Exploring > T.S. Eliot > People > Verdenal
This page will explore the relationship between T.S. Eliot and his friend Jean Verdenal. Eliot's first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, (1917) was dedicated to Verdenal. That dedication and the epigraphs to 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and Prufrock and Other Observations will also be discussed.
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The little that the world knows of Verdenal comes mainly from the research of George Watson [1] and Verdenal's letters to Eliot. [2] No other letters from Verdenal are available, not even to his family. There are no copies of Eliot's letters to Verdenal.
Jean Jules Verdenal was born 11 May 1890 in the French town of Pau in the Pyrennes and was brought up in old stone house near the center of town, the same house where his father was raised. We are told that Verdenal excelled at languages and that he had copies of Mallarmé's Poésies and of Laforgue's Poésies and Moralités légendaires. He may have preferred to study literature but became a medical student, perhaps to please his father, a doctor. Watson tells us that in Paris Verdenal had frequented literary circles, and knew Madame de Noailles and Jacques Rivière.
In 1910 T.S. Eliot, then a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard University, went to Paris to study a year at the Sorbonne. He took a room at the Cazaubon (1) family's pension, Rue St Jacques, where he met Verdenal who had another room there. When Eliot traveled to Germany and Italy in the summer of 1911 Verdenal wrote him. After Eliot returned to Harvard in the autumn of 1911 to continue his work toward a doctorate they carried on a correspondence at least through 1912. Seven letters from Verdenal to Eliot (written in French) are archived at Harvard University's Houghton Library. The Verdenal letters, in French and in English translation, have also been published in The Letters of T.S. Eliot : 1898-1922 (Vol 1)
A photograph of Jean Verdenal given by his brother Pierre to George Watson appears on plate 22 between pages 416-7 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot : 1898-1922 (Vol 1)
Jean Verdenal died a few days short of his 25th birthday during the infamous Gallipoli Campaign (2) of World War I.
James E. Miller Jr. provides a short synopsis of George Watson's findings in T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977): [3]
Miller cited Watson's essay. [4]In the summer of 1976, George Watson published in The Sewanee Review his "Quest for a Frenchman," presenting what he was able to discover about Jean Verdenal though French military records and talks with a younger brother (Pierre Verdenal) and with a surviving friend. The service records revealed that Jean was born not in 1889 as Eliot indicated in his dedication but in 1890 (11 May). Verdenal entered military service in March 1913, and "became a medical officer in November 1914." The record indicates that he was "killed by the enemy on the 2nd May 1915 in the Dardanelles," and contains a citation dated 30 April 1915: "Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist helping to evacuate the wounded by sea, thus giving a notable example of self-sacrifice." And a later entry in the record, dated 23 June 1915, says: "Verdenal, assistant medical officer, performed his duties with courage and devotion. He was killed on the 2nd May 1915 while dressing a wounded man on the field of battle" (p. 467).
In his essay "Stetson in The Waste Land" Donald Childs writes that Eliot's The Waste Land has allusions to Gallipolli Campaign and that they are there because of Verdenal. Childs supplied some material he collected on one of the early battles of the campaign: [5]
Childs' notes are listed below. (4)
[Verdenal's military citation for heroism and self-sacrifice] probably refers to the aftermath of the First Battle of Krithia (3) on April 28th: a battle fought by the combined Allied force. The French certainly played their part, advancing half a mile (no mean feat in trench warfare) after a day of heavy fighting. The British, Anzacs, and French spent the next two days straightening the line and sorting out the confused battalions. The wounded were tended on the night of April 28th, during which a storm blew in to make the loading and unloading of ships very difficult, for the piers and jetties were still under construction. It was probably this battle and this weather that provided the context for Verdenal's heroism.
