claims in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that art itself is ‘timeless’ and exists ‘in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past.’³³ Eliot, in gothic tradition, attempts to collate the fragmentary and uncertain past, present and future experiences of post-war Europe and America into a single body.

Why Eliot elects to go backwards, drawing on Poe in his gothic presentation of the modern body, is rarely commented upon. Given Eliot’s interest in Symbolism, he probably read Baudelaire’s analysis of Poe. In it, Baudelaire claims that ‘the United States was nothing but a vast prison house for Poe […] a gaslit desert of barbarism—and that his inner spiritual life as a poet, or even as a drunkard, was a constant struggle to escape from this hostile atmosphere.’³⁴ This may have appealed to Eliot in echoing his own experiences of London and Boston. Poe becomes the perfect example of how ‘public opinion in democratic societies is indeed a pitiless dictatorship,’ an idea that undoubtedly appealed to Eliot, who also considered Poe a ‘master of suffering and vulnerability.’³⁵ Evidenced in a letter to his father in 1920, Eliot complains that ‘the Sweeney [poems] […] are intensely serious […] but even here I am considered by the ordinary newspaper critic as a wit or satirist, and in America I suppose I shall be thought merely disgusting,’ demonstrating a clear desire to maintain ambivalence between these two conceptions.³⁶ The crowds Eliot moved within were a constant reminder of his poetic unacceptability in his refusal to be easily defined. Concerns over poor sales and the possibility of obscenity lead him to his more financially stable job as a Lloyds bank clerk. Eliot’s turn to Poe is a means of channelling this feeling—that the impersonal forces of society were weighing him down, eroding his personality, and he had little means of halting this process.

This leads directly to the development of Eliot’s theory of impersonality as a means of analysing and collecting the pieces of the past and present, and assembling them into a comprehensible, observable narrative: the calculating eye of a bank clerk. In his essay in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ Eliot writes ‘we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his [the poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.’³⁷ The influence of the gothic on Baudelaire and Laforgue, and their consequent influence on Eliot’s thinking, is even more pervasive than has been noted, as there is more than a hint of Frankenstein in his conception of the author. Frankenstein ‘collect[s] bones from charnel houses’ (F, 43), raids ‘the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse’ for materials, to ‘renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption,’ just as Eliot postulates the author takes pieces of ‘dead poets’ and gives them ‘immortality’ to produce ‘the most individual parts of his work.’ Indeed, Eliot argues the ‘analogy was that of the catalyst’ (SW, 48), using scientific metaphors to claim that ‘the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum’ for channelling these outside forces to ‘write themselves.’ The author appears as a scientist capable of analysing and reassembling data points—pieces of past—to discover something beneficial to modernity, advancing human understanding.

Numerous critics, such as Paul Jennings and McLaughlin, have noted out that Eliot’s bank job enabled him to do exactly this. Although hardly working class, banking brought him into the world of mundane routine the crowds of his early poems satirised.³⁸ Indeed, McLaughlin even claims that ‘writing in the war’s aftermath, Eliot the cultural banker is trying to cut losses by collecting and reassembling the fragments of a culture that have yet to be destroyed or emptied of meaning.’ Eliot imagines the city not only as a material stand-in for the fragmented mind of the modern individual, but as a means by which he can ‘structure’ these fragments into a complete, if chimerical, body. His experiences of public approval, the demands of money and time, the sudden loss of his own history, family and identity, and London itself, impressed on him the fact that his poetry depended upon commerce. It is a product, not of his own genius, but of economic and social forces driving him to express one thing or another. After the war, Eliot the puppeteer had been exchanged with his marionettes, strung along by the same cultural forces that controlled the crowd. His use of the body consequently shifted from a means of expressing his individuality, to a means of dealing with its loss. Boston and London, their histories and peoples, have produced Eliot and his work, and he turns to city itself to capture and address these abstract forces.

The Urbanised Patient: Eliot’s Embodiment of the City

There was a long tradition of city poems in which Eliot was intervening. For the gothic worlds of Poe, the city provides a site for exploring the most modern, civilised aspects of humanity alongside its most animal and depraved dark side. This hybrid city was adopted by Baudelaire and the symbolists, whose dandies wandered the streets, observing the degenerate masses, separate and aloof from them. This flânerie was subsequently adopted by modernists too. Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1930), establishes the hybridity of urban London: ‘islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, […] perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space as one passes the iron railing’: jointly light and dark, natural and unnatural as it was for Conrad, a place of beauty and the ‘humped, the twisted, the deformed’ simultaneously.³⁹ Critically, Woolf shows an interest in the city’s ability to control the eye without its consent, with the ‘danger of digging deeper than the eye approves.’⁴⁰ While it is ‘on the stroke of six; […] we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd?’⁴¹ The city uses the eye to make visual the unseen world of memory by embodying it within the shapes and structures of its architecture. Our attention, for Woolf, is drawn to the unseen lives behind closed doors by showing us those closed doors, the ‘shell-like covering which our souls have excreted,’ recalling Lewis.⁴² But Woolf’s use of the city is very similar to Eliot’s poetry—his huge crowds, dirty, twisting streets and fragmentary episodes. But what differentiates his city poetry is his changing perspective on the role cities play in forming and embodying mental life.

