‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?’ Eliot, Stoker and Stetson in The Waste Land

Abstract

Academic criticism has long speculated regarding the influence of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), though the novel itself is named neither in the poem nor in its at times ironic endnotes. The interface of the two works is inevitably problematic. Stoker’s ‘prurient, highly coloured sensationalist prose’, according to A. N. Wilson’s introduction to the 1983 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Dracula, ensures that Tt is not a great work of literature’.1 Conversely, The Waste Land, according to Calvin Bedient, is ‘the quintessential poem of Anglo-American modernism’—a text, in other words, unequivocally worthy of serious study and a suitable recipient, therefore, of a more favourable critical hyperbole.2 It is this gap between the serious and the sensationalist, between the unanimously accepted and the merely tolerated—in genre as much as in choice of texts—that has coloured the way in which academic criticism has reacted to the apparent presence of Dracula in The Waste Land. The intertextual trace of Stoker’s novel has been noted, but never explored at length. Unlike the allusions to Dante, Spenser or Shakespeare in The Waste Land, Dracula, a text neither historically canonical nor venerably antique, is conventionally mentioned merely in passing during analysis. If not an embarrassment, then it is an inconvenience for criticism—a private joke on Eliot’s part, never adequately explained, never worthy, indeed, of the effort of explanation, at least in the rarefied field of Modernist criticism.