I am enjoying this thread --- I promise to get back to the actual poetry because I love the discussion and because of my love of "Prufrock"....

But >>

I think it is appropriate to somewhere in here make note of Eliot's anti-Semitism. Two of my very favorite top-ten poets were anti-semi tic -- TS Eliot and ee cummings (and some might include Shakespeare but I do not for historical reasons not to be debated here). If you Google TS Eliot and anti-Semitism you will get a ____load of pages to peruse. I share with you a few quotes and links. Look, my 3rd favorite poem of all times is "Prufrock" and have written allusionary poems because I am in awe of that poem.  I am also a devoted fan of the poetry of ee cummings (sans his kike poem and others). If I can steal fom Toscanini's famous quote about the Nazi conductor von Karajan; "To cummings and Eliot the poets --- I tip my hat; to cummings and Eliot as 'men', I put it back on."

There is plenty to read on the subject -- and there is enough in both of their works to support what both men had in mind on the subject --- here are a few references that I hope will educate. I try not to play the game of genetic fallacy and try to "stick to the poetry" and not the character of the poets. I can respect them as poets -- but not as human beings. And those of you have known me over the years, "Prufrock" permeates me as does most of cummings, so surely I have laid aside genetic fallacy and accept and love the poetry (not the poets).  Some have become apologists for Eliot --- I do not buy into that. He certainly was not a "kill them all" Nazi or even a sympathizer or advocate for the slaughter in WW II.
>>>>

"T. S. Eliot's anti-Semitism is not a new subject. It has been remarked upon and debated since the publication of his earliest poems and essays and been the subject of other recent critical studies. Yet, at least until now, Eliot's anti-Semitism has been routinely brushed off by almost all of Eliot's readers. What Anthony Julius's book helps to explain, then, is not so much the fact of Eliot's anti-Semitism but how Eliot and his readers explain away the anti-Semitism of his work. Eliot, writes Julius, was the kind of anti-Semite "who was able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art. Anti-Semitism supplied part of the material out of which he created poetry. I do not ask the biographical question: what made Eliot an anti-Semite? Instead, I ask: of what was Eliot's anti-Semitism made, and what did Eliot make out of anti-Semitism?" (p. 11). In the process, Julius also asks fundamental questions about our theories of poetry and of literature. These theories, which Eliot helped shape, stress the self-referential character and aesthetic objectivity of the work, and so disconnect literature from social and political issues, even those that appear in the work's own words. Such theories come in handy when readers wish to dismiss as irrelevant such things as a writer's anti-Semitism or misogyny or racism. "

--- From a book review by  Gregory S. Jay - © 1997 Journal of English and Germanic Philology 
 
"T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. By Anthony Julius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 308. $49.95. "

http://www.uwm.edu/~gjay/Julius.html

===================================================

"What is most surprising about the whole contretemps is that it took so long for the literary community to come to terms with Eliot's anti-Semitism, to acknowledge the ugly prejudice in poems and essays written some 60 to 70 years ago. Instead, Eliot's seemingly unassailable stature as a founding father of literary modernism has combined with formalist fashions in criticism to almost willfully minimize the role that anti-Semitism played in his work. That is, until Mr. Julius came along with his powerful indictment. 

Indeed, as Mr. Julius points out in these pages, an astonishing number of critics have tied themselves into knots over the years, trying to rationalize or whitewash Eliot's prejudice, a dubious tradition carried on last month by the poet Craig Raine, who tried to defend Eliot in an article in The Financial Times. Some critics have insisted that Eliot was not personally anti-Semitic (the "some of my best friends. . . ." argument); others that his life and beliefs were one thing, his poetry another. "

--- from BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Was Eliot Anti-Semitic? An Author Says He Was 
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E7DB1F39F937A35755C0A96095826...

=======================================================

The only way I can cut him some slack regarding his reputation as an anti-semite is reflected in the article below:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/april9/eliot-49.html

Norm

Hey Prosaic. 


James

Notes and comments in blue. This information is presented for educational purposes only. Nothing here should be reproduced or used anywhere else. Much of it can be found in the Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land and various other sources, I highly recommend purchasing the NCE if you want to understand this poem and its place in literature. 

