Eliot, Blake, Unpleasantness

The Waste Land is full of different voices—as handsomely established by a long tradition of criticism, latterly crowned by the magnificent edition of Ricks and McCue (on which I draw extensively here). In the poem you can find Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Joyce—and, I am going to say, Blake. He is an incongruous participant in the chorus in various ways, not least in that while Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and even Joyce continued to sound in Eliot’s work, Blake seems to have faded away as Eliot moved on; but for a short time in the early 1920s, I