Eliot intervenes in the tradition of city poetry by employing the city as a metaphor for the ways in which we are formed and controlled by social forces. Eliot’s city becomes our self, rendering it impossible to be outside urbanity and look on it disinterestedly. It infiltrates the mind of the individual, producing a uniform ‘crowd mind’ which Eliot associates with the ‘unthinking’ working class, guiding the eye, hand and foot with its architecture, down streets to impersonal ends. As Ford Madox Ford noted in The Soul of London (1905):

the modern spirit express[es] itself in terms not of men but of forces, we gliding by, the timbers swinging up, without any visible human action in either motion. No doubt men were at work in the engine-belly of the crane, just as others were very far away among the dynamos that kept us moving. But they were sweating invisible. That, too, is the Modern Spirit: great organisations run by men as impersonal as the atoms of our own frames, noiseless, and to all appearances infallible.⁴³

In describing the modern metropolis, Ford combines imagery of machinery with the human body and its internal organs. The ‘engine-belly’ seems to consume the humans who operate it, ‘sweating invisible,’ prefiguring Lewis’s organ-devouring auto-mobile. The word ‘impersonal’ is key: the modern city is ‘noiseless,’ ‘gliding by,’ ‘without any visible human action.’ Human bodies are consumed for fuel to keep urban life moving, inverting the hierarchy of mankind over its creation. Modernity renders us blind and deaf to the bodies of the people around us, those who build the city and keep it running, yet seem totally subservient to it. Eliot, and modernists more generally, are interested in the city because it is a nexus of contact between individual and masses, living and machine, civilised and savage, working class and elite. Using ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1915) and ‘Preludes’ (1915), which chart Eliot’s journey out of Boston and into London, I argue that Eliot turns the city into an embodiment of his own fears and desires over being an outsider, craving acceptance and fearing the loss of his identity to achieve that acceptance.⁴⁴ The city as a body becomes a way for Eliot to grasp the intangible forces of immigration, crowd dynamics, economics and tribalism, making ‘visible’ the ‘human action’ in ‘the engine-belly’ of industrial society. He suggests societal pressure has rendered the individual a mindless and ‘savage’ member of the—predominantly working class—crowds. Both the crowd and the city are marked upon the individual’s body.

‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ was written in 1911 while Eliot was studying at Harvard, having recently returned from a European trip. It was published in 1915 in Wyndham Lewis’s periodical BLAST—where it is mistitled ‘Rhapsody of a Windy Night’—and eventually collected in Ara Vos Prec/Poems in 1920.⁴⁵ Eliot evidently thought of this poem as a pair with ‘Preludes,’ which I shall discuss later, for both were written within a year of each other, are concerned with observing urban life and decay, were republished whenever Eliot moved to a new city, and were placed adjacent to one-another other in both BLAST and Ara Vos Prec/Collected Poems. Eliot’s use of urban imagery did not change between 1911 and 1920: what changed was his attitude towards the urban, which gave new context to his work. ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ follows an unnamed narrator through a city which calls up fragments of his memories, which, as in Woolf, become embedded in the city’s architecture. In this city, ‘Every street lamp that I pass / Beats like a fatalistic drum’ (CP, 18.8–9). The drum was a common image of primitive cultures at this moment. In binding it to a modern streetlamp, the poem’s imagery quickly establishes the modern city as a site of hybrid temporality, just as the animal Sweeney is also the quintessential modern man. This ‘fatalistic’ and primitive piece of technology torments the narrator with visions of future and past urban decay, for ‘the street […] / Dissolves the floors of memory’ (CP, 18.1, 5), and ‘Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium’ (CP, 18.11–12). The city returns memory to life, erasing the line between the ‘dead’ past and the ‘fatalistic’ future.

The city thus controls the narrator’s memory, guiding his thoughts down specific ‘avenues’ towards images of urban and bodily decay:Verse

Verse The street lamp said, ‘Regard that woman Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. You see the border of her dress Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin.’ (CP, 18.16-22)

This segment shows a shift in Eliot’s attitude towards mechanical bodies. Eliot puns on ‘sputtered,’ as the streetlamp moves from inhuman noises to speech, to lure the reader into a false sense of normality, only to suddenly force a reassessment of the sputtering as a speaking voice which ‘mutters’ and ‘says.’ Unliving matter is imbued with human speech and action, but unlike Eliot’s marionettes, the city is the master and the narrator is its puppet. The ‘fatalistic’ street lamp speaks entirely in the imperative and present tense, ordering the narrator to ‘Regard that woman,’ ‘You see the border,’ ‘And you see the corner of her eye.’ Combined with its second person address, the street lamp is made to seem a narrator itself: superior, omniscient and indeed ‘fatalistic,’ guiding the narrator’s vision towards its own, unknowable, impersonal ends. Eliot’s poetic language seems to imagine the city as a living being, like Ford’s ‘engine belly,’ echoing Conrad’s vision of London as a ‘monstrous town’ (SA, 6) (HD, 5) whose ‘strayed houses’ get up and move around, while humans have no power ‘for compelling those edifices to return where they belong’ (SA, 18).

This living city illuminates a ‘woman’ in ‘the light of the door / […] opens on her like a grin.’ Here the ‘grin’—which forcibly ‘opens on her’—is displaced from the woman onto the ‘door,’ inverting the relationship between mechanical tool and living user. The paradoxical ‘hesitates toward’ injects something sinister into this urban hybridisation. That the woman is attempting to restrain her movement, even as she moves ‘toward you,’ suggests her body is not fully under her control. The somewhat strange ‘on’ preposition establishes the woman as the object of the sentence: the door is pushing ‘on her’ to ‘open’ itself, as if she were the door instead. This line ambiguously suggests that the house is grinning through its door, turning it into a strange approximation of a face, and the city ‘twists’ her eyes and face into something ‘like a grin’: a manufactured impersonation of human emotion. Indeed, ‘the corner of her eye / Twists like a crooked pin’: the symbols of the ‘pin’ and ‘eye’ recall Sweeney’s face ‘gashed with eyes’ (CP, 36.14), doing violence to the material embodiment of sight. The eye is degraded to the level of the urban detritus it observes, the sort of material the narrator or Eliot might find discarded on the streets. The narrator cannot be outside the urban world, for his sight is part of, and obscured by, the very urban world he observes.

