202
PARTISAN REVIEW
the necessity for the author of a consciousness of the past as far back
as Homer, when he brings the reader back to Dante, the Elizabethans
and Andrew Marvell, he· is also speaking as. the heir of all the ages.
The emphasis on a consciousness of literature may also be
mis–
leading, for nowhere better than in Eliot can we see the difference
between being merely literary and making the knowledge of litera–
ture an element in vision, that is to say, an essential part of the
process of seeing anything and everything. Thus, to cite the advent
of Tiresias again, the literary character of
his
appearance is matched
by the unliterary actuality by means of which he refers to himself
as being "like a taxi throbbing waiting." In one way, the subject of
The Waste Land
is the sensibility of the protagonist, a sensibility
which is literary, philosophical, cosmopolitan and expatriated. But
this sensibility is concerned not with itself as such, but with the com–
mon things of modern life, with two such important aspects of
existence as religious belief and making love. To summon to mind
such profound witnesses as Freud and D. H. Lawrence is to remem–
ber how often, in modern life, love has been the worst sickness of
human beings.
The extent to which Eliot's poetry is directly concerned with
love is matched only by the extent to which it is concerned with
religious belief and the crisis of moral values.
J.
Alfred Prufrock is
unable to make love to women of his own class and kind because of
shyness, sclf-com;ciousness, and fear of rejection. The protagonists of
other poems in Eliot's first book are men or women laughed at or
rejected in love, and a girl deserted by her lover seems like a body
deserted by the soul.
In Eliot's second volume of poems, an old man's despair issues
in part from his inability to make love, while Sweeney, an antitheti–
cal character, is able
~o
make love, but is unable to satisfy the woman
with whom he copulates. In
The Waste Land,
the theme of love as
a failure is again uppermost. Two lovers return from a garden after
a moment of love, and the woman is overcome by despair or patho–
logical despondency. A lady, perhaps the same woman who has re–
turned frolll the garden in despair, becomes hysterical in her boudoir
becaus·e her lover or her husband has nothing to say to her and
cannot give her life any meaning or interest: "What shall I do now?"
she says, "what shall I ever do?" The neurasthenic lady is succeeded in
the poem by cockney women who gossip about another cockney
woman who has been made
ill
by contraceptive pills taken to avoid
the consequences of love; which is to say that the sickness of love has
