The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [34]
Some authors—like Laurence Sterne, for example, or T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce—demonstrably use allusion as a major constituent part of their own creative work.10 Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is, in formal and intellectual terms, both a tapestry of allusions and a send-up of, or a challenge to, the very idea of allusion. But if an allusion falls (or is dropped) and no one catches it, does it really allude?
T. S. Eliot famously added learned footnotes to his poem The Waste Land when it was published in 1922. References to Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ezekiel, Dickens, etc., are essential to the structure, tone, and content of the poem, but the footnotes are selective, didactic, and (deliberately?) pompous and condescending. In a preliminary note, for example, Eliot cites “Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge)” and “another work of anthropology … one which has influenced our generation profoundly: I mean The Golden Bough.”11 (No author is cited here; those who don’t know, don’t know.) Eliot proceeds to comment that “Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” The tone is droll, deadpan: there are sheep and goats, insiders and outsiders. And the language is scholarly piling-on: “anyone,” “immediately,” and the tantalizingly vague “certain references.” Again, if you know, you know. These are parody footnotes, allusions to footnotes, allusions to allusions. Yet, like many others of my generation, I wanted to know what the poets knew. Eliot’s poem and its footnotes were my homeschooling. I went in quest of the works of Mr. Frazer, The White Devil, and the philosophical writings of F. H. Bradley. I read Dante and Spenser and whatever translations of the Upanishads I could find. I also bought and read Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, a slim book that became a must-have on the bookshelves of the time, right next to all those New Directions poetry paperbacks.
Much critical sport has been made of Eliot’s learnedly mocking footnote on the song of the hermit-thrush, which cites the bird’s Latin name (Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii), Chapman’s commentary on it in the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, and a further ornithological observation from the annotator-poet: “Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.” What Eliot doesn’t mention is that the hermit-thrush is Whitman’s bird and plays an important role in two of the best-known poems in the American canon, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln, in which the solitary thrush becomes an American elegist and muse. This is a kind of allusion by omission, even a misdirection ploy, as the diligent student is invited to hunt down Frank Chapman’s field handbook to regional birds (not even the author’s full name is given) rather than to speculate upon the canonical place of the hermit-thrush in poetry.
But these notes, however belatedly added to the poem, are themselves works of art rather than of scholarship, as the next footnote makes clear. “The following lines,” writes Eliot, “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s) …” No academic could get away with this insouciance or this inexactitude. Despite my early eagerness to follow the track of the poet’s reading—rather like J. L. Lowes’s exhaustive study of Coleridge’s reading in The Road to Xanadu—such notes are tantalizing digressions rather than allusions, since their associations (assuming them to be truthful rather than completely