T.S. Eliot’s “Coriolan” and Political Tragedy

As a critic, T.S. Eliot was rightly wary of any thorough description of the imaginative unities against which poets work, whether biographical, historical, or religious; he more often suggests how it is that in the formal properties of a work, and its design, it apprehends—with the feeling that marks intelligence—something greater than it can fully embody, however perfect its form. As a poet, T.S. Eliot makes tantalizing a greater unity that flickers from impossibility into possibility, but that never is allowed to sustain itself as something actual or even fully knowable. We can see this in the earliest masterwork, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” where the irony of the buttoned-up clown refuses to exclude delusional absurdity from his most romantic visions. We can see it in The Waste Land where the tragic erosion of cosmological unity is made a principle of formal unity for the poem. We can see it in the most beautiful of his lyrics, “Marina,” in which Greek tragedy and Christian redemption are held in perfect poise, as if by something somehow greater than either, but always maybe one or the other. It is the restraint that allows the possibility of the whole to emerge as something more actual than would happen were the attestation more forceful, the possibility more explicitly substantiated. Eliot’s is a technical as well as imaginative achievement, continuous across criticism and creation.

By the early 1930s, Eliot had started work on, and eventually abandoned, two poems which search the hollow resonances of the nation, and its invitation for heroics as well as heroism, as a modern source of strength and reconciliation. The poems “Triumphal March” and “Difficulties of a Statesman” published in 1931, separately, were brought together in 1936 under the title “Coriolan,” which acknowledges common source material in Shakespeare’s tragedy of the Roman general. Despite their initial publications being separate, the two sections were conceived as parts of a larger sequence which Eliot imagined would be longer than The Waste Land. In a letter to Hugh Ross Williamson from 1932, Eliot explains: “The titles themselves suggest that, as The Waste Land was the post-War world, so here is the post-Peace world.” Coriolanus had of course appeared in the earlier masterpiece: “Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.” But here the figure is central: his martial identity, his fraught obligation to his mother, his conflation of personal pride and his nation’s honor, his heroic stature, his disdain and alienation of the Rome’s demotic elements are all the stuff of these poems, as they were much in Eliot’s mind as he and others (Keynes famously) saw the undoing of the fragile post-War peace of 1919.[i]

It’s both tempting and enormously frustrating to seek in Eliot’s letters, essays, and reviews clarity not so much on what his poem are about, but on what is about or behind them. It is tempting because of the brilliance and suggestive continuities between everything Eliot wrote; it is frustrating because rather than clarify in the map of Eliot’s imaginative world, the letter and essays often add perplexing features or new gaps—there is always something, even in his occasional writings, not fully said, or hinted at, or conspicuously absent, and while this sometimes feels like Eliot is playing a game of cat-and-house with readers, it is probably fairer to read this as symptomatic of the same imaginative energy that moved him to write the poems he did: they do not withhold so much as they are held by something that they feel but do not know with any certainty, and the strength of which they neither trust nor ultimately believe.

The psychoanalytic theorist Christopher Bollas suggests that aesthetic experience reproduces the infant state of being-held: we feel ourselves held by something beyond comprehension, but sensuously present.[ii] Eliot’s poetry, at least up to this abandoned sequence, is occasioned less by apprehending such a holding presence (a holding wholeness), but by a doubling of self-consciousness, wherein being held is both produced by the imagination and inspires doubt. His suspicion of Romanticism was in part the ease with which it substituted, at will, faith that the imagination itself, or then imagination working through nature or vice-versa, could adequately embrace an active intelligence; his Christian faith is similarly guarded against a merely personal relationship with the divine. He understood that we are held also, whether we like it or not, by institutions, by societies, and by traditions. But he is saved from the sentimental urges of communitarianism and conservatism by remaining ill-at-ease even with their embrace. The accounts of young Eliot in social settings, wearing his three-piece suit, mask-like, stiff in his disposition, are not unrelated to his profounder imaginings; he may have sought larger unity that could hold him, but he seems to have disliked being held. He seems the least huggable of the poets—maybe he envied Donne for his apparent ease with embraces.

