Date Published:
2 June, 2014
Abstract:
The essay takes a fresh look at Eliot's "water-dripping song" in The Waste Land. It seems impossible for the ornithologically minded Eliot not to have known that the hermit thrush's song does not sound like dripping water. In fact,nowhere in ornithological writing - and certainly not in his source, Chapman's Handbook of North American Birds - is it described in these terms. Emphasizing the humorous potential of Eliot's display of "bogus scholarship," the essay argues that Eliot's ludic bird masks not only the darker presence of its poetic predecessor in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" but also the poet's own longing for the fluid pleasures of his lost North American childhood.
June 2014: Christoph Irmscher is Provost Professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. His books include The Poetics of Natural History, Longfellow Redux, and Public Poet, Private Man as well as the co-edited collection A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (with Alan Braddock, College of William and Mary). For the Library of America, he has edited John James Audubon's Writings and Drawings. His most recent book, the biography Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was selected as “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times Book Review. Christoph Irmscher’s fields of expertise include 19th and 20th century American and Canadian literature, with a special focus on nature and science writing, history of the book, and poetry. He was featured in two documentaries about John James Audubon, the award-winning American Masters program Drawn from Nature and, more recently, A Summer of Birds, produced by Louisiana Public Television. His online exhibit on H. W Longfellow won a Leab Award from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. He can be reached through his homepage at www.christophirmscher.com. |
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Publisher's Version
