Different Streets, Same Shoes: The Modernist Perambulations of Mirrlees and Eliot

Traversing the scarred streets of the 1920s, the poets found themselves steeped in the

incoherence of a new age, troubled by what Brimley Johnson observes as ‘the currents of

thought’ that ‘have been hurried by war and its consequences’1. The emergence of modernist

techniques lauded a rebirth from the ashes of old poetic form that no longer served cultural

consciousness and the transitory mood of a traumatised city. As a key motif of modernist

literature, the urban metropolis address themes of anonymity, transience and societal change,

ideas famously explored by the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire who

celebrated the flâneur as an inconspicuous observer of city life. In his 1863 essay The Painter

of Modern Life, Baudelaire’s profile of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ sets the flâneur ‘in the ebb

and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite’, he is at one with the crowd yet separate as

he absorbs the movements of the metropolis in finite detail2. Walking in the footsteps of

Baudelaire and the eighteenth-century meandering Romantics, Hope Mirrlees and T.S Eliot

bring the flâneur into the chaotic, ephemeral moments of the urban landscape as a way of

expressing what Anne Fuchs observes as ‘the disconcerting experience of modernity’3. Their

defining works Paris, first published in 1919 and The Wasteland, published three years later

in 1922, are seminal in their entrenched sense of cultural consciousness, with both poems

mapping the vivid moments of a mourning city in the wake of The Great War. As the poets

push the boundaries of poetic form in their experimental typography, layering of images and

ruminations on the real and the unreal, the reader gets a canny sense of the sprawling urban

landscape that holds a mirror to the fractured consciousness of modern times. It is within

these experimental modernist techniques that the reader feels the city as a Baudelairan

1
R. Brimley Johnson, 'Introduction', in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (Freeport: New York: Books
for Libraries Press, 1920), p. 7.
2
Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life ', in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. by P. E.
Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972) p. 399.
3
Anne Fuchs, 'Modernist Perambulations through Time and Space - From Enlightened Walking to Crawling,
Stalking, Modelling and Street-Walking', Journal of the British Academy, (2016), p. 216.
‘kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness’4. This essay will examine the various techniques

deployed by Mirrlees and Eliot to depict the visual, physical and psychological experiences

of their wanderings flâneurs in Paris and London, and how the unsung modernist masterpiece

of Paris, and the strikingly similar but later published masterpiece of The Wasteland shine a

lurid light on the fast-paced and fleeting sensibility of modern life.

Mirrlees’ introductory statement of ‘I want a holophrase’ immediately calls for a

simplified articulation of the poet’s inundated synaesthesia of the city5. The notion of a

holophrase departs from symbolism in order to define the intense aesthetics of the passing

moment, therein touching upon the vorticist ideal in what Ezra Pound would advocate as ‘the

point of maximum energy’ of a singular word6. Mirrlees’ desire to revert back to the

monolinguistic characteristics of the early stages of language development works to cleanse

the palate of the stagnated syntax of the past. In doing this Mirrlees’ reworking of the

holophrase to “make it new” in the Poundian sense, captivates the detached urbanism of the

city in its synecdoche of modern life. Julia Briggs’ commentary on Mirrlees’ Paris draws

attention to the homophone pun of “holophrase” as a ‘hollow phrase’, playing again on the

melody of a shell-shocked city in crisis, seeking to rearticulate the reality of the metropolis in

a lucid, simplified form7. As Michel de Certeau observes in The Practice of Everyday Life,

‘objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps,’ which makes a

connection with Briggs’ “hollow phrase” in the sense that the language available to the poet

to describe the experience of the flâneur is no longer sufficient in articulating the fleeting

transience of the modern city. From the very first line we can see Mirrelees’ Paris to be

4
Charles Baudelaire, (p. 399).
5
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, ed. by Bonnie
Kime Scott (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007) 1 .
6
Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska : A Memoir, 2nd print. edn, (New York : New Directions, 1980), p. 93, in
WorldCat.org <https://bibliotheekuniversiteitvanamsterdam.on.worldcat.org/oclc/974103163>. [accessed 26th
December 2019]
7
Julia Briggs, 'Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism', in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies,
Complex Intersections, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 287.
striking out and away from the old form and the old city, as the flâneur looks to a simplified

syntax that sees the world like Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life, ‘in the spiritual condition

of a convalescent’8.