This merging of human and urban landscape calls up ‘A crowd of twisted things’ (CP, 18.24) from the narrator’s memory:Verse

Verse The memory throws up high and dry A crowd of twisted things; A twisted branch upon the beach Eaten smooth, and polished As if the world gave up The secret of its skeleton, Stiff and white. A broken spring in a factory yard, Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left Hard and curled and ready to snap. (CP, 18-19.23-32)

Memory distorts the recollection of past experiences, turning them into abstract facts ‘Eaten smooth, and polished’ by time and distance. But throughout the poem, memory is linked directly to the ‘twisted’ urban environment. For example, in equating the ‘crowd’ with the ‘twisted things’ that the narrator remembers discarded around the city, the poem suggests the city twists human bodies into detritus just as memory twists and falsifies human experiences. Indeed, in the very final lines of the poem, city and memory become one and work together to compel the narrator to forget and abject the horrible visions he sees embedded within the city. The ‘number on the door’ becomes ‘memory!’ (CP, 20.71–2) itself, commanding him to ‘sleep, prepare for life / The last twist of the knife’ (CP, 20.77–8).

Notably, this ‘crowd of twisted things’ is associated with the final ‘twist of the knife,’ the corner of the woman’s eye which ‘Twists like a crooked pin’ and, in turn, with the ‘twisted branch.’ I argue the text itself creates a grotesque body through its interlinking of these images and metaphors, producing a monster whose parts are made from the urban world. The branch becomes a ‘skeleton,’ an ancient corpse, by the poem’s association of ‘stiff and white.’ It is inflexible, mechanical and dead—‘stiff’ like a ‘broken spring in a factory yard’ that ‘the strength has left.’ Like the rigor mortis of a corpse, both are ‘Hard and curled.’ Branches and springs substitute metaphorically for human bodies oppressed by urbanity. This is an important function in understanding how Eliot constructs the city-as-body. The ‘skeleton, / Stiff and white’ at the centre of this passage is the anchor point around which the branch is converted into the spring, the twisted ‘eye’ is converted to a twisted ‘crowd,’ and the human body is converted into a heap of dead objects, used and discarded by the city when they are no longer useful. Not only are nature and mechanisation hybridised through their embodiment in the branch and spring, they are also merged with the human body. The ‘twisted’ debris of urban life, the animals in the gutter, automatons, machines and city architecture are rendered indistinguishable from the bodies of the degraded humans who live within it. According to Tratner, ‘the capitalist method of control, in Eliot’s view, has no heart, and produces only a mechanical subject,’ and this passage similarly produces a mechanical body that metaphorises modern life. The city ‘rust[s]’ the parts that run it, until they are discarded, left ‘ready to snap’ under the strain of ‘civilised’ existence.⁴⁶

We have already seen the city ‘throw up high and dry’ twisted images in the narrator’s mind, but the image of being ‘dry’ immediately establishes the possibility of wetness, anticipating the ‘branch upon the beach.’ Prior to this, the woman’s dress was ‘torn and stained with sand,’ combining poverty and the seaside. What connection does Eliot envision between beaches, class, and the city? Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) provides a framework with which we might explain why Eliot connects the city and sea. Freud deals firstly with the ‘“oceanic” feeling’ of religion as an introduction to the psychology urban life.⁴⁷ Freud associates the ocean with the pre-ego unconsciousness, which is ordered and structured by the ego and super-ego, represented by the city.⁴⁸ The ocean is comforting chaos, at one with the world; the city is an oppressive structuring of that chaos, which still exists alongside it, just as land is inevitably surrounded by the ocean. This finds several parallels in Eliot’s use of the sea, which throws up ‘dry’ memories on the beach of his conscience. Indeed, the sea is associated with ‘the world’ by Eliot, and what the sea throws up provides insight into the ‘secret […] skeleton’ that lies below appearances. McLaughlin argues that modernist images of the ocean are metaphors for the individual’s place within the urban crowds which threaten to drown them, violating the boundaries of bodily and subjective integrity. The city had always been a site of atavism and degeneration for eugenicists like Lombroso and Nordau, and urbanisation, pollution and poor working conditions produced a culture which looked upon city-dwellers as regressive and savage, just as Eliot looks upon Sweeney. As previously noted, Le Bon had already begun to associate crowd behaviour with degeneration, and the anti-immigrant literature of Eliot’s era frequently turned to images of the ‘sea,’ ‘swarms’ and other images of all-encompassing chaos.⁴⁹ It is no surprise that Eliot’s city would be associated with the oceanic, especially London’s ‘tangled jungle of styles, languages, immigrant labourers, and commodities […] modernity’s intensified version of the ancient country fair, the Turkish bazaar, the Bakhtinian carnival,’ in which the individual is forced to re-join with the world, reversing primal abjection and thus annihilating individuality.⁵⁰

