T. S. Eliot and A. C. Swinburne Decadent PDF

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Cassandra Laity
Modernism/modernity, Volume 11, Number 3, September 2004, pp.

425-448 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2004.0059
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LAITY / t. s. eliot and a. c. swinburne
425
T. S. Eliot and A. C. Swinburne: Decadent

Bodies, Modern Visualities, and Changing
Modes of Perception
Cassandra Laity
MODERNISM / modernity
Eliot claimed to have bypassed the “diffuse,” “Romantic,” VOLUME ELEVEN, NUMBER
“effeminate” British Decadent legacy that had privileged “sound” THREE, PP 425–448.
over “concrete image” in favor of French urban poets such as © 2004 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Charles Baudelaire or Jules Laforgue.1 And perhaps because
modernism so successfully rid itself of A. C. Swinburne’s infec-
tious aural traits, critics have not recognized the profound vi-
sual impact of his pagan “natural” landscapes on modern urban/ Cassandra Laity is
Associate Professor of
war poetry. In an age defined by world war and large scale tech-
English at Drew
nology, Swinburne’s Decadent images of drowning and storm-
University. She is co-
shattered bodies accrued new iconic significance. Far from pro- editor of Modernism/
jecting utopian “romantic” visions of lost “unity,” the Decadent’s Modernity and a co-
Sapphic sublime of elemental obliteration—surfacing initially founder of the
in H.D.’s (and Pound’s) imagist, floral bodies whirled by a mael- Modernist Studies
strom of forces—dramatized at once modernity’s keenly shat- Association. She is
author of H.D. and the
tering intensity and a correspondent awareness of corporeal fra-
Victorian Fin de Siecle:
gility.2 It has become a commonplace that Eliot’s Baudelairian
Gender, Modernism,
“Fourmillante cité” reflects back the alienated “etherized” mod- Decadence (1996), and
ern subject. However, by contrast, Swinburnian pagan sites of editor with Nancy K.
death by drowning and snowstorm frequently stage spectacles Gish of Gender, Desire,
of an Eliotic numbed body stung into sharp, percipient, erotic and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot
self-realization by the metropolis, world war, and technology. (2004) and of H.D.’s
Paint it Today (1992). She
Thus in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’s” concluding
is currently completing
Swinburnian turn “seaward,” modernity awakens the speaker
a book entitled, “T. S.
into acute erotic sentience—“human voices wake us, and we Eliot’s Pagan Bodies:
drown”—from the bodily/perceptual haze of its overtly urban Modernity, British
sections.3 Images spinning out the “chilled delirium” and “beauty Decadence, and Avant-
in terror” denied to a sensually deprived Gerontion who never Garde Visualities.”
11.3laity. 425 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

M O D E R N I S M / modernity
426 “fought in the warm rain” propel the downed gull across Belle Isle’s “windy straits” to
its Swinburnian-Sapphic death by crystal, “white feathers in the snow” (CPP, 21, 23).
Tim Armstrong argues in Modernism, Technology and the Body that technology ren-
ders the body supersensual.4 And Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” taken in tandem with “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
imply that under the pressures of modernity’s life-threatening stimuli, all modes of
perception—erotic, aesthetic, visionary—become predicated on “shock.”5 Further,
Benjamin’s choice of Baudelaire (Swinburne’s master) as the lyric poet who best incor-
porates a shock-aesthetic capable of competing with film’s blitzing medium, prescribes
a modern poetics based on Decadent self-shattering structures of eros and imagina-
tive self-realization. Thus Benjamin alludes to Baudelaire’s equation of “the creative
process” with a “duel” “in which the artist, just before being beaten, screams in fright”
(I, 163). And, citing Baudelaire’s “À Une Passante” as an illustration of “sexual shock”
arising under the conditions of “urban traffic,” Benjamin defines modern desire in
terms of Decadent self-dissolving eros: in that poem, the citydweller is convulsed ac-
cordingly with “le plaisir qui tue” (“the pleasure that kills”) by the lightning glance of a
mysterious female stranger borne by the crowd (I, 168, 169).
Here I extend Benjamin’s program for an urban “Baudelairian” poetics based on
modern shock modes of perception to Swinburne’s pagan landscapes, seeking to de-
lineate a lyric Sapphic-Swinburnian “moment” in Eliot’s (and other modern) poems.
Like the more pervasive “futurist moment” Marjorie Perloff traces to Pound’s “vor-
tex,” the Swinburnian “moment”—cut, spliced, and mobilized in accord with modern
filmic modes of attention by H.D.’s and Pound’s imagist/cinematic “eye”—shares a
heady engagement with technology’s speed, danger, immediacy, and attendant rup-
tured forms.6 However the fragile, Decadent body plunged in an imagist “vortex” of
external forces, unlike F. T. Marinetti’s avant-guerre “man at the wheel,” sustained an
elegiac pathos as well as mystic/erotic transport in the Janus face of technological “ad-
venture” and war-ruin.7 Jerome McGann’s recent comments on Swinburne’s “nature
poetry” as a powerful “objective correlative” for “the immersive imagination” suggests
its relevance to such a poetics/erotics of modernity’s violent atmospherics: “when
Swinburne’s I/eye enters the natural world it gets engulfed . . . by tactile . . . immedia-
cies . . . [A “dissolution” experienced from the perspective of] a percipient creature
plunged within.”8
Related to this, while Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire forms a theoretical frame-
work for this essay, my emphasis shifts from Baudelaire’s darker Decadent fantasias of
urban “vice” to the more childlike, Sapphic eros emitting from Eliot’s submerging
Swinburnian seas and chill rose gardens. Catherine Maxwell explores the resonances
between Eliot’s rose garden in Four Quartets and Swinburne’s recurrent motif of a
childhood “garden of memory.”9 Indeed, Eliot’s incidents of vision and eros frequently
evoke a regression to besieged childlike fragility and awe in drowning Swinburnian
underworlds. “Marina’s” hallucinated childhood “moment,” told in Swinburnian sea/
garden transpositions and prosody—“whispers and small laughter between leaves and
hurrying feet / Under sleep, where all the waters meet”—(CPP, 72) later manifests as
11.3laity. 426 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

“Burnt Norton’s” bewitching laughter in the rose garden—“for the leaves were full of 427
children, / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter”—(CPP, 118) and reemerges in “Little
Gidding”’s penultimate mystic juxtaposition of submerging garden and sea: “And the
children . . . // . . . heard, half-heard in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea”
(CPP, 145). Leo Bersani’s elaboration on the origins of (male) receptive, self-shatter-
ing desire in the Freudian child’s “thrill of being invaded by a world we have not yet
learned to master” offers a psychoanalytic bridge between Benjamin’s Baudelairian
version of “shock” and the more childlike Swinburnian correlative I suggest here. Both
Bersani and Benjamin base their respectively sexual and cultural scenarios of “shock”
on Freud’s theories regarding the pleasurable, unpleasurable effects of external reality’s
repeated blows to the human “cortex.” However Bersani traces this pattern of im-
pulses to Freud’s essay on infantile sexuality describing the child’s first haunted en-
counters with the outside world : “[Freud posits that] the infant . . . [o]verwhelmed by
stimuli in excess of the ego structures capable of resisting or binding them, . . . may
survive that imbalance only by finding it exciting.”10 Thus in Eliot’s urban and war
poems of sensory bombardment, his speakers appear to experience mystic/erotic trans-
port as a return to early worlds “we have not yet learned to master.”
This view of Swinburne’s pathos and immersive, pagan imagination coincides with
the Decadent-Romantic Eliot and Pound had worshiped throughout their poetic ap-
prenticeships and continued to admire in lesser known writings. The canon of pre-
ferred dramatic monologues from Poems and Ballads circulating among modernists’
poetry and prose works favored poems “sung” from pagan underworlds of drowning
sensory bombardment: “Itylus,” “Before the Mirror,” “A Leave-Taking,” “The Triumph
of Time,” “Laus Veneris,” among them.11 Both Eliot’s notes to his extension lectures
on Swinburne and Pound’s letters specifically celebrate the Decadent-Romantic’s “pa-
gan” mythmaking, and “championship of liberty” and stoic survival.12 Further while
Eliot’s essay on Swinburne (1920) dismissed Swinburne’s storm imperiled “Snowdrops
that plead for pardon / And pine for fright” as a failed objective correlative, he re-
versed his position tellingly in a later Turnbull lecture on the metaphysical conceit
(1933).13 There he concedes significantly that Swinburne’s elementally embattled
[“Snowdrops”] correlate “our feeling toward small pathetic fragile human beings.” Thus
perhaps not incidentally, Eliot’s (and McGann’s) delineation of Swinburne’s pathetic
fallacy answers “Preludes’” call for images to embody the human subject besieged by
urban life, that “infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing” (CCP, 13).
However, as Eliot and others implied in their expositions on the modernist image/
object, Swinburne’s proliferating, overembellished imagery and repetitive “sound” could
not hold modern modes of attention. Under the technologically informed “eye” of
H.D.’s (and Pound’s) imagism, Swinburne’s already highly pictorial, pagan Sapphic
sublime was effectively cut and photogenically enhanced by cinematic technique. As I
will later discuss, Sea Garden’s subjection of Swinburnian ravished bodies to a barrage
of cinematic innovations—the close-up, montage, and sudden changes in place and
focus—assembled a powerfully influential “intertext” for Eliot, demonstrating how
modern visualities could actualize British Decadent images of violent self-dissolution.
11.3laity. 427 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