On May 1st, however, the Turkish forces began an assault upon the Allies at 10 pm. The bombardment and assault were described by one observer as "hell let loose upon earth". The French forces apparently broke under this relentless attack, and were overrun by the Turks until Allied reinforcements arrived to fill the breach in the trenches. The Allies mounted a counter-attack at 10 am on May 2nd, but by evening the Turks and Allies were back in their original trenches. In the end, the French "suffered over 2,000 casualties". In fact, French grave-diggers could not bury all those who had fallen: "The French, finding the ground. too hard, or perhaps the task too great, slung some bodies over the cliffs into the swift-flowing Dardanelles". One of the casualties, I assume, and perhaps one of those thrown into the Dardanelles, was Jean Verdenal, for another entry in the latter's war record indicates that he was "Killed by the enemy on the 2nd May 1915 in the Dardanelles".
After presenting the information about the Verdenal dedications similar to that which I have synopsized below James E. Miller Jr. writes in T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977) [6] :
The only other public reference by Eliot to Jean Verdenal appeared some seventeen years after the Prufrock dedication, in the April 1934 issue of The Criterion, in the editor's column, "A Commentary." In browsing through a book (Henry Massis, Evocations, 1934) about Paris during the time that Eliot was a student at the Sorbonne there (1910-11), Eliot becomes steeped in romantic memories, and turns both autobiographical and confessional, as, in an aside, he says"
This brief comment stands out with a remarkable brilliancy in the brief "Commentary." as it is the only genuinely personal note struck in what is essentially a reminiscence of the intellectual and literary milieu of Paris during Eliot's year there a quarter of a century before. Although Jean Verdenal's name is not mentioned, there seems little doubt in view of the Prufrock dedication that he is the friend referred to."I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli." [7]
This page has information on the Prufrock dedication below.
| 26 September 1888 - | Eliot born. [8] |
| 11 May 1890 - | Verdenal born. [9] |
| 1906 to 1909 - | Eliot is an undergraduate at Harvard (graduated in just 3 years). [10] |
| 1909 to 1910 - | Eliot in graduate school at Harvard. [11] |
| October 1910 - | Eliot goes to Paris to study at the Sorbonne (aged 22).
Stays at a pension with Jean Verdenal (aged 20). [12] They had separate rooms. [13] |
| 26 April 1911 - | First known mention of Verdenal. In a letter to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley, Eliot mentions going to Verdenal's room to look out at the garden. Finding Verdenal out there, Eliot throws a lump of sugar at him. [14] |
| Summer 1911 - | Eliot travels to Munich and Northern Italy.
[15]
Eliot writes most of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' in Munich. [16] Verdenal writes Eliot while Eliot is in Munich (2 letters in July 1911). [17] |
| September 1911 - | Eliot returns to America. [18] |
| 1911 to 1912 - | Verdenal writes Eliot while Eliot is in America
[19]
(17 October 1911, 5 February 1912, 22 April 1912, 26 August 1912, 26 December 1912). |
| 1911 to 1914 - | Eliot back in graduate school at Harvard. [20] |
| March 1913 - | Verdenal enters military service in France. [21] |
| 1914 - | Eliot, while still a Harvard graduate student,
given a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship to study at Merton College, Oxford.
Passing through London, Eliot goes to summer school in Marburg, Germany.
When war breaks out, Eliot goes back to England.
[22]
Did Eliot visit Verdenal in France on the way to Germany? |
| March or April 1915 - | Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood meet. [23] (She commonly used the spelling Vivien.) |
| 25 April 1915 - | Amphibious landing at Gallipoli commences. [24] |
| 2 May 1915 - | Verdenal killed. [25] |
| June 1915 - | 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' published in "Poetry."); [26] |
| 26 June 1915 - | Eliot marries Vivienne Haigh-Wood. [27] (By nearly all accounts it was a troubled marriage.) |
| January 1916 - | A letter to Conrad Aiken indicates
that Eliot definitely knows of Verdenal's death by this time.
