The analysis (it's more than that) may or may not hold up, but Nancy
doesn't seem to have touched it. That she does "not see how the word
'pastoral' fits at all" should perhaps tell her something. Note in the
quote it is "city pastoral." And that she doesn't see anything sacralized
to desacralize she might take as an invitation to slow down and consider
more carefully or more openly; remember that TSE wanted to use Gerontion as
the gateway to TWL: "I would meet you upon this honestly". I don't think
McLuhan's thought foolproof, but I do think it deserves real consideration,
not this sort of transparent rush to discredit it. The statements not even
lighted upon seem very rich with some possible leads for TWL
readers/detectives.

Ken Armstrong


> PM>Pardon please, my sloppy attempts to summarise a large statement,
> based on memory. Here is the relevant paragraph from the original:
>
> The Waste Land that Eliot first showed to Pound was a four-part poem,
> both seasonal elegy and city pastoral. Embedded in this text was a
> dramatic ode to London written in the terza rima of Dante. Eliot's
> original four-part structure of The Waste Land is an anticipation of the
> four divisions of the Four Quartets in respect to the four seasons, the
> four elements, and the four analogical levels of exegesis. All of these
> are musical and simultaneous rather than sequential. Pound modified this
> liturgical pattern by desacralizing it. He was alienated by the religious
> aspect of Eliot's four levels, which as a medievalist he, too, understood
> very well.
>
> So there you go. Keep in mind that whatever else McLuhan was, he
> was a NASH specialist (under Leavis at Cambridge), focussed on
> the medieval processes of education as he found them transforming
> in Nash.
>
> Cheers,
> Peter