Using such an approach, we might read Eliot’s sea, eating and polishing the once living branch into something rigid and dead, as his attempt at embodying his loss of individuality to the constraints of urban life. That ‘memory throws up high and dry / A crowd of twisted things’ interchanges images of the sea, the crowd and memory. Thus, the poem turns personal memory into societal history, and the individual into a crowd of external influences. We might compare ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’s use of the sea to ‘Sweeney Erect,’ where the narrator states ‘Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks / Faced by the snarled and yelping seas’ (CP, 36.10). The poem does not personify the sea so much as ‘animalise’ it through the strange sounds of ‘snarled and yelping.’ This finds a parallel in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’s sea, which has ‘eaten’ the branch like an animal tearing at a carcass, leaving only a ‘skeleton.’ Eliot’s deliberately ambiguous language here implies both that the rocks are ‘anfractuous’—winding and confusing—and that they are fragmented and “irritated” by the waves. The sea is turned into a pack of wild dogs—the crowd—which threaten to tear at and fracture the body of the ‘bold,’ individual rocks. Facing the ‘yelping’ masses, the individual weathers assaults that fragment it, tear it apart and drag it into the sea. Eliot’s poetic associations construct a bodily sculpture out of the urban landscape in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ rendering this relationship between the individual and the crowd unfamiliar and alien using bodily imagery.

Yet this imagery does not allow for such a straightforward reading. Eliot’s poetic imagination conceives of this juxtaposition of city and ocean ambivalently. The image of ‘high and dry’-ness is at odds with the sea. Indeed, so is being ‘smooth and polished’ for something supposedly ‘twisted.’ The branch is presented as almost pure and elemental, as if sea-erosion has exposed its true, absolute nature—the ‘secret of its skeleton.’ It is neither sea nor land, but ‘the world’ that exposes this ‘secret.’ These odd linguistic choices express an ambivalence towards the anti-immigrant, anti-worker, anti-socialist rhetoric surrounding sea imagery. The branch is twisted, but also polished and rendered smooth, blank and uniform—a comforting purity that echoes the treacherously familiar ‘memory’ and unthinking ‘sleep’ that conclude the poem. We could interpret this line as stating the true nature of the world is being exposed through the stripped branch—and to some extent the rusted spring—by stripping away the familiar outer surface of the body to reveal its ‘skeleton.’ The urban crowd-body performs a kind of defamiliarisation, revealing civilisation as abrasive to selfhood via translating that normal act of erosion into the ‘inappropriate’ language of the grotesque body. For example, oceanic ambivalence permeates Eliot’s work, such as Prufrock walking on the beach, and the ‘controlling hands’ of ocean at the end of The Waste Land. In ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ Eliot marks the woman’s dress as ‘torn and stained with sand.’ The beach lies between both land and sea and is thus liminal; sand imagery suggests Eliot’s ambivalent position on her body, controlled by both primal chaos (as with Sweeney) and the oppressive order of the city in a somewhat similar manner to Freud.

Perhaps the most direct expression of this transgressive desire for the controlling chaos of the ocean is found in Eliot’s odd use of ‘crabs’ as amphibious wanderers:Verse

Verse I have seen eyes in the street Trying to peer through lighted shutters, And a crab one afternoon in a pool, An old crab with barnacles on his back, Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. (CP, 19.41-45)

The poem moves immediately from urban ‘streets’ to the crab in the ‘pool,’ implying some connection between the beach and city. Such imagery of crabs recurs in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ where the titular narrator states ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’⁵¹ This helps contextualise his earlier poems, for it shows an association with the crab, who lives on the beach and under the water, able to move between these two realms at will without drowning or suffocating. The sea is ‘silent,’ implying peace and calm, but also empty, devoid of sounds, differing sharply from the ‘snarled and yelping’ (CP, 36.10) seas of ‘Sweeney Erect.’ Becoming a sea crab is instead coded as a form of forgetting—a destruction of personality that eases the pain of living at the cost of self-possession. Although the crab is mindless in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ gripping the ‘stick’ without purpose, this connection between the Eliot-narrator and the crab suggests his own desire to be mindless, to be working class, to integrate with the sea that constitutes urban life. Such an idea of water as an ambivalent metaphor for social life would later come to permeate The Waste Land. The crab returns to Eliot’s ‘Suite Clownesque’ and re-expresses his desire for the public acceptance for his individual expression. His beach imagery expands on this desire to cross from the safe but imprisoning land to the enticing and engulfing power of the abject ocean. Eliot’s constant poetic walks on the beach therefore mark out a space of exploration between oppressive order and populist chaos, envisioning the tension between his sense of self and the world outside upon which he depends for his survival.

This urban ambivalence manifests in Eliot’s poem the same way it would later appear for Woolf:Verse

Verse Half-past two, The street lamp said, ‘Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out its tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter.’ So the hand of the child, automatic, Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. I could see nothing behind that child’s eye. I have seen eyes in the street Trying to peer through lighted shutters, (CP, 19.33-42)

The city, crushing its people, animals and refuse together in squalor, produces hybridity. Using the word ‘so,’ the child’s ‘automatic’ hand, prefiguring the automatic hand of the typist in The Waste Land, is made comparable to the ‘cat which flattens itself in the gutter / Slips out its tongue’ (CP, 19.35). Animals, machines and children are all combined in Eliot’s poetic imagination. The repetition of ‘eyes,’ which ‘I could see nothing behind,’ suggests the later ‘eyes in the street’ are not human, but eyes ‘in’ the street, which try to ‘peer through lighted shutters’ and violate the privacy of the individual even at home. In the 1911 draft of the poem, Eliot deleted an additional reference to the child’s eyes, suggesting he placed considerable stress on them.⁵² A gothic source of these eyes might be found in Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) (MC).⁵³ Eliot possibly found this story through Baudelaire’s discussion of it in his essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863), in which he explains his concept of the flâneur ‘dandy’; an artist who looks upon the crowd of the modern city with ‘that stare, animal-like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new.’⁵⁴ Eliot’s image of the animal child stripped of innocence and thought satirically perverts Baudelaire. No longer can the artist gaze on the city with childlike, animal wonder, for the animal and child are both mindless parts of the city. In an ironic take on the Symbolist repertoire of marionettes and artificial bodies that cannot feel pain, Eliot reverses their pacifying impersonality into a horrible deformation of the self under capitalist modernity. Pain is human, but society exploits our fear of it to rid us of both pain and humanity.