[28]
(5)
The question remains though of when he first learned that his friend was killed. |
| 1917 - | Prufrock and Other Observations published. Dedicated to Jean Verdenal. [29] |
| 8 August 1917 - | In a letter to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley, Eliot writes "I remember Jean Verdenal saying to me when I left Paris that Space more than Time would seperate us." [30] |
| January 1921 - | Eliot writes his mother of visiting Paris before Christmas. [31] He spent a week at the Cazaubon pension. "If I had not met such a number of new people there Paris would be desolate for me with pre-war memories of Jean Verdenal and the others." |
| 1922 - | Eliot's The Waste Land published.
[32]
Is Phlebas an allusion to Verdenal? |
| 17 September 1932 - | Eliot leaves to lecture in America. He leaves his wife in England. [33] (6) |
| February 1933 - | While in America Eliot starts seperation proceedings from his wife. [34] |
| 26 June 1933 - | Eliot leaves America to return home. [35] After his return he only meets his wife twice, once with the solicitors and once when she tracks him down (18 November 1935). [36] |
| April 1934 - | Eliot publishes in The Criterion a reminiscence of a friend waving a branch of lilac in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris. [37] (7) |
| July 1952 - | John Peter's 'A New Interpretation of The Waste Land' published. [38] It does not mention Verdenal but does propose that the persona behind the poem fell in love with a young man who died. [39] (8) |
| February-March 1953 - | Peter's 'A New Interpretation of The Waste Land' suppressed. [40] [41] ; |
| 4 January 1965 - | Eliot dies. [42] |
| 1967 - | Verdenal's surviving letters to Eliot given to Harvard's Houghton Library by Theresa Eliot, the widow of Eliot's brother Henry Ware Eliot Jr. [43] (9) |
| 1969 - | John Peter's essay 'Postscript' indentifies Verdenal as The Waste Land's drowned young man. [44] |
| 1970-1973 - | George Watson researches Verdenal. Meets with his younger brother Pierre and Verdenal's friend Dr. Andre Schlemmer. [45] |
| Summer 1976 - | The Sewanee Review publishes Watson's Verdenal research as "Quest for a Frenchman." [46] |
| 1977 - | James E. Miller Jr. elaborates on Peter's discussion of Verdenal's influence on The Waste Land in his book T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land. [47] |
| 1988 - | Verdenal letters published in
The Letters of T.S. Eliot both in French and in English translation.
[48]
A photograph of Verdenal in his Army uniform that was given to George Watson by Pierre Verdenal [49] is printed also. [50] |
1925 - T.S. Eliot's final conjoining of the Prufrock and Other Observations dedication and epigraph [51] [More on this below]:
For Jean Verdenal, 1889-1915
mort aux Dardanelles
Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
[Now can you understand the quality of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.] [52]
1952 - John Peter (critic) in his impersonal, dramatic reading presented in "A New Interpretation of The Waste Land": [53]
What the poem seems to require is some preliminary statement, rather like those prefixed to magazine serials, to explain what has gone before. Of course, it is true that the protagonist's monologue implies its own history and that it is from the monologue itself that any sketch of this history must be deduced. But the implications are not always as clear as they might be and it is perhaps permissible to do temporary violence to the poem in order to set them out more explicitly. If we try to do this I believe that we shall find ourselves gravitating towards an account in some such terms as these:
Such an introduction is obviously inadequate and may, I fear, even seem brutally insensitive; but if we take it simply as a rather clumsy stage-direction, to be inserted at the beginning of the monologue, it may go some way to justify itself on the grounds of usefulness, if not subtlety.At some previous time the speaker has fallen completely (perhaps the right word is 'irretrievably') in love.
The object of this love was a young man who soon afterwards met his death, it would seem by drowning. (An appropriate parallel would be the situation recorded in In Memoriam.) (10)
Enough time has now elapsed since his death for the speaker to have realized that the focus for affection that he once provided is irreplaceable.
The monologue which, in effect, the poem presents is a meditation upon this deprivation, upon the speaker's stunned and horrified reactions to it, and on the picture which, as seen through its all but insupportable bleakness, the world presents.
