T.S. Eliot

If Lewis’s visually grotesque bodies are a way of grasping the world beyond sight with the same intensity that vision confronts us with, then T.S. Eliot’s poems are grotesque for similar reasons. Eliot turns the human inside out, with visuality that Chao identifies as essential to poetry, laying bare the minds and lives of his modern savages, human-animals and marionettes. Despite this, Eliot has never been explicitly connected to the tradition of the grotesque. Criticisms have tended to portray him instead as an abstract, metaphysical and religious poet, interested in the soul, the fragmentation of the mind and the stream of experiences and memories within it. This absence of the grotesque, is surprising, given the considerable amount of critical material outlining Eliot’s interest in anthropological and degenerative bodies, both mythical and modern. Eliot has never been publicly viewed as a comedic or obscene poet, or indeed as a gothic poet, and criticism usually neglects these aspects of his work. His earlier poems, unpublished works and juvenilia nevertheless show a strong concern with embodied life—and the forces that control it—in much the same manner as Lewis. Clowns, marionettes and animal-human hybrids fill Eliot’s poems—bodies formed, in part, by his encounters with modern urban life. In this chapter, I argue that Eliot’s poetry employs the grotesque body to give voice to his uneasy position within the city as a faceless member of the crowd, produced by social and technological changes: an immigrant separated from his homeland and past.