Return to Answer

Following T. S. Eliot’s own suggestion, critics have generally assumed that Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance is the sole source for the title of The Waste Land. But seven years before the publication of Miss Weston’s book, there appeared in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine a poem which bears striking similarities to The Waste Land. Madison Cawein’s “Waste Land”, like Eliot’s poem, presents a desolate landscape as a metaphor for spiritual desolation: “The field seemed sick despair.” Much of the poem’s imagery also suggests Eliot’s. Cawein’s setting is dry and dead. Trees are “Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place”, and the single human being on the scene is “Like a dead weed, gray and wan,/Or a breath of dust”. Eliot’s "cicada/And dry grass singing" is forecast by Cawein’s “crickets’ cry and the locusts’ whirr”. More revealing than the imagery, however, is Cawein’s explicit equation of “the grim death there” with “forms of the mind, an old despair,/That there into semblance grew/Out of the grief I knew”. We now know, thanks to Valerie Eliot’s facsimile edition of The Waste Land, something of the grief that lay behind T. S. Eliot’s own work. Of course, the use of nature to express an emotional or spiritual condition does not originate either with Eliot or with Madison Cawein. But Eliot must surely have read Cawein’s poem in Poetry; and Cawein’s title, combined with his imagery and theme, seems rather too close to Eliot’s to be purely coincidental.

Ulysses was published in its final form in the same year as The Waste Land was written; besides, the Lestrygonians episode, from which this passage is taken, is among those published two or three years before in The Little Review, a periodical to which Eliot himself contributed. There can be little doubt that the poet had read it before writing The Waste Land, and, reviewing it in 1923, he acknowledges that it had made a deep impression on him: ‘It is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.’ It would not be surprising that the scene from the Lestrygonians, where the suggestion of sumptuousness in the window-display rouses voluptuous thoughts (together with a hint of sexual disgust), leading to the merely physical and sordid stimulus of food, should have wandered into the poet's imagination while he was dealing with a not very different subject.

But what seems most striking is the echo of Joyce's line ‘He turned Combridge’s corner, still pursued’, in Eliot’s “And still she cried, and still the world pursues.”

These parallels even extend as far as verbal echoes. “The Burial of the Dead” actually takes place, in the form of Patrick Dignam’s funeral. The concept of planting the corpse comes up at the funeral when Bloom pleads, “Plant him and have done with him” and Bloom’s thought in the graveyard, "How many! All these here once walked round Dublin” resembles Eliot’s lines, “so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many.”

Even without the operation of dishonesty, so long as everyone relies on secondary and tertiary sources instead of checking against the originals, a game of whispers can take place whereby a coincidental similarity gets described by A as a “parallel”, by B as a “borrowing”, by C as “copying”, and by D as “plagiarism”. In this kind of ‘innocent’ accusation, even a casual reader ought to be able to tell that D has gone wrong somewhere, because if they really had evidence for plagiarism they would present their best examples. The fact that they don’t do so is evidence that they have nothing to present.

Following T. S. Eliot’s own suggestion, critics have generally assumed that Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance is the sole source for the title of The Waste Land. But seven years before the publication of Miss Weston’s book, there appeared in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine a poem which bears striking similarities to The Waste Land. Madison Cawein’s “Waste Land”, like Eliot’s poem, presents a desolate landscape as a metaphor for spiritual desolation: “The field seemed sick despair.” Much of the poem’s imagery also suggests Eliot’s. Cawein’s setting is dry and dead. Trees are “Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place”, and the single human being on the scene is “Like a dead weed, gray and wan,/Or a breath of dust”. Eliot’s “cicada/And dry grass singing” is forecast by Cawein’s “crickets’ cry and the locusts’ whirr”. More revealing than the imagery, however, is Cawein’s explicit equation of “the grim death there” with “forms of the mind, an old despair,/That there into semblance grew/Out of the grief I knew”. We now know, thanks to Valerie Eliot’s facsimile edition of The Waste Land, something of the grief that lay behind T. S. Eliot’s own work. Of course, the use of nature to express an emotional or spiritual condition does not originate either with Eliot or with Madison Cawein. But Eliot must surely have read Cawein’s poem in Poetry; and Cawein’s title, combined with his imagery and theme, seems rather too close to Eliot’s to be purely coincidental.