1969 - John Peter (critic) in his "Postscript" reading of The Waste Land as a personal poem: [54]
And later: [55]Anyone reading Eliot with real attentiveness today, I think, can hardly avoid the conclusion that in his own youth he had a close romantic attachment to another young man, and that this far from uncommon type of friendship was rudely cut short when the other was drowned. Consider the dedication to the Prufrock volume of 1917: ... [More on this dedication below]:
As with Hallam and Tennyson, so with Jean Verdenal and Eliot: the implication is subtle but not, I think, illusory. 'I that am of your blood was taken from you For your better health'--as, in writing of Middleton, the poet chose to rephrase his Bullen text. (11)
1973 - T.S. Matthews (biographer): [56]
What are we to make of these facts? Not much, beyond inferring that a friendship between young men can be warm and may stir the blood without firing it; and that there may well have been some exaggeration in Eliot's melancholy remembrance of this foreign friend.
1975 - Stephen Spender (critic, friend): [57]
Eliot once referred to The Waste Land as an elegy. Whose elegy? His father's? Jean Verdenal's--mort aux Dardanelles (12) in the war?
1976 - George Watson (critic): [58]
I believe Eliot's debt to Verdenal was in the conversation he gave and the literary acquaintance he offered. All this, no doubt, warmed by a profound and admiring affection that may rightly be called love.
1977 - James E. Miller Jr. (critic) in a discussion of the importance of Verdenal in Eliot's The Waste Land: [59]
We probably can never know, even when all the biographical data are available, the role Jean Verdenal played in Eliot's life, particularly his imaginative or psychic life. There may well have been nothing visible externally but a close friendship, and there may well have been nothing "overt" beyond this fellow-feeling or comradeship. But Eliot's imagination could well have transformed the meager facts beyond recognition, especially after Verdenal's death. And memory might well have spun in agony over times and opportunities passed by. It is, after all, human nature to remember the close associations of ardent youth in a golden haze. And an imaginative mind can change a chance encounter into cataclysmic experience. Emily Dickinson offers only one case of many in which a transcendent imagination derived a great body of love poetry from the most casual of relationships. Eliot may have created or intensified in retrospect the feelings he experienced in his youthful association. But this imaginative expansion renders them no less valid, no less anguishing, no less proper as the subject of poetry.
1989 - John T. Mayer (critic): [60]
A telling indication of the force of Verdenal's impact, and a tribute to the relationship they shared, is the fact that Eliot chose to dedicate his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and other Observations (1917), to Jean Verdenal, giving only his names and dates, 1889-1915, but not the clarifier "mort aux Dardanelles" that would identify him as a victim of war, which Eliot added only in 1925. At the very time Eliot sought to impress on his parents the value of his career, he paid tribute not to them or his new wife or to Pound (who had by 1917, almost singlehandedly launched Eliot on his public career) but to Verdenal. The dedication of a first volume holds great significance for a new writer. Eliot's choice is usually read as a memorial to heroic sacrifice in war, yet without the later clarifier it is unclear that Verdenal died in the war. This dedication is Eliot's homage to the person who meant most to him in his life to this point, because he "understood" him as no one else had, and understood as well the kind of poetry represented by the Paris poems, written when he knew Verdenal. This is the kind of poetry that he feared he could not repeat but that he wanted to equal, the "accents" of the now retired "profession of the calamus."
1984 - Peter Ackroyd (biographer): [61]
The two young men were, in any event, in close intellectual and imaginative sympathy. They visited galleries together, discussed the latest books, and corresponded after Eliot's return to America, It was the kind of friendship which, established upon youthful enthusiasm and in the absence of those constraints which afflicit young men coming from the same background or country, Eliot had never experienced before. (He was to say later that there had been very few people at Harvard whom he could tolerate, and even his friendship with Conrad Aiken was marked by a jocular uneasiness.)