The chaos of style to reflect the outer stimuli of the street in Paris is mimetic of a solo

walk through a city. Capitalised typography of metro stations and passing advertisements of

‘NORD-SUD / ZIG-ZAG / LION NOIR’ set amongst allusions to people as ‘black figured

vases’ urges the reader to feel the nausea of a fleeting moment in the metropolis9. The surface

level onomatopoeic utterance of ‘Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the seine’ is

rich with the clanky exertions of a working city that descends into obscurity as the flâneur

gives the impression of crossing the river into the underworld to delve into the caverns of the

city10. At second glance however, this line is reminiscent of Aristophanes’ 405 BC play The

Frog, in which Dionysius enters the underworld to bring back the playwright and poet

Euripides11. The effect of this intertextuality positions the flâneur as Dionysius, travelling

into the depths of the underworld to retrieve poetry and save it from the ‘dead carcuss’ of

stale poetic form12. This fusion of advertising language, ancient muses and the “brekekekek

coax coax” chorus of The Frog demonstrates Mirrelees’ ability to be both cultured and

vulgar, giving form to the chaotic overlapping’s of the frenetic perambulations of a modern

city.

With the intermittent dialogues of the ‘scarlet woman shouting’ and a phantom voice

asking ‘vous-descendez Madame?’ amidst capitalised existential declarations in French, it is

not hard to imagine the speaker walking down a main street in broad daylight, weaving

8
Charles Baudelaire, (p. 397).
9
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 2-6.
10
Ibid., 10.
11
Julia Briggs, (p. 288).
12
T. E. Hulme, ' A Lecture on Modern Poetry', in T E Hulme 'Selected Writings', ed. by Patrick McGuiness
(London: Taylor & Francis, 2003), p. 61,
<https://bibliotheekuniversiteitvanamsterdam.on.worldcat.org/oclc/371364>. [Accessed 5th January 2020]
amongst the pulsing throng of a passing crowd as she begins her walk as a modernist

flâneuse13. The pace of the poem is unrelenting in its constant enjambment that leads to the

next superimposed image of the city, to the point that we feel the sensation of the speaker

physically halting on the pavement, ‘I can’t / I must go slowly’ 14. This dominance of city-life,

these ‘expressions of ennui and disgust at being jostled by others in conditions impossible to

enthuse about’, as Tim Conley writes in Mass Movements and Metropolitan Poetics, compels

the flâneur to wade slowly through the urban synaesthesia in order to craft ‘a newness of

expression’ to holistically sculpt the experience of a city that satisfies both private and public

perception15.

In light of Conley’s ‘newness of expression’ to encapsulate the mobility and mood of

the post-war metropolis, Mirrlees’ unconventional typography rebels against the nineteenth

century realism of literature and art that no longer depicted Paris in its most lucid state:

‘The Tuileries are in a trance

Because the painters have

Stared at them so long’

gives the poem a sense of the drawn-out lethargy of the moment steeped in its realist stupor16.

Through Mirrlees’ experimental typography, the reader is given a sense of the stagnated,

commodified realism that undermines the present need for new artistic form. Alternatively, as

Briggs mentions in her commentary, the spaced words graphically imitate the layout of the

Tuileries garden, and by extension the shifting sensations of the physical city itself17. Megan

13
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 12-14.
14
Ibid., 18-19.
15
Tim Conley, 'City Transit Gloria: Mass Movements and Metropolitan Poetics', Journal of Modern Literature,
37 (2014), p. 94, in JSTOR <http://www.jstor.org.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.37.4.91>.
[Accessed 23rd December 2019]
16
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 20-22.
17
Julia Briggs, (p. 288).
Beech makes the argument that the typography of Paris attempts to ‘map the metropolis’ and

that the poem’s form ‘emulates and creates the multi-sensory nature of urban experience and

perception’18. Indeed, it is this technique that truly grounds the poem in the kaleidoscope of

the city, as the meandering flâneur records, in Anke Gleber’s words, the ‘significant traces of

the material dimensions of culture and history’ in poetic form19.

