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THREE 3 T. S. Eliot getting out of the picture In the fall of 1908, the young T. S. Eliot composed two sonnets for publication in the Harvard Advocate, “Circe’s Palace” and “On a Portrait .” These poems are remarkable for their skilled integration of the Rossettian picture sonnet with the language of Swinburne. They are all the more remarkable for their very early dates of composition, before Eliot read Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, discovered the poetry of Jules Laforgue, and sprang to life as a poet, as the story goes. In fact, these two sonnets suggest that Eliot’s reading of Rossetti and Swinburne had brought him to the boiling point already and shaped some of his most fundamental concerns, for which Laforgue would provide the idiom and the irony. Eliot later acknowledged his early “rapture” for Rossetti, while summarily dismissing him from the scene of modern poetry. “Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, first by my rapture and next by my revolt, held up my appreciation of Beatrice by many years,” he wrote in the 1929 essay on Dante, his only reference to Rossetti in the canonforming Selected Essays.1 Eliot does not say that it was Rossetti, the foremost English translator of the Vita Nuova and a leader in the modern revival of Dante, who introduced him to Dante in the first place. Nor does he allude to his family connection to the founder of the American Dante Society, Charles Eliot Norton, the most important supporter and collector of Pre-Raphaelite art in the United States.2 Getting Rossetti out of the picture was important to Eliot’s anti-Victorian project and self-presentation as the heir of European culture.3 Yet his reading of Rossetti at the most formative stage of his life shaped Eliot’s way of looking, his disposition to “portray.” Rossetti’s deployment of a double perspective—inner and outer “standing points”—entered Eliot’s poetry through his early picture T. S. Eliot 77 sonnets and became a central feature of his portraiture, culminating in “Portrait of a Lady” and revisited in The Waste Land. Eliot’s early picture sonnets indicate that his interest in perspective, which became a central feature of his poetry and the subject of his philosophical dissertation, initially arose in an engagement with painting. This is hardly surprising insofar as painters had been working to establish new relations between beholder and artwork since the 1860s, foregrounding the issue of perspective by flattening the appearance of the canvas and introducing multiple vanishing points. Eliot’s two sonnets responded to paintings from two different movements: English Aestheticism and French Realism. Even as a college student, Eliot had a preternatural ability to combine divergent cultural threads in a way that brings out their common ground. His “On a Portrait” uses the language of Pater and Swinburne and the form favored by Rossetti to describe a painting by Édouard Manet, a surprising choice that shows many fundamental similarities between Aestheticism and Manet’s protomodernism, including their shared technique of flattening and motif of mirrors. In running the ekphrastic sonnet through Manet, however, Eliot found an approach more consonant with his temperament and perception of modernity. While Rossetti’s use of an “inner standing point” calls on the reader or beholder to feel desire or sympathy for the subject of the portrait, Eliot imagines ways of looking that do not entail entering either the painting or the mind of the figure portrayed. In “Mandarins,” “La Figlia Che Piange” and “Portrait of a Lady,” all composed from 1910 to 1911, Eliot experimented with a variety of approaches to portraiture, motivated by the project of releasing the viewer from the absorptive power of the image and—more important—from the idea of interiority per se. “Portrait of a Lady” recapitulates and revises the features of the Aesthetic portrait to represent the self as reflective, inherited, and without interiority. Finally, ten years later, Eliot returned to the scene of his original Aesthetic absorption in an ekphrasis of Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, literally internalizing the genre of the portrait poem as an inset in The Waste Land. 3 “Circe’s Palace” announces Eliot’s entry into the poetic vocation under the sign of Aestheticism, rehearsing Rossetti and Swinburne’s gestures and finding, within these, his own distinctive themes. “Circe’s Palace” imitates Rossetti’s picture sonnet “For ‘The Wine of Circe’ by Edward Burne-Jones” (1870), Rossetti’s homage to the younger painter, his friend and...

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