1998 - Lyndall Gordon (biographer): [62]
These letters reflect Eliot's capacity for friendship without the bravado he went in for with buddies like Aiken: his new friend was devoid of the ostentatious masculinity American men felt compelled to construct; his unaffected seriousness was charming. Eliot was struck by the French determination to catch the most elusive feelings in the net of language. Long after, he remembered Verdenal coming towards him across the Luxembourg Gardens, waving a spray of lilac--the rare sentiment in this memory has raised the question whether the feeling between them was 'queer'. Eliot denied this absolutely, and spoke of 'nervous sexual attacks' which he 'suffered' in Paris: 'One walks about the street with one's desires, and one's refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches.' He made it plain that these desires were for women. Who can now determine the exact ways people of the past bent their inclinations in order to construct gender according to absurd models of masculinity and femininity? Verdenal was easy with Eliot who, stiff himself, had a stiffening effect on others when he did not deliberately unbend. The Frenchman's most important legacy for Eliot was to offer a blend of sensibility and intellect missing in the English intellectual tradition since the seventeenth century.
2001 - Carole Seymour-Jones (biographer): [63]
For Tom, too, Bergsonian exhorations to taste life to the full enabled him to cast off Bostonian inhibition and, free from the watchful eye of his mother and his classmates, to allow himself to create an emotional bond with Jean Verdenal. For a man who had no intimate friends previously, the relationship with Jean was a revelation. Full of conflict, ascetic, yet deeply sensual as his poetry reveals, Eliot discovered that his new-found intimacy with Verdenal crystallised the struggle between his instinctive sexual orientation, which seemed predominantly homosexual at that time, and the dictates of tradition and conscience, which demanded a conventional life. Although the relationship with Verdenal was unlikely to have been a physical one, given Eliot's inhibitions--notwithstanding the consistent homosexual theme of the Colombo verses--it was the knowledge that in this gay relationship alone he felt, for the first time, accepted and understood by another human being, which was to lead to a mental crisis after his return to America.
George Watson visited with Jean Verdenal's younger brother Pierre in 1972. He reported in "Quest for a Frenchman" that the Verdenal family were "staunchly antiradical and anti-Gaullist, and touched with some of the convictions that early in the century would have been called anti-Dreyfusard." [64] Watson also told of receiving a letter in 1973 from Dr. Andre Schlemmer, a friend of Jean Verdenal where Schlemmer reported that Verdenal "took a small interest, literary and political, in Charles Maurras and his Action Française. He may have been inclined to be monarchist theor[et]ically, but not to take part in this extremist movement." [65] Watson then went on in length to discuss Eliot's admiration for Charles Maurras and, as an aside, also mentioned "the anti-Gaullism of the Verdenal family and their lack of bitterness over the Vichy era" [66] (During the German occupation of France in World War II Pierre Verdenal was mayor of his and Jean's hometown of Pau). [67]
All in all, not much direct evidence exists to conclude much about Verdenal's own attitudes.
A case can be made that Phlebas the Phoenician in The Waste Land is a transformed Jean Verdenal, as is the hyacinth girl. I am working on a new presentation of the argument. In the meantime, an older version of this page can be looked at to discover more about the transformation of Jean Verdenal into something rich and strange.
This combination of praise and recognition of personality may seem odd for Eliot, who was famous for his "Impersonal theory of poetry" [70] as expressed in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent':This is great poetry, economical of words, a universal emotion related to a particular place; and it gives me the shudder that I fail to get from anything in Maud. But such a passage, by itself, is not In Memoriam: In Memoriam is the whole poem. It is unique: it is a long poem made by putting together lyrics, which only have a continuity of a diary, the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself. It is a diary of which we have to read every word.
Perhaps then, it was Eliot's grief more than Tennyson's that led Eliot to write in his 'In Memoriam' essay: [74]
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. [71]
Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. [72]
Poetry is not a turning loose of expression, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. [73]
It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from his generation.
