![]() ![]() The museum is a place of sickness and stunted potential. (That was a new contemplation, the death-museum.) ![]() O commemorable fusion of science with disease… Pre-natal dust, what life is it you missed?) The death-before-life, the atom in the womb In a key passage, a medical museum becomes a symbol for the macabre nature of collections more broadly:ĭown a side-street, there’s a full century’s matter To her, the desire to shore up fragments against ruins and thereby impose order on a broken world is a morbid enterprise-one that shows a stifling preoccupation with the past over the present and future. The gas-fire puffs, consumes, ticks out its minor chords-” Here Cunard fuses the image of the yellow fog in “Prufrock,” which “Curled once about the house, and fell asleep,” with the “Unreal City” of The Waste Land lying “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn.” In doing so, she takes up the collage method Eliot had developed in The Waste Land, and applies it to Eliot’s own poetry.Īt the same time, Cunard repeatedly criticizes the collage method and its underlying impulse. For example: “Sunday creeps in silence / Under suspended smoke / And curdles defiant in unreal sleep. In other instances, she combines echoes to multiple poems within a single passage. Eliot ghosts these lines without Cunard having to overstate the relation. The allusion is discreet yet effective, depending as it does on an opening phrase and a very similar, if not identical, meter. Compare the rhythm of “ In the rooms / A somber carpet broods, stagnates be neath de liberate steps” (‘ u ‘ u ‘ u ‘ u ‘ ‘ u u ‘ u ‘ u u ‘), with “ In the room the women come and go, / Talking of Michael angelo” (‘ u ‘ u ‘ u ‘ u ‘ ‘ u u ‘ u ‘ u u). Alfred Prufrock” makes several appearances. This passage reconfigures the sights and sounds of The Waste Land and places them within a new context.Įlsewhere, Cunard’s allusions extend beyond The Waste Land to Eliot’s other early poems. The “desert’s voices” evoke a host of voices in Eliot’s poem: the nightingale Philomela in section II, who “Filled all the desert with inviolable voice” the “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” in section V and the discordant languages that reverberate across the final lines of the poem: “London Bridge is falling down falling down… Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie… Shantih shantih shantih…” The taverns in which Cunard’s “poet-fool must halt… Observing the crusty wrecks of aftermath” recall the pub scene in section II, where gossip about Lil and Albert gets interrupted by repeated calls of “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” Indeed, the “poet-fool” could easily be read as a sly reference to Eliot himself. The phrase “ruined waste” in the second line quickly establishes Cunard’s frame of reference. Observing the crusty wrecks of aftermath,ĭevouring fever of bone transfused to brain, Parallax opens with the journey of a “poet-fool” through a landscape reminiscent of The Waste Land:Īcross its ruined waste, its tortuous acreĭraws out his complex fires, drives on his feetĪll roads that circle back-he shall tread these Attending to these allusions can shed light on a little-known response to The Waste Land, as well as a notable alternative to the philosophy that Eliot helped to make such a dominant strain of modernist literature. At the same time, Cunard employs Eliot’s language and collage method to question his views on the decline of civilization and the artist’s place in society. The allusions to specific passages are discreet but persistent, accumulating from line to line until Eliot’s poetry forms a sort of under-song for Parallax. She also uses an urban setting and a deserted landscape as spaces emblematic of the modern era. Like Eliot, Cunard weaves together a multiplicity of speakers, perspectives, and languages. Parallax offers a rich web of allusions to The Waste Land. What scholars have yet to do is pin down the precise nature of her response-what, exactly, she said. Still, most critics have maintained that the poem holds a complicated relation with Eliot. Leavis, five years after the poem’s initial publication, dismissed Parallax as a “simple imitation” of The Waste Land. Eliot’s tune adding her own motifs and orchestration to the general theme.” Over time, some critics began to argue that the poem’s piping was, in fact, a little too derivative. Miss Cunard has caught strains of it too. Eliot is the first who heard the new music in its full harmony. ![]() But even when this is recognized, Miss Cunard’s poem shows the individuality of its author.” Outlook chimed in with a similar sentiment: “T.S. According to the pages of The Nation: “Miss Cunard’s poem would never have been conceived without the example of Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land, released three years prior. When Nancy Cunard published her long poem Parallax through the Hogarth Press in 1925, several reviewers noted similarities between it and T.S. ![]()
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