¹ Quotations from the poems are from the Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1963). As several other editions are widely used and as the bulk of Eliot's poetry is small, I have not provided page references. Occasional italics have been added in the quotations.

² I do not think the image represents, as some writers have maintained, the desire for instinctual or predatory animal life; it is merely a stronger poetic equivalent for the commonplace metaphor of a person's retreating into or being drawn “out of his shell.”

³ From an uncollected essay, quoted in Kristian Smidt's Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 58.

⁴ The Three Voices of Poetry (New York : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954), p. 21. The whole passage, pp. 19–24, is of great interest in this connection. Laforgue, of course, provided part of the poet's “make-up” for Prufrock, but the tracing of sources is not my present subject. Laforgue's influence is treated extensively by Hugh Kenner (The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot, New York: McDowell, Obolen-sky, 1959), and by Herbert Howarth (Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot, London: Chatto and Windus, 1965); and Grover Smith, Jr. (T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, 3rd ed., Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961).

⁵ See his Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 17, 137; also pp. 272–73, where he discussed the Vita nuova as neither strictly truth nor fiction.

⁶ Referred to at the time as “rolled.” A trivial detail, but one that has led to some comically ingenious interpretations. Robert Llewellyn solved the difficulty some years ago in the Explicator. But notice also (near the end of the Lestrygonians episode in Ulysses) that Blazes Boylan was wearing “Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers.” Boylan, too, dressed well.

⁷ Either of the two biblical Lazarus stories may be referred to, or the allusion may be composite, both having to do with the return of the dead. See Luke xvi.20–31 and John xi.1–46, xii.1–18.

⁸ Quoted without reference in Georges Cattaui, T. S. Eliot, trans. Claire Pace and Jean Stewart (New York: Minerva Press, 1969), p. 26. I have seen the passage somewhere in Eliot but cannot now locate it. Something similar is said in the essay on Dante about the “relation between the various plays of Shakespeare, taken in order” and “the pattern in Shakespeare's carpet” (Selected Essays, p. 245). Cf. also “this unity is a lifetime's work” (pp. 193–94).

⁹ Through the courtesy of Mrs. T. S. Eliot and Mrs. L. L. Szladits, Curator of the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, I was enabled to see, before publication of the facsimile, the MS of The Waste Land, which I had hoped might throw light on the sequences of “What the Thunder Said.” Both Eliot and Pound, however, left the original version here nearly untouched. In her notes to the now published facsimile, Mrs. Eliot confirms the absence of any material revisions in Part v.

¹⁰ Eliot refers to Arnold often, not always favorably. See, e.g., the Introd. to The Sacred Wood, the essay on Bradley in 1927 (Selected Essays, pp. 449–53), the editor's “Commentary” in Criterion for Jan. 1925, and scattered references elsewhere in Criterion. See also the discussion of Arnold's influence in Howarth, pp. 253–56.

¹¹ Published in the same year as The Waste Land but known to Eliot and admired by him earlier. See the account in Howarth, pp. 242–45.

¹² One of the minor cross-patterns may perhaps lie in the old Greek division of matter reapplied to govern the first four divisions of the poem: Earth (“Burial of the Dead”), Air (all mere talk without substance; for, as Chaucer says, sound “is noght but air y-broken, / And every speche that is spoken . . . / In his substaunce is but air”), “The Fire Sermon,” and “Death by Water,” all arranged in the customary order. If this is indeed intentional, it is one of the more arbitrary of the patterns, representing a leaning, which Eliot later outgrew, toward an omnium-gatherum of allusion.

¹³ “The Literature of Fascism,” Criterion, 8 (Dec. 1928), 283. The article, incidentally, is not an espousal of fascism, but is polite criticism of it rather than denunciation.

¹⁴ This statement concludes a significant passage in “The ‘Pensées’ of Pascal,” 1931 (Selected Essays, p. 412). Much in that essay throws light on Eliot's own experience as an intellectual convert.

¹⁵ In After Strange Gods Eliot justified other “apparent incoherence between my verse and my critical prose” differently: “In one's prose reflexions one may be legitimately occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse one can only deal with actuality” (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 28.

¹⁶ The few statements having to do with doubt that I remember seeing in Eliot's prose appear deliberately ambiguous or, if one is unsympathetic, even sophistical: e.g., “doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief” (“A Note on Poetry and Belief,” The Enemy, 1 Jan. 1927, 16); and see the statement on doubt and belief quoted earlier from the essay on Pascal.

¹⁷ “Lancelot Andrewes,” dated 1926 in Selected Essays. “Journey of the Magi” appeared in 1927, the same year as the “Salutation” section of Ash Wednesday.

¹⁸ Quoted by Elizabeth Drew in T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribners, 1949), p. 127.

¹⁹ Grover Smith, Jr., cites this statement from a letter of 1930 (p. 131). In 1927 Eliot had written the introduction to a new edition of Thomas Newton's Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies, in which the Hercules Furens stands first.

²⁰ “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” Selected Essays, p. 137. The essay is dated 1927.