The moment is was published in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s 433-line poem “The Waste Land” was greeted as a masterpiece, a perfect distillation of “the horror, the horror” that mankind had just witnessed in The Great War. But where did this poem come from? Eliot was well-known enough at the time (he’d already published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1917) but this was still more than anybody expected. How did he write it? What role did the editor play? These sorts of questions are always asked about great works of literature, but seldom are they answered. Eliot’s poem is an exception.

In 1971, Eliot’s wife Valerie published the materials that went into making up “The Waste Land”: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.

Those “annotations” were the part everybody wanted to see. Pound, the elder poet, was an early admirer booster of Eliot, as he was of James Joyce, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Classical Chinese Poetry, Japanese “Noh” Drama, (and, well, Mussolini). Before publishing “The Waste Land,” however, Pound took his pencil to it, crossing out entire lines and stanzas.

Were the edits improvements? Grab a copy of Valerie Eliot’s edition, and decide for yourself.

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“A book lives longer than a girl,” Vladimir Nabokov once remarked during a lecture to his Cornell students about Gustave Flaubert’s crowning masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857). The same could be said of Gaetano Donizetti’s most famous opera, the blood-soaked and melodramatic opera Lucia di Lammermoor(1835). It is widely agreed that of all of opera’s crazy ladies—of which there are many—the title character’s rambling, hallucinatory 20-minute descent into madness set the gold standard for going bonkers. But it wasn’t only the music world that was taken in by Lucia’s formidable charms. The opera found a second life as part of the plot of some of the greatest works of western literature, including such classics as Leo Tostoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), E.M. Forster’s, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and most notably in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

With the character of Emma Bovary, Flaubert set out to create a woman whose raison d’être is making her life as elaborate a novel as possible, and who is ultimately undone by her inability to bridge the gap between illusion and reality. Finding herself bored and restless in her marriage to a kindly but milquetoast husband, Emma tries to live out her fantasy life by engaging in numerous affairs while racking up considerable debt as a result of her profligate spending habits. After one such love affair ends in disaster, a heartbroken and highly impressionable Emma sees a performance of Lucia di Lammermor, and finds inspiration in the opera’s tragic heroine. The famous Act IV “mad scene” of the opera finds a distraught Lucia forced into a loveless marriage by her brother to a man she loathes, and scorned by her beloved for her “betrayal.” Overwhelmed with despair, Lucia stabs her betrothed to death offstage. She dramatically stumbles back onstage for her famous 20-minute mad scene, wielding the bloody knife that she had just unleashed on her unlucky husband. She wanders the stage, singing back-to-back arias in which she hallucinates that she is marrying her true love and that she is already dead and looking down on her beloved from Heaven. The ordeal proves so traumatizing that she dies from a broken heart the next day.

After being exposed to Lucia Di Lammermor, Emma, “[p]ermits herself to be lulled by the melodies and felt her entire being stirred as if the bows of the violins were passing over her nerve-ends…[L]ucia begged for love, longed for wings. Emma, too, would have liked to flee away from life, locked in a passionate embrace.” Emma adopts the fictional character as her role model and so strongly identifies with the tragic heroine of Lucia that she becomes convinced that the only correct way to respond to heartbreak is to go mad and take her own life. After another failed love affair and panicked over her spiraling debt, Emma swallows arsenic and dies an excruciating death. Even the romance of suicide failed the tragically empty Emma Bovary in the end.

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(After “Invisible Man” by Jeff Wall)

One of the most influential photographers working in the world today is Jeff Wall. His photographs are extremely large, back-lit “cibachrome” works (basically, extremely large slides). More importantly, they are images of elaborately set-up scenarios: an apartment that looks like it was destroyed in a hurricane or earthquake, a “conversation” among dead troops in World War II, the restoration of an enormous mural. But one of Wall’s greatest works draws its imagery directly from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

In the preface to Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator describes an unusual project he has embarked upon. In order to take something back from the society that has taken so much from him, the narrator is fighting a war against Monopolated Light & Power. More specifically, he is stealing electricity in order to illuminate his basement hovel with 1,369 light bulbs. A lot has been said and written about what Ellison is trying to express here, but Wall took a very different approach. He simply recreated the scene in perfect detail, and took the photograph above. More than any work of literary criticism, Wall’s photograph demonstrates just how radical and surrealist Ellison’s imagery is. Reread the book with Wall’s photos in mind, and you’ll find hundreds more images like it.

Wall’s After “Ralph Ellison”, and dozens of other works by him, are currently on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. View the “online exhibition” here.

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Today’s entry in The Intellectual Devotional introduces Langston Hughes’ great poem “I, Too, Sing America.” We can’t think of a better compliment to that entry than another great Hughes poem: “Jazzonia.”

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

A wonderful analysis of this poem is included in a volume that every Devoted Intellectual should read: Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow Burn. In that book, Paglia introduces and analyzes “Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems,” as the subtitle indicates. Her selection of poems is strong throughout, and her interpretations are never marred by the kind of academic prose that would send most readers running from a book of “poetry criticism.” As Paglia has immodestly pointed out, “Break, Blow, Burn may be the only book of poetry criticism that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States.”

How does she read Hughes’ poem? She starts by making an intriguing point: “modernist” poetry has mostly been associated with the despair and desperation of works like T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” but most modernist poems were written just as jazz — one of the great new popular entertainments of the twentieth century — was coming into its own. Hughes was almost unique in embracing the celebratory aesthetic of jazz in his work, rather than dwelling on the uglier aspects of humanity revealed, for instance, in the trenches of the First World War.