This is important for the “Coriolan”poems, since they take up the mother-son relationship that is definitive of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Eliot speculated, in a letter to G. Wilson Knight of 1930, that “the political criticism” of the play, “so much mentioned, is a very surface pattern; and the real motive of the play is the astonishing study of the mother-son relation: ‘he did it to please his mother…’” This of special significance to a poem in which Eliot perhaps echoed lines of his own mother verse drama, Savonarola, the 1926 publication of which Eliot had facilitated. But the point is not that the poem or the play are really about this or that mother so much as that they are about the hold, perhaps sheltering, perhaps suffocating, a mother offers an infant, the imagination of which persists throughout life, a greater unity that promises strength.

In the “Coriolan” poems, evidently, Eliot had hoped to write two more sections, the fourth of which he announced, as early as 1932, would be probably unwritable and that would need to be “largely derivative from S. John of the Cross.” It is hard not to read what we have of “Coriolan” in light of what might have been, but it is some consolation that the two poems we have are so unified in their progression; if Eliot thought there was more of the sequence, it might have enlarged what these initial two poems apprehend, but it is hard to think it would alter it.[iii]

Assume, for the sake of reading, that “Coriolan” is a diptych: modern and ancient; Eliot and Shakespeare; Roman and British; private and public; pagan and Hebraic; these are the pairs that operate within the poems, as well as across them. The first of the poems, “Triumphal March,” presents a crowd: it beholds and is held by a spectacle that is militaristic, nationalistic, and utterly impersonal, crushing the possibility of individuality, rather than eclipsing personality. It is not about Coriolanus, but Coriolanus, with its depiction of the Roman plebeians, and the sway of popular acclaim and disdain, is around it; it is written in the shadow of a hero who we do not see:

Are they coming? No, not yet. You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets.

Here they come. Is he coming?

The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.

We can wait with our stools and our sausages.

“Sausages,” Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue’s notes tell us, is combustible as well as comestible, munition as well as meal. This doubleness is apt for the doubleness elsewhere in the scene: they are waiting for the hero, their Coriolanus, but they are also waiting for more, in two senses. On the one hand, they are waiting for a resumption of war (this is what “waiting with…our sausages” in the sense of munitions means), for the military might to prove itself. On the other hand, they are waiting for something that they do not recognize, something that remains tragically hidden:

And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent.

O hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast,

Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water

At the still point of the turning world. O hidden.

They are “indifferent” to what is “hidden,” and out of the military procession, this other ritual is drawn out by the poem. The word “perceiving” is what links the two passages: “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.” Not “perceiving” but “a perceiving,” so that the continuous act is reduced to a moment, an insight, a glimpse. It recalls in its grammar the great poet of the ego, Wordsworth, who in his “Intimations Ode,” which Eliot had criticized as consisting of so much “verbiage,” had written “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” In Wordsworth’s line, the instant of birth and the instant of forgetting are set against the duration of sleep; there is something similar in Eliot’s line, which insists on the present-tense existence of the natural “Ego.” This is the ego capable of being held in awe by the spectacle, susceptible to living for a future only in so far as that future is conditioned by the march of the present. The triumph is that of modernity as well as the military, at the cost of indifference for what is hidden and, though a “still point” is beyond time, a greater unity than the present can offer. “O hidden…” does not find the object of its praise or awe: it is characteristic of Eliot in opening its mouth in praise of what remains unspoken, hidden “at” the still point, but not the still point itself. “O hidden” closes this interruption to the poem, its own sources hidden, but also suggesting, again by the grammar itself, that “hidden” is a substance, an entity, as well as an adjective, and this is a comment: the “O” appeals to a quality not of some particular thing, but a quality that in itself hovers free from an object; this feeling of being hidden, of something that is hidden, is all that is available to worship. But we can read it one more way still, with the “O” itself as the being modified by “hidden”—the open mouth, the zero point, the vowel sound that is hidden in the noise of the march, beneath the running water, beyond conceptual significance, but total in its meaning, all of nothing and all of something.

It is this transcendence that pries its way into the scene, and to which the spectators are oblivious. Even what is taken by them to be potentially sacred is worthless:

Now come the virgins bearing urns, urns containing

Dust

Dust of dust, and now

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone,

oakleaves, horses’ heels

Over the paving.

