In Further Defiance of Valerie

      Anyone who studies T.S. Eliot knows that his second wife, Valerie Eliot, guards Eliot's copyrights ferociously, such that there is a vicious current of anticipation in Eliot studies known rather insidiously as the "Valerie Death Watch." (As much as I would like to be able to share Eliot's words with those not immediately in access of them, I'm not one to wait for the death of anyone, except perhaps Brian Mulroney. ;-) Just kidding, if you're reading this, Bri Bri.) But I wanted to offer this poem as a shattering of a lot of people's assumptions about TSE, a poem that shows Eliot with a rarely-abrasive sense of humourous vitriol.

The Triumph of Bullshit

Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited
If you consider my merits are small
Etiolated, alembicated,
Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,
Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,
Impotent galamatias
Affected, possibly imitated,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Ladies, who find my attentions ridiculous
Awkward insipid and horribly gauche
Pompous, pretentious, ineptly meticulous
Dull as the heart of an unbaked brioche
Floundering versicles feebly versiculous
Often attenuate, frequently crass
Attempts at emotions that turn out isiculous,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Ladies who think me unduely vociferous
Amiable cabotin making a noise
That people may cry out "this stuff is too stiff for us" ---
Ingenuous child with a box of new toys
Toy lions carnivorous, cannons fumiferous
Engines vaporous --- all this will pass;
Quite innocent --- 'he only wants to make shiver us."
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

And when thyself with silver foot shall pass
Among the Theories scattered on the grass
Take up my good intentions with the rest
And then for Christ's sake stick them up your ass.

--- T.S. Eliot, either 1910 or 1916, also from Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks

      Keep in mind, my readers, that the word 'bullshit' may have been in colloquial parlance, but it was not a distinctly-recorded word, and the OED, as Ricks notes, identifies the first written or published usage was circa 1915, in a letter from Wyndham Lewis, possibly about this poem of Eliot's (or perhaps another, which makes the dating of this unpublished piece rather awkward). I don't know if the OED has since emended this or not.

      Such versifications are among the reasons that many feminists loathe Eliot so intensely, not to mention his treatment of women in The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (with the women essentially callous and empty figures, talking pretentiously and emptily about Michelangelo), and particularly of the crucified Celia Copplestone in The Cocktail Party. Such feminist critics tend to see Eliot venting his own personal frustrations with women in such pieces, assessments that seem to lean heavily on psychoanalytical pretensions. Call me an apologist if you will, but I'm more inclined to see Eliot's male characters as figures of social and sexual disconnection, a disconnection very typical to Modernism entire, and perhaps best emblematized in the central position given to the figure of Tiresias (who has "foresuffered all") in The Waste Land. There's a tone of self-mockery to this poem, but also a proper sense of defiance to the flimsy act of bald characterization, to the niggling process of "thising and thating" with which I think most of us are very familiar. (If not, sit in a bar and listen to either men or women talk about others in the bar, and listen how they, and perhaps you, say "oh so-and-so is too this or too that"). It's also a poem about deflating the idealizing tendencies of male-female interaction, a tradition that Eliot, like Pound, probably would have described as being too throughly ensconced in emotional slither.

      For me, there's a kind of refreshing quality in the cynical instruction to tell the ladies to 'stick it up their ass,' especially in a poem so carefully metered and rhymed. (The verse may sometimes seem blank by nature, but there's an alternation between short 8-9 syllable lines and 12-13 syllable lines, by which the shorter lines are curtailments of statement, and the longer lines extensions or erections of statement, thus setting up an exaggerated distinction between truncated and tumbling lines; the returns, then, so to speak, to standard pentameters are more exercises in verbal grounding.) The language ventures from high-language to low-language with clever abruptness, as if the language of sophistication is merely the language of excuse-making and self-importance, while the language of the vulgar is a means to cleave through the pretensions and dismissals, and to defeat them in their tracks. In that regard, the language of sophistication is stultifying, and the language of coarseness seems liberating in its defiance. All in all, I think this a better poem than most would, and it offers a rejoinder to the dominant conceptions of Eliot as the prissy American more English than the English.