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For almost a century, there have been accusations that T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land “borrowed” from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, and they are fueled by Joyce’s own comments regarding the relationship between the two great writers.

However, the situation is far more complicated than one writer plagiarizing another, and a deeper review of their similar passages reveal stark differences between their intent and meaning that are critical to understanding both authors and their works.

The Accusation

Critics will forever compare these pillars of Modernism (both the authors and their works) due to their similar themes and the proximity of their publications. According to Stanley Sultan, Ulysses and The Waste Land “began to enjoy or suffer from one common distinction: an almost universal characterization as the epitome in English of, respectively, the modernist novel and the modernist poem” (Sultan p. 3).

Although this description suggests they shared a congenial literary relationship, Sultan is more revealing later on when he describes Joyce’s attacks on Eliot in Finnegans Wake : “Joyce makes him a Shaun type and rival. He seems to have regarded the two of them as competitors with their pair of central works, and Eliot as guilty of filching some of his thunder, in two respects: appropriating fame that was rightfully his; and plagiarizing freely, with inferior results” (Sultan p. 136).

Although Sultan tried to tone down and rationalize Joyce’s critique of Eliot, it is clear that Joyce believed that there existed a strong relationship between the two works with only quality, and not theme, differentiating the two.

Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that Eliot had access to Joyce’s work, allowing him to steal from Joyce if he so chose.

As Joseph Campbell pointed out, “Eliot had read Ulysses before he wrote The Waste Land. There are constant echoes in The Waste Land of themes and images from Ulysses –the drowned man, the voice of thunder, and others” (Campbell 48).

This would be damning if the story was so simple.

The Role of Ezra Pound

The missing link that unites Joyce and Eliot, establishing them as more than just admired and admirer, is Ezra Pound. His influence on Modernism cannot be disputed, and, as Eliot claimed in a 1946 article: “Pound did not create the poets: but he created a situation in which, for the first time, there was a ‘modern movement in poetry’” (Eliot p. 20).

However, Eliot was being modest when it came to Pound’s direct influence on the language of his own works. Sultan positioned Pound’s role as a publisher who would use the Little Review to accomplish his goal of forming a new movement among writers: “The first year saw work by Eliot, Yeats, and other modernists, in addition to a great deal by Pound and Lewis; and it ended with the first chapters of Ulysses –to be read there by Woolf” (Sultan p. 123).

It was Pound who helped Eliot become editor for the Egoist during the printings of chapters from Ulysses, but Pound went further than just bringing the two together. It has long been acknowledged that Pound helped shape Eliot’s The Waste Land just as he helped, to a lesser extent, shape Ulysses. Although Pound was responsible for much of Eliot’s language, he held less sway over the poem’s themes.

The Moral Difference

Of course, Joyce’s themes, especially the comparison of the urban life with Hell, were not unique or revolutionary, and they appear in many of Eliot’s early poems. This does not mean that Eliot’s use of themes was not influenced by Joyce or that he did not borrow specific images.

Lyndall Gordon, taking a limited approach, described one such connection: “Eliot’s specific borrowings, almost always from the ‘Proteus’ and ‘Hades’ episodes of Ulysses, reinforce his own sense of horror at the prospect of decay and death. They are essentially embellishments to the poem and came, with one exception, only late in the history of The Waste Land ’s composition” (Gordon p. 545).

When taking a closer look, this connection is more descriptive than thematic, and Eliot’s view of the modern city as Hell is more black and white while Joyce’s is far more morally nuanced. Helen Gardner went so far as to deny a connection between the two works because of Joyce’s atheism and concluded that the works “display fundamentally different attitudes to life” (Gardner p. 88). The question, then, is why there are such similarities in language that surrounds very different perspectives?

Both Ulysses and The Waste Land owe much of their understanding of morality to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s understanding of sin can be traced to both Aquinas and Aristotle, which represents a universal understanding of sin that is not limited to only a Christian mode of thought.