Poe’s presentation of an American wandering through London in ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ illuminates the gothic tradition Eliot’s city poetry participates in. Poe’s American narrator observes the London crowds as ‘full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye.’⁵⁵ What catches his eye amongst this crowd is an old man, who hybridises ‘what is termed gentility’ and ‘darker and deeper themes for speculation’ (MC, 222), both rich and poor, high and low class. Chasing him through ‘night-fall, and a thick humid fog’ (MC, 224), the narrator is disturbed by the mindlessness of the old man’s actions. His ‘eyes rolled wildly from under his knit brows, in every direction,’ he ‘repeat[s] the same walk several times,’ ‘entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and looked at all objects with a wild and vacant stare’ (MC, 225). Like Eliot’s narrator, who sees nothing in the ‘eyes in the street’ (CP, 19.41), Poe’s narrator sees nothing in the eyes of this ‘man of the crowd.’ He is pulled across London by the unpredictable flows of people who exert an unseen force upon him and the narrator. Poe’s story presents crowd behaviour by singling out one individual body, which ‘stalked backward and forward, without apparent object, among the throng’ (MC, 227). In imitating and isolating the crowd’s unthinking actions, repetitive journeys and movements outside their natural context, Poe defamiliarises the uncanny loss of individuality experienced by those who move within it.

Where Eliot diverges from Poe is in the reminder that his observation of the city, along with the reader’s, is not passive. This is obvious in Eliot’s ‘Preludes,’ written in 1910 while in Boston. This poem-city was evidently inspired by Boston, for in the original version of the text, prior to its publishing in BLAST, each numbered section was titled with the name of various areas in Boston. Yet this poem, like ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ was continually republished, and the removal of specific Bostonian references depersonalised the poem and merged the urban worlds of Boston, Oxford and London into a single city:Verse

Verse Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. (CP, 15.i.2-13)

Eliot describes a shattered, broken city of ‘broken blinds and chimney-pots,’ which Crawford argues is ‘combination of city and desert [which] is the legacy of the Romantic view of the city.’ But the poem evidently draws on the same gothic sources as Poe’s London, which employs similar imagery of dirt and decay:

By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in directions so many and capricious, that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them. The paving-stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the rankly-growing grass. Horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation (MC, 226).⁵⁶

The ‘horrible filth’ in ‘dammed-up gutters’ echoes Eliot’s ‘grimy scraps’; the broken ‘paving-stones’ and buildings ‘tottering to their fall’ find comparison in the ‘broken blinds and chimney-pots’; both urban landscapes ‘teemed with desolation.’ However, while Poe’s flâneur-narrator almost disappears in his use of the passive ‘were seen’ in describing the city—as if it were not he who was witnessing them—Eliot’s narrator uses the second person to remind the reader of their bodily presence: that they belong to, and are shaped by, both city and crowd. The sudden appearance of ‘your feet’ reminds the reader of both the narrator’s existence as a speaker and their own existence within both the city and stanza. The word ‘Your’ reveals the reader’s own complicity in voyeuristic observation: they are part of the crowd and looking at it from within. Eliot eliminates all privileged positions of observation—another attack on the superiority of the eye over that which it observes—rendering the reader uncomfortable in much the same way as being reminded of your blinking or breathing.

In the early 1910 draft, Eliot ends the poem on ‘we are moved into these strange opinions / By four-o’clock-in-the-morning thoughts’ (IMH, iv.17–18).⁵⁷ This slightly comical dismissal of the severity of the poem, with its huge compound word emphasising the ‘strange[ness]’ of Eliot’s thoughts, was probably removed because Eliot’s views on city life had developed by the 1915 publishing date. In fact, it ironically re-enacts the ending of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ where Eliot attacks such dismissals of the visions the city provides—returning to mindless sleep—as perpetuations of the ignorance of social reality that the city encourages. By the 1915 revision, Eliot is clearly aligning himself with the views he later expressed in his review of Tarr, and by extension Lewis’s view of humour as a deflection of reality. Nevertheless, this removal highlights the poem’s interest in the progression of time. Rather than the linear, if sudden, movement of time in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’—drummed out by the and light of the streetlamps—time in ‘Preludes’ seems to flow in unpredictable ways. Time ‘resumes’ (CP, 15.ii.20) as ‘morning comes to consciousness,’ with the ‘raising [of] dingy shades,’ ‘when all the world came back / And the light crept up between the shutters’ (CP, 15.iii.30–1). Time only exists in the brief moments of light between the darkness, just as ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’s streetlamps beat out the passing of time on their drums. Eliot’s linking of light, time and city architecture perhaps derives from the movement of his thoughts away from Bergson’s theories of dureé over this period. Eliot proposes a temporality counter to Bergson’s internal subjectivity. Time, like memory in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ exists embodied in city rhythms, paused and resumed by shutters and lamps, measured in the flow of crowds at rush hour—a material, external thing.

