Allusion is a complicated device. Students of Eliot’s poetry are generally taught to regard it either as a way of evoking moods and themes from other poems—for example, the echo of Dante’s Inferno in the line “sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” in Part I of The Waste Land—or as marking a point of contrast between past and present—for example, the echo of Spenser’s “Prothalamion” in Part III (“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song./The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers…,” and other detritus of modern life). But this misses the boldness—the scandalousness, really—of what Eliot was doing. The allusions to Dante and Spenser are straightforward: we are meant to recognize them, and we miss part of the meaning if we don’t (and, of course, they are identified in the “Notes” to the poem). But are we also expected to recognize that “Marie,/ Marie, hold on tight” in Part I of The Waste Land are the words of the Countess Marie Larisch, whose memoir, My Past, was published in 1913? Or that “Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain,” the opening lines of “Gerontion,” are adapted from A.C. Benson’s 1905 biography of Edward Fitzgerald? These are not allusions; they are more like objets trouvés, or appropriations—devices that flirt with plagiarism. For straightforward allusion, like the references to Dante and Spenser, is only one figure on a whole palette of similar devices, from parody and pastiche to homage and citation (in the creative use of epigraphs), that Eliot drew from in the poems he began writing after 1917.
Louis Menand, “How Eliot Became Eliot” in The New York Review of Books (May 15, 1997)