Ulysses was published in its final form in the same year as The Waste Land was written; besides, the Lestrygonians episode, from which this passage is taken, is among those published two or three years before in The Little Review, a periodical to which Eliot himself contributed. There can be little doubt that the poet had read it before writing The Waste Land, and, reviewing it in 1923, he acknowledges that it had made a deep impression on him: ‘It is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.’ It would not be surprising that the scene from the Lestrygonians, where the suggestion of sumptuousness in the window-display rouses voluptuous thoughts (together with a hint of sexual disgust), leading to the merely physical and sordid stimulus of food, should have wandered into the poet’s imagination while he was dealing with a not very different subject.

But what seems most striking is the echo of Joyce’s line ‘He turned Combridge’s corner, still pursued’, in Eliot’s “And still she cried, and still the world pursues.”

These parallels even extend as far as verbal echoes. “The Burial of the Dead” actually takes place, in the form of Patrick Dignam’s funeral. The concept of planting the corpse comes up at the funeral when Bloom pleads, “Plant him and have done with him” and Bloom’s thought in the graveyard, “How many! All these here once walked round Dublin” resembles Eliot’s lines, “so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many.”

Tindall

William Tindall claimed that Joyce had accused Eliot of stealing ‘The Waste Land’ from Ulysses, and that he had encoded this claim in the text of Finnegans Wake. He states this with great confidence (but without citation) early in his Reader’s Guide:

Joyce, as we have also noticed, always insisted that Eliot stole ‘The Waste Land’ from Ulysses.

_{William York Tindall (1969). A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake, p. 60. Syracuse University Press.}

However, if you look in detail at Tindall’s method, any confidence you might have in his boldly stated claims evaporates. The trouble is that Finnegans Wake is written using stream-of-consciousness, dream-logic, fluid symbolism, shifting allusion and convoluted puns. This encourages a mode of reading in which you grasp at associations in an effort to find any kind of meaning in the text. But this is hopeless if you are trying to make biographical claims about Joyce: to make these associations you have to read as much into the text as you read out of it. I’ll give two examples where I am confident that Tindall is confabulating.

First example:

[Finnegans Wake] Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers or Helviticus committed deuteronomy

[My interpretation.] This sentence gives us Finnegan’s profession, and sets the scene in space and time. ‘Bygmester’ is Danish for ‘master builder’ and sounds like ‘big mister’. ‘Maurer’ is German for ‘mason’. Freeman’s Stone is an ancient boundary marker formerly on the ‘margin’ of Dublin. In Ulysses a ‘two-pair-back and passages’ is a kind of Dublin tenement. The time is antiquity, before the books of the Bible—Joshua, Judges, etc.—had been written. ‘Helviticus’ looks like a portmanteau of ‘Helveticus’ (Latin for ‘Swiss’) and ‘Leviticus’.

[Tindall’s interpretation.] Helviticus comitting “deuteronomy” is T. S. Eliot imitating Ulysses in Switzerland—“by the waters of Leman”, as he says in ‘The Waste Land’.

[My commentary.] Tindall’s theory here is that ‘deuteronomy’ means ‘imitation’ (because it repeats material from Exodus) and that ‘Helveticus’ means ‘Eliot’ (because Eliot visited Switzerland in 1921 during the composition of ‘The Waste Land’). But these connections are very thin: there would be no reason to suspect the equation of ‘Helviticus’ with Eliot unless you were already convinced that Joyce thought Eliot had plagiarised from Ulysses while he was in Switzerland, so you can’t adduce it as evidence of Joyce accusing him of doing so without engaging in circular reasoning.

Second example:

[Finnegans Wake] What child of a strandlooper but keepy little Kevin in the despondful surrounding of such sneezing cold would ever have trouved up on a strate that was called strete a motive for future saintity by euchring the finding of the Ardagh chalice by another heily innocent and beachwalker whilst trying with pious clamour to wheedle Tipperaw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spignt of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the Jacobiters.

[My interpretation.] This sentence alludes, first to the dispute between the finders of the Ardagh Chalice in 1868. A ‘strandlooper’ is a beach-comber, hence by association a treasure-hunter. ‘Trouved’ suggests French ‘trouver’, to find, and English ‘trove’ meaning buried treasure. ‘Euchring’ means ‘outwitting’ but also puns on ‘eucharist’ which the chalice was used for. Paddy Flanagan found the chalice in a potato (‘puteter’) field near Ardagh Fort, but his friend Jimmy Quin tried to ‘euchre’ him out of the credit. Then the allusion switches to the Jacobite Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 in Tipperary. ‘Patchpurple’ puns on ‘purple patch’ and the ‘battle of Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch’ in which the ‘Jacobiters’ (the Young Irelanders) fought the Irish Constabulary in a ‘duel’ of gunfire, the ‘dual’ ‘massacre’ being the killing of rebels Cahir McGoldrick and Gareth Ney. Jacobites traditionally wore a sprig of purple heather in their caps, or perhaps the patch is purple with the blood of the slain men.

