Palimpsests and Doubles: Echoes of The Rubáiyát in T. S. Eliot's Poetry after Vinnie-Marie D'Ambrosio

Abstract

Palimpsests and Doubles:Echoes of The Rubáiyát in T. S. Eliot's Poetry after Vinnie-Marie D'Ambrosio Russell Brickey (bio) In his 1933 Norton Lecture "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism,"1 T. S. Eliot related the following anecdote to explain his emergence as a poet: I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald's [sic] Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me. It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious and painful colours. (25) Eliot's anecdote was by no means recondite, but its significance was never truly evaluated until Vinnie-Marie D'Ambrosio's 1989 Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and FitzGerald's Rubáiyát. D'Ambrosio takes T. S. Eliot's brief recollection about Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer Poet of Persia and traces the putative effect of the medieval Persian-cum-Victorian [End Page 79] poem on Eliot's seminal modernist poetry. D'Ambrosio's thesis is fairly succinct: The themes that the Rubáiyát shares with The Waste Land are fruitful to explore: sterility and fertility, isolation and alienation, time, the questioning attitude, power, the ambiguity of the "you" address. A few of the many symbols shared, but transformed by Eliot's forceful originality, are the waste, the desert, washing rituals, Nothingness, broken images, rebirth after burial, wind, Procne, checkerboard games. Even structural parallels exist, though transformed. (182) Simply put, The Rubáiyát seems to have given Eliot his poetic instinct, an instinct that follows a "good writers borrow" process rather than the "great writers steal" dictate that Eliot espoused. This paper compares these aspects of FitzGerald's aesthetic and Eliot's later poetry, as well as their relation to their literary progenitor, Omar Khayyám, who by the time of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát was more legendary construct and caricature than actual author. Buried in history and revived by concepts that are untrammeled Orientalism, the Omar of the poem (as opposed to the real Omar Khayyám designated by his full name in this paper) rails against Persian aristocracy, petty bureaucracy, and Sufism, but the true subject matter is civilization itself. The Rubáiyát is about humanity, even if the ostensible marriage between Victorian England and medieval Persia is the implied provenance. In the same way that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" describes St. Louis or that The Waste Land invokes post–World War II Europe or that both could be set in London, The Rubáiyát evokes a specific landscape, depending on the reader's lens, or it can represent the world. As there are many readership communities in action at any one time, the onus of meaning falls on which fiction the community believes—the poem belongs to either the country of origin or the world at large—and thus both readings depend on how the community views the authors. This is a long way around to suggest that the authorial fallacy is unusually strong in these poems and that the patrilineal relationship between these poets is more pronounced than is usually the case. [End Page 80] With its great geographic, literary, and temporal leaps, the continuum between these poets suggests two doublings: the Imaginary-Double of Omar Khayyám when reinscribed by Edward FitzGerald's pseudotranslation (which FitzGerald referred to as "transmogrification" and which is often referred to as "FitzOmar" in critical literature today) and the Obscured-Double of FitzOmar within Eliot's poetry—a Double who speaks through the author, in this case a historical parent-author, from behind a textual veil. The Imaginary-Double (as I am using the term here) begins with a falsified literary source, initially presented as fact, that allows the actual author-translator-transcriber to speak with the assumed authority of a spurious historical figure. The Imaginary-Double can work only with a fiction of original source material. Readers must accept, no matter...