From Steve:

> The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes!
> ---------------------------------
> Ezra Pound crossed out the "yes!" with the note: "Penelope/J.J."
>
>    First of all, it is clear from Pound's comment that he and Eliot had
read
> the Penelope chapter of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' before the TWL manuscript
was
> completed. When Pound crossed out the "yes!" and wrote "Penelope/J.J." he
> seemed to be cautioning TSE that Eliot's readers would think that the
"yes!"
> was supposed to be an allusion to 'Penelope'.

Which readers? Pound, and perhaps half a dozen others? Ulysses wasn't in
print, would later be banned, and as far a I know 'Penelope' hadn't appeared
separately in any periodical.
I'd say the point of allusions in TWL is that they are all fairly
recognisable, or at least traceable (Wagner, Ovid, Verlaine, Arthurian
legends). Parallels with Ulysses belong to a different category: influence,
perhaps. Or if they were allusions, they didn't function in quite the same
way as other allusions. Eliot could never have assumed that most readers
would pick up the reference.  I know he said he was writing for a few, but
in that case the intended audience would have been very limited indeed.

Another argument: TWL sometimes echoes Ulysses, but at no point does Eliot
provide a note referring to Joyce.

>  My thoughts are that this was precisely the allusion that Eliot intended.
> The ending of Ulysses has such an unusual use and repetition of "yes" that
I
> don't think TSE 'accidentally' ended the line that way.
> Ending the line with
> "yes!" sounds odd and forced until one recognizes the 'Penelope' allusion.

But then so many things in TWL are unusual or forced... why think of
'Penelope' in particular? Obviously Pound did, but was his conjecture right?
How do we know that Eliot agreed with his comment?

Yours,

Raphaël
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