428 Benjamin claims that early movements based on a structural optics such as cubism,
Dadaism, and futurism mimicked and anticipated the film apparatus (I, 238, 250).
And as he famously asserts in “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
modern attenuated and distracted modes of attention find aesthetic/emotional gratifi-
cation particularly in the movie camera’s visually assailing “lowerings and liftings . . .
extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions” (I, 237). Further,
Benjamin’s Baudelaire suggests the “possibilities” for a lyric poetry able to compete
for modern modes of attention with the emergent film medium because he is a self-
described ‘“kaleidoscope equipped with a consciousness,’” training “shock” techniques
of the film apparatus on images of urban assault (I, 175). Benjamin emphasizes
Baudelaire’s citydweller in the act of visually capturing the modern crowd’s onrushing
siege, and turning the “camera” on himself, its dazzling recoil against his convulsing,
hypersentient body.14 Benjamin does not specifically include imagism among his list
of early modernist movements based on optic structures, however its primary archi-
tect H.D. was well positioned to formulate a poetic “cinematic modernism.” Schooled
from childhood in technologies of the “eye” by her botanist/astronomer father and
oceanographer grandfather, and already regularly attending “the pictures,” H.D. would
later apply her scientifically trained visual imagination toward avant-garde cinema and
film criticism in the film journal she helped found, Close-Up (1927–1933).15
H.D.’s widely anthologized, optic rupturings of Decadent influence in Sea Garden
(1916) mined a storehouse of Swinburnian lines and images instantly available to Eliot,
Pound, and other modernists. Thus, for example, in a 1914 letter to Conrad Aiken
seeking to describing the wild gardens of Marburg, Eliot quoted Tanhauser’s desire
for self-obliteration “where tides of grass break into foam of flowers” from Swinburne’s
“Laus Veneris.”16 Five months earlier the Egoist had published H.D.’s “Oread” whose
invocation to the gods in sea/forest transposition, “whirl up sea— / . . . splash your
great pines / on our rocks, / . . . cover us with your pools of fir,”17 clearly finds a source
in the fuller text of Tanhauser’s prayer: “Ah yet would God this flesh of mine might be
/ Where air might wash and long leaves cover me, / Where tides of grass break into
foam of flowers.”18 However, as we will see, H.D. spins Swinburne’s spectacles of
bodily ravishment into optical/ mystical “play” through the cinematic operations of
montage. While Tanhauser’s prayer is orchestrated within what Robert Langbaum
termed the Victorian monologues’ Romantic, narrative “song of the self,” H.D.’s rapid-
fire sea/forest intersplicings of cones and circles doubly assail and absorb the “I”/“eye”
in a volley of filmic technique.19
Severing the time honored binary between Eliot and Swinburne and viewing Eliot’s
Decadent British legacy through the lens of modern visualities and cultural/historical
forces challenges, among other things, oppositional and period restricted definitions
of modernism.20 From the nineteenth-century side of modernity’s spectrum, a mod-
ernism conceived in reaction against the “sentimental,” “effeminate” past denies
Swinburne’s relevance to the elegiac and receptive desires infusing poetries of war and
large scale technology. From the postmodern side, a modernism viewed as “reaction-
ary” and “elitist” prevents inquiries into the early twentieth century’s vital interactions
11.3laity. 428 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

with “progressive” literary forms and social, cultural, historical phenomena. Rather, 429
Eliot may be positioned in a more inclusive modernity-at-large conceived as a rich and
contradictory era extending from the late-nineteenth century to the present and en-
compassing engagements between “high” and “low” culture, technological change,
and complex attitudes toward gender and sexuality.21 Further, my focus on Eliot’s po-
etic optics also seeks to restore “play”— the sometime preserve of postmodernism—
both to Eliot’s poetry and to the modernist image/object frequently accused of halting
free-play in the logocentric correspondence “between word and thing.”22 Therefore,
before proceeding to examine imagism’s filmic, Swinburnian intertextualities and Eliot’s
ensuing optical transpositions of Swinburne’s death by drowning and midwinter spring
motifs, it would be useful to begin by summarizing some contact points between Eliot
and modern visualities.
While critics are beginning to explore Eliot’s linguistic innovations, the restive, tech-
nologically sophisticated “eye” that mobilizes his images has received little atten-
tion. Indeed, Eliot’s “individual” transformations of poetic tradition were often predi-
cated on the fragment or “sound bite” from the past both in his allusive practice and
his image-making. He tellingly describes the memory as “a set of snapshots,” “souve-
nirs of passionate moments.” And the presence of cinema in Eliot’s imagination is
suggested both rhetorically and literally by his clipped, photographic conception of
poetic influence as the “reborn image or word” surfacing not just from literature but
from the “whole of [the poet’s] sensitive life.”23 As early as 1914, letters plotting an
anticipated “ten reel” mock melodrama, “Effie the Waif,” show Eliot’s easy familiarity
with the current cinema, its visual syntax, and dramatic possibilities. Frequently elabo-
rated scene-by-scene and shot-by-shot, Eliot’s film parody, like The Waste Land, is a
quirky assemblage of disparate “scenes” sewn together by subtitles and moving from
indoor melodrama to desert and plain, “([in a film] you must have either the plains or
the desert if you expect a good pursuit).” The densely detailed plot spans years and
continents, varying from tense, wistful close-ups betraying the actors’ suppressed emo-
tion to wide panoramas of India where the heroine wanders through jostling crowds,
“(here a street scene with camels, monkeys (comic), and pythons).”24 Accordingly,
Susan McCabe who describes The Waste Land as the modern “montage poem par
excellence,” includes among its filmic techniques, “quick shifts between images,” “un-
expected juxtapositions,” and “film tricks of flashback and forward motion.” Eliot,
McCabe specifies, “widens his lens” to portray crowd scenes reminiscent of D. W.
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in “cascading visions” of “hooded hordes swarming / Over
endless plains”; and I would add, rapidly narrows his lens in poignant imagist close-
ups of the fragile drowned body amid modern ruin, “(Those are pearls that were his
eyes. Look!).”25 Aspects of Eliot’s objective correlative repeatedly suggest his fascina-
tion with abrupt optical shifts such as changes in focus and montage. For example,
Eliot’s description of the conceit, which epitomized his objective correlative, gains its
“powerful immediacy” from “sudden contrasts,” a “telescoping of images and multi-
plied associations,” and the implicitly visual yoking of “heterogeneous ideas” “by vio-
lence together” (SE, 243). Later, Eliot’s direct, intimate experience with the filming of
11.3laity. 429 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

430 Murder in the Cathedral prompted sophisticated aesthetic observations on film’s pri-
macy of the “eye,”—“[in] looking at a film we are always under direction of the eye”—
the role of the producer—“you are, in fact, looking at the picture . . . through the eyes
of the producer. What you see is what he makes the camera see”—and film’s immedi-
ate, assailing impact—“the camera must never stay still”: “We are seized with the illu-
sion that we are observing the actual event, or at least a series of photographs of the
actual event; and nothing must be allowed to break the illusion.”26
Indeed, briefly, The Waste Land’s postwar “story” of Philomel’s rape and mutilation
cinematically “told upon the walls,” may be seen to condense Swinburne’s “Itylus” into
a single moving picture. Among Swinburne’s most affecting monologue issuing from
“a percipient creature plunged within,” Philomel’s agonized song to her oblivious sis-
ter swallow is frequently cited as among the sources behind Eliot’s refrain “O Swallow
Swallow” throughout the Waste Land Facsimile and the published poem. (Indeed,
H.D. who admitted to Swinburne’s influence, would echo “Itylus’” refrain “O Swallow
Sister” throughout her career from the early prose of the 1920s to Helen in Egypt
[1962].) As if enacting a Benjaminean transition from the once meditative absorption
demanded of lyric poetry and painting to modern modes of perception, Eliot’s Philomel
appears not in painterly repose “Above the antique mantel . . . displayed,” but “as
though a window gave upon the sylvan scene” (CCP, 40; emphasis added). Eliot’s “scene”
of the changed Philomel “So rudely forced” explodes onto our consciousness with the
vividness and seeming reality lent by the “lens” (window) recalling Eliot’s later com-
ment on film, “We are seized with the illusion that we are watching the actual event.”
Swinburne’s Philomel proclaims her ecstases of self-loss in an elaborate, narrative “song,”
shed “upon height, upon hollow,” “Feed[ing] the heart of the night with fire” (PB, 61).
While Eliot’s postwar Philomel appears in animated close-up, forcibly apprehending
the reader with the tactile intimacy of an imaginative/creative transport purchased at
the price of war-time devastation27 : “yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert
with inviolable voice” (CCP, 40). And Eliot’s Philomel, like so many Waste Land in-
habitants, recounts one among several tragic stories “told upon the walls” by “staring
forms,” “leaning” “out,” struggling towards us with “withered stumps,” each perform-
ing in savage close-up minute dramas of bodily undoing (40).
Imagism : Swinburne’s Sapphic Sublime and Optical Technique
Imagism has generally been dismissed in favor of voriticism as stationary, “referen-