A more developed discussion on Eliot's strange rhapsody about Tennyson and In Memoriam can be found in the first chapter of James Miller's T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land, "Prologue," subtitled "A Curious Shudder" (alluding to Eliot's shudder on reading In Memoriam.) [75]
The epigraph chosen by Miller for his first chapter helps to show what he sees as a connection between the poems The Waste Land and In Memoriam:
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Note: The Italian in the editions of The Divine Comedy that Eliot used do not always match the Italian in current editions of Dante's poem.
Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' was mostly written in the summer of 1911, [76] the summer Eliot spent in Europe before leaving Verdenal to return to Harvard University to finish his studies. [77] Prior to being published in Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 the poem was printed in Poetry in June 1915. [78] In neither printing did the poem have a dedication but it did have the epigraph:
S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tomasse al mundo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
However, in the draft of the poem the epigraph was:
"sovegna vos a temps de mon dolor"--
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina. [79]
The line "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina." appears as line 427 of The Waste Land. [80]
Much of the dedication information below comes from B.C. Southam's A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (1994) [81]
Please note that located above is a quotation from John T. Mayer about the importance of Eliot's dedication of his book to Verdenal.
In Eliot's volume of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) the entire volume was dedicated with the lines:
To Jean Verdenal
1889-1915
( Correctly the dates should have been 1890-1915 [82] )
In Eliot's Ara Vos Prec (1920) the volume had no dedication but did have an epigraph (the lines 133-136 of Canto XXI from Dante's Purgatorio - translation below
Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
When Ara Vos Prec was republished in America as Poems (1920) (with "Hysteria" replacing the poem "Ode") there was no epigraph but it did have the dedication:
To Jean Verdenal
1889-1915
In Eliot's Poems: 1909-1925 (1925) the entire volume was dedicated to Henry Ware Eliot (Eliot's father.) However, the section containing the poems originally published in Prufrock and Other Observations was dedicated to Verdenal (with For replacing To). This time both "mort aux Dardanelles" and the Dante epigraph were added to the dedication.
For Jean Verdenal, 1889-1915
mort aux Dardanelles
Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
The epigraph from Dante that Eliot used with the dedication to Verdenal in Prufrock and Other Observations came from Purgatorio, Canto XXI, lines 133-136:
In his essay "Dante" (1929) [83] Eliot provided this translation:Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
Other translations are:Now can you understand the quality of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.
Now you are able to comprehend the quality of love that warms me to you, when I forget our emptiness, treating shades as if they were solid.
or
Now you can understand how much love burns in me for you, when I forget our insubstantiality, treating the shades as one treats solid things.
Dante had the Roman poet Statius speak these lines to Virgil. Statius lived generations after Virgil and greatly admired his work. In Purgatory, when Statius saw Virgil guiding Dante, he came up to Virgil to greet him. He was unable to touch him as both Statius and Virgil were ghosts (shades) and had no physical bodies (thus their emptiness.) [84]
The published version of the epigraph for 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' came from Dante's Inferno:
Southam provides this translation [85] :S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tomasse al mundo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
"If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy."
He also provides these additional notes [86] :
These words are spoken by Count Guido da Montefelltro (1223-98) in Dante's Inferno xxvii, 61-6. Dante recounts his visit to the underworld. In the Eigth chasm of Hell he meets Guido, punished here , with other false and deceitful consellors, in a single prison of flame for his treacherous advice on earth to Pope Boniface. When the damned speak from this flame the voice sounds from the tip, which trembles. Guido refers to this, and goes on to explain that he speaks freely only because he believes that Dante is like himself, one of the dead who will never return to earth to report what he says.
The draft version of the epigraph for 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' comes from Dante's Purgatorio, Canto XXVI, lines 147-148:
More fully (lines 142-148):'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
In his essay "Dante" (1929) [87] Eliot provided this translation (emphasis added):'Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;
consiros vei la passada folor,
e vei jausen lo jorn qu'esper, denan.
Ara vos prec, per aquella valor
que vos guida al som de l'escalina,
sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor!'.
