The Poet And The City

We don't expect bankers to be great poets, but when TS Eliot took up a job at Lloyds he would occasionally break from his work to jot down a few lines. And with 'The Waste Land' he crafted a poem that resonates today, writes ALAN O'RIORDAN

WHEN WE think of the poet in the city, we picture the flâneur: someone who is in the crowd, but observing it too; caught in the teeming metropolis, but not blind to what it means; able to divine images from the constant flux. The poet is alive to the comings and goings of cities, the coincidences, the anonymity, the constant tumult of significance and silliness. But, not rushing to the office, he notices.

He is free from the quotidian concerns, because the muse does not work nine to five.

Such, at any rate, goes our popular imagining. It is the very picture of the modernist and persisted right up to the last one, Samuel Beckett, inextricably linked with cigarettes and cups of espresso on the boulevards of the Left Bank.

And it appears TS Eliot shared this idea. In 1916, he quit his job at Highgate Junior School, with the hope of becoming a proper poet and man of letters: earning enough from reviews and lectures to give his time more fully to his craft. It proved an unsuccessful embrace of the bohemian life. He was unable to do any poetic work and was not very busy as a freelance writer either. Eliot needed the security of a monthly pay cheque in order to write creatively. And so, he joined Lloyds bank in 1917.

Instantly he was a changed man: “It is a great satisfaction to me to have regular work,” he wrote to his mother, “and I can do my own work much the better for it.”

Rather than the work of a bohemian martyred to the cause of his art, The Waste Land, that great work of the city, the poetic complement to Ulysses, was written in and around the City: its author a respectable banker, who, for a time at least, appeared to enjoy the job. He sat behind a desk, no different from his colleagues, except in a reported penchant for breaking off in the middle of dictating a letter, to grab a pen and jot something down.

Ezra Pound mounted campaigns to liberate Eliot from his day job, complaining: “It is a crime against literature to let him waste eight hours per diem in that bank.” It seems, however, that the contrary is true: it was very lucky for literature that TS Eliot did work in a bank.

Not only was the salary conducive to his great flowering as the poet of T he Love Song of J Alfred Prufrockand The Waste Land, but the nature of his work proved a remarkable fit for the kind of poetry he began to write.

The Waste Land, a poem of collapse and disorder, where a straightforward narrative is dispensed with to mirror the fractured unity of the postwar world, found an echo in Eliot's day-to-day work as what we would probably call an analyst in Lloyds's foreign and colonial office. Eliot dealt in particular with prewar loans to Germany, and, much as now, sovereign default was exercising minds.

OUTSIDE THE CITY, the postwar period was a time with certain resonances for our moment: austerity ruled; economic models thought immutable were being shown not fit for purpose; unstable governments had ineffectual policies with which to deal with massive unemployment. The broad public consensus was that leadership was needed, but lacking, and was sowing the seeds for future failures even more terrible. So far, so familiar.

And Eliot was focused on such matters by his work: he loved “the science of money” and the interplay of politics, history and finance. Indeed, it gave him a concrete sense of worse to come; he complained perceptively at one point of “trying to elucidate points in that appalling document, the Peace Treaty”.

Eliot summed up his work as "struggling with chaos": and this is precisely what The Waste Landembodies. It is hard to think of an economic climate more imitative of the sense of decline, the fragmentation of tradition that The Waste Landso brilliantly captures.

Eliot worked in the "Unreal City": the capital C is no accident. We can, and boy do we, analyse our present dilemma: economists can tell us why it happened; philosophers can tell us the immorality of it, the paucity of ideas that let it happen. But only the poet can embody it – capture its impact on the spirit, and the intellect. It is precisely because Eliot was unable to separate his many personal problems from his wider concerns for western civilisation that The Waste Landstill speaks to us; that he could not make the trip from across London Bridge without thinking of Dante's Inferno: "so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many".

The poet’s City is a landscape haunted by his ideas of anthropology. The Square Mile, our symbol for all that has gone wrong in the world recently, is itself a metonymy for a wider atrophy. Eliot takes the reader through familiar streets alluding to religions, ancient rituals, myths that no longer serve. In his City, there are masses without community. Eliot wrote using what he called the “mythical method” – but, ironically, only because his was a time “barren of myths”. The point of myths is that they explain. Urban man, knowing too much but not enough, recognises they have lost this function. Yet he has nothing with which to replace the old rituals. Certainly not the market economy or democracy. Lacing rituals through his City, Eliot reminds us that it is hubristic to think we can forget our primordial selves. Frail human instincts are inescapable: our herd mentality, weakness for manias, our base urges. In the City in our time, another myth has been found wanting: blind faith in mathematical risk models and self-correcting markets.

Eliot felt the mass society then emerging was an ungovernable thing because it disrupted tradition. At work he saw how the world, gradually becoming more deregulated, was changing in ways that could not be sanctioned either politically or socially. His poem challenges our conceptions of tradition with its very first line. This is a poem, we think, and read “April is”. So we expect something sweetly lyrical, a paeon to renewal. But no. “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of dead land”. It is not any more Chaucer’s great month of venturing out.

Tradition, what is to be expected, even the natural order: these mock us in our present condition, a condition that led to our own technocratic society with its ethics of individualism. And so, The Waste Land's various voices do not cohere: their diverse experiences are not shared, indeed are mutually alienating. A wife tries to engage her husband: "Why do you never speak?" But he cannot tell her what is on his mind: "I think we are in rats' alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones." In such moments, Eliot dramatises the loss of a "collective temperament"; his poem is a triumphant recreation of the din of the modernity. There is but one eternal message for a dispirited poet, one of "vanity, fear and lust" – as witnessed in the cold seduction by, naturally, a financial worker with "bold stare". "His vanity requires no response" and his typist lover is "glad it's over" when it's done, putting on her gramophone from where her music creeps "along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street". "O City city" begins the next section, as the Thames daughters sing in despair, "I can connect nothing with nothing."

THE IRONY OF OUR TIME, of course, is that the connectivity that makes the globalised world possible is its chief vulnerability. We worry what will happen when we can connect "nothing with nothing". In our wider culture, too, everything is connected, but in that web of relativity, we lose the very basis of meaning and values: as Eliot's London on the Thames, we are cut adrift.

Eliot's career was a search for values that would not drift. He found them in Christianity a few years after he wrote The Waste Land. But in 1922, he was not there yet – and so he captured the uncertainty of his (and our) time. The Waste Landhas been compared to a pilgrimage in which the pilgrim does not know where the holy place is. Ireland's dilemma right now is very close to that position, in both a secular and, with the church in crisis, a spiritual sense. The wider culture of Eliot's time and after turned that search for renewal into consumer society's endless grasping for the new. We have seen that this is not enough and there is a clamour for reinvention now, from politicians and even in the pages of this newspaper. On a personal level, some of us will be lucky as Eliot was to find a coherent sense of being in the world. For many others, however, his masterpiece remains an uncomfortable reminder of our society's lack of cohesion and our civilisation's vulnerability.

To read the full text of The Waste Land, see theotherpages.org/poems