Abstract
If in his last years Lawrence partially restored his own psyche devastated by war, Eliot promised restoration to an entire culture by very different means and with different consequences. Lawrence’s novels did not shy from mentioning the war as the evil from which they turned, and while he repeated its violence in a series of abreactive discharges, he progressively distinguished this violence from his projected state of recovery. The Waste Land shared Lawrence’s abreaction of horror and impotence, however it also anticipated Eliot’s alternative development by not disclosing the relation of these feelings to the war. In Eliot’s later works the horror would subside into impotence, to be redeemed as spiritual resignation and martyrdom.
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Notes
Sigmund Freud, “Analytic Theory” (1917), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1991), 506.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (London: Routledge, 1992), 62.
Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 140; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 95–6; Ann E. Kaplan, Trauma Culture (London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 123.
T.S. Eliot, “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, XVI (12 Jan. 1935), 34; A.A. Milne, “T.S. Eliot’s Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, XVI (19 Jan. 1935), 95; T.S. Eliot, “Mr Milne and War”, Time and Tide, XVI (26 Jan. 1935), 124.
Berg Collection; Virginia Woolf, A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary (London: Hogarth, 1990), 463; Hayward Collection, Kings College Library, Cambridge.
Jason Harding, The Criterion (Oxford University Press, 2002), 208.
T.S. Eliot, “The Prose of the Preacher: The Sermons of Donne”, Listener, II (3 July 1929), 23.
Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 1984), 139.
Allen Tate, ed., T.S. Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), 59.
Stephen Spender, T.S. Eliot (London: Fontana, 1975), 117.
T.S. Eliot, “The Church and Society”, New English Weekly, VI (21 March 1935), 482.
T.S. Eliot, “Christianity and Communism”, Listener, VII (16 March 1932), 382.
T.S. Eliot, “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden”, Listener, III (9 May 1930), 642.
Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), 20; T.S. Eliot, “Modern Heresies”, New English Weekly, V (3 May 1934), 71–2; T.S. Eliot, “Notes on the Way” (1935), 34.
T.S. Eliot, “The Search for Moral Sanction”, Listener, VII (30 March 1932), 446.
T.S. Eliot, “Thinking in Verse: A Survey of Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry”, Listener, II (12 March 1930), 442.
A.D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 174.
Ibid., 203.
Bernard Bergonzi, T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1969), 128.
Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s New Life (Oxford University Press, 1988), 110.
T.S. Eliot, “Towards a Christian Britain”, in The Church Looks Ahead (London: Faber & Faber, 1941).
Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), 166, 168.
T.S. Eliot, “T.S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime”, Common Sense, XI (Oct. 1942), 351.
T.S. Eliot, “Leçon de Valéry”, Cahiers du Sud, 276/278 (1946), 76–7.
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© 2011 Carl Krockel
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Krockel, C. (2011). Trauma Transfigured: “The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding. In: War Trauma and English Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307759_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307759_7
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