Publishing of The Waste Land

"History has cunning passages, contrived corridors, and issues". --T.S. Eliot--

The Players

Boni and Liveright--Book Publishers

The Dial--The Dial Magazine, founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson...a literary magazine. During the 1920’s Scorfield Thayer's Dial featured contemporary literary works including the first publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and much of Yeats finest latter verse and a selection of Ezra Pound’s best Cantos. It also featured artwork by Picasso, Klimt, and Schiele who were unheard of in America at that time. Thayer’s major objective was to rouse the American public to develop a taste for modern art. The Dial set about to achieve this by forming a collection of paintings and sculptures by the best contemporary artists of the day, exhibiting their works in the pages of The Dial and featuring articles describing the role of modern art in relationship to the Fine Arts. 

The Criterion--Literary publication started and edited by T.S. Eliot in the early 1920s.The Waste Land appeard in the first issue in 1922.

Vanity Fair--Magazine

Horace Liveright-- Co-owner of Boni and Liveright
John Peale Bishop--Resigned as managing editor of Vanity Fair (1922), replaced by his friend Edmund Wilson.
Edmund Wilson--managin editor Vanity Fair
Gilbert Seldes--Managing editor of The Dial.
Scofield Thayer--Co-owner of The Dial and chief editor.
James Sibley Watson Jr.--Co-owner of The Dial with Thayer. 
Felix Schnelling--Ezra Pounds professor at Univ. of Penn.
Ezra Pound--Poet, activist. Modernist movement.
T.S. Eliot--Poet. 


Eliot finished writing The Waste Land through the end of 1921 and begining of 1922. 

January 1922.  Horace Liveright (Boni and Liveright) offers Eliot publication of The Waste Land before the poem is completed and before it has been given the title 'Waste Land'. Liveright's interest in the poem was not based on any reading of it as he hadn't read it, but rather on his belief that the poem might possibly be representative of the pinnacle in the 'Modernist movement' in poetry. 

January 2-January 16, 1922.  Eliot arrives in Paris for two weeks from Lausanne where he was recovering from a breakdown for three months, and where Eliot and Ezra Pound had edited the Waste Land manuscript. 
Liveright was also in Europe at this time and Boni and Liveright had published a number of Pound's poems such as Instigations in 1919, Poems in 1920, and payment for a translation of 'Physique de le Amour' in the summer of 1921, helping Pound avert financial disaster. Liveright trusted Pound's ability to recognize new talent. He also thought Pound's work might be commercially viable in the future. Ezra Pound wanted to unite all the important 'modernist' poets under one publisher. Pound and Liveright met daily for a week with Pound believing Liveright was 'going towards the light' (of Pound's desire for 'modernism' to become the high mark of modern literature). At this same moment James Joyce was looking for an American publisher of Ulysses. 

January 3, 1922.  Liveright has dinner with James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. to discuss his ideas for a publishing program. He agrees to pay Joyce $1000 against royalties for Ulyesses, offers a contract to Pound of $500 a year for two years for any poems translated from French, and offers Eliot $150 advance and 15% royalties for Waste Land. 

Liveright's only concern with Waste Land was he thought it too short, (he hadn't read it yet) and he asked Pound to contact Eliot and see if he could 'add anything to it'. 

Note-- Ezra Pound had contacted W.B. Yeats to try to get him to leave his current publisher and sign with Boni and Liveright so as to gather all the main poets of modernism under one roof, so as to give the modernist movement a singular voice. Yeats declined.

February 18, 1922.  T.S. Eliot had been in recent negotiations with The Dial's Scofield Thayer on publishing Waste Land. Ezra Pound wrote to Thayer:
    'Eliot's Poem is important , almost enough to make  everyone else shut up shop!'
Thayer replied to Pound that he couldn't comment on the merit of the poem as Eliot hadn't sent him a manuscript of it. Pound replied:
     'His poem is as good in its way as Ulysses in its way, and there is so darn little genius, so darn little work that one can take hold of and say, "This at any rate stands, makes a definite part of literature." '
Pound presented The Waste Land as a verse equal to Ulysses, as a work that epitomized the hegemonic position of modernism in literature, which was Pound's main and overriding goal. 

