4 - London

Summary

London! The needy villain's gen'ral home,

The common sewer of Paris, and of Rome;

With eager thirst, by folly or by fate,

Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state.

(Samuel Johnson, ‘London’)

How many? Count them. And such a press of people.

We hardly knew ourselves that day, or knew the City.

(CPP, 127)

By the time T. S. Eliot affixed his name to a poem entitled ‘London’ in 1930, he had maintained residence in this ‘common sewer’ of eight million ‘dregs’ for a decade and a half. He had abandoned a career in philosophy and a job in banking for the curial poses of an ‘agèd eagle’ (CPP, 89): director of Faber & Faber, oracular editor of the Criterion, the Pope of Russell Square. He had rendered his adopted ‘Unreal City’ (CPP, 62) as The Waste Land and assumed guardianship of a poetic movement well on its way to canonical orthodoxy. Accidents of birth aside, few figures could better voice the city's accent, and fewer still could claim to have mastered its poetic corruptions and virtues so thoroughly.

In 1930, however, Eliot borrowed the stance of another poet to describe the capital, introducing a limited edition of Samuel Johnson's ‘London’: ‘among the greatest verse Satires of the English or any other language’. In part, Eliot's essay attempts a mild self-correction, moderating his curt dismissal (offered in 1921) of those dissociated sensibilities condemned to a fractured experience after the English Civil War.