tially naïve,” and unconcerned with social and historical forces.28 Critical advocates of
imagism (and H.D.) however have observed importantly that Hugh Kenner inaugu-
rates The Pound Era with imagism and its attraction to Sappho’s “radioactive mo-
ments”29 ; that Pound’s imagist tenets were fashioned around the optic dynamism of
H.D.’s poetry (Pound places “Oread” in his vorticist manifesto beside the paintings of
Kandinsky and Picasso as among the prime exemplars of the vortex)30 ; and that Sea
Garden’s embattled landscapes enact the upheavals of World War I. However, although
Sergei Eisenstein compared the ideogram, among Pound’s models for imagism, to the
11.3laity. 430 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

operations of montage, critics have yet to inquire into the film syntax of H.D.’s imagism.31 431
And, related to this, the connection between social/historical modernity and imagism’s
afflicted Sapphic (Swinburnian) floral tropes and luminescent bodies has yet to be
examined.
Hugh Kenner first explored the Sapphic rhetoric of delicate flowers and fragility in
imagism he ascribed to Pound’s early “poeisis of loss.”32 Since then feminist critics
have variously examined H.D.’s language of Sapphic flowers and its attendant Deca-
dent-Hellenic legacy as manifestations of “Sapphic modernism,” the literary phenom-
enon fashioned largely by women writers seeking to articulate a poetics of female/
lesbian desire.33 However, Swinburne’s finely wrought floral bodies flourishing in a
“hostile clime” also described a modern body culture of keen corporeal hypersentience
incited by technological duress for both men and women writers. A discernible chain
of influences and aesthetic purposes evolves from Sappho’s terse fragments on the
throes of torturous love through Swinburne’s elaborated landscapes of mystic/erotic
self-shattering to H.D.’s embattled sea-flowers created in the years surrounding World
War I. Thus Sappho’s “Love . . . bitter sweet” or Longinus’s famous allusion to her
sublime as “Ice and fire” become Swinburne’s salt/sweet, heat/chill landscapes where
the “foam-flowers” “endure when the rose-blossoms wither” and winter collides vio-
lently with spring—“When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces / . . . / And frosts
are slain and flowers begotten.”34 In turn, Sea Garden’s imagist array of salt-encrusted,
frost irradiated sea-flowers mystically transported by lashing winds and froth attest to
modern embroilments in urban life, technology, and world war.
Thus viewed through its Sapphic-Swinburnian legacy, the sudden flush of Pound’s
transparently yielding “Petals on a wet, black bough” may be seen as precipitated by
the metro crowd’s dark, crushing mystique even as it’s stark colors provide apparitional
contrast (“In a Station of the Metro”).35 Like Benjamin’s urban female figure of “sexual
shock” from Baudelaire’s “À Une Passante,” Pound’s beautiful faces are constituted or
borne by the crowd. And as their rain thirsty super-position implies, they have become
fine tuned to the extremes of urban life, alternately screening and absorbing its
everpresent “shocks.” Similarly, Tim Armstrong attributes Mina Loy’s floral evoca-
tions of “the skin as a porous membrane” and the “traffic across boundaries” to Loy’s
common theme of the “fragile” “penetrable” self “subsumed to technology.”36 He cites
as an example Loy’s later poem from the sequence “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”
(1923) whose overarching title (a reference to her English mother), imagery of leaves
and rain, and alliterative prosody recall Swinburne. In that poem, the daughter is both
“restringent” and hypersensitized to “the aura of subcarnal anger” emitting from the
mother she elsewhere equates with “ringing metal”:
. . . the pores
of her skin—
which opening
like leaves for rain
crave for caressings
soft as wings
[MTB, 119]
11.3laity. 431 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

432 However, Swinburne’s Sapphic sublime also presents the body violently torn apart
by oppositions, a splintering eros articulating the war-wracked body in H.D.’s Sea Gar-
den and further enhanced by her rupturing cinematic/optical techniques. Yopie Prins
aptly sums up this more lacerating aspect of Swinburne’s “Sapphic sublime” as issuing
from Sappho’s fragment 130, “which dramatizes the effects of eros on a body that
trembles in violent contraction, at the moment of coming apart”: “And eros again the
loosener of limbs makes me tremble / A sweet bitter unmanageable creature.” Prins
adds, “often called ‘the loosener of limbs’ in archaic Greek lyric, [Eros] describes a
force so powerful it dissolves the joints and disjoins the body, disarticulating the parts
from the whole.”37 The following discussion of Sea Garden’s ravaged Swinburnian sea
flowers explored largely in conjunction with modernist film criticism on magnification
(the close-up), juxtaposition (montage), and rapid shifts in focus offers a set of visual/
emotive “cues” for divining the obliterating Swinburnian-Sapphic “moments” in Eliot’s
poetry.
Early French film critic Jean Epstein observes in his essay on “Magnification” that
under the camera’s dissecting gaze any “close-up” represents a “minute dramaturgy”
of the object “flayed and vulnerable.”38 Already thematically “flayed,” H.D.’s dashed
and submerged floral bodies are additionally dismantled by the imagist “I”/ “eye’s”
deep penetration into the sea-flowers’ magnified tissues in tight, overly bright close-
up. Further, H.D.’s raw grained, marred flowers evince her early exposure to the “en-
tirely new structural forms” revealed by the magnifying or telescopic apparatus that
Benjamin equates with an “unconscious optics” (I, 237). Plied beyond “the naked eye”
in densely magnified, harsh anatomical detail, they appear “cut in rock, “fluted,” and
“furrow[ed] with hard edge,” displaying the corporeal supplementarity French Im-
pressionists termed “photogénie.”39 Thus driving wind abrades the “sea-lily’s” photo-
genically calcified skin—“scales are dashed / from your stem,” “Myrtle-bark / is flecked
from you” (CP, 14). Optic flashes of “entirely new structures” uncovered by photogénie
enact/induce the individual’s amplified experience of splintering “shock” and carry the
“I” into new psychic dimensions.
Anticipating Eisenstein’s description of the ideogram as montage, “Oread’s” colli-
sion of “two depictables” (sea and forest) to represent “something that is graphically
undepictable” clears imaginative space for “shock” in Swinburne’s already liminal land-
scapes.40 While sea and forest are easily visualized in separate frames, “Oread’s” dis-
jointed, whirling points and circles can only be captured fleetingly by the reader’s
epistemological bridging of the gaps between:
Whirl up, sea—

whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
[CP, 55]
11.3laity. 432 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

As mentioned above, the nymph’s plea for self-obliteration finds a source in the sea/ 433
garden juxtaposition of Tanhauser’s prayer, “Cover me . . . // . . . where tides of grass
break into foam of flowers” (PB, 15). Noting Sea Garden’s debt to Swinburne’s border-
line landscapes, Diana Collecott points out the importance of the “between” in
Swinburne, exemplified by poems such as “A Forsaken Garden” which begins “At the
sea down’s edge between windward and lea.” And Jerome McGann observes that
Swinburne’s poetry is “remarkably rich in boundaries.”41 However, H.D.’s operations
of montage compel both perceiver and “I” to undergo epistemological “shock” in the
accelerated, violent crossing of sea and forest. At the vanishing point of entrance be-
tween rapid-fire intersplicings, “Oread’s” reader joins the “I” in the tactile frisson of
self-obliteration. This process also deploys Pound’s imagist praxis of Phanopoeia, aptly
described by Adalaide Morris in H.D. as “the act of throwing or shooting forth” onto
the perceiver whereby the image bodily seizes the spectator.42 And Benjamin’s com-
ment on the film-like jolt of Dadaism’s structural optics further implicates the corpo-
real “shock” of modernity in Phanopoeia: “[it was] an instrument of ballistics,” “it hit
the spectator like a bullet. It happened to him” (I, 238). Accordingly, early German
cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer asserts that the film medium stimulates “the mate-
rial layers of the human being: his nerves, senses, his entire physiological substance.”43
H.D.’s calculated use of abrupt, long and short changes in focus often deploy what
Gilles Deleuze described as “the pathetic” in camera technique whereby successive
changes in the visual “quality” via “a series of enlarging close-ups” or other chains of
changing foci provoke shifts of consciousness and emotion “to a higher power.”44 In
H.D.’s well-known, much anthologized “Hermes of the Ways” and elsewhere a nu-
anced longing for elemental self-obliteration overtakes the “I” and the reader whose
“eye” follows the same emotional trajectory through swift changes in prospect: begin-
ning with hypermagnification (tense, painful proximity), followed by the photographic
panning across vast spaces (escapist desires), and concluding with a telescoping in on
the elementally-submerged minutia of a distant vantage point (fantasies of cool demise).
the hard sand breaks,

and the grains of it
are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,

the wind,
playing on the wide shore,
piles little ridges,
and the great waves
break over it.
[CP, 37]
The emotional trajectory of what I will term “the longing gaze” thus follows searing
self-presence in the tense close-up of wine-clear grains of sand, possible release in the
projection across “leagues of [sand],” and imagined relief as the “zoom” lens arrests
11.3laity. 433 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