The difference in both works is not on the nature of sin and decay but on how it can be overcome. Sultan argued that Eliot focused on the salvation of a civilization while Joyce focused on the individual: “The vision of love in The Waste Land corresponds to that of civilization generally. But in Ulysses the method makes a contrary assertion about the same concern, despite an unpromising beginning and the presence of a series of temptresses … and always in the background Odysseus is rejoining Penelope–all to present connubial love (despite some genial mocking) as an alternative to the spiritually destructive City” (Sultan p. 159).

Eliot’s focus on the individual is due to the influence of Homer’s Odyssey, to which the general structure and the name “Ulysses” allude. In Portraits of the Artist in Exile, Joyce claimed, “The most beautiful, all-embracing theme is that of the Odyssey. It is greater, more human than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust. Dante tires one quickly; it is as if one were to look at the sun. The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the Odyssey” (pp 69-70).

This pagan focus on the individual means that not everyone will be saved; the “Hades” section makes it clear that all of Dublin, as with all of humanity, are bound by death. ALL of the characters moving through Dublin are trying to escape from the Hell that they find themselves within, but there is no evidence that they will eventually be able to accomplish this goal. Even Leopold, who returns to Molly, will probably not find any happiness, let alone a lasting happiness. He is able to escape from the Hell of the city, but he hasn’t found something greater.

In Eliot’s method of understanding the Divine Comedy, Dante compares the perspective of those in hell with those in heaven, and a reader can only understand the Inferno after reading the Paradiso. However, Joyce does not provide a direct, contrasting view to Ulysses, but Eliot most certainly does later in his life when he wrote the Four Quartets. The later poem, modeled off of The Waste Land in its structure form, completes Eliot’s Dante method, and it allows him to establish a parallax that alters his meaning in a way Joyce’s work does not.

The Case Against Plagiarism

Ulysses is the culmination of many literary techniques, many perspectives, and many beliefs. It is also a long wandering journey with little certainty, but it does manage to tie several of the plot strands together in the end. Eliot’s poem is relatively short and, thanks to Pound’s editing, is tightly written. They are very different works in terms of style, but they share some similar images and language. They are a product of their time and influence, and they are still used as representations of Modernism.

Any language or similarities between the works of Joyce and Eliot can be attributed to Pound’s changes or to mutual concepts that dominated the theory of literature that Pound was promoting. It was his pushing and prodding that led to many revisions in language, and he actively tried to get various writers to work with each other. Either directly or indirectly, he created a common language with a lasting impact.

Some aspects of The Waste Land may have been “plagiarized” from Ulysses, but none of them remain in their original form when the poem is read in unison with the Four Quartets. Even though Joyce died before three of the poems making up the Four Quartets were written, the general Christian direction of Eliot’s writing was made clear in his conversion poem “Ash Wednesday,” the first of the quartets “Burnt Norton” and his many essays.

The possibility of The Waste Land hinting of a future salvation could have been predicted before it was fully revealed in the Four Quartets, especially by one of Joyce’s background. Additionally, the relationship with The Waste Land to the Divine Comedy provides the possibility of salvation as an inevitable result of the Hell depicted in the early poem, which Joyce’s Ulysses lacks, possibly due to the influence of Homer or his personal thoughts on Christianity.

Furthermore, it is difficult to argue that Joyce held anything but an antagonistic view to practical Catholicism, even though he (ironically) derived many of his ideas from Dante and Augustine. It is also possible that Joyce’s derisive rejection of Eliot’s writing was actually a rejection of the High Church Anglicanism that Eliot embraced only a few years before Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake.

Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land will always be connected as long as Modernist literature is read. While describing the works in relation to each other helps to identify many important ideas of the period, it is simplistic to dismiss Eliot as copying Joyce. Claims of plagiarism and borrowing fail to explain the complex ideas within both works, and it simplifies their contrasting views of the universe.

References

* Campbell, Joseph. Mythic Worlds, Modern Words. Novato: New World Library, 2003.

* Eliot, T. S. “Ezra Pound.” Poetry LXVIII. (Sept. 1946)

* Joyce, James. Portraits of the Artist in Exile. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.

* Gardener, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. New York: Dutton, 1959.

* Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

* Sultan, Stanley. Eliot, Joyce & Company. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.