March 8, 1922.  Eliot telegraphs Thayer that he cannot accept less than $250 for The Waste Land. (The Dial's standing policy was that all poets would be offered $120 per poem, whether they were unknowns or well known.)
Thayer had offered Eliot $150 having never seen the poem and an amount 25% higher than their normal payment for publishing rights. The average income in the U.S. at that time was $750, when compared to today with an average income of $32,000 that would be the equivalent of roughly $6400. 

March 10, 1922.  Pound writes to The Dial:
  'I wish to Christ he (Eliot) had the December award'.
The 'December Award' was The Dial Award for services in the cause of letters (literature). The Dial Award was $2000!

March 16, 1922.  Eliot's letter to Thayer: 
   '...took on good authority you paid $400(aprox) to George Moore for a short story, and I must confess that this influenced me in declining $150 for a poem which has taken me a year to write and is my biggest work...if I am to be offered only $150 it is out of the question. 
   I have written to Ezra Pound to explain my reasons to dispose of the poem to The Dial at that price and he concurs with me. You have asked me several times to give you the right of first refusal of any new work of mine, and I gave you the first refusal of this poem.'

Note--George Moore was owed several hundred dollars from an earlier agreement with The Dial, this the reason for Moore being offered more money.

  Eilot to Pound:
   'I think these people should learn to recognize merit instead of senility, and I think it an outrage that we should be paid less merely because Thayer thinks we will take less and be thankful for it...'

Thayer was insulted by Eliot's comments and refused any further contact with him. He instead turned to Pound, who was working for The Dial, to exert pressure on him. Ezra Pound agreed with Eliot in general but wrote to Thayer:
    'I shd. prefer one good review to several less good ones. I have, as you know, always wanted to see a concentration of the authors I believe in, in one review. The Dial perhaps looks better to me than it does to Eliot.'

Pound knew that Modernism in poetry needed a great financial success, as had been achieved by the other modernist arts such as in painting. This was his guiding light. 

Late April, 1922.  With relations between Eliot and Thayer breaking down, Pound seaches for another publisher for The Waste Land. 

May 6, 1922.  Pound contacts John Quinn, contributor to Vanity Fair and friend of John Peale Bishop. Pound:
  'What wd. Vanity Fair pay Eliot for "Waste Land". Cd. yr. friend there, Bishop, get in touch with T.S.E.'

July 19, 1922.  James Sibley Watson (co-owner Dial) meets Pound in Paris to buy Waste Land. Pound reports his meeting to his wife:
   '...lunch with Watson of Dial, on Wed. [19 July], amiable...wants T's poem for Dial etc..'

Watson had bought into the idea that the poem vindicated the project of modern experimentalism 'since 1900'. and he did not want The Dial to suffer 'the defeat' and eagerly wanted The Dial to be seen as THE representative of advanced cultural life. Watson flies to Berlin to meet with Thayer the next day.They discuss The Waste Land and reach a decision. They would offer Eliot the second annual Dial Award in secret as the price of the poem, and officially they would pay him only the $150 that was the original offer. So their offer would be $2000, an unheard of amount!!  FOR A POEM NEITHER HAD READ. 

July 27, 1922.  Watson meets Pound again says he needs the manuscript. Pound contacts Eliot and Eliot replies:
 'I will let you have a copy of The Waste Land for confidential use as soon as I can make one...I infer from your remarks that Watson is in Paris. I have no objection to either his or Thayer's seeing the manuscript.'
Eliot sends the manuscript to Watson on Aug 13. Watson reads manuscript and reports to Thayer:
  'In response to Pound's letter Eliot has assumed a more conciliatory attitude and has sent a copy of Wasteland for our perusal. I am forwarding to you...Anyway I wrote him more plainly about the prize (Dial Award) and await his answer. I found the poem dissapointing on first read but after a third shot I think it up to his usual.'

Eliot's 'services to letters' (the justification by The Dial for the Dial Award) and 'the merits' of The Waste Land were issues that had no bearing on publication of the poem in The Dial. 

Aug 30, 1922.  Eliot in a letter to Pound:
  'I received a letter from your friend Watson most amiable in tone...offering $150 for The Waste Land (not "Wasteland" please, but "The Waste Land"), and (in confidence) the award for virtue (Dial Award)...'  

A deal was struck to allow The Dial to publish the poem in October 1922 and for Boni and Liveright to postpone its November 1, 1922 publishing of the poem in book form. Boni and Liveright agreed as long as The Dial agreed to buy 350 copies of the book form of the poem, adding another $315 to the cost for procurring the poem. 

