5 - Poems (1920)

Summary

It was characteristic of Eliot not to try to repeat his successes, and the volume of 1920 shows, accordingly, a completely new series of experiments in style, though not without significant continuities with the previous volume. Indeed, the most important poem of the volume, ‘Gerontion’, is in a direct line of development from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to The Waste Land, whereas the poems in quatrain form, which constitute the majority, are in some ways a detour, an experiment which represents one side of Eliot, but not the central stream. ‘Gerontion’ opens the volume (Eliot had an instinct for opening with one of the best), but it was probably one of the last written, since it does not appear in any earlier published form. Eliot also, early in 1922, thought of the possibility of including it as a prelude to The Waste Land, but was dissuaded by Pound. For these reasons I shall discuss it at the end of this chapter.

The quatrain poems show the direct influence of Théophile Gautier (1811–72). As Eliot records: ‘At a certain moment, my debt to [Pound] was for his advice to read Gautier's Émaux et Camées.’ Pound, looking back in The Criterion in July 1932 in an article on Harold Monro, described the process with characteristic pungency:

At a particular date in a particular room, two authors, neither engaged in picking the other's pocket, decided that the dilutation [sic] of vers litre, Amygism [the reference is to Amy Lowell, one of the original ‘imagists’], Lee Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some counter-current must be set going. […]