In its divorce of typography from sound, the printing of ‘there is no lily of the

valley’20 in a vertical column of single letters echoes Apollonaire’s calligrammes, who

displayed his words in shapes that corresponded with the subject matter21. The visual imagery

of these lines form as if they were the stem of a lily as well as the ‘line of Marchers’, as

suggested in Briggs’ commentary, who marched in a mass strike in Paris on May Day in

191922. In displaying the walk of the strikers in mimetic typographical form the reader feels

the immediacy of the strike and the fragmentary transient experience of the modern city as

the flâneur passes through. Michel de Certeau describes this ‘stylistic metamorphosis of

space’ as ‘trees of gestures’ that can be fixed ‘in a certain place by images’, by this account

the strikers are recorded in the poem by transforming the space of the letters23. What’s more

as Mirrlees mentions in her footnotes, lilies of the valley were usually sold in Paris on May

Day but was not sold in 1919 due to the strike24. These lilies, typically symbolic of death and

grieving holds its own force within the poem, particularly in its connection to the strike of the

working people. Why would Mirrlees honour every letter with a new line if it did not

18
Megan Beech, 'Obscure, Indecent and Brilliant: Female Sexuality, the Hogarth Press, and Hope Mirrlees', in
Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, ed. by Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill (Clemson: Clemson
University Press, 2018) p. 72.
19
Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princton University Press, 1999), p. 51-52.
20
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 236-259.
21
Guillaume Apollonaire, Calligrammes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1918), p. 70. 74-76.
22
Julia Briggs, (p. 296).
23
Michel De Certeau, 'Spatial Practice: Walking in the City', in The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988) p. 102.
24
Hope Mirrlees, p. 13.
symbolise great change within the city? It is as if the absence of the flowers marked a new

mood of hope for the metropolis and its typographical uniqueness stands testament to this as

the flâneur observes what John Meynard Keyes described as ‘the threshold of a new age’25.

While it should be noted that Mirrlees does not explicitly divulge the unprecedented

horrors of the war or the uncertainty of the future, the historical experience of the city is

registered in the form of the poem. Mirrlees’ deployment of free verse in Paris is expressive

of what Ian Patterson would describe as the ‘articulated structure of anticipation’, therefore in

not providing a rigid poetic structure to the flâneur’s reflections or observation the poem

anticipates the open temporality of the modern city26. As the flâneur layers observations in

free verse of the President Wilson grinning ‘like a dog’ who ‘runs about the city’ past shop

windows of ‘CHARCUTERIE’ and ‘APERITIFS’ alongside ‘the learned seal at the Nouveau

Cirque Cottin,’ the reader gets an impression of the city in rapid real time, as the flâneur

shows the city against the backdrop of the historical Paris peace negotiations of 191927. The

use of free verse anticipates the influx of all these experiences existing in parallel to each

other, bringing attention to the rich tapestry of a living city in a pivotal moment in history.

Moreover, the description of Wilson grinning and running about the city creates an energetic

movement of the moment, one that is moving towards a more prosperous and stable city. The

same can be said for the flâneur’s enumeration of the hidden artwork returning to the Louvre:

‘In the Louvre

The Pietà of Avignon,

L’Olympe,

25
John Meynard Keyes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1919), p. 15.
26
Ian Patterson, 'Time, Free Verse, and the Gods of Modernism', in Tradition, Translation , Trauma: The
Classic and the Modern, ed. by Parker, Jan and Matthews, Timothy (Oxford University Press: Oxford, ) p. 178.
27
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 125, 126, 144, 164.
 Giles,

Mantegna’s Seven Deadly Sins,

The Chardins;

They arise, serene and unetiolated, one by one from

their subterranean sleep of five long years.

Like Duncan they slept well28.’

The effect of a new line for every named piece of art, like the active verbs used to describe

President Wilson, is effective in giving the poem a sense of movement and progress, as if the

listing of the artwork tells the order in which they physically emerged ‘one by one’ from the

bunkers of ‘their subterranean sleep’. In alignment with the recently resurrected paintings

however Briggs notes the ‘implicit contrast with dead soldiers, who cannot be resurrected’

and, unlike the murdered King Duncan in Macbeth, ‘may not sleep well’29. It is likely that

Mirrlees is also making a comment on the durability of art here, in that the transience of

humanity will only leave traces on a city like ghosts ‘walking the streets… with paper

wreaths’, but it is art that will live on outside the temporality of the evolving metropolis30.

Writing in free verse has allowed Mirrlees to record the streets of Paris uninhibited without

alterations to rhyme or metre, therein allowing the reader to get a true sense of the moment as

the flâneuse passes through the city observing these seemingly incoherent scenes running in

parallel around the city.