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
'I am Arnold, who weeps and goes singing. I see in thought all the past folly. And I see with joy the day for which I hope, before me. And so I pray you, by that Virtue which leads you to the topmost stair--be mindful in due time of my pain'. Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.
Citations are denoted by square brackets surrounding the citation number. See the bibliography section for fuller citations.
Comments are denoted by parentheses surrounding the comment number.
The spelling used by George Watson is Cazaubon. Eliot used the spelling 'Casaubon' in a letter.
The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 was an Allied attempt to force Ottoman Turkey out of World War I. The allies attempted to gain control of the Dardanelles, the western section of the straits seperating Europe from Asia Minor. On April 25, 1915 Allied troops landed at several points near the Gallipoli peninsula. Each side suffered about 250,000 casualties before the allies withdrew in January 1916.
One good website about Gallipoli is at URL http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/gallipoli/navigate.htm
More on the French involvement in the First Battle of Krithia can be found on-line in the essay Helles: The French in Gallipoli by Eleanor van Heyningen. The file is at URL http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/gallipoli/pdf_files/French.pdf (in PDF file format.)
Child's end notes for the First Battle of Krithia are:
- Note #28 (near "hell let loose upon earth")
- Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary (1920), vol i, p. 187
- Note #29 (near "2,000 casualities)"
- Robert R. James, Gallipoli (1965), pp. 146-47
- Note #30 (near mention of bodies slung into the Dardenelles)
- Eric W. Bush, Gallipoli (1975), p. 160
Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) was an American poet, short story writer, critic and novelist. He was also a Harvard classmate of Eliot's and a lifelong friend. He split his time living in both America and England. See a short biography at http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/caiken.htm.
A case can be made that Eliot may have responded to his grief over Verdenal's death by rushing into his marriage with Vivienne. Similarly, his breakup from Vivienne and his subsequent hiding from her and less frequent contacts with friends afterward may have contributed to Eliot's melancholy lament in published The Criterion.
Vivienne Eliot was committed to a mental asylum in July 1938. She died there 22 January 1947. (Painted Shadow, pp. 557-558,568.)
The Criterion was a quarterly literary journal founded and edited by Eliot. It was published during the years 1922-1939.
Care should be taken when discussing the two Peter essays. They are in different styles and written seventeen years apart. It may be fair to discuss Peter himself as having one view but the essays attempted two different approaches to The Waste Land. John Peter's earlier essay was an attempt to give a reading to The Waste Land where Eliot the poet was writing a drama. Eliot was the author but was not intended to be a character nor the narrator. In his later essay Peter identifies Eliot as the voice behind The Waste Land and Verdenal as its drowned youth Phlebas and he makes the poem to be very personal to Eliot himself. Here most readers will see Peter claiming Eliot to be homosexual. At the least, he appears to give Eliot a homosexual leaning.
Henry Ware Eliot Jr. (1879-1947) was Eliot's older and proud brother. He collected much T.S. Eliot and Eliot family memorabilia and donated it to Harvard's Houghton Library.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) spend seventeen years (1833-1850) writing the passages of his long poem In Memoriam an elegy in memory of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Tennyson befriended Hallam when they were students at Cambridge University. Hallam even became engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily. Hallam died unexpectly in on September 15, 1833, at the age of twenty-two.
The quotation "I that am of your blood was taken from you / For your better health;" is from Thomas Middleton's play Women Beware Women. In 1927 Eliot gave a fuller rendition of this at the end of his essay "Thomas Middleton" but apparently he had a different version of the text than that of A.H. Bullen, the editor of a set of Middleton works.
Peter may have brought in the Middleton quotation for us to compare to these lines in The Waste Land:
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retractSee the comment above for information on the Tennyson/Hallam relationship.
Mort aux Dardanelles: Died at the Dardanelles
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Copyright © Rickard A. Parker
Rick can be contacted via e-mail at raparker@theworld.com
Originally published: January 1999
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