434 distant, intricately wind-traced “ridges” of sand engulfed by “great waves.” Later in
“Hyacinth,” the suicidal pangs of love-longing are evoked explicitly by the heaving
“camera’s” liftings and lowerings, extensions and accelerations, enlargements and re-
ductions trained upon a chilling wind- and snow-tormented mountain prospect:
I...
...
who long but for the ridge,
the crest and hollow,
the lift and fall,
the reach and distant ledge
of the sun-smitten
wind-indented snow.
[CP, 206]
...
A pivotal sea-fragment from Eliot’s Four Quartets signaling the speaker’s withdrawal
into solitary contemplation and spare, childlike simplicity (“my beginning”), invokes
H.D.’s trajectory of the longing gaze. In an unwitting sound-image homage to H.D.’s
imagist Hellenic “Hermes of the Ways,” perhaps, Eliot directs the “I”/“eye” from
“pointed,” fevered close-up, across the sea, to telescopic scrutiny of cool, wind traced
phenomena: (the lines from H.D. are in brackets):
Dawn points, and another day [the hard sand breaks / and the grains of it]
Prepares for heat and silence. [are clear as wine]
Out at sea the dawn wind [Far off over the leagues of it, / the wind
playing on the shore]
Wrinkles and slides. I am here [piles little ridges]
Or there, or elsewhere in my beginning.
[CCP, 124]
Eliot’s Imagist/Cinematic Swinburne:

Death by Water and Midwinter Spring
The Swinburnian-Sapphic sublime of Eliot’s urban and war poetry performs the
same assailing imagist/filmic improvisations on Decadent motifs of death by drowning
and the lacerating midwinter spring. Thus, in its brazenly Swinburnian conclusion,
“Prufrock’s” wistful, sea-borne telescopic gaze—“I have seen the mermaids riding sea-
ward”—lures both reader and citydweller outward toward the “shock” of a submerg-
ing modernity—“human voices wake us, and we drown” (CCP, 7). The Waste Land
Facsimile’s postwar drowned Phlebus presents the dis-located body in glassy, under-
water close-up, unraveling beneath Swinburnian “torn algae . . . purple, red.”45 And,
bearing witness to the World War II bomb that “breaks the air / With flame of incan-
descent terror,” Four Quartets enacts spiritual seizure in the midwinter spring’s killing
11.3laity. 434 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

juxtapositions of frost on flowers and fierce, luminescent light distractions (CCP, 143). 435
Like Swinburne’s (and H.D.’s), Eliot’s pagan “minute dramaturg[ies]” of the body “flayed
and vulnerable” frequently gesture toward a childlike pathos suggesting Bersani’s
abovementioned psychoanalytic relocation of erotic “self-shattering” desire in Freud-
ian theories of infantile desire. Eliot’s Swinburnian psychic landscapes often recall the
speakers to their “beginning” and the sense of being overwhelmed by erotic longing,
fear, and awe in worlds they “have not yet learned to master.” Moments before his
hallucinated death by drowning, Prufrock murmurs in childlike tones of wonder at the
memory of mermaids riding tumultuous seas—“I have heard the mermaids singing,
each to each / I do not think that they will sing to me” (CCP, 7). The narrator(s) observ-
ing Phlebus’s dead body in the aftermath of a violent death by drowning assume el-
egiac tones of childlike tenderness and awe—“(Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Look!)” (The Waste Land; CCP, 38). And Eliot’s Swinburnian midwinter spring, as
Murder in the Cathedral’s Tempter’s promise of spring’s return in winter suggests,
signifies the sudden onset of youthful sexuality in old age (CCP, 184). Indeed, para-
doxically, Eliot’s own prose account of his early rejection of an “adolescent” Romanti-
cism for a mature modernism describes the Sapphic-“Swinburne” that pervades Eliot’s
poems. In this particular scheme of poetic influence, Eliot begins by delineating his
discovery of Romanticism as a “delicious and painful” seizure:
It [the discovery of the Romantics] was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared
anew, painted with bright delicious and painful colours. Thereupon I took the usual ado-
lescent course with Bryon, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne.
and proceeds to equate it with the overwhelming (Sapphic) sensory immersion of youth-
ful first love:
I take this period to have persisted until my nineteenth or twentieth year . . . Like the first
period of childhood, it is one beyond which I dare say many people never advance. . . .
[W]e must not confuse the intensity of the poetic experience in adolescence with the
intense experience of poetry. At this period, the poem, or the poetry of a single poet
invades the youthful consciousness and assumes complete possession for a time. We do
not really see it as something with an existence outside ourselves; much as in our youthful
experiences of love, we do not so much see the person as infer the existence of some outside
object which sets in motion these new and delightful feelings in which we are absorbed.46
The submerging “feelings” absorbing Eliot’s youthful poet and set in motion from
somewhere “outside” suggest Benjamin’s similarly random and objectless (albeit
harsher) “sexual shock” emitting from modernity’s “urban traffic.” And notably, Eliot’s
dramatization of a poetic influence rhetorically predicated on “shock” illustrates the
cultural incursion of modernity’s violence on all schematizations of perception.
Elsewhere, modern writers summon Swinburnian monologues of victimized or sub-
lime first love to convey the intensities of war. Wilfred Owen’s homoerotic war poem
“Greater Love’s” proclamation of a love surpassing that of women for the more “ex-
11.3laity. 435 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

436 quisite” bodies of his fallen comrades was written as a “response” to Swinburne’s por-
trait of fragile, pining maidenhood (“Before the Mirror”).47 And perhaps it is no acci-
dent that Eugene O’Neill returns to abusive childhood memories and Swinburne in
his raw, autobiographical play of oedipal love for an oblivious drug-addicted mother
(Long Day’s Journey Into Night). The play, composed during World War II—“while
he was full of anger at the Germans”—concludes with a full recitation of Swinburne’s
suicidal (drowning) lament on unrequited love, “A Leave-Taking”: “Let us go hence,
my songs; she will not hear. // Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear, / She would not
hear / / Let us go seaward. . . .”48
Death by Water
The subtle interweaving of Eliot’s dramatic monologue “Prufrock” with “A Leave-

Taking” has gone unexplored for several critically sound reasons despite the shared
theme of unrequited love and climactic death by drowning. Important resonances
between the poems include the echo of Swinburne’s then-famous opening refrain de-
claring the speaker’s suicidal intent—Let us go hence [my songs; she will not hear]”
(PB, 59) in Prufrock’s “Let us go then”; and both poems’ movement “seaward” where
the speakers witness their own drowning: “I have seen [the mermaids] riding seaward
on the waves / / When the wind blows the water white and black. / . . . / Till human
voices wake us and we drown” (“Prufrock”; CCP, 7)/ “Let us go seaward as the great
winds go, / Full of blown sand and foam . . . / . . . / . . . all those waves went over us, and
drove / Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair” (“A Leave-Taking”; PB, 59, 60).
Until now, a lengthy inquiry into Swinburne’s influence on “Prufrock’s” obviously Ro-
mantic ending may have seemed critically superfluous. From New Criticism onward,
Prufrock’s apparent hope and/or despair of creative/erotic “unity” with mermaid muses
has often been dismissed as a retrogressively Romantic, sentimental afterthought. Were
it not for the Swinburnian ending, “Prufrock’s” echo of “A Leave-Taking’s” refrain
might also be explained as yet another Eliotic ironic counterpoint to the Romantic
tradition: Eliot juxtaposes his derailed modern “love song” against Swinburne’s senti-
mental lament. Rather than simply an escape into Romantic reverie, however, Prufrock’s
turn toward a Swinburnian drowning sea-scape may bespeak a collective, elegiac “song”
of awakening into acute erotic sentience on the impact of modern urban/war “shock”
experience. (We recall that the poem is dedicated to Jean Verdenal, Eliot’s beloved
friend slain in World War I.) Colleen Lamos argues importantly that Eliot’s elegiac
mode of desire is linked to “the motif of drowning” “relentlessly reiterated” from
“Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and “Hysteria,” through Four Quartets and The Family
Reunion. Lamos notes that his speakers appear to write their own elegies from “be-
neath the waves” where “death,” forms “the condition of the possibility for . . . the
expression of passion.”49 Within the larger cultural context of this essay, Eliot’s elegiac
eros may be aligned with Benjamin’s predication of all modern modes of perception,
including desire, on “shock.” And the motif of eroticized death by drowning appears
equally relentlessly in Swinburne’s monologues well known to the moderns, “A Leave-
11.3laity. 436 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

