Sara Trevisan wrote:

> I wonder why T.S. Eliot had opted for Conrad's short passage as an
> epigraph, and then switched to such a different genre ...
>
> Indeed, there might have been other two lines which could have been
> used by Eliot, and they could have been in English like Conrad's and
> as weighty as Petronius' lines, as far as the 'tradition' is
> concerned. They are:
>
> "O horror, horror, horror!
> Tongue nor heart cannot conceive, nor name thee."
> (Macduff, Macbeth, 2.3, lines 65-66)
>
> Just a thought --


Sara,

Let me add a thought too.  After I read your post I happened to read
Harold Bloom's introduction to one of the zillion's of books he's
edited, "T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land."  Bloom declares that Eliot's
poetry derives from Whitman (I'll quote him below.)  Bloom gives us a
few excepts from Whitman and then writes:

    Rather than multiply images of despair in Whitman, I turn to the most
    rugged of his self-accusations, in the astonishing "Crossing: Brooklyn
    Ferry":

        It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
        The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
        The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious,
        My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in
            reality meagre?
        Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
        I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
        I too knotted the old knot of contrariety,
        Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd,
        Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
        Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
        The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
        The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish,
            not wanting,
        Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness,
            none of these wanting,
        Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
        Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men
            as they saw me approaching or passing,
        Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning
            of their flesh against me as I sat,
        Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly,
            yet never told them a word,
        Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing,
            sleeping,
        Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
        The same old role, the role that is what we make it,
            as great as we like,
        Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

On reading "Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, / I am
he who knew what it was to be evil," I thought that the words seemed to
match the thoughts in Eliot's Conrad epigraph and in the line stolen
from Baudelaire, "You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable,--mon frère!"

Regards,
    Rick Parker


Here are some of Bloom's own words from his introduction:

    Eliot's declared precursors form a celebrated company: Virgil, Dante,
    the English Metaphysicals and Jacobean dramatists, Pascal, Baudelaire,
    the French Symbolists, and Ezra Pound. His actual poetry derives from
    Tennyson and Whitman, with Whitman as the larger, indeed the dominant
    influence. Indeed, Shelley and Browning are more embedded in Eliot's
    verse than are Donne and Webster. English and American Romantic
    tradition is certainly not the tradition that Eliot chose, but the
    poetic family romance, like its human analogue, is not exactly an
    arena where the will dominates.'

    The Waste Land is an American self-elegy masking as a mythological
    romance, a Romantic crisis poem pretending to be an exercise in
    Christian irony.