The times ‘four and five and six o’clock’ (CP, 16.iv.42) recur repeatedly in both poems. Why does Eliot emphasise these specific times of the early morning and evening? These times, the desolation of the early and late cityscape turning into the sudden pressing crowds of rush hour, show Eliot’s interest in the temporal rhythms of crowds. Eliot’s ‘vision of the street, as the street hardly understands’ (CP, 15.iv.33–4) seems highly elitist in its reduction of the masses to unthinking, automaton labourers. In ‘Preludes,’ the masses are atomised, reduced to only their feet and hands:Verse

Verse With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms. (CP, 15.ii.17-23)

People are dismembered into body parts, identifying the urban crowds only by the parts used for physical, unthinking labour. The image of ‘short square fingers stuffing pipes’ is almost physiognomic in its depiction of the masses as nothing but sets of dirty working hands and feet. Eliot subverts these ‘masquerades,’ the joyful union of the common people, into something ‘dingy’ ‘In a thousand furnished rooms’; a suggestion of cheap, pre-made rental apartments and hotels that divide in their cell-like uniformity, rather than unite. The mid-rhyme of ‘street’ and ‘feet,’ and the word ‘with,’ suggest that that the street itself seems to possess, or is intimately linked to, these feet. The crowd’s movements belong to and are guided by the city’s architecture. Yet in the third stanza it is ‘You’ who ‘clasped the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both soiled hands’ (CP, 16.iii.37–8). The reader’s own body parts have been cut off and ‘soiled’ with the ‘muddy’ body parts of the crowd, intermingled and degraded. The ‘muddy feet’ and ‘soiled hands’ again suggest Eliot is referring to manual labourers specifically. It is ‘You’ who ‘had such a vision of the street,’ in ‘The thousand sordid images, / Of which your soul was constituted’ (CP, 16.iii.27–8). Eliot seems to be anticipating a ‘you’ who is high-brow, the expected reader of poetry over and above the masses who drag ‘you’ down. But this high-brow reader is in turn as much a product of the working masses as anyone else. The repeated number of ‘thousand,’ previously used to number the uniform ‘thousand furnished rooms,’ connects the nameless crowds, the uniform rooms, the urban streets with the ‘sordid’ images of the reader’s own mind. Memory becomes a series of hotel rooms ready for occupation, soulless and inhuman in their factory assembled, pre-made uniformity. The human mind is thus manifested in the physical architecture of the city, projected ‘against the ceiling’ (CP, 16.iii.29), just as Prufrock’s ‘magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.’⁵⁸ The structure of the city turns us inside-out by embodying the structure of the mind physically and observably.

Contrary to Irving Babbitt, Eliot’s Harvard tutor, who claimed that ‘mobs’ existed to produce individuals to lead them, Eliot instead believed that ‘the humanist ideal of creating individuals […] leads not just to mobs in the streets, but a mob inside each individual,’ in Tratner’s words.⁵⁹ If the crowd produces the individual then, for Eliot, the individual must be a ‘man of the crowd’—controlled by mob psychology. This model of the mind again resembles Freud’s, who would later employ the city as a means of representing the mind and mental processes in Civilisation and its Discontents, arguing that the ‘remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis’ just as it is in ‘a psychical entity.’⁶⁰ Eliot similarly imagines the mind as physically embodied by the city:Verse

Verse His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet (CP, 16.iv.39-41).

Here the soul is ‘stretched tight across the skies,’ like the etherized patient in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ The ‘He’ is indistinct and obscured: the urban skyline literally obscures the individual which begins to ‘fade behind a city block,’ stretching it until it is ‘tight’ like the spring in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night.’ The individual is then ‘trampled by insistent feet,’ trampling carrying connotations of both herds of animals and beating down into submission. These lines expose Eliot’s view of the modern city-dweller: an individual controlled and obscured by the architecture of civilisation and crushed into a uniform shape by the will of the masses. The crowds and city are merged into a single body such that even the ‘blackened street’ has ‘eyes / assured of certain certainties’ (CP, 16.iv.44–46), certainties as vague and unknowable as the powers that guide urban life.

Eliot’s city thus reveals that civilisation is not a product of human labour and reason, but that labour and reason are products of the structures of civilised society. In a grotesque inversion, the modern city produces its populace. Yet, Eliot’s response to these atomising crowds of the working class remains ambivalent. Both poems end on a denial, of both laughter and horror simultaneously. In ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ the somewhat disturbing set-up and punchline of ‘“Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.” / The last twist of the knife’ (CP, 20.77–8), metaphorically pulls the rug out from under the reader’s feet. The formulaic escape from the dark streets into the safety of the home is subverted, for the home is treacherously revealed to be a part of the city’s urban planning. Eliot’s body inflects the grotesque in a distinctly Kristevan direction. There is a desire in his poems for the abject world of mass culture and homogenised bodies because it provides comfort and security of stifling maternity. In the city, the abject world and the normal world are identical, and it is simply a matter of perspective which it appears as. Thus, desire for normality and desire for abjection are often the same in modernism: aimed at the annihilation of thought and self in merging with others and losing yourself amongst the crowd.

