T.S. Eliot and Guillaume Apollinaire

Abstract

PERSISTENT theme in studies is the poet's debt to earlier writers, with the establishing of more or less convincing parallels in cases where direct borrowings cannot be found. Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope, has exhibited an eclecticism perhaps unmatched in the history of poetry. The list of those to whom his work owes something extends from Cavalcanti and Dante through the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals to Gautier, Corbiere, Laforgue, Rimbaud, and Joyce, as the studies of Richard Aldington, Rene Taupin, Mario Praz, Edmund Wilson, Luciano Anceschi, Claude Magny, and others have, with varying degrees of convincingness, proved (see the articles in R. March's T. S. Eliot: A Symposium and L. Unger's T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique). himself, with his passionate belief that the poet must possess a sense of the past, seems to invite this type of critical approach; and an enriched understanding of Eliot's poetry has been made possible by what might in other circumstances seem to be only a sterile game of source hunting or forced comparisons. Rene Taupin, who mentioned briefly in L'Influence du symbolisme francais sur la poesie americaine (p. 220) that Eliot a connu pendant son sejour a Paris Apollinaire, found little to develop by way of similarities between the expatriate American and the cosmopolite Pole. He presented striking evidence of the influence of Corbiere, Laforgue, and Gautier, involving verbal similarities and outright translation, but limited his remarks concerning Apollinaire and to two points-the device found in both of a sudden change of time and place at the end of a poem, and the grouping of objets les plus divers with no preoccupation apparente d'expression personnelle-citing one brief example of each, neither of which bears direct resemblances to passages in Eliot. Since Apollinaire died in 1918, his work was finished almost before Eliot's was begun. Correspondences between the two must be regarded then as evidence either of influence upon or as accidental parallels attributable to, say, a common tradition or some sort of affinity in poetic outlook and technique, similar perhaps to that discovered by Mario Praz between and Eugenio Montale. Whatever the explanation may be, the existence of kindred stylistic traits in poets of the same era cannot fail to hold implications for both readers and critics. To the sense of the past must certainly be added an equally significant faculty-the sense of the present. The typical protagonist of the early poems indulges in an ironic