The outcome was a great success. 

Feb 5, 1923.  Liveright to Pound:
   'God bless you and Cantos 9 to 12. If we can get as much publicity from them as The Waste Land has recieved, you will be a millionaire. The Waste Land has sold 1000 copies to date and who knows, it may go up to 2000 or 3000 copies. Just think, Eliot may make almost $500 on the book rights of this poem.'

The publication of The Waste Land marked the crucial moment in the transition of modernism from a minority culture to one supported by an important institutional and financial apparatus. 

The Dial closed in 1929.
Vanity Fair closed in 1936 (resurrected later).
Ezra Pound  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound

In the end it was only an illusion for the public, that the poem itself was the object of concern. It was not. All the deals had been worked out without the publishers ever having read the poem. The Dial profited from a spectacle it had produced.  Marketing! 

So the question arises, would this poem have risen to its lofty heights without all these mostly financial machinations? I think we come back to Eliot's opening quote:

 "History has cunning passages, contrived corridors, and issues". --T.S. Eliot--


James

Hi James,

I should've spoke up sooner; I appreciate you 'blogging' this TSE and the Waste Land. I've read the poem many times and have researched the poem's allusions/references and it became too much for my patience. There is something about being the Poet's Poet that misses the mark for others---that being said, every single poet aspiring to write a poem that encapsulates large swaths of their philosophy, religion, social constructs, whatever should definitely be free to do so. I would encourage. Such a creation is not easy and gains my respect in the mere creative process of such a labourious task.

All-in-all, I respect TSE for what he accomplished and what little I've gained from strong and somewhat strange juxtapositions.
Many thanks to you, James, for taking the time for spilling out your discoveries onto this jaundiced thread---I am gaining much and may find something to contribute along the way. I am glad to hear you're still attending to 'real' life and not just academia.

~Tim

I haven't given up on this thread at all, I have been reading and attending to real life. 


James

Some background on Eliot.


Born 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri.

1898 attends Smith Acedemy in St. Louis.
1906 begins attending Harvard.
1907 publishes several poems in the Harvard Advocate.
1909 joins editorial board of the Advocate, publishes several more poems in same. Receives his B.A. and begins graduate work in literature and philosophy. (Easy to see where his wealth of knowledge of literary works comes from now.)
1910 receives M.A., travels to Paris to attend Sorbonne.
1911 visits London. Returns to Harvard to pursue Ph.D in philosophy. 
Complets Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady, Preludes. 
1914 receives fellowship to study philosophy at Merton College, Oxford. Meets Ezra Pound in London. Pound sends Prufrock to Poetry Magazine. Early fragments of The Waste Land composed. 
Marries Vivien Haigh-Wood. Prufrock and other poems published. Decides to make England his permanent home. 
1915-1916 teaches at grammar and junior high schools in England. Meets Virginia Woolf. 
1917 is employed by Lloyds of London. 'Prufrock and Other Observatios' published. 
1919 'Poems' published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth Press. 
1920 meets James Joyce in Paris. 'The Sacred Wood', Eliots first essays published. Mentions The Waste Land to his mother in a letter.
1921 has mental and physical breakdown, takes three months leave from Lloyds, spends a month at Margate, England (mentioned in The Waste Land), goes to Lausanne, Switzerland for treatment and during these two months completes writing The Waste Land drafts. 
1922 Eliot and Ezra Pound revise The Waste Land. Cutting it down from 800 lines to 433. The Waste Land is published in Eliot's magazine The Criterion in October 1922, then in The Dial in November. Boni and Liveright publish The Waste Land in book form in December.
1925 leaves Lloyds to join Faber and Gwyer(became Faber and Faber) as editor and publisher. 
1927 becomes English citizen.
1938 Vivien Eliot declared insane and committed to an asylum for the rest of her life. 
1947 Vivien Eliot dies.
1948 awarded Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for literature. 
1957 marries Valerie Fletcher.
1964 awarded U.S. Medal of Freedom.
1965 dies on January 4.

I'll be adding to this. 

Very interesting James, thank for sharing. . .I am going to make a point to get in here and take this post in. . .see what comes out.

~Ren~