T. S. Eliot’s Re/reading of Baudelaire and Allegory of Modernity¹

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is double-folded: it aims to examine the significance of Eliot’s re/reading of Baudelaire’s urban poetry in the formation of his modernist poetics and, thereby, to uncover the lasting presence of allegory in the modernist poetry of Eliot. Important texts for the exploration of Baudelaire’s impact on Eliot are his own later essays on the French poet. The poet of The Flower of Evil, according to Eliot, revolutionizes modern poetry not just by selecting the metropolitan life as the main subject matter of poetry but by penetrating into its shocking reality deeply and accurately. Eliot highlights the fusion of reality and fantasy as the essence of Baudelaire’s urban poetics and, at the same time, as the most important factor that he has learned from the French poet. However, Eliot’s later essays on Baudelaire are not fully helpful in explicating the French poet’s influence on his own urban poems in that Eliot’s critical writings on Baudelaire, mostly written after his 1927 conversion, are not so much concerned with the urban aesthetics of his poetry as with the ethical and religious agendas. Eliot’s early poems reveal that he develops his modernist sensibilities under the strong influence of Laforgue and Baudelaire. Viewed in the context of the poetic discourse of the French poets, Eliot’s early poems gradually move from Laforguian ironic voice and his detached attitude to Baudelairean aesthetics of allegory and shock. At the center of the impact of Baudelaire on Eliot lies the French poet’s deployment of the souvenir as an allegorical sign of the barrenness and the self-alienation of modern experience. In Eliot’s urban poetry, the souvenir is transfigured into debris and there exists a certain “genealogy” of debris. This genealogy begins with “Second Caprice in North Cambridge,” in which “the debris of a city” is a realistic sign of its ruined cityscape, and makes a radical turn in “Goldfish,” where “the debris of the year” is internalized as allegory of the inner death of modern experience. “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” unifies these opposing sides of debris in that “A crowd of twisted things” are mobilized to describe both the external urban space and the protagonist’s memory or “inner-scape.” Eliot’s deployment of debris as allegory of modern experience reach a peak in The Waste Land. As the title bespeaks, the poem is about the land of waste or debris. In this allegorical city of modernity, ghosts of the ancient period return as modernity’s others and their return transfigures the desert-like city into a ghostly land. In the secular Hell of The Waste Land, ruins/debris of cities, an allegorical sign of modern experience, become fused with ghosts, an allegorical sign of modernity’s others.