28
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 116-124.
29
Julia Briggs, (p. 292).
30
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 116 - 124.
 John Johnstone’s book on The Poet and the City: A Study in Urban Perspectives

draws focus on how modernist poets subvert the ‘topographical tradition’ as a way of

depicting the material space of the city as an ‘experiential entity’31. This is certainly true of

Eliot’s flâneur walking down the river Thames in “The Fire Sermon”:

‘The river sweats

Oil and Tar…

Red Sails

Wide

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialalala leia

Wallala leialala…

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores.32’

In this the reader gets a vivid, albeit bleak impression of the flâneur walking along the banks

of the Thames through the continuous flow of the river-shaped lines. The enjambment of

‘reach’ and ‘past’ is as if the river itself is conscious of its movements as it ‘sweats’ out the

city’s poisonous biproduct of ‘oil and tar’. As Maria Frendo observes, these irregularly

rhymed ‘truncated lines suggest debris floating in the river’ as well as the quick ‘fleeting

31
John H. Johnstone, The Poet and the City: A Study in Urban Perspectives (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1984), p. 170.
32
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 266-285, in WorldCat.org
<https://bibliotheekuniversiteitvanamsterdam.on.worldcat.org/oclc/4536347> [accessed 18th December 2019]
images’ projected in short succession on the page33. What’s more the subverted lines of

‘weilalala leia / Wallala leilala’ can first be read as an exhibition of Dadaist nonsense but on

its sub level it can be seen as an allusion to Richard Wagner’s opera wherein the three Rhine-

maidens lament the loss of their gold. Here Eliot is making a comment on the city’s loss of

morality in pursuit of commodified wealth, and as the chant breaks the natural flow of the

preceding lines it also, as Frendo notes, obtrudes itself ‘like a sudden breeze in a note of

agitation against the river’s calm flow’ therein affirming the flâneur’s presence in the decay

of a materialised, polluted city34.

Similar graphic iconicity can be seen in Mirrlees’ Paris, to the effect that the reader

can visualise the physical movements of the flâneur’s journey through the various lengths of

the lines:

‘Against it there pass

Across the Pont Solférino

Fiacres and little people all black,

Flies nibbling the celestial apricot—

That one with broad-brimmed hat and tippeted pelisse must be a

priest.

They are black and two-dimensional and look like silhouettes of

Louise-Philippe citizens.35’

33
Maria Frendo, 'T.S Eliot and the Music of Poetry' Durham University, (1999) p. 127.
34
Ibid,.
35
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 398-404.
Through Mirrlees’ fusion of hypotaxis ‘against’ and across’, followed by the metaphor of the

‘celestial apricot’, to the parataxis ‘and look’ and finally similes that are ‘like silhouettes’, the

reader gets a saturated image of the urban landscape being seen in explicit detail by the

flâneur. Like directions we follow the perceptions of the observer through the layout of her

lines and layering of imagery that reminds us of Eisenstein’s montage technique, a process of

seemingly unrelated images hinting at a deeper meaning of a complex, conscious metropolis.

Amidst the frenetic unravelling of the city through deconstructed images of buildings,

enumerated objects, snippets of dialogue and ‘little funny things ceaselessly happening’, a

strong sense of a city emerging from wartime is discerned through imagery of Spring, Lent

and the first of May36. ‘The wicked April moon’ works as a tenuous oxymoron in relation to

the three major events that stir in the background of Mirrlees’ poem - the Versailles peace

treaty, the May Day protests and workers strikes37. Brigg’s commentary notes the symbolism

behind the imagery of the April moon, being characterised by ‘cold, harsh winds that seem to

scorch the new growth’ is fitting in its backdrop to the uncertain events unravelling at the

same time, whilst the new moon brings hope for change it still casts shadows of doubt and

uncertainty over the city in the wake of World War One38. Mirrlees’ statement strikingly

anticipates Eliot’s opening line of The Wasteland, ‘April is the cruellest month’ that arrests a

more pessimistic tone than Mirrlees, who weaves optimism into the line in its relation to the

historical events of the day (unlike Eliot whose tone is dejected from the offset)39. In these

paralleled lines we can get a sense of the nascent mood of Europe on the cusp of political,

social and poetic revolution, all of which are focal motifs to modernist ideals and heavy in the

atmosphere of early twentieth century cities.