Taking,” “Laus Veneris,” “The Triumph of Time,” “Anactoria,” “Satia Te Sanguine,” 437
“Ave Atque Vale” among them. Rather than the banished muses of lost “unity,” Eliot’s
mermaids might therefore constitute the presiding geniuses (“nymphs”) of a modern
Swinburnian-Sapphic sublime. Hovering over the poem’s erotically consummate cold,
sea-plunge, they join the urban song of “human voices.” Further the poem’s Romantic
afterthought refashions a modern filmic/imagist sea-fragment from Swinburne’s “A
Leave-Taking” replete with shifts in prospect (the longing gaze), juxtaposition (mon-
tage) and magnification (the close-up)
Before discussing Prufrock’s ending, it is important to distinguish briefly the con-
trasting influences of Baudelaire and Swinburne on the poem’s strikingly divergent
representations of the body as respectively “etherized” or catalyzed by cultural/histori-
cal forces. Critics have traced Baudelaire’s equally complex impact on Eliot’s lyric re-
sponses to urban modernity. However from Inventions of the March Hare, through
“Prufrock” and The Waste Land, hybrid Baudelairian-Swinburnian versions of moder-
nity coexist, reflecting by turns bodily alienation and hypersentience. While Baudelaire
also lamented the fragility, suffering, and transport of his citydwellers as Benjamin and
others have elucidated, Eliot’s Baudelairian conception of modernity is overwhelm-
ingly associated with the numbing horror of reviled desire. Thus his Baudelairian streets
are populated by prostitutes and “vile old men,” recurring in poems such as “Dans le
Restaurant,” with whom Nancy Gish associates the “I’s” simultaneous attraction and
revulsion toward desire.50 Patricia Clements points out Eliot’s debt to Baudeliare’s fly-
infested carcass, stinking “Comme une fleur” (“like a flower”) (“Une Charogne”) in
“The Burial of the Dead’s” corpse-flower: “That corpse you planted last year in your
garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”51 And Maud Ellmann’s
catalog of Kristevean bodily waste (“abjection”) infesting the waste land with litter,
carious teeth, corpses, and cigarette ends may be traced back to Baudelaire and Jules
Laforgue.52 Baudelairian “abjection” most often numbs Eliot’s citydweller and fellow
specters of the “Unreal City,” catapulting him into a state of attention deficit. By con-
trast, Eliot’s Swinburnian-Baudelairian hybrids such as “Prufrock” and the below ex-
amined “Silence” moves from sensory disconnect in Baudelarian “static” to rapt atten-
tion and Swinburnian emotive reconnection.
Eliot’s “Silence” which juxtaposes Baudelairian and Swinburnian forms of percep-
tion through the same sea/crowd metaphor illustrates this tension. Indeed, composed
a year before the first draftings of “Prufrock” and echoing another stanza of “A Leave-
Taking,” the poem is among Inventions of the March Hare’s several brief, roughly
worked “drafts” of the published poem. In the first half of “Silence” Eliot’s Baudelairian
urban traffic blares static interference at its confounded and distracted narrator:
Along the city streets

It is still high tide,
Yet the garrulous waves of life
Shrink and divide
With a thousand incidents
Vexed and debated53
11.3laity. 437 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

438 However, later in the terrifying vacuum of night’s silence, the citydweller’s Swinburnian
recollection of the same urban masses takes on the compelling magnetic character
Benjamin attributes to Baudelaire’s crowd:
The seas of experience

That were so broad and deep,
So immediate and steep are still.
[IMH, 18; emphasis added]
Eliot’s contrasting evocation of submersion in the heaving, multidimensional drama of

human experience, “broad,” “deep,” “immediate,” “steep,” is enhanced by the specific
echo, noted by Christopher Ricks, of the “deep” “steep” rhyme from “A Leave-Tak-
ing.”54 Significantly, there the echoed passage describes love’s drowning, consuming
“ways,” couched in the typically Sapphic (bitter-sweet) language of passionate extremes:
“how sore [ love’s ways] are and steep. / / . . . Love is a . . . sea, bitter and deep” (PB, 60;
emphasis added). “Silence’s” crowd thus exhibits the experiential depths of romantic
enthrallment.
“Prufrock” may be viewed as similarly structured by successive versions of a
Baudelairian and Swinburnian modernity again drawing directly on Swinburne’s “A
Leave-Taking.” The querulous, “vexed” and “debated” Baudelairian street scene of
“Silence” greets Prufrock’s passage “through certain half deserted streets” winding
like an “argument / Of insidious intent.” However, despite Prufrock’s numerous hesi-
tations, repetitions, and deflections he is simultaneously driven—“let us go then”—
toward a similar erotic plumbing of modernity’s depths in the poem’s concluding
Swinburnian sea/crowd submersion—a “sexual shock” further induced by imagist/cin-
ematic technique.
Therefore, while Prufrock’s passage seaward from the claustrophobic parlors and
steaming streets is initially compelled by the “ear”—“I have heard the mermaids sing-
ing, each to each”—sound alone fails to make a connection—“I do not think that they
will sing to me” (CCP, 7). Rather the “eye” becomes the speaker’s vehicle for the de-
sired crossing into tactile, obliterating intimacies. Like H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways,”
“Prufrock’s” trajectory of the longing gaze draws the “eye”/“I” outward from smother-
ing self-presence to cool relief at sea where it focuses microscopically on wind-tor-
mented minutia, here of foaming seas, “comb[ed]” by mermaids:
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
[CCP, 7]
Prufrock’s desire to be immersed in the interstices “between” two elemental states—

“When the wind blows the water white and black”—recalls once more Tanhauser’s
prayer in “Laus Veneris” “[that this flesh of mine might be] where tides of grass break
into foam of flowers.” However, taking his cue perhaps from “Oread’s” imagist mon-
11.3laity. 438 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

tage of sea and garden, Eliot also draws the “I”/ “eye” to the space of “shock,” here 439
microscopically cleaved by the hair/wave superimposition: both Prufrock and the reader
are arrested in the turbulent instant “when” waves “Comb[ed]” backward like “white
hair” “blown back” produce finely textured streaks/strands of “white” and “black”
ephemera (emphasis added). In obedience to Pound’s elaboration of the image in his
essay “Vorticism,” the hair/wave juxtaposition derives its “beauty” from stark, opposi-
tional (white/black) “planes in relation.”55 Simultaneously, the lines, “I have seen them
riding seaward . . . Combing the white hair of the waves blown back,” echo and implic-
itly follow “A Leave-Taking’s” similar progress toward drowning self-obliteration in
frothing sea, “Let us go seaward as the great winds go, / Full of blown sand and foam”
(PB, 56; emphasis added). (And we note Eliot’s use of Swinburne’s characteristic asso-
nance, alliterative “w’s,” and “s’s,” and quirky internal sound play—“blown back,” “blows
. . . black.”) Prufrock’s shift from the irony and paralyzing self-consciousness of the
urban sections toward childlike wonder and longing for self-dissolution in Swinburnian
seas thus introduces a modern body culture of vulnerable receptivity and imminent
violation. As in H.D.’s drowning sea-flowers or Loy’s transparently fragile “leaves,”
Prufrock’s delicate Swinburnian landscape/body may be said to gesture toward the
penetrable self “subsumed to technology.”
The final “shock” wave of tidal immersion—“we have lingered in the chambers of
the sea // Till human voices wake us, and we drown”—need not be viewed entirely as
a return from utopian dream worlds to the harsh reality of urban life (CCP, 7). Rather
the two realms are yoked by violence together in Eisensteinian montage as the already
sea-borne Prufrock “drowns” in the urban masses (those “human voices” comprising
the poem’s urban sections). The imploding sea now graphically and conceptually gath-
ers the surging urban crowd, pulling the perceiver downward to a supersensory mo-
dernity. Prufrock realizes in the “shock” of the crowd his former longing to be covered,
like H.D.’s Oread, in the frothing ferment of full waking/drowning sentience. While
“A Leave-Taking’s” languid eroticism is more overt—“all those waves went over us and
drove deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair”(PB, 60)—Eliot’s sudden cut to
the sea/crowd juxtaposition he explored in “Silence,” “we have lingered in the cham-
bers of the sea // Till human voices wake us and we drown,” both thematically and
formally induces the convulsive seizure Benjamin links to the “sexual shock” of mod-
ern experience. “Prufrock’s” concluding stanzas like Pound’s Phanopoeia similarly
ambushes the perceiver drawing him/her into a chain of visually absorbing, ever inten-
sifying, optical readjustments toward the final cataclysmic surge.
In the clipped “Death by Water” sequence of The Waste Land Phlebus has already
suffered the shock wave of war off-camera. The swirling, drifting, undulating body
many have linked to Jean Verdenal forms yet another “reborn image” surfacing in
imagist relief from Swinburne’s poems. An oddly sentient (heat/chill) Sapphic body,
“seen” through a watery lens, he lies caressed by cool currents in Facsimile drafts amid
swaying “torn algae,” “purple, red,” revealing his Swinburnian-Sapphic legacy of pas-
sionately fevered, scarlet flowers and intricate, cool sea-algae:
11.3laity. 439 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

440 A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
...
Entering the whirlpool.
[CCP, 46]
...
And the torn algae drift above him, purple, red
And the sea colander.
Still and quiet brother are you still and quiet
[WLF, 123]
Eliot’s tender, childlike elegy to the whirling, rising, and falling sea-body recalls
Swinburne’s elegy to his French “brother,” Baudelaire, in which the poet is likened to
the drowned Sappho driven by oblivious tides : “The wild sea winds her and the green
gulfs bear [her] / Hither and thither” (“Ave Atque Vale”; PBII, 72). In Swinburne’s
“The Triumph of Time” the lover similarly imagines his own drowned body entwined
with a sea “mother”: “I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside” (PB, 49). However
Eliot seems to be responding directly to Swinburne’s “Satia Te Sanguine” where the
speaker compares his love tormented body to Sappho’s “white,” “feverish” drowned
body “lift[ed]” by currents in “foam where the sea-weed swims”:
As the lost white feverish limbs

