Introduction to “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”

A complex web of allusions, voices that are difficult to analyse, together with a lot of political controversy make this poem seemingly elusive of sensible criticism. Once, however, the allusions are worked through and the original context of the poem is restored, the poem has a plummable plot, which follows Eliot's agenda as he was inspired to describe by the inscription over Dante's Hell:

O lord, have patience
Pardon these derelictions -
I shall convince these romantic imitations
By my classical convictions. (IMH, p. 83) 

Two dramatic characters visit Venice together, Burbank and Bleistein. Burbank, a young, handsome American tourist, visits Venice for the first time with a Baedeker, a popular tourist guide, in his hand to tell him what he is looking at. At first he is totally taken in by the outward beauty and splendour that Venice exhibits to him in the personification of Princess Volupine. The story takes us through three different phases of Burbank's personality, based on George Wyndham, Henry James, and Henry Adams respectively., each of whom Americans who in their life have come to visit Europe, like Eliot after them. 

The first three stanzas are about the temperament of Romance, exemplified in Eliot's time by George Wyndham (typified by Eliot as a 'Romantic Patrician', who wrote about his travel to Egypt that 'we could have been Antony ..." References are to apparently Romantic visions, but in each of the allusion is a foreboding of coming decay and death.

The second section is about Bleistein, the most important, and is inspired by Henry James who wrote about the Jews in Venice that they woke the Romantic traveller to reality and were a great cure for pedantry. This task is left to Bleistein, who plays a part that is much inspired by Browning's old man in black in 'How it Strikes a Contemporary' and Shylock's speech in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Browning's poem, although largely about Shelley and other poets of Browning's day, suggests a Jew and this image is used by Eliot, who recalls the image to make an accusation against Venice, personified by Princess Volupine - the accusation exposes, like the Jewish tourist industry did for Henry James, Venice's dilapidation. 

The final phase is that of Henry Adams, who contemplated 'Time's ruins', wondering, like Gibbon and many other English and French writers somehow associated with Italy, how the gigantic Roman empire could have fallen (typified by Eliot as a 'Skeptical Patrician').