T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (TWL), lines 411-417
412 Eliot: Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46: ‘ed io sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto all'orribile torre.’ Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346. ‘My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.’ Dante, Inferno : “And I heard locking up the under door / Of the horrible tower.” See Appendix D. F. H. Bradley was Eliot’s professor at Oxford, and his book, Appearance and Reality (1893) was the basis of Eliot’s doctoral thesis in 1916. Bradley advanced the philosophy of solipsism, suggesting that only one’s mind exists with certainty and everything outside the mind is questionable. Eliot, and modernist literature in general, refuted this, arguing instead that the world, like thunder, speaks to us all; the concepts of “datta” and “dayadhvam” go even further, telling the poet to give back and sympathize with the world. See note 400. Dayadhvam means “Sympathize,” what the demons understood in hearing “Da.”
417 Eliot: Shakespeare, Coriolanus (1608) 3.3.125-126: “CORIOLANUS (after being banished from Rome): And here remain with your uncertainty. / Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!”
✭ See Eliot, The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism: Hamlet and His Problems (1920), in which Eliot presented his OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE theory of literature, arguing that a literary work needed explicit, relatable elements to express itself and evoke emotions in its audience. By this theory, Eliot proclaimed Coriolanus a better tragedy than the more solipsistic Hamlet. But see note 432 for Eliot’s awareness of emotions beyond explanation.
from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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