Of the Lesbian Sappho, adrift
In foam where the sea-weed swims,
Swam loose for the streams to lift, . . .
[PB, 96]
Again, Eliot’s Phlebus poses a hypersentient Swinburnian body transformed by violent

self-dissolution against “The Burial of the Dead’s” benumbed Baudeliarian specters of
an “Unreal City.” Yopie Prins cites the above passage from “Satia Te Sanguine” to
exemplify Swinburne’s Sapphic sublime of eros “the limb loosener” signifying the body’s
emergence at the moment of its own passionate dis-location.56 Displaced to Eliot’s
modern war poem, Phlebus’s turbulent undoing also initiates a crossing into strange
childlike otherworlds where he suffers a wondrous seachange. Recalling H.D.’s
“frost[ed],” flashing sea-flowers, “more precious” for their striving with the elements,
or Pater’s diaphanous slain youths, the stricken beloved is concentrated to a luminous
point of light, “(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!).57 And the minute war
dramaturgy comprising “Death by Water” resembles H.D.’s imagist “Loss” where the
drowned warrior-lover, embodying H.D. salt-encrusted, phosphorescent sea-flowers,
is ornamentally sanctified by the elements:
O beloved,
...
your white flesh covered with salt
as with myrrh and burnt iris.
[CP, 22]
11.3laity. 440 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

Lamos dwells particularly on “Death by Water” as an example of Eliot’s elegiac 441
homoeroticism whereby the recurring motif of death by drowning enables his speak-
ers to “achieve imaginary union with the lost [drowned young men] they tenderly
describe.” “Embracing in death like Dickens’s mutual friends,” she elaborates, “Eliot’s
speakers identify with the deceased in a gesture that commingles desire and resem-
blance” (GDS, 29). Within the cultural construct of this essay, the merging of the
poem’s “I” with the drowned body in a lover’s embrace extends collectively to the
elegiac eros of a submerged humanity. Eliot’s Decadent slain youth, as in the early war
poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, occasions an erotic lament for the
fragile male body plunged in war ruin: “Death by Water” concludes with the appeal,
“Consider Phlebus, who was once handsome and tall as you” (CPP, 47).
Midwinter Spring in Four Quartets: Death by Crystal

The eroticized transformation attendant upon Phlebus and Prufrock’s death by water
returns in Eliot’s World War II devotional as a midwinter spring, spiritual paroxysm of
floral bodies stunned by chilling/fevered extremes. Yet another site of the numbed
(aged) body roused into (youthful) erotic/visionary fervor, “East Coker’s” late-Novem-
ber writhing “snowdrops . . . under feet” and crystalline “Late roses filled with early
snow” may be traced specifically to the pathetic fallacy from “Before the Mirror” Eliot
cited as correlating “our feeling toward small pathetic fragile human beings” (CCP,
124). In that poem, Swinburne’s love-blighted girl is by turns whiter than “Snowdrops
that plead for pardon / And pine for fright,” a “Late rose whose life is brief,” and “a
fallen rose / [Lying] snow white on white snows” (PB, 146, 147). Other instances of the
snow smitten Sapphic body Swinburne associated with torturous eros recur in the
poem literally entitled “A Vision of Spring in Winter” (PBII, 135–40) ; “The Leper,”
where the pangs of love are compared to “berries under snow” (PB, 135) ; “The Gar-
den of Prosperpine’s” “blind buds the snows have shaken” (PB, 195) ; and “Four Songs
for Four Seasons’” “Deep in the snow’s bed bury the rose” (PBII, 165). However, both
“East Coker’s” and “Little Gidding’s” escalation of the midwinter spring into blinding,
spiraling emanations of frost and fire also evoke the transporting, predatory collision
between winter and spring from Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon Leslie Brisman terms
“a panorama of sex and violence”: “When the hounds of spring are on winters traces /
/ And frosts are slain and flowers begotten.”58
I conclude here by focusing on the midwinter springs pictured successively in Eliot’s
“East Coker” and “Little Gidding” as optically blitzing war-time emanations of the
Swinburnian-Sapphic sublime. Evoking both Swinburne’s elegiac pathos and mystic/
erotic transport, the midwinter spring’s frost/fire light “distractions” and phosphores-
cent snow-encrusted bodies attest to Eliot’s omnipresent consciousness of the World
War II “dove [that] breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror” (CCP, 143).
Eliot’s service as a firewatcher on the lookout for fires caused by bombs during the
Blitz might have disposed him more urgently to “shock” modes of processing desire,
spirituality and aesthetics while composing the poem.59 Noting the juxtaposition of
conflagrations in a philosophical context, F. O. Matthiessen links the Christian/Dantean
11.3laity. 441 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

442 “rose of light” to “Little Gidding’s” “incandescent” bomb “that must blot out either
London or Berlin” as mutual expressions of Christianity’s “inscrutable terrible fire of
Divine Love.”60 Eliot himself asserted that “there are really three roses in the set of
poems; the sensuous rose, the socio-political Rose . . . and the spiritual rose [all] in
some way . . . identified as one.”61 I would add that Swinburne’s pagan crystalline roses
lend a body, albeit of a beset Sapphic eros to “the sensual rose” often directly presag-
ing the poem’s frost/fire imagery of war-destruction. Richard Badenhausen and
Elisabeth Däumer discuss Eliot’s growing attraction toward a classical “pagan” world
of natural forces in plays such as Murder in the Cathedral.62 Thus Eliot’s erotic, lumi-
nous pagan roses “filled with early snow” bear the “incandescent” trace of technologi-
cal warfare even as they glow beneath “the rose of light’s” symbolic enfoldings.
Eliot’s repeated recourse to Swinburne’s Sapphic sublime for his benumbed mod-
ern bodies roused to lacerating sentience by urban/war technology targeted in par-
ticular “Before the Mirror’s” winter-spring juxtaposition “a fallen rose / [Lying] snow-
white on white snows.” The Decadent objective correlative and its chain of Swinburnian
echoes binds The Waste Land, “Gerontion,” and Four Quartets respectively, as the
“cruellest month” visits fevered memory and desire on its numbed postwar inhabit-
ants, “dried tubers” in “forgetful snow” (CCP, 37); an aged Gerontion dreams of a
“chilled delirium” conjuring the perished gull, “White feathers in the snow” (CCP, 23);
and “East Coker’s” rending midwinter spring connotes mystic/erotic invasion, “Late
flowers filled with early snow” (CCP, 124). Moreover “East Coker’s” conjoinment of
war, assailing imagist/vorticist technique, and Swinburnian self-shattering eros is un-
derscored by its direct descent from “Gerontion’s” vision of “chilled delirium.” Eliot’s
desire to use “Gerontion” as a prologue to The Waste Land (which Pound discour-
aged) implicitly associates war experience with the terror and delirium granted the
snow-smitten body but accessible only in dreams to the old man who did not fight in
the war.63 Further, in both passages the chilled delirium is activated by optic tech-
nique, recording in imagist close-up the crystalline toll on an enraptured Swinburnian-
Sapphic body and spiraling telescopically toward a fiery/chill constellational frenzy of
heavenly bodies anticipating war-time violence. Thus Gerontion’s vision of the “beauty
in terror” denied to him accelerates the perceiver from a decimating constellational
orbit “whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms” down-
ward to the gull’s crystalline demise:
. . . Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow . . .
[CCP, 124]
Microscopically enhanced, the “naturally” blurred image of white gull on white snow
gains its “terror” and poignance through imagist “planes in relation” beyond the naked
eye revealing in magnification evanescent, finely textured feathers splayed against chill
crystal. H.D.’s salt-encrusted, imagist sea-violet drew similarly on the frost/flowers/
star complex which Charlotte Mandel links to her experience with the telescope and
11.3laity. 442 11/29/04, 11:46 AM

the microscope: “Violet / your grasp is frail // but you catch the light— / frost, a star 443
flashes with its fire.”64 And in “Hyacinth” the slain youth’s delicately veined hands are
“Snow craters filled / with first wild-flowerlets” (CP, 201).
“East Coker’s” midwinter spring reverses the spiral, beginning with the midwinter
spring’s frost/fire massacre on delicate floral bodies surprised into hypersentience:
What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
...
Late roses filled with early snow?
[CCP, 124]
In the remainder of the passage, “East Coker” enjoins the “eye” to spiral upward from
the crystalline body toward fiery chill “constellated wars” where “Comets weep and
Leonids fly” “Whirled in a vortex” (as opposed to “Gerontion’s” “circuit”; CCP, 125).
Notably, here Eliot acknowledges the impact of his early imagist/vorticist training on
images of war-destruction and obeys his own later injunction, “the camera must never
stay still.” Indeed Swinburne’s Sapphic sublime may yoke “Gerontion’s” crystalline gull
to “Little Gidding’s” radioactive dove, both of whom descend toward “terrible” irradiated
destruction. Swinburne delineates airborne ecstasy as intrinsic to Blake and Whitman in
an unwitting tribute to his own Sapphic sublime in William Blake: A Critical Essay
(well known to Eliot and probably discussed among other “prose” during his extension
lectures): “[one may discover in their poems] an expanse and exultation of wing across
strange spaces of air and above shoreless stretches of sea; a love of liberty in all times
and things . . . tender . . . and bitter.”65
Finally the swift onset of “Little Gidding’s” midwinter spring is represented largely
as an assault on “the eye” through rebounding, dazzling light on snow:
Midwinter Spring is its own season