[Tindall’s interpretation.] At this point Kevin–Shaun is T. S. Eliot stealing ‘The Waste Land’ from Ulysses, Joyce’s purple-patched “massacre”. April, “future saintity”, the chalice (Joyce’s golden cup and Eliot’s grail), “strandlooper” (Prufrock), “beachwalker” (Stephen) and “euchring” (Mme. Sosostris’ wicked pack of cards) establishes identity.

[My commentary.] I can follow some of Tindall’s associations: in Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ Prufrock says that he will “walk upon the beach”; in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus walks on the beach; Ulysses can be described as a ‘purple patch’ in both senses (a success; an excessively ornate passage of text); Eliot drew on the Grail legend, and the Grail is a cup, and so is the Ardagh chalice; Madame Sosostris has a deck of Tarot cards and euchre is also played with cards. But these seem very weak, and I don’t understand Tindall’s claims about “massacre” and “future saintity”.

The trouble with Melchiori’s argument in this paper is that it relies on picking a little atmosphere and a few words out of a very large amount of text. In light of the size and variety of Ulysses, Melchiori’s textual echoes seem to me very weak. This is as good as it gets in the 1951 paper:

The trouble with Melchiori’s argument in this paper is that it relies on picking a little atmosphere and a few words out of a very large amount of text. This is as good as it gets in the 1951 paper:

Thomas Lorch also combed the two texts for thematic parallels, finding in both works rivers, nymphs, nerves, adultery, rats, thunder, and barren lands.

These parallels even extend as far as verbal echoes. “The Burial of the Dead” actually takes place, in the form of Patrick Dignam’s funeral. The concept of planting the corpse comes up at the funeral when Bloom pleads, “Plant him and have done with him” and Bloom’s thought in the graveyard, "How many! All these here once walked round Dublin” resembles Eliot’s lines, “so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many.”

_{Thomas Lorch (1964). ‘The Relationship between Ulysses and The Waste Land’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 6:2, p. 125.}

But the last of these verbal echos may be another case of a shared source. Eliot is alluding to Dante, and Joyce may be too:

And there, behind it, marched so long a file
Of people, I would never have believed
That death could have undone so many souls.

_{Dante Alighieri. Inferno III.55-57. Translated by James Finn Cotter.}

As with Melchiori, in evaluating the saliency of these echoes we face the problem of a missing base rate. Ulysses is so vast and multifarious that we should expect to be able to find echoes of it in a great many works. The question is not whether ‘The Waste Land’ has any echoes of Ulysses, but whether it has significantly more and stronger echoes than a typical work of its length, and neither Melchiori nor Lorch addresses this point.

Ulysses was published in its final form in the same year as The Waste Land was written; besides, the Lestrygonians episode, from which this passage is taken, is among those published two or three years before in The Little Review, a periodical to which Eliot himself contributed. There can be little doubt that the poet had read it before writing The Waste Land, and, reviewing it in 1923, he acknowledges that it had made a deep impression on him: ‘It is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.’ It would not be surprising that the scene from the Lestrygonians, where the suggestion of sumptuousness in the window-display rouses voluptuous thoughts (together with a hint of sexual disgust), leading to the merely physical and sordid stimulus of food, should have wandered into the poet's imagination while he was dealing with a not very different subject.

(Note the speculative rhetoric: “There can be little doubt” and “It would not be surprising”.)

Ulysses was published in its final form in the same year as The Waste Land was written; besides, the Lestrygonians episode, from which this passage is taken, is among those published two or three years before in The Little Review, a periodical to which Eliot himself contributed. There can be little doubt that the poet had read it before writing The Waste Land, and, reviewing it in 1923, he acknowledges that it had made a deep impression on him: ‘It is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.’ It would not be surprising that the scene from the Lestrygonians, where the suggestion of sumptuousness in the window-display rouses voluptuous thoughts (together with a hint of sexual disgust), leading to the merely physical and sordid stimulus of food, should have wandered into the poet's imagination while he was dealing with a not very different subject.

Melchiori’s claim in the first sentence is false: ‘The Waste Land’ was published in 1922, but the earliest manuscripts are thought to date from 1914. Note also Melchiori’s use of speculation: “There can be little doubt” and “It would not be surprising”.