‘Preludes,’ however, proves somewhat more difficult to decode. The Eliot-narrator is not isolated by the city he imagines, but put into action by the city as a part of its crowds:Verse

Verse I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots. (CP, 16.iv.48-54)

In the 1910 draft manuscript, the text reads ‘I am wrought by various fancies, curled’ (IMH, iv.10). That ‘wrought’ becomes ‘moved’ suggests a change from an internal view of the human body and emotions to an external view. He is not in control of his ‘fancies,’ which appear to him distantly as ‘The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing’—the ‘thing’ potentially referring to his own personality, made distant and impersonal by the demands of urban life. In both poems, and especially the early draft of ‘Preludes,’ Eliot reveals the extent to which he is part of the crowd and wishes to forget this fact; to ‘laugh’ is to ‘sleep’ and forget these images of urban life. In channelling the city, and its impersonal forces which compel him to view these scenes, Eliot reveals his own desire to laugh at his own revelations and betray himself to the mindless crowd, to escape the horror of ‘reminiscence’ (CP, 20.62) that his poetry enacts.

Eliot suggests poetry’s ability to embody the reality of urban life is a means of releasing him from that reality, recoiling into a world where the incomprehensible, fantastic forces that guided life could be understood. As Eliot himself states in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ by 1919 his poetry had become an ‘escape from emotion’: as Anthony Cuda argues ‘poetry alleviated for him the mundane pressures of a bank clerk who lived hand-to-mouth, caring for his sick wife during the day and writing for the Times Literary Supplement at night.’⁶¹ The impersonal arises from a personal desire: the wish to forget the stresses of material life and work, but to do so is to become mindless. By ending his poems with denials, Eliot reveals the enticing power of the crowds who, according to his poetic imagining of them, are unable to experience the painful uncertainty of modernity because urban life completely structures their thoughts.

Consequently, in dealing with city life amongst the crowds, and the uncontrollable pressures they exert on him, Eliot projects his own mind onto his cityscapes. Kerry Weinberg calls this ‘an “extinction of personality” in the face of and for the sake of revealing an underlying reality,’ and yet I argue that in revealing the reality underlying city life, Eliot also reveals the forces acting upon his self. His concerns over economic security, family heritage, public acceptance and masculinity are all made manifest in the architecture of his poetic cities, and urbanity’s effects on its inhabitants. What changed across his poetic career is his emotional response to these forces as he moved from a position outside the crowd to one within it. It is not surprising that Eliot would return to these two poems when he moved to London and found himself amongst strange and unfamiliar crowds; he chose them for collection in Prufrock and Other Observations only four months after starting his London bank job. Giving the city a body enables him to physically confront the impersonal forces that he felt were bearing down upon his life.

For Conrad and Lewis, the grotesque is a desire that corrupts you and must be resisted, a temptation that lures you into normality and lulls you to sleep. But for Eliot this sleepwalking acts as a way of channelling the force of social normality to write poetry and expose that world as grotesque and abnormal. The sleepwalker shows the action of society upon the movement of the body, as in Barnes’s somnambulists. We invariably surrender part or all of our self to external forces, and the recognition of this fact through witnessing bodily automatism is both horrible—in the recognition of our ‘disposability’ to capital—and a relief from that recognition via mindlessness, thus rendering the automatic self both pleasurable and painful to be made aware of.

As Eliot’s poetic imagery develops, he becomes more aware of his own lack of ‘authority’: how social, economic and even architectural forces direct him down certain paths, and even into other times and places, unconsciously. Eliot’s grotesquery reveals just how intertwined the modernist body and mind are, and thus how society’s structuring and restricting of the body creates temporal and psychological order. Eliot gathers the forces that control us and embodies them in the physical city itself, making them visible and unfamiliar via this instantiation, which brings the modern ‘unconscious’ into consciousness. This body acts as a material, non-linguistic metaphor that lets us approach and analyse things which we do not yet have terms for, because they are new and lie outside normal perception, but which play an important role in defining modernity, self-identity and expression. Grotesque bodies—which exceed control and transgress restrictions—reveal how arbitrary and fabricated modernity actually is: our experience of ‘modern life’ depends entirely on how modernity limits our ability to experience that ‘life,’ manufacturing pasts, presents and futures to create the façade of a monolithic and unchanging state.

By striping away human minds and turning them into body parts, giving minds to the lamp posts and streets, and scattering the individual’s fractured body across this living cityscape, Eliot makes the relationship between society and individual manifest. Capitalist modernity atomises and commodifies the individuals within it: a process we have grown so used to that we no longer think it strange until it is given form by Eliot’s bodily imagery. Eliot not only uses the grotesque body to reveal the systems that meditate between the self and other(s) in modern society but also to actually mediate that relationship himself. Satirising crowds as mindless automatons that only Eliot and his poems can reveal for what they are serves this dual purpose; Eliot’s poetry turns his satire back upon his own body, revealing his ambivalent horror at, and desire for, the death of personality that belonging to the crowd entails.

