Canto XXII and The Waste Land as Modern Infernos

By Eric Wagner

World War I profoundly affected both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.  The profound destruction and its aftermath in a Europe no longer unified by either religion or culture led the two poets on profoundly different paths.  Pound found London unbearable and moved Paris and then to Italy, focusing more and more on understanding the economic causes of war.  Unfortunately, this path of study eventually led him to embracing Mussolini as a possible economic savior.  Eliot chose to remain in England, and his struggle to deal with his personal and poetic experience led him to both become a British citizen and join the Church of England in 1927.  Interestingly, though, both poets continued to perceive Dante as both a poetic and spiritual model.

Eliot wrote The Waste Land at least in part about his personal struggles, but many have seen it as a portrait of a modern Inferno, a picture of a devastated Europe, full of people lacking hope or vision.  Pound had begun work on the Cantos even before the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, although none of the poems had yet reached their final form.  Pound always had the large-scale structure of Dante’s Commedia in mind when thinking about the form of his long poem.  The example of The Waste Land helped Pound discover how to shape his idea of the “poem containing history.”  Pound conceived of a secular Commedia, or least a non-Christian one, divided at least roughly into Inferno, Purgatorio and a terrestrial Paradisio.  At first he thought the poem would last about 100 cantos, although it eventually stretched to an incomplete 120.  The first book of the Cantos, A Draft of Thirty Cantos, definitely contains large elements of Pound’s vision of the Inferno from an often post-World War One, post-Christian set of perspectives.  (Like Eliot, Pound preferred to use a large number of viewpoints.)  Pound often pictured his Inferno as an economic one, full of the consequences of human’s economic inhumanity to humanity.

Canto XXII opens with a comparison between Pound’s grandfather Thaddeus Coleman Pound, who built a railroad in Wisconsin, and Frederick Weyerhaeuser (Terrell 90), the lumber magnate “that beat him, and broke up his business.”  (Pound 101)  Pound’s grandfather saw economic cooperation with Native Americans as more profitable and more humane than genocide.  He also built a railroad, at least in part for the public good.  Pound contrasts this with Weyerhaeuser’s manipulation of the U. S. Senate (whom Pound calls “the American Curia”) to reap huge profits through his railroad and lumber businesses.  In this passage Pound links greed with government corruption and genocide to form an image of the modern Inferno.  Note how he links the modern secular world with Dante’s medieval one through the “American Curia” description of the Senate.

In the first section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot discusses the “Unreal City.”  The lines “I had not thought death had undone so many,” and “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled” (Eliot 31) come directly from the Inferno.  A not yet Christian Eliot here creates an image where the viewpoint character feels overwhelmed by the number of those who have died, just as the viewpoint character in the Inferno felt.  However, Eliot’s poem, appearing in 1922 just four years after the end of World War One and containing many contemporary references to London and Europe, suggests specifically the huge number of those who had died in the recent war.  Like Pound’s poem, we have a sense of the futility and needlessness of large-scale slaughter, as well as a definite sense of a modern Hell.  However, Eliot does not clearly present a cause for this modern Hell, as Pound attempts to do.  It seems to me that Eliot, especially in the final section “What the Thunder Said,” suggests an inevitability to this hellish state due to each human’s isolation, following the philosophy of Bradley, on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation. 

            . . . I have heard the key

            Turn in the door once and turn once only

            We think of the key, each in his prison

            Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

                                                                        (Eliot 45)

One might see this as representing Eliot’s isolation in his unhappy marriage.  On the other hand, one might see it as Eliot’s conception of each person’s isolation from all others in a godless universe.  Certainly Eliot’s viewpoint changed by the time he wrote such explicitly Christian poetry as The Four Quartets.  However, in the world of The Waste Land, this isolation certainly seems a hellish state, and Eliot explicitly uses lines from Dante to emphasis the hellishness of this modern existence, as well as to ironically understate the difference between his Inferno and Dante’s.  The world of Eliot’s poem has no deity to unify the poem or the characters therein.  Hence Eliot poem infers neither a modern Purgatorio nor a modern Paradisio.

On the other hand, Canto XXII continues with amusing anecdotes contrasting Pound’s ideas of economic sanity with the blockheaded, greedy economics which Pound thinks have created our modern Inferno.  Pound’s humor helps to suggest the possibility of a Paradisio, or at least a Purgatorio, if enough people take to thinking about economics (at least in the way Pound conceived of economics).   This brings to mind e. e. cummings famous remark about Pound, “You damned sadist, you want to make your readers think.”

First Pound discusses the lack of success of someone who didn’t make any “rejects,” any unusable product.  Pound ironically comments, “Price of life in the occident.”  (Pound 101)  This also suggests that some of the tools for creating a modern Purgatorio or Paradisio might come from the orient.  Elsewhere Pound would emphasize the importance of Confucius for the modern West.  Next, Pound relates a discussion between the economists C. H. Douglas and John Maynard Keynes, where Pound portrays Keynes as a closed minded buffoon, who says after his refusal to consider Douglas’s argument, “I am an orthodox ‘Economist.’” 

The poem continues:

    Jesu Christo!

Standu nel paradiso terrestre

Pesando come si fesse compagna d’Adamo!!

                                                                        (Pound 102)

This means:    

                           Jesus Christ!

            Standing in the Earthly Paradise

            Thinking as he made himself a companion of Adam!!

                                                                                    (Terrell 90)

Pound explicitly refers to the possibility of an earthly paradise, once again blocked by what he saw as bad economics.

Both Pound and Eliot saw Dante as a great poet who had successfully written a long poem, one which would serve them better than the classical models of Homer and Ovid, etc.  They also both saw that the medieval Catholic meta-structure of Dante’s work could not function in a modern poem without significant alterations.  Both Pound and Eliot chose to use radical juxtapositions of different voices to present their modern Infernos, and they reached radically different conclusions about how to deal with life in the wake of World War One.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems.  NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1958.

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos.  NY: New Directions, 1972.

Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1980.