But our prize poems are especially to be damned not because of superficial bad workmanship, but because they are rehash, repetition—just as Eliot’s more exquisite work is rehash, repetition in another way of Verlaine, Beaudelaire, Maeterlinck,—conscious or unconscious,—just as there were Pound’s early paraphrases from Yeats and his constant later cribbing from the renaissance, Provence and the modern French: Men content with the connotations of their masters.
It is convenient to have fixed standards of comparison: All antiquity! And there is always some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever to rate highly his eternal Eliot. It is because Eliot is a subtle conformist. It tickles the palate of this archbishop of procurers to a lecherous antiquity to hold up Prufrock as a New World type. Prufrock, the nibbler at sophistication, endemic in every capital, the not quite (because he refuses to turn his back), is “the soul of that modern land,” the United States!
Blue undershirts,
Upon a line,
It is not secessary to say to you
Anything about it—
I cannot question Eliot’s observation. Prufrock is a masterly portrait of the man just below the summit, but the type is universal; the model in his case might be Mr. J.
No. The New World is Montezuma or since he was stoned to death in a parley, Guatemozin who had the city of Mexico levelled over him before he was taken.
For the rest, there is no man even though he dare who can make beauty his own and “so at last live,” at least there is no man better situated for that achievement than another. As Prufrock longed for his silly lady so Kensington longs for its Hardanger dairymaid. By a mere twist of the imagination, if Prufrock only knew it, the whole world can be inverted (why else are there wars?) and the mermaids be set warbling to whoever will listen to them. Seesaw and blind-man’s-buff converted into a sort of football.