36
Ibid., 338.
37
Ibid., 262.
38
Julia Briggs, (p. 296).
39
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 1.
 ‘Through sluggish watery sleep come dreams / They are the blue ghosts of king

fishers’40 suffuses the hallucinatory depths of Freud with the mythological, as Mirrlees recalls

Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, wherein the curse of the fisher king maimed by

sickness, plights the land with a curse of sterility which can only be lifted upon the

appearance of a knight who will question the meaning of various symbols41. In this sense,

Mirrlees’ flâneur is the knight walking ‘knee-deep in dreams’, plumbing her unconscious to

see modern Paris emerge from the depths of its decay42. As Julia Briggs observes in her

commentary, the spirit of the symbolist avant-garde, where Freud ‘has dredged the river’43 is

strong in Mirrlees’ commitment to ‘record the contemporary scene’ as she explores ‘the

newly identified life of the unconscious’44. In charging images of the fisher king’s sterility

and the unconscious, Mirrlees’ poem projects a discombobulated chaos of the city that finds a

paralleled root in The Wasteland’s “A Game of Chess”, where Eliot’s technique of allusions

to ‘the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king’ makes a strong comment upon, and a

symbol of, the modern world45. In referring to the Fisher King in the latter half of the line,

Eliot, like Mirrlees, draws an image of the city’s barren and neglected state that, combined

with the notable tense change in the ensuing lines ‘And still she cried, and still the world

pursues’ encapsulates the emotional and spiritual sterility of the present as Eliot’s flâneur

moves detached and indifferently through the steady decline of the contemporary city46.

Eliot’s reference to Jessie Weston’s grail manuscripts is a major symbol of The Wasteland,

particularly in its sub levels of meaning as noted by Cleanth Brooks, who stated that ‘a

40
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 271-272.
41
Jessie Laidlay Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: 1920), in WorldCat.org
<https://bibliotheekuniversiteitvanamsterdam.on.worldcat.org/oclc/63481517>. [accessed 2nd December 2019]
42
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 310.
43
Ibid., 414.
44
Julia Briggs, (p. 262).
45
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 99.
46
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 101.
violation of a woman makes a very good symbol of the process of secularisation’47. In this

sense Eliot is paralleling the violation of Philomena and her subsequent loss of speech with

the complicit degradation of the state of London. De Certeau also makes the point that in

substituting the ‘figures of pedestrian rhetoric’ with those ‘that have a mythical structure’ the

flâneur gives a more concrete existence to the world around him (assuming that the myth is

known to the reader) and the poem positions itself in the city with a more enriched level of

comprehension48. Both poems engage with the mythological and the phantasmagoric to

reveal the emptiness of the city and the tacit submersion of its inhabitants in the emptiness

around them, each laden with the cryptic presence of their unconscious minds.

Rivers also run central to the poems of Mirrlees and Eliot, with allusions to the river

and ghosts that walk over its bridges in Mirrlees’ Paris permeating echoes of Eliot’s

Wasteland (and vice versa). As Mirrlees’ flâneur ponders on ‘the Seine, old egotist’ that

meanders ‘imperturbably towards the sea’49 we are reminded of the ‘sweet Thames’50 of The

Wasteland. Both personified rivers are construed as the beating heart of the metropolis,

ebbing and flowing with the current of the city pressed into a single moment of a flâneur’s

gaze. As Melissa Boyde dictates in The poet and the ghosts are walking the streets, ‘the

modern city which the speaker observes is alive with the traces of the past’ and that ‘it is the

poet alone who can observe the ghosts who simultaneously walk there’51. In Paris the poet is

the flâneuse, who sees ‘Sainte-Beuve, a tight bouquet in his hand for Madame / Victor Hugo’

passing on the river ‘Pont-Neuf’ as he makes ‘for the salon d’automne / of Madame de

47
Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), p.
132, in WorldCat.org <https://bibliotheekuniversiteitvanamsterdam.on.worldcat.org/oclc/641920>. [Accessed
4th January 2020].
48
Michel De Certeau, (p. 102).
49
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 269.
50
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 176.
51
Melissa Boyde, 'The Poet and the Ghosts are Walking the Streets: Hope Mirrlees--Life and Poetry. (Traveling
Modernisms)(Critical Essay)', Hecate, 35 (2009), p. 7 .
Lafayette’52. By using the river as the stem, the flâneur is observing the timelessness of the

city through memory, that extends her walking route into the history of Paris through the

dead that walked over the river before her. Interestingly, Mirrlees’ tone is not interceded with

sadness or fear when referring to people who are marked by death as they pass over the river,

something which can be held in stark contrast to Eliot’s Wasteland as the walker’s perception

of the city is steeped in a deathly pessimism unbeknown to Mirrlees’ flâneuse. ‘A crowd

flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many’53 stirs a

memory of a Dantean scene, with the latter line a direct quote from Canto III in Inferno, used

ironically in this instance to refer to the living inhabitants of London, in order to ‘establish a

relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life’54.

