1 W. J. Maxwell, “Introduction,” in Cl. McKay, Complete Poems, p. xxx. On this issue, see also J. R. Keller, “A Chafing Savage, Down the Decent Street.” For a more comprehensive appraisal of McKay’s poems as one of the ferments of the African American sonnet tradition, see T. Muller, The African American Sonnet.
3 E. Longley, “The Great War, History, and the English Lyric,” p. 63.
4 T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre,” p. 189.
5 H. Monroe, “Comments and Reviews: The Death of Rupert Brooke,” p. 138. These remarks prefigure Dick Diver’s speech on the Somme battlefield in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night: “‘See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. […] You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 64-65.
6 H. Monroe, “Comments and Reviews,” loc. cit., p. 137-138.
7 R. Brooke, “Nineteen-fourteen,” p. 9. Though such a consideration lies beyond the scope of this article, one could argue that Eliot’s “Gerontion,” a meditation on the deviousness of history and the desolation of the postwar period, can in part be read as an answer to Brooke’s sonnet. Compare Brooke’s imperative address to the reader (“think only this of me”/”And think…”) and Eliot’s “Think now…” / “Think at last…”: these thoughts, unlike Brooke’s, enmesh the reader in paradoxes and perplexities, with strident ironies taking the place of pious patriotic fictions: “Think/ Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices/ Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues/ Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.” (l. 44-46)
8 See M. Perloff, “Avant-Garde Eliot,” p. 39, and Eliot’s Notebook dedication to Verdenal, Inventions of the March Hare, p. 3.
9 A similar ambivalence characterizes Eliot’s judgments about Brooke. His conflicted views are hinted at in a letter to the Egoist, dated Dec. 1917, headed “Thridlingston Grammar School” and signed “Helen B. Trundlett,” in which he playfully attacked his own review of Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s The New Poetry: An Anthology, which had appeared in The Egoist the previous month, and in which he had laconically noted that “Rupert Brooke is not absent [from the anthology]” (“Reflections on Contemporary Poetry,” p. 151). Writing as Helen B. Trundlett, he now ironically defended Brooke, claiming that his “early poems exhibit a youthful exuberance of passion, and an occasional coarseness of utterance, which offended finer tastes; but these were but dross which, as his last sonnets show, was purged away (if I may be permitted this word) in the fire of the Great Ordeal which is proving the well-spring of a Renaissance of English poetry.” (“Correspondence,” The Egoist, December 1917, p. 165). On another occasion he acknowledged Brooke’s “personal beauty” while denigrating his poetry (“A Preface to Modern Literature: Being a Conspectus, Chiefly of English Poetry, Addressed to an Intelligent and Inquiring Foreigner,” Vanity Fair (Nov. 1923), Complete Prose II, p. 484).
10 T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre,” p. 187.
11 R. Peterson, “‘The women come and go’: Sonnet Cycles in T. S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings,” p. 23.
12 Although it may be argued that the production of such an irregular couplet is not intentional, since it results from Pound’s cutting off the next two lines in the manuscript (“And at the corner where the stable is/ Delays only to urinate, and spit”), the fact remains that Eliot accepted the cut, turning what would have been a four-quatrain sequence into an almost-perfect Shakesperean sonnet.
13 “Seguono, l’uno dopo l’altro, i monologhi drammatici delle tre Figlie del Tamigi (vv. 292‑295, quartina abab; vv. 296‑299, quartina cdcd; vv. 300‑305, due terzine efg efg – possibile rimando allo schema rimico di un sonetto per metà shakespeariano e per metà petrarchesco).” T. S. Eliot, La terra devastata, p. 131.
14 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, p. 30.
15 In the drafts, this line was later displaced two lines down, after “equipoise.” I have decided to keep the initial order, as it makes clearer the original Petrarchan division between octet and sestet, and the turn l. 9, with “Some minds….”
16 “Glaucon” replaces “Ademantus” in a previous version. Both were disciples of Socrates in Plato’s Republic. I have retained Glaucon as it is to him that Socrates, in The Republic, speaks the words echoed in the last line.
17 Plato, The Republic, Bk. IX, 592 A-B, quoted by Chr. Ricks and J. McCue, “Commentary – The Waste Land,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, p. 660.
18 T. S. Eliot, “London Letter, May 1921,” The Dial, June 1921, Complete Prose, vol. II, p. 345. In this letter to the American readers of the magazine, Eliot lamented the coming disappearance of the City of London churches, then slated for demolition, and, by quoting a line of Dante’s that would later resurface in “What the Thunder Said,” cast himself as a spiritually starving Ugolino imprisoned in the City: “Probably few American visitors, and certainly few natives, ever inspect these disconsolate fanes; but they give to the business quarter of London a beauty which its hideous banks and commercial houses have not quite defaced. […] To one who, like the present writer, passes his days in this City of London (quand’io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto) the loss of these towers, to meet the eye down a grimy lane, and of these empty naves, to receive the solitary visitor at noon from the dust and tumult of Lombard Street, will be irreparable and unforgotten.” (ibid.)
19 The Liberator, July 1919, p. 20-21. A facsimile of the issue is available online (see bibliography).
21 W. J. Maxwell, Introduction, p. xxi.
22 C. McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 31.
23 Specifically the 18th-century prayer: “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” which contains the line “If I should die before I wake.”
24 F. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 190.
25 P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 63.
26 E. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, p. 196.
27 B. Kun, “A Message from Hungary to the American Workingmen,” p. 9.