Page 17 - summer 22

Unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many,
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

But in The Prelude, amidst all the drudgery, waste and mass isolation of modern
urban life, he writes (in an echo of the curling yellow fog of Prufrock),

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some
Infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

As with other Modernists, there is a spiritual core to Eliot’s vision, which came to

dominate his later poetry after his conversion to Anglicanism; old faith meets
Modernist innovation.

Eliot’s early poetry, culminating in his masterpiece, The Wasteland (1922), defined
Modernism. The Wasteland is really five poems, presenting modern civilisation as a
waterless desolation, summed up in another memorable on-liner:

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”.

After its famous enigmatic beginning …

April is the cruellest month

…we are launched adrift onto a sea of allusion (like Joyce’s Ulysses and Eisenstein’s

use of montage in cinema, see below). Allusion in The Wasteland meant piecing
together disjointed, jarring, incongruous and fragmentary snatches of quotations,
taken from everywhere: past literature, newspapers, snatches of conversation (in
several languages), everyday working-class speech, popular songs. This use of
allusion allows parallels and connections between the present and the past. But it
also jars and provokes us. There are no references, commentary*, explanation or
narrator to explain it all for us. So, it also confuses or baffles us (though even without
understanding them all, we can appreciate how their fragmented, disjointed nature
reflects the dislocation of modern life). As does the form: rhyme, free verse, short

lines, long lines.