Conclusion

For Barry J. Faulk, ‘Eliot's fantasy of becoming a modern poet […] has its roots in the Decadent dream of losing your identity, including your class status, by merging with the denizens of night life, and vanishing, flâneur-like, into the city crowd.’⁶² But as many critics have noted, The Waste Land (WL), the pinnacle of Eliot’s ‘impersonal’ poetry, is also ‘a profoundly personal poem. One of his close friends who read the manuscript soon after its completion called it “Tom’s autobiography”.’⁶³ In fact, ‘Eliot occasionally admitted the autobiographical impulse in his poetry, notably and perhaps disingenuously in the remark attributed to him that The Waste Land “was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life”.’⁶⁴ In The Waste Land, Eliot produces his most direct vision of urban life in the ‘Unreal City.’⁶⁵ Eliot names many cities in the final section of the poem:Verse

Verse What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal (WL, 17-18.v.371-376)

The ‘Unreal,’ recalling the poem’s earlier association of London with the ‘Unreal City,’ is isolated on its own line, as if to suggests a descent from the three cities of antiquity, ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria,’ all fought over or colonised during the First World War, to two modern, Western cities—‘Vienna London’—that represent countries which fought over them, implying a rapid, violent and final descent to the future ‘Unreal’ city: the collapse of society through the collapsing of time. This is a city of the ‘Unreal’—the strange forces of society, war, culture, history and economics embodied through the city-body. In the narrator’s own terms, ‘We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison’ (WL, 19.v.413–4), a direct expression of Eliot’s ambivalent desire to forget his self and lose his painful individuality. As previously mentioned, the sea is directly associated with control by the crowd and the unconscious by Eliot. However, this control is ambivalent and enticing: ‘The sea was calm, your heart would have responded / Gaily, when invited, beating obedient / To controlling hands’ (WL, 19.v.420–2). Seymore-Jones argues that Eliot’s later turn to Christianity—and to accepting the Freudian ‘oceanic feeling’ which fills the imagery of Eliot’s later religious poems, like ‘Marina’ (1930)—was a product of his life-long social and marital isolation.⁶⁶ Eliot’s abject disgust at the female body, and its perceived threat to his masculine independence, works its way into his prose poem ‘Hysteria’ (1917), in which the Eliot-narrator is swallowed up by a laughing woman, consuming his self-identity. In a letter to Conrad Aiken, he claimed he was ‘very dependent upon women (I mean female society)’ and wishes he had ‘disposed of [his] virginity and shyness several years ago.’⁶⁷ Eliot’s poetic imagery shows a clear desire for public acceptance and union with others, but remains strongly ambivalent to acting on this desire, for public acceptance seemingly means giving up his individuality.

Although Eliot implies he is merely collecting fragments of city life, and assembling them into the body of modern society, he actually states that ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ (WL, 19.v.430). The narrator’s ruined mind is connected to the ‘ruins’ of the city. In fact, this is a key image in ‘Tiresias’ (WL, 19.iii.218), who appears at the ‘violet hour’ (WL, 19.iii.215). This is a moment of ‘violation,’ in which the human form is infiltrated by machinery, becoming ‘the human engine’ (WL, 19.iii.216), recalling Ford’s ‘engine belly.’⁶⁸ Tiresias is a hybrid figure, an ‘Old man with wrinkled female breasts,’ who ‘though blind […] can see’; his body, both male and female, man and machine, provides a ‘vision’ of city life beyond mere sight; the skeleton underlying our urbanised expectations.

Tiresias’s body becomes one with the typist too, for ‘I too awaited the expected guest’ (WL, 19.iii.230):Verse

Verse (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) (WL, 19.iii.243-6)

Tiresias inverts the cold, rational observers of Poe, and the dandies of Baudelaire, for he cannot be impersonal. He both walks among the ‘dead’ masses and sits by the city ‘wall’: he has ‘foresuffered,’ and belongs to, modern city life. This body is inscribed with the city’s violation of the human form: a violation that leaves them ‘the lowest of the dead,’ material bodies moving mechanically. Eliot reveals in Tiresias the purpose of the grotesque body: in Maud Ellman’s words ‘the body and the city melt together […] both the woman and the city have been raped.’⁶⁹ This body allows Eliot to express the otherwise unnameable forces that he felt oppressing his individual history, transferring these pressures from his body onto the body of the poem. In attempting to escape thought and personality, his poem ironically refuses to be impersonal, instead acting out his anxieties.

As such, we might read Eliot’s poetry as the initial ruminations of what would later become Eliot’s campaign for artistic free speech, which began in earnest in 1918 when Wyndham Lewis’s short story ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’ was refused publication by the Little Review. By 1925, Eliot had left his job at Lloyds bank for the directorship of Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, having begun publishing The Criterion in 1922. Throughout the post-war period, Eliot was a fierce campaigner for freedom of literary expression, as seen in his later defence of Radclyffe Hall’s internationally bestselling novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) which was suppressed in England, even though Eliot described it as ‘dull, badly written.’⁷⁰ But Eliot also simultaneously argued for censorship of ‘genuine pornography.’ Eliot seems to have been torn between freedom and censorship, between obscenity and cleanliness, just as he was torn between his own elitist expressions and his desire to appeal to the masses.

It was through Faber, and indeed through Eliot, that Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) came into the material world. To quote Miriam Fuchs, ‘Eliot’s legitimizing what previous readers had criticized as obscure or incomprehensible’ was what attracted Barnes to him.⁷¹ She points out that Eliot often made changes to Barnes’s manuscript without informing her which version he was using. Eliot’s editing of Barnes’s work was an exercise in eliminating the ‘obscene’ and replacing it with vague, socially acceptable and less explicit language that might open Faber up to potential litigation. This is almost literal in the final act of the novel, in which Eliot’s substitution of ‘obscene’ with ‘unclean’ acts out his negotiation between individual expression and social acceptability. Eliot is constantly negotiating between his own self-expression and the people he must rely on for his expression to propagate. The body is a contact point between self and other, revealing the structures that make Eliot’s own existence possible. Djuna Barnes responds to this conception of the body—in which individuals are not in control of their own acts—by suggesting how the individual might be freed of such oppressive social processes, instead of bargaining with them.