...
Suspended in time between pole and tropic.
When the shortest day is brightest with frost and fire
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches . . .
...
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And a glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers.
[CCP, 138]
In a passage suggesting at once the bomb’s “incandescent terror” and more ob-
liquely, modern cinema, light optically flays the spectator. Glancing off surfaces at
erratic angles, the blinding glare lances “the material layers” of the body, in Kracauer’s
11.3laity. 443 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

444 words, the “nerves,” “senses,” “the entire physiological substance,” reaching rhetori-
cally into the body’s fluid interiors: “The soul’s sap quivers.” Here again, Eliot directs
our attention to the Swinburnian in-between of liminal elemental boundaries as the
site of “shock.” “Between melting and freezing,” the perceiver is prompted to occupy
the gaps “between” wildly deflecting and reflecting light momentarily undimmed by
moist or crusted opacities. Vaulting and rebounding visualities, in accord with Deleuze’s
description of the “pathetic” in film technique, also convey a leap into vision, “the
sense that consciousness is also a passage into a new dimension, a raising to the power
of two.” Similarly, in H.D.’s “Hippolytus Temporizes,” Hippolytus’s pagan vision of
Artemis—”Ah splendor my goddess turns”—stuns his “brain” with repercussive light:
“the flash of sun on the snow, / the fringe of light and the drift, / the crest and the hill-
shadow” (CP, 122). And H.D. extends the Decadent/Hellenic trope to the “gift” of
“light” bestowed by the shattering film “god,” in “Projector II,” “This is his gift; / light,
/ light that sears and breaks us” (CP, 353). Three sections later “Little Gidding’s” war-
time “dove descending” similarly “breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror”
(CCP, 143). Shortly thereafter, Eliot makes a moral distinction between the fires of
purgation and of destruction (lust, war): “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by fire
or fire” (CPP, 144). However the poem’s yoking of Decadent, cinematic, and historical
conflagrations suggests the pervasiveness of “shock” as a structural entailment of see-
ing, being, and loving in the modern age.
Notes
I wish to express my gratitude to Susan McCabe’s pathbreaking work on modern poetry and film
in conference papers, essays, and drafts of her forthcoming book, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist
Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
1. Pound critiques the obscuring effects of Swinburnian “sound” in “Swinburne Versus his Biogra-
phers,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1935), 290–4. Eliot
similarly critiques Swinburne’s “diffuse” sound and its obfuscation of the concrete image in “Swinburne
as Poet” (Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 281–5; hereafter abbrevi-
ated as SE. On the modernists’ gendering of Swinburne and Decadent-Romanticism as “effeminate,”
see my Chapter One, “The Rhetoric of Anti-Romanticism: Gendered Genealogies of Male Modern-
ism,” H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 1–28. Peter Nicholls traces the continuities between Swinburnian “sound”
and Pound in “The Swinburne Nexus,” Parataxis, 10 (2001): 1–22.
2. Various books have examined H.D.’s debt to Swinburne, Sappho, and Decadent-Hellenism.
See Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle; Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism:
1910–1950 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and sections on Pater from Eileen Gregory,
H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
3. T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 7; here-
after abbreviated as CPP.
4. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998); hereafter abbreviated as MTB. See also Sara Danius, The Senses of
Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002);
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); and Mary Ann Doane, “Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision
in Modernity,” Differences 5. 2 (1993): 1–23.
11.3laity. 444 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn 445
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968); hereafter abbreviated as I. Armstrong offers a delineation of the
way in which Benjamin’s conception of “shock” is used in this essay. Armstrong points out that “shock”
in Benjamin as in Sigfried Kracauer’s “The Cult of Distraction” (1926) may be seen not only as a
disengaged, fragmented form of attention but also as a shattering dis-location by which the spectator
is “shocked out of the seamless narrative of the bourgeois artwork by the cinema’s ‘fragmented se-
quence of splendid sense impressions’” (MTB, 216). Armstrong also points out the important contra-
diction in Benjamin (and Kracauer) on the “shock” effect of modern media which on one hand views
it as “the vehicle of social pessimism” “reflect[ing] back” “an alienated existence” and on the other as
“a utopian possibility which might open up new modes of perception” (MTB, 217). This essay draws
on the latter conception.
6. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rup-
ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 173.
7. On futurism and gender see Futurism, ed. Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozalla (London: Ox-
ford University Press, 1977), 153–64.
8. Jerome McGann, “Swinburne’s Radical Artifice; or, The Comedian as A. C.,” Modernism/Mo-
dernity 11.2: 216.
9. Catherine Maxwell, “Eliot’s Four Quartets and Swinburne’s A Rosary,” Explicator 52. 2: 102.
10. Leo Bersani elucidates his theory of ecstatic “self shattering” male desire in Homos (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), but he had already made the connection between
Freud’s theories on stimuli and Freudian theories of infantile sexuality in The Freudian Body: Psy-
choanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Bersani draws on Freud’s Three
Essays, quoting Freud’s assertion in Homos that “all comparatively intense affective processes, in-
cluding terrifying ones [spill over into sexuality]” and noting that Freud includes “railway travel” (100, 101).
Benjamin bases his exposition of “shock” in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” on similar aspects of
Freud’s theories concerning external stimuli and sexuality from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (I, 160–2).
11. In his essay on Swinburne, Eliot lists among the poems “we should like to have” “the Atalanta
entire, and a volume of selections which should certainly contain The Leper, Laus Veneris, and The
Triumph of Time” (SE, 281). Elsewhere in the essay he also alludes to “Itylus” and “Before the Mir-
ror” (284). Pound writes exuberantly to Margaret Cravens (1910) that he has returned to Swinburne
“with new eyes,” and refers to the “‘Laus Veneris’ edition” which gives us the “great Swinburne, the
high priest.” See Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, ed. Omar Pound and
Robert Spoo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 42. H.D.’s HERmione (New York: New
Directions, 1981), composed in the 1920s, contains echoes of “Before the Mirror,” Atalanta in Calydon,
“Itylus,” and “Faustine.”
12. Eliot notes Swinburne’s “paganism,” his “championship of liberty,” and his romanticism in
notes to his extension lectures quoted by Ronald Schuchard in Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of
Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 40. In Pound’s letter to Margaret Cravens
(op. cit.) he notes Swinburne’s poetics of “liberty” and calls him the “inspirer of men.” Several critics
have written on Swinburne’s pagan poetics and his romantic mythmaking. See especially David G.
Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978);
Margot K. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods: The Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry (Montreal,
Canada: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990); Jerome McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criti-
cism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978); and Pauline Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines:
The Language of Landscape in Victorian Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
13. (SE, 284) T. S. Eliot: The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1993), 272. Notably, Eliot mistakenly calls Swinburne’s “snowdrops” “violets” here,
but he quotes the lines correctly in his essay on Swinburne.
14. Scholarship specifically applying Benjamin to modern literature includes Miriam Hansen,
“Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German
Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 179–219; Alessia Ricciardi, “Cinema Regained: Godard Between Proust
and Benjamin,” Modernism/Modernity 8. 4 (2001): 643–61; and Susan McCabe, “‘Delight in Disloca-
tion’: The Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray,” Modernism/Modernity 8. 3 (2001):
11.3laity. 445 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

446 429–52. Susan McCabe’s forthcoming book, Cinematic Modernism, examines, among other things,
the impact of film and Benajamin’s “shock” aesthetic variously on poetic language, the dis-located
bodies within modernist poems, and on the body of the poem itself: “[The] body of the modernist
poem gained new angles, line-breaks, asymmetries and synapses, shifting within and through the very
technologies that disoriented the relationship of the human body . . . ” (unpaginated manuscript).
Michael North addresses modernism and film in Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and more specifically in “Words in Motion: The Movies,
the Readies, and ‘the Revolution of the Word,’” Modernism/Modernity 9. 2 (2002): 205–23.
15. There has been and continues to be important scholarship on H.D., film, and technologies of
the “eye.” See especially Charlotte Mandel, “Magical Lenses: Poet’s Vision Beyond the Naked Eye,”
H.D.: Woman and Poet (Orono, ME.: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 301–36; Ann Friedberg,
“Approaching Borderline,” Millenium Film Journal, 7–9 (1980–81): 130–9; Adalaide Morris, “The
Concept of Projection: H.D.’s Visionary Powers,” Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Fried-
man and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 273–96; Cinema
and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Jane Marcus (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1988); Elisabeth Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City:
University of Iowa, 2003). Susan McCabe includes a chapter on H.D. in her forthcoming book, Cin-
ematic Modernism.
16. T. S. Eliot, The Letters: 1898–1922, Vol. I, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1988), 40.
17. H. D., The Collected Poems: 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions,
1983), 55; hereafter abbreviated as CP.
18. A. C. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads (London: Chatto and Windus, 1914), 146; hereafter
abbreviated as PB.
19. Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradi-
tion (New York: Norton, 1963).
20. There have been very few considerations of Eliot and Swinburne. The few have focused on the
poets’ differences with the exception of Thäis Morgan’s “Influence, Intertextuality and Tradition in
Swinburne and Eliot” in The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne, ed. Rikky Rooksby
and Nicholas Shrimpton (U.K: Scolar Press, 1993), 136–47. Morgan argues persuasively for the influ-
ence of Swinburne’s prose on Eliot’s definition of himself as a modernist. Leslie Brisman reverses the
original binary which defined modernism at the expense of Swinburne, arguing that Swinburne dem-
onstrates a more progressive, postmodern poetics in “Swinburne’s Semiotics,” Georgia Review 31
(1977): 578–97.
21. For more on the positioning of Eliot in a modernity-at-large with respect to gender in particu-
lar, see my introduction, “Eliot, Gender, and Modernity,” in Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S.
Eliot, ed. Cassandra Laity and Nancy K. Gish (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–19;
hereafter abbreviated as GDS. Studies seeking to move beyond the polarized versions of modernism
and postmodernism toward a redefinition of “the modern” include David Chinitz’s T.S. Eliot and the
Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), the first full length study of Eliot’s
engagement with popular culture; Michael North’s Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern
(1999); Janet Lyon’s Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: New York, Cornell University Press);
Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998); and Rita Felski’s Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2000). For a recent study that challenges period restricted defini-
tions of mid-Victorian literature and modernism, see Jessica R. Feldman’s Victorian Modernism: Prag-
matism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Still
relevant studies of the continuities between Romanticism and modernism include George Bornstein’s
Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976); Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image (London: Routledge, 1957) Carol T. Christ’s Victorian and
Modern Poetics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984); James Longenbach’s Stone Cottage: Pound,
Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and his Modernist Poetics of His-
tory: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).
11.3laity. 446 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