“And now” because the ceremonies of the virgins bearing urns now contains this moment. Even as this first “now” is occupied by the Roman world—the first intimation of Coriolanus’s era in this poem—the “dust” is already passed away, and the line “dust of dust, and now” tremors with simultaneous possibilities. First, “and now” might occupy the same temporal plane as the first “now,” so that the entire scene is Roman; second “and now” might leap to the twentieth century, the continuity of the past and present depending on them both filling the same urns, the dust of Rome equivalent to the material and materiel of twentieth century; finally, “dust of dust, and now” can be heard as a self-standing unity, where the dust consists both of dust (the desiccation of time compounded by time’s further desiccation) and also of “now,” so there is old and new dust mingled. “Urn” catches and undoes the “turn” of “still point of the turning world,” as if to reduce the turning world to death and the uniform stasis of a dust that changes only into a further dust of an unending present tense, a succession of moments like the succession of machines in the parade (the tally of machines earlier in the poem, exhausting and exhausted as well as exhaustive), gathering all into its empty form that is quite other than the “still point.” That still point is timeless; knowing it is to know the movement of time; the votive urns are timebound and dissolve time’s movement within them. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” Eliot had written in “Ash Wednesday,” with an understanding that the stillness of a center is only possible in relation to a turning of conversion. “The natural waking life of the Ego is a perceiving” and yet:

That is all we could see

But how many eagles! And how many trumpets!

From the perspective of the spectators, the frustration of “That is all we could see” is of a view obstructed by crowds, rather than an awareness of how much is missing from the “all” they had hoped for; they do not know how much they missed. But the phrase admits that it might have been a larger disappointment, closer in nature to the desperation of Prufrock: “That is not what I meant at all | That is not it, at all.” In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the word “all” is exasperated and self-accusing at once; in “Triumphal March,” the word “all” contains something closer to dramatic irony, the characters blind to what they have seen. “But how many eagles! And how many trumpets!” drives the irony further, since eagles and trumpets are Roman standards in the case of the former, objects of modern military fanfare in the latter, and in both cases are icons of Christian triumph utterly ignored. Despite “how many,” they are not counted enough. But this is only “closer” to a dramatic irony. The inadequacies of Roman virtue and modern military industrial might are asked to be seen against something that cannot be brought into fullness of vision, but that is sensed as a possibility that would redeem and condemn both if it might. It is hidden not only from the spectators, as a mere dramatic irony would be, but even hidden from the poem; it does not lord the Lord over its characters.

It may seem odd to speak of characters in this poem, since the perspective floats over the spectators. But in its final lines, it is focused on individuals, one of whom is given the name that Eliot had once thought might be the protagonist, or thread, through the sequence:

(And Easter Day, we didn’t get to the country,

So we took young Cyril to church. And they rang a bell

And he said right out loud, Crumpets)

“Crumpets” plays against “trumpets,” but without the echo of Christian symbolism; hearing the bell, Cyril thinks of crumpet-sellers clanging in the streets to announce their wares. He might also be mistaking the host for a crumpet, with the words Christ and trumpet perversely, sacrilegiously conflated, similarly to how “bloody” (“bloody hell!”) is sometimes thought to be a shortened “by my lady” or “God’s blood.” The joke is doubled by the colloquial “right out loud,” since it is “wrong out loud.” Colloquial phrases stumble into truths. Cyril’s mother, or father (the pressure of the mother-son relationship in Shakespeare makes this less likely), find it all to be a joke, but of the wrong sort—a joke that reveals what they do not know rather than what they do. These three lines in parentheses are the counterpart to the “O Hidden” passage: both break the poem, but they face opposing directions, with this one turning inward and away, this reducing religion to a choice of private experience, and the other leaving faith unnamed as something hidden to public and private life alike.

The crumpets are followed in the next line by sausages—and though I mentioned that the word refers to a weapon (a German trench-mortar bomb, “so called because of their shape”—quoted from OED by Ricks and McCue in their notes), there would be little reason to think it at this point. Instead, we are invited to set our minds on still more food: the body, its appetite asserts itself:

Don’t throw away that sausage

It’ll come in handy. He’s artful. Please, will you

Give us a light?

Light

Et les soldats faisaient la haie? Ils la faisaient?

