Publication History of "Burbank"

The poem was first published in Arts and Letters (London), June 1919, under the title "Bleistein with a Cigar." It had been finished too late to be included in Poems 1919 (London), but was in time for the American publication of Poems (1920) in which it is included, now under the full title "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar". Subsequently it was released in London in the bundle Ara Vos Prec, which contained all Eliot's poems so far including the four poems also in the American Poems (1920). Besides "Burbank with a Baedeker", these four poems included "Sweeney Erect", "A Cooking Egg" and "Gerontion" which are hence also termed the Ara Vos Prec group.

It is uncertain when Eliot started on "Burbank" but generally at least the year is presumed to be 1918, though I would not exclude the possibility of the Bleistein section being written as early as 1917, together with the first beginnings of "Gerontion."

Like nearly all Eliot's early poetry, Burbank has passed through Pound's hands, though a date for when this happened has not been given. This first draft contained the following variants:

l.2. And Triton blew his wrinkled shell. [instead of "Descending at a small hotel;"]
l.6. Passed slowly like [instead of "Passed seaward with"]
l.7. Seaward: [instead of "Slowly:"]
l.29. the lion's mane [instead of "the lion's wings"]

Two of the alterations have come from suggestions by Pound, who suggested "wings" instead of mane, thus suggesting the Winged Lion of St Mark, and next to "shell" he wrote "If you 'hotel' this rhythm shd be weighted a bit, I think." The reference to 'hotel' seems to imply to me that Pound and Eliot had discussed the poem together on a previous occasion.

The first title and its subsequent change point to a shift in Eliot's own perspective on the poem - in that he presumably at least initially considered Bleistein the most important character. This would correspond with the evidence in the Notebook which shows that Eliot wrote the three stanzas on Bleistein first, and later added the other five stanzas and the epigram [# check! unfortunately I've lost the source for this, which substantially weakens my point. I'd be forever grateful to anyone who knows where I may have read this!] My guess is that he wrote Bleistein after he first came across Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses and recognised what Joyce was doing with that character, remembering the section in Portrait of the Artist in which Stephan discusses the principles of esthetic perception with Lynch. Eliot was a staunch supporter of this work, the best and most compact evidence of which we can find in his letter to John Quinn of 9 July 1919, in which he not only proposes that The Egoist should publish Ulysses, which it subsequently did and for which Eliot even proof read parts, such as Nestor for the January-February 1919 issue, but also praises John Quinn's defense of the work, expresses his frustration with not being able to "impose Joyce on such 'intellectual' people, or people whose opinion carries weight as I know, in London." Finally, on the section from Ulysses for which the May issue of The Egoist was banned, "Scylla and Charybdis", he remarks that "the part ... struck me as almost the finest I have read: I have lived on it ever since I read it." We can see Eliot 's support of Joyce's work throughout his Letters, where he recommends the work to virtually everyone and calls Joyce "the greatest living prose writer" (to Scofield Thayer, 30 June 1918). Influences of Joyce have been pointed at elsewhere in "Gerontion" also, and certainly a general similarity in, particularly allusionary, style between Joyce and Eliot, can be noted.

So, going back to Bleistein, Eliot seems to have made a link between Bleistein and the 'poet' character in Browning's poem "How it Strikes a Contemporary" - reasons for which in particular seem to be the role of prejudice of all kinds that Browning presents, including some which remind of Lopez-inspired mistrust which could have been from Shakespeare's days:

...such a brow
His eyes had to live under!-clear as flint
On either side the formidable nose
Curved, cut, and coloured, like an eagle's claw.
Had he to do with A.'s surprising fate?
When altogether old B. disappeared
And young C. got his mistress,-was't our friend,
His letter to the King, that did it all?

The mistrust and suspected extravagance of this poet which the narrator presents to us as well as the physical description may remind us of a Jew. Although it is at least as likely Browning was thinking of Carlyle and his 'Portraits', among which Tennyson who is described to have an 'aquiline nose' and whom as the poet laureate was in a position to converse with the King, the context in which Eliot uses the reference determines the interpretation, just as many of Eliot's allusions are in part (re)interpretations of the works cited in their new context. The contrast between rumour and what the narrator himself observes in Browning's poem suit Joyce's depiction of his Bloom character, and through these two the link to Shakespeare is inevitable. Particularly Ulysses springs to mind again, when Stephen implies that Shakespeare identified with Shylock, to whom Eliot alludes in the third "Bleistein" stanza, and suggests that Shakespeare resembled Shylock closely in spirit and business attitude; additionally, Stephen supports his argument by stating that Shakespeare was "made in Germany ... as the champion French polisher of Italian scandals" almost certainly seems to have inspired the line in "Gerontion" ("Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, / Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London."), and presumably the line "Chicago Semite Viennese" stems from a similar wide-spread international conception of the Jew, which Eliot uses to attack the scandal around the publication of Ulysses, both in America and in England (It is with some irony that the current scandal over Eliot's alleged anti-Semitism can be viewed, in this respect.)

Having worked these three stanzas out in detail and keeping them in his scrapbook, presumably Eliot came to the idea of integrating it into a larger poem that included a comment on American "tourism" in Europe. This idea Eliot must have got from studying such eminent American tourists such as Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Wyndham, about whom he wrote several articles and reviews during 1918 and 1919, and with whom he himself must have identified, being himself in the same position - an American tourist in Europe. Eliot couples this investigation of what these people learned in Europe with observations from other, mostly English, writers who had a similar relationship to Venice as the Americans do with Europe, with Venice (together with Rome) as its supreme esthetic symbol, and with Burbank as the prototype of the American tourist, who imagines himself an Antony in Egypt, like George Wyndham, who is awakened from his Romantic musings by a Jew, like Henry James in The Italian Hours, and who is inspired by Venice to start asking questions, like Adams in Rome. Finally, there is perhaps Eliot himself, who goes a step further than Adams - who says that he, like everyone before him, can do little more than ask "why, why, why!" Rome, or in this case Venice, has fallen, and recalls John Ruskin who in The Stones of Venice gave specific reasons for why and specified when Venice had fallen. Ruskin, wielding his seven laws of architecture, holds the lot of Venice upwards to his English audience and tells them to pay heed, and Eliot does the same for his American audience in Chicago. London at this time has presumably already fallen for Eliot (viz. The Waste Land, where London closes the rank of fallen towers, after Vienna, which figures also in "Burbank", through "Istria" and "Viennese", as well as indirect references to Vienna, through Hamlet and perhaps even Freud's Interpretation of Dreams).

When Eliot changes the title from "Bleistein with a Cigar" to "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," he therefore presumably slightly shifts the focus of the poem to the American part, and hence his American audience. Like in so many of his poems at this time, the Eliot we see in Burbank remains both a liberal and a conservative, fighting on the one hand the lingering Victorian decadence of his age, expressed in his support of Joyce and condemnation of his condemnors, and on the other hand the deprecation of tradition, of the classics and the old values, the author of the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." There is no real contradiction - as the latter essay says, an artist needs to be aware of his predecessors to be able to see what he must add.