22. For a summary of postmodern critical dismissals of Eliot’s objective correlative, see my “Eliot, 447
Gender, and Modernity” (GDS, 9, 10).
23. See Marjorie Perloff’s analysis of Eliot’s constructivist linguistic technique in “Avant-Garde
Eliot,” 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (New York: Blackwell, 2002), 6–43. T. S. Eliot,
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 148. Andrew Ross
discusses Eliot’s “primacy of the eye” in his criticism in The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of
American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 29, 30.
24. Eliot wrote two letters expounding in detail on this cinedrama dated 14 October 1914 and 27
November 1915, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 62–4; 71. Susan McCabe notes Eliot’s obvious familiarity
with film syntax in “Effie the Waif” among other things in a conference paper, “The Double Life of
Modernism: Eliot and D. W. Griffith,” MSA IV, Birmingham, 26 September 2003. David Chinitz
gathers all Eliot’s public dismissals of film for its passivity and displacement of the music hall he loved
in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide.
25. Susan McCabe, “The Double Life of Modernism.” See also Chapter One, “Modernism, Male
Hysteria and Montage” in the forthcoming Cinematic Modernism.
26. The Film of Murder in the Cathedral, by T. S. Eliot and George Hoellering (London: Faber
and Faber, 1952), 110. David Chinitz observes that Eliot grudgingly admired Charlie Chaplin who
was an icon for modernist writers in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, 87. Various critics have noted
Eliot’s admiration for Groucho Marx.
27. For an application of Bersani’s theory of self-shattering male desire to Eliot’s Philomel, see
Tim Dean, “T. S. Eliot Clairvoyante” (GSD, 59–61).
28. David Kadlec most recently reiterated these charges against imagism, although many other
critics share his view, in “Early Soviet Cinema and American Poetry,” Modernism/Modernity 11. 2
(2004): 307.
29. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 60.
30. See especially Cyrena Pondrom’s “H.D. and the Origins of Imagism,” Signets, 85–109. John T. Case’s
In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981)
gives a particularly subtle and nuanced view of imagism’s optical experimentation among other things.
31. Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” Film Form, ed. Jay Leyda (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 48.
32. See especially, “The Muse in Tatters,” The Pound Era, 54–75. Kenner notes that Pound,
Aldington, and the imagists all pored over Henry T. Wharton’s edition of Sappho which also contains
many renderings from Swinburne. Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and A Literal Transla-
tion (New York: Brentano’s, 1920).
33. See especially Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, Laity’s H.D. and the Victorian Fin de
Siecle, and parts of Gregory’s H.D. and Hellenism.
34. Fragment 40 in Henry T. Wharton’s Sappho. “Longinus,” On the Sublime, trans. T. S. Dorsch
(New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 21. A. C. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads. Second Series (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1915), 29; subsequently abbreviated as PBII. Atalanta in Calydon, First Chorus,
Selected Poems, ed. L. M. Findlay (Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1982), 9.
35. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. I, ed. Jahan Ramazani,
Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (New York: Norton, 2003), 351.
36. (MTB, 119, 116) While Armstrong asserts that Loy demonstrates a “female” modern body
culture of penetrability, I am arguing that it extended to male writers also (116).
37. See Yopie Prins, “Swinburne’s Sapphic Sublime,” Victorian Sappho (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 112–73.
38. Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907–1939, ed. Richard
Abel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 238.
39. (CP, 24, 21, 14) On photogénie and the close-up, see Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale
and Detail in Cinema,” Differences 14. 3 (2003): 89–111.
40. Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Cohen Marshall (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992), 128, 129
41. Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 25. Jerome McGann, Swinburne: An Experi-
ment in Criticism, 171.
11.3laity. 447 11/29/04, 9:57 AM

448 42. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, 25. Adalaide Morris, “The Concept of Projection,” Signets, 275.
43. Cited by Miriam Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseilles, 1940,”
Critical Inquiry 19 (1993), 458. See also Siegfried Kracauer’s “The Cult of Distraction,” The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), 323–8.
44. Gilles Deleuze, “Montage—The American School and the Soviet School,” The Visual Turn:
Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 61.
45. The Waste Land: A Facsimile, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harvest, 1971), 123; hereafter
abbreviated as WLF.
46. (emphasis added) T. S. Eliot, “On the Development of Taste,” The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 33–4.
47. See notes to Wilfred Owen, “Greater Love,” in The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon
Stallworthy (London: Oxford University Press, 1983).
48. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press),
102. See Tom Creamer, “Long Day’s Journey: A Production History,” On Stage: The Goodman The-
atre Newsletter 10 (2000), 5.
49. Colleen Lamos, “The Love Song of T. S. Eliot: Elegiac Homoeroticism in the Early Poetry”
(GSD, 30).
50. Nancy K. Gish, “‘Discarnate Desire’: T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Dissociation” (GSD, 107–29).
51. (CCP, 39) Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 388.
52. Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: Eliot and Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1987), 93.
53. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1996), 18; hereafter cited IMH.
54. Christopher Ricks notes Swinburne among other sources (IMH, 126).
55. Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review no. 96 (September 1914), 87.
56. Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho, 119.
57. See my discussion of the beloved, crystalline slain youth associated in Pater, Wilde, and Swinburne
with whiteness, transparency or burning light in H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle, 70–6). See also
Sarah Cole’s section on “Hellenism and the Beautiful Body: Carpenter, Pater, Symonds,” Modernism,
Male Friendship and the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 23–50.
58. Leslie Brisman, “Swinburne’s Semiotics,” 584.
59. See Peter Middleton’s interpretation of Four Quartets as a war poem in “The Masculinities
behind the Ghosts of Modernism in Eliot’s Four Quartets” (GDS, 83–104).
60. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958),
189–92.
61. Quoted in Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1978).
62. See Richard Badenhausen, “T. S. Eliot Speaks the Body: the Privileging of Female Discourse
in Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party” and Elisabeth Däumer, “Viper, Viragos, and
Spiritual Rebels: Women in T. S. Eliot’s Christian Society Plays” (GDS, 195–214; 234–53).
63. See T.S. Eliot, letter to Ezra Pound, 24 January 1922 in The Letters, 504. In The Great War
and the Language of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Vincent Sherry connects
the passage on “chilled delirium” to the war, although he suggests that the allusion to the white
“feather” recalls “the token of shame that women imposed on men not in uniform” (211). George
Bornstein describes the passage on the white gull as an Eliotic moment of heightened imaginative
power deriving from Romantic poetry (and displaying Eliot’s customary violence) that does not finally
enlighten the old man in Transformations of Romanticism (137).
64. (CP, 25) Charlotte Mandel, “Magical Lenses,” 308.
65. A. C. Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay, ed. Hugh J. Luke (1868 rpt.; Lincoln, Neb.,
1970), xiv. David Reide notes that Swinburne describes his own poetics here in Swinburne a Study of
Romantic Mythmaking, 35.
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Modernism/modernity, Volume 11, Number 3, September 2004, pp.

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T. S. Eliot and A. C. Swinburne: Decadent

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Eliot’s Imagist/Cinematic Swinburne:

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The subtle interweaving of Eliot’s dramatic monologue “Prufrock” with “A Leave-

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Along the city streets

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The seas of experience

Eliot’s contrasting evocation of submersion in the heaving, multidimensional drama of

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Prufrock’s desire to be immersed in the interstices “between” two elemental states—

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440 A current under sea

As the lost white feverish limbs

Again, Eliot’s Phlebus poses a hypersentient Swinburnian body transformed by violent

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Midwinter Spring in Four Quartets: Death by Crystal

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. . . Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

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What is the late November doing

Midwinter Spring is its own season

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