But an appetite for what? For food, yes, and then for a readiness that is military since “it’ll come in handy” could not be the meat, but would refer instead to the grenade-launcher; and then for a cigarette. But also, in the request for light, for something that is not at hand, and that will not come in “handy” (even in the hands of the Artful Dodger): not just for a light, a cigarette to be held, but for light that holds. The shedding away of the ephemeral contexts of from “Give us a light” to reveal the word “Light” alone is effected without the will of the speakers, and without, it is made to seem, the will of the poet: the phrase “Give us a light” becomes a part of the poem, and it holds within it the light that is more than it was: so it is with language in Eliot’s hands, the words taken for granted apprehending their own depths of meaning. “Light” needs to be repeated to suggest a tone, but the tone turns uncertainly on an axis: parched and seeking light; satisfied at an arrival in light; the meaning of light dawning gradually, with each repetition fulfilling itself further. All are possible. But “light” cannot have the last word: we are returned, albeit neither to Rome nor to Britain, but to that modern Latin dialect, French, another voice as it were interrupting, with a question that suggests it has arrived late on the scene, translating to “And the soldiers were lining the way? They were lining up?” “Haie” is a hedge, with figurative extensions into a fence or wall; “haie d'honneur” is a guard of honor. The swerve of this final line is a swerve world-wards: “light” had opened a vista into something beyond the world, transcending it; the French voice jostling to see, inquiring after the military formation, leaves us instead with a European scene of shared martial investment and interest. Against the wordless universality of light, the poem runs up against the worldly fracture of language. Against the thought that such fractures might be repaired in a shared contemplation of something otherworldly set against each, they are brought together—not repaired but united—in the fascination of worldly power that threatens to extend those same fractures. This fascination is shared with the fascination for Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the source of his self-destructive pride; his self-destructive pride is taken as indicative of the Roman legacy of martial ambition and honor, an inheritance still alive in Eliot’s Europe, to its detriment.

Eliot looks to classical Rome in these poems, but he does so from the understanding of what the city will mean for Christianity. Even before his conversion to Christianity, Eliot’s poetry is profoundly Augustinian in its impulses: the “restless heart” (cor inquietum) conditions and occasions his poetry from its first publication. The very idea of a “restless heart,” in the opening of Augustine’s Confessions, serves as well as any to name what motivates the break from a habit of life in search of a restored apprehension of a greater whole: in the work of literature, the formal audacities, shaking off expectations, altering a convention of language, is that same restlessness. Late in his career, when he wrote his essay on Pascal, Eliot asserted against those who failed to understand all that the word “heart” contained in the phrase, translated roughly as “the heart has its reasons that reason does not know”: “this is by no means an exaltation of the ‘heart’ over the ‘head,’ a defence of unreason. The heart, in Pascal’s terminology, is itself truly rational if it is truly the heart.”[iv] In his conception of the heart, Pascal is indebted to Augustine, and elements of Pascal, giving life to the distinctly French tradition of moral philosophy extending through Baudelaire and beyond, are present in Eliot from the start. They are certainly present here, where the French language and Roman city are brought together: “Coriolan” suggests that within the stirring of the crowd at the parade, within the stirring of the general’s pride, and within the stirring militarism of European politics, incessantly tending towards war, the restless heart has gone unnoticed for what it is and for what it seeks. But the restless heart, its depths and energies, is not taken for granted by the poem. The poem’s strength owes to its balancing an apprehension of a presence that is hidden beyond the world and beyond humanity, an object of faith, against a presence that is hidden within the world, within humanity, an object of feeling: each is knowable by means of the other, and both are negative presences in the poem’s principal action, neither sought nor recognized. In his study of Pascal and Racine, the French Marxist philosopher Lucien Goldmann writes that “the God of tragedy is a God who is always present and always absent. Thus, while his presence takes all value and reality from the world, his equally absolute and permanent absence makes the world into the only reality which man can confront.” Eliot realizes this tragic vision in this poem as he does nowhere else, since in it he recognizes that for the modern world “the only reality which man can confront, the only sphere in and against which he can and must apply his demand for substantial and absolute values” has become the political.[v] It is not, Eliot feels, the case that everything is political, but that everything becomes political absent other alternatives—and this is too much for politics. In 1940, in The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot had complained that “the obvious secularist solution for muddle is to subordinate everything to political power: and in so far as this involves the subordination of the money-making interests to those of the nation as a whole, it offers some immediate, though perhaps illusory relief.” This is a decided conservative perspective, and it speaks to the elevation of a “statesman” to the status of hero. He goes on: “a people feels at least more dignified if its hero is a statesman however unscrupulous, or the warrior however brutal, rather than the financier.” The suggestion is that a statesman affords a relief, but that this relief is itself illusory (Eliot’s word “perhaps” is suspicious hedge); though he does not suggest it, the inference we can draw from Eliot’s words is that a statesman or warrior—Coriolanus both at once—cannot sustain himself without something beyond politics.

