Eliot’s Depersonalizing Techniques in the Quatrain Poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”

Abstract

This essay investigates Eliot’s depersonalizing techniques in “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” which is chronologically the first of Poems (1920). To strengthen the process of depersonalization further, Eliot introduces some new techniques and modifies the old. One major reason for this technical shift is, paradoxically, the increasingly personal nature of Eliot’s poetic subject during the period. As his subject matter became more personal, the need to transform it into something impersonal became more acute. With acutely personal and contemporary subject growing in his mind, Eliot finds a way further to depersonalize them in the quatrain poems, while keeping intact its constituent voices and points of view. He does this by borrowing Gautier’s form and technique, through an intricate tapestry of allusions and mythic suggestions. By setting mythical personages, i.e. mythical points of view and voices, against the contemporary points of view and voices, Eliot introduces more impersonalized reflectors and façade to the poem, a quest which started in the shorter satiric poems in Prufrock and continues throughout. The third person narration is another important way to depersonalize the personal experience, as Eliot used pronouns for a monitor of the distance between the self and the world from the beginning.