Eliot’s echoes of Dante in the Wasteland gives a destitute impression of the urban

metropolis as an ‘unreal city’, thick with ‘the brown fog’55 of industry that Bassel

Almasalmeh reveres as ‘a stifling, alienated place from which the inhabitant finds no

escape’56. As the flâneur walks the streets of London he sees ‘crowds of people, walking

round in a ring’57, a mimetic scene of Canto III where Dante sees the shades of cowards who

‘lived without disgrace and without praise’ forever bound to traipse behind the other in a

hopeless, cyclical fashion58. This impression of the London people as the ‘living dead’ strikes

a chord of hopelessness beyond anything in Mirrlees’ Paris, as Eliot fuses the morbid setting

of Dante’s hell to reflect the mood of a post-war city. In Eliot’s essay What Dante Means To

Me, he writes that Dante’s work gives ‘recognition of a temperament akin to one’s own’

52
Hope Mirrlees, 'Paris', 369-373.
53
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 62-63.
54
T. S. (T Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 128.
55
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 60-61.
56
Bassel Almasalmeh, 'Transcending Boundaries: Modern Poetic Responses to the City ', University of
Leicester, (2007), p. 14.
57
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 56.
58
Allen Mandelbaum, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd., 1995),
p. 69. Inf, 3, 36.
therefore the intertextuality of Dante in the Wasteland serves to explicitly bring an

understanding of the human condition to the forefront of contemporary consciousness,

particularly in the aftermath of the horrors of World War One59. As mentioned in the

Wasteland’s footnotes, ‘sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled’60 is detailed to be a

reworking of the ‘sighs and lamentations and loud cries’ in Canto III of The Divine

Comedy61. The use of the passive tense gives a sense of the flâneur’s apathy towards the

anguish of the crowd around him, confirming the view of Fredrich Engles in his essay

Conditions of the Working Class in England, where he states that the ‘greater the number of

people that are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and offensive becomes the brutal

indifference’62.

As each flaneur travels across the city, the contemporary mood of the metropolis and

the geographical layout of the city is concisely visualised in Paris and the Wasteland through

the poet’s experimentation with typographical form, layering of images and their deployment

of the mythological. In pushing the boundaries of syntax, Mirrlees and Eliot stand at the

forefront of the avant-garde in their efforts to encourage readers to diverge from the habitual

modes of reading literature and grasping the rapidly changing world around them. For Briggs,

Mirrlees ‘soaked up l’espirit nouveau, the new spirit of art’ in her unprecedented layering of

high and low culture, of the historical and the phantasmagoric, and of the visual and the

verbal experience63. These techniques are similarly reflected in the ‘rhythmic grumblings’ of

The Wasteland, where Eliot captures the post-war disillusionment that weighs heavily on the

59
T. S. Eliot, (p. 126).
60
T. S. Eliot, 'The Wasteland', 64.
61
Allen Mandelbaum, (p. 68). Inf, 3, 22.
62
Fredrich Engles, quoted in, Walter Benjamin and Peter Demetz, Reflections : Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writing (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 116, in WorldCat.org
<https://bibliotheekuniversiteitvanamsterdam.on.worldcat.org/oclc/12805048>. [Accessed 3rd January 2020]
63
Julia Briggs, (p. 262).
steps of his downcast and alienated flâneur64. While there are notable similarities between

Paris and The Wasteland, the crucial dichotomy of the two poems lie in the psychological

state of the speakers, with the flâneur of Paris journeying through the city with a sense of

hope and progress whilst the flâneur of The Wasteland wades through, and becomes part of,

the despair of a stagnated city. Together they give you maps to the city, and the keys to

liberate the consciousness of a new age through their fearless steps into unprecedented

modernist techniques.

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