This is subject of the second poem in “Coriolan”, “Difficulties of a Statesman.” In it, Cyril, now grown and named in full, Arthur Edward Cyril Parker, reappears, though the reappearance only establishes how weak a link he is; he is mentioned and dismissed, his purpose not worked out by Eliot. The stronger link between the poems is the word “hidden,” at the heart of poem’s reach into the heart of its speaker (Coriolanus is shadowed onto the statesman):

Fireflies flare against the faint sheet lightning

What shall I cry?

Mother mother

Here is the row of family portraits, dingy busts, all looking remarkably Roman,

Remarkably like each other, lit up successively by the flare

Of a sweaty torchbearer, yawning.

O hidden under the… Hidden under the … Where the dove’s

foot rested and locked for a moment,

A still moment, repose of noon, set under the upper branches of noon’s widest tree

Under the breast feather stirred by the small wind after noon

There the cyclamen spread its wings, there the clematis droops over the lintel

How do we hear the ellipsis? A fading away, a falling off, a coming up short against a blank of mind? A failed effort at repetition, as if what had been said in “Triumphal March” was a prayer, unable to be uttered again? The effort to turn inward or turn back is thwarted in the saying. But the key word is “locked,” in “rested and locked for a moment,” where “locked” is a sudden setting right, an arrest that holds, and that holds something in; it is a restraining and safeguarding, “for a moment” but also, in the suggestion of the wording, as “a still moment.” As in the earlier poem, the eternal intersects the temporal, but here the temporal is not the passing of a parade but the passing of generations. “Mother mother” is the cry of an infant, and the cry of a speaker seeking in an inherited history something to give weight to the burdens of the present, but even that historical gallery is, in the end, illuminated only by “a sweaty torchbearer, yawning,” its “flare” revealing only a monotony of likeness.

“Difficulties of a Statesmen” looks backwards for its consolation, to the mother’s hold: he would be hidden himself, with her:

May we not be some time, almost now, together,

If the mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations,

Are now observed

May we not be

O hidden

Hidden in the stillness of noon, in the silent croaking night.

Come with the sweet of the little bat’s wing, with the small flare of the firefly or

lightning bug,

‘Rising and falling, crowned with dust,’ the small creatures

The small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through the night.

O mother

What shall I cry?

The statesman’s voice that turns to the mother is helpless before the world. But it is also capable of finding in the world a stirring of life: “crowned with dust” is not ironic, the dust does crown, its seeming worthlessness rendered meaningful by resting on the “small creatures,” that cry alongside him. The final invocation, “O mother” parallels “O hidden” and suggests just how near his looking back to the earliest infant dependency approaches to the helplessness he feels as an adult; the parallel also marks the difference, and “O mother” is not a cry asking her protection, but asking her guidance in what he should cry for, as if recognizing at last it is not him.

In the opening lines of the poem, the allusion to Isaiah 40, 6-8 is explicit. Isaiah: “The voice said Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass witherith, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass witherith, the flower fadeth: but the word of God shall stand forever.” The arc of the poem traces first the degradation of these words by the bureaucracy of the state and the military, and then their attempted recovery in the feeling of the speaker for his mother, before they crash into helplessness and hopelessness in the final section. “Difficulties of a Statesman” begins:

Cry? What shall I cry?

All flesh is grass: comprehending

The Companions of the Bath, the Knights of the British Empire, the Cavaliers,

O Cavaliers! of the Legion of Honour,

The Order of the Black Eagle (1st and 2nd class),

And the Order of the Rising Sun.

Cry cry what shall I cry?

The first thing to do is to form the committees:

The consultative councils, the standing committees, select committees and sub-committees,

One secretary will do for several committees.