For her actual line-by-line analysis, you’ll have to read the book. Order it here.

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In 1913, T.S. Eliot was a student at Harvard University who had just been awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford. He hoped to establish himself there as a poet and a thinker, and he knew that one of the most influential people in the field was Ezra Pound. Pound, who would soon take up Eliot’s cause, was the overseas editor of a Chicago magazine named Poetry, to which he would submit Eliot’s “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the January 1913 edition, Pound published an essay about the best new poets in London (a list that Eliot would soon strive to make). That issue, which Eliot is likely to have read, also contained a poem by the Kentucky writer Malcolm Cawein. The title of the poem was “Waste Land.”

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
Twisted and torn they rose–
The tortured bones of a perished race
Of monsters no mortal knows,
They startled the mind’s repose.
…
I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again–
And man and dog were gone,
Like wisps of the graying dawn.

As Robert Ian Scott first pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995, Cawein’s poem (which preceded Eliot’s by eight years) has more than its title in common with Eliot’s far more famous work. The tone and sensibility are very much like Eliot’s, as are many of the images, from the “skeletons gaunt” to the “breath of dust” that Eliot would transform into a “handful.” At the end of his poem, Eliot famously listed his sources, but not all of them. He was happy to put himself in the same company as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Dante and the Bhagavad Gita, but did not condescend to mention the forgotten poet from Kentucky who influenced him more than anyone else.

Was Eliot’s act plagiarism or homage? Compare Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Cawein’s “Waste Land” and decide for yourself.

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Go, stranger, and in Lacedaemon tell,
That here, obeying her behests, we fell.
–epitaph of Leonidas, King of Sparta

Famously, the electorate doesn’t like a loser; conversely, the poets appear unable to abide a winner. Our canonized imagery of warriors and warfare clusters around defeat: Thermopylae, Waterloo, Custer’s Last Stand, Hannibal’s Elephants, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” The Fall of Troy, Rocky I, and Lucan’s Pharsalia all hew to the narrative tropes of tragic implosion or moral victory set against a backdrop of loss. (When we do glamorize triumph, it is almost always the triumph of the underdog that we celebrate; victory against underwhelming odds carries less poetic resonance.)

The Frankish Emperor Charlemagne is mostly remembered—in the history books, that is—as the military and political architect of medieval Christendom. In the annals of verse, however, the most famous of the Carolingian chansons de geste, The Song of Roland, takes for its primary topic the Emperor’s most famous defeat. Roland (etymologists among you may be interested to know that, in Spanish and Italian, he is known as Orlando) was Charlemagne’s nephew and his commander at the Battle of Ronceveaux in A.D. 778, a relatively small engagement between the Franks and the Basques that prevented the Franks from holding onto recently conquered Moorish lands in northern Spain.

The Roland poet, whose identity is unknown, took some liberties with the story. Instead of facing a rag-tag band of Basque landsmen, the “fair flower of French chivalry” was up against the arrayed forces of 400,000 Moorish “paynims.” Roland’s stand in the high mountain pass also echoes Leonidas at Thermopylae–in the poem he is the last line of defense against a Muslim Europe. In the final analysis, the fact of Roland’s defeat is less important a subject for poetic elegy than his apotheosis as an exemplar of martial virtue.

It is thus a fool’s game to question the valiant nature of Roland’s gambit. (Indeed, it is a fool’s game to question the nobility of any military gambit not involving Benedict Arnold, the Nazis, or John Kerry.) On one issue, at least, the majority of poets seem to be in agreement: It is sweet and beautiful to die in defense of one’s country.

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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ranks among the elite group of literary classics for good reasons. It boasts nothing less than the following: an epic villain, a famous narrator, an early critique of colonialism in Africa, famous last words, a memorialized river, a film adaptation that is elite in its own right, and a whole subgenre of literature inspired by it. (This perhaps explains why F. Scott Fitzgerald followed Conrad around like an awestruck schoolboy at fashionable London parties.)

The narrator of Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow, is a narrator in the great tradition of framed narratives—Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Arabian Nights are some other examples—wherein the main story unfolds inside a story featuring a largely separate cast of characters. Conrad exploits this literary device, also known as mise en abyme, to highlight the symbolic extension of the specific conclusions drawn from Marlow’s story, set in the jungle, applied to the real, “civilized” world of present day action.

Heart of Darkness is most innovative in its depiction of Marlow’s relationship to the novella’s villain, Kurtz; it has no single literary precedent. Readers cannot help but admit the undoubted talents possessed by the likes of Lucan’s Caesar and Milton’s Satan or even sympathize with the tragic downfalls of once-good men Victor Frankenstein and Macbeth, but, hitherto, all such villians ended in a position of total defeat, both with respect to their stories and in the assessment of audiences. Kurtz, embodiment of evil though he may be, exposes the hypocrisies and social masks intrinsic to civilization and ultimately forces Marlow, who personifies human reason, to abandon his faith in society—a desertion represented by his storytelling “pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes.”

The Janus-faced themes of mendacity and authenticity were increasingly important toward the end of the 19th C and are especially prominent in the literature and criticism of our own time. Earlier notions of the motivations that underlie individual and societal virtue have been compromised as our psyche has been thrown under the philosophical microscope. Marlow’s reaction to a humanity suspended in moral limbo—a kind of scarred, horrified paralysis—has been infrequently transcended.

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