What the opening omits is what prompts the question: not the voice of the lord surely, but a priest perhaps? Or an order handed down, to cry out? The idea that the imperative “cry” could have as its origin anyone except God is perverse or else perverted, a play of power that suggests coercion and violence. But perhaps the first question owes to the speaker not knowing what he has heard: he has been commanded to play a role, perform some act, and this is all he can imagine it might be, even though he can make nothing of it. His question is distant from Isaiah’s, since Isaiah is taken aback only by the content of the message, and not that he would have one to deliver. At first, this speaker seems inspired: he is moved to speak Isaiah’s words that “all flesh is grass,” but here he comes up short, dead grass comprehending only what the speaker knows: the tedium of military orders and committees, the modern state’s superfluous honors and wasted efficiencies. Committee work: the opposite of prophecy.

Cruelly, the only true cry of the poem arises from these same committees, in the poem’s last lines:

We demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation

RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN

The statesman has been rejected, turned on by the committees he had sown like so many grasses of the fields. These words are the response to his final beseeching “What shall I cry?” Having admitted his helplessness before the public—his failure to know what to say to them, for them—the committees cry out against him. “RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN” might be words on placards, words on a telegram, words printed on a newspaper. They are the final debasement of the word “cry,” arid and negating (as opposed to being that different thing, negative). Their message though is a defeat far greater than political removal: they demand resignation to the world, resignation to the impossibility of knowing what else there might be to cry except to resign. With these words, we see that the cry of the opening might have been an imperative of a people demanding the cry of unbridled enthusiasm, aimless except in opposition; the statesman goes most wrong in asking what there is to cry. There is, in his world, only the dullness of committee work disguising visceral anger and hate. Another sort of cry, fleetingly admitted to the poem, is impossible within it.

These are poems of political tragedy: not a tragedy within politics, but a tragedy of politics, insofar as politics cannot resolve or reconcile what the restless heart seeks and feels. The resolution to which politics leads, both of these poems suggest, is conflict and war. Written between the wars, it is not difficult to see why Eliot could not complete them. They were unfinished because their only true completion would be historical: the war that would arrive in 1939.

In “Coriolan,” Eliot finds a new way of writing political poetry by drawing on his earlier discoveries. “What clearly still fascinates him, as he had been fascinated in his earlier great work” Geoffrey Hill writes, “is the requirement to make incoherencies cohere, without imposing the ruminative, well-modulated voice of the man of letters.” (579) In it, he achieves a balance that breaks beyond its limits, a restless will that resolves into something greater than it, not setting itself in opposition to what is alien and other, but knowing itself reconciled in difference from it. The poem demonstrates a strength that is alien to the politics and politicians of Eliot’s day, and that is unfound in all but the rarest of statesmen and leaders. It is also a strength that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, if not for his pride, might have managed, though without that pride it would not have been even a possibility. Geoffrey Hill believes that “Coriolan” shows Eliot’s continuing and final dedication to fight “for the intelligence of poetry within the civic domain.” That he had sufficient humility to admit to what Hill calls a “savage defeat” is what perhaps made possible the success of the poem in its unfinished state.[vi]

[i] Cf. Christopher Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (Faber and Faber, 1988), 268: “‘Gerontion’ and ‘Coriolan’ had not put their faith in the Treaty of Versailles. The phrase ‘l’entre deux guerres’ catches the foreboding of the era, and does so in the language of England’s traditional enemy.” Though not pursued in my essay, this suggests a new resonance—a changing sides, as in Coriolanus’ betrayal of Rome—in the final line of ‘Triumphal March,’ written in French.

[ii] Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: 30th Anniversary Edition (Routledge, 2018), 11. Bollas writes: “In the transference—which is as much to the analytic space and process as it is to the person of the analyst—the patient is relating to the transformational object, that is, experiencing the analyst as the environment-mother, a pre-verbal memory that cannot be cognized into speech that recalls the experience, but only into speech that demands its terms be met: unintrusiveness, ‘holding,’ ‘provision,’ insistence on a kind of symbiotic or telepathic knowing, and facilitation from thought to thought or from affect to thought”

On page 17, he writes of “the uncanny pleasure of being held by a poem, a composition, a painting, or, for that matter, any object, rests on those moments when the infant’s internal world is partly given form by the mother, since he cannot shape them or link them together without her coverage.”

[iii] The texts of Eliot’s poems, as well as his remarks from letters and essays, are all quoted from the gratifyingly exhaustive notes in Jim McCue and Christopher Ricks’ edition: The Poems of T.S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2015) 1442-1480.

[iv] T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (Faber and Faber, 1999).

[v] Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Phillip Thody (Verso, 2016)49.

[vi] Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford, 2009) 579.