T.S. Eliot’s anti-Polishness: British literary responses to Central European geopolitics in the interwar era

Hidden within the nascent and rough-hewn pages of the drafted version of T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, is a snippet of the Slavic, ultimately scratched out before the poem reached publication: ‘who are those hooded hordes swarming / over Polish plains’. Eliot altered this to ‘endless plains’ in the final version, but the lost reference to Poland is a telling omission, which offers an insight into the poet’s perception of the newly-independent nation, and wider geopolitics in Central Europe, during the period immediately after the First World War. Eliot was writing at a time when – as a result of the work of historians like R.W. Seton-Watson – ideas of the region were changing in Britain, from ignorance to British involvement, and then disillusionment.

This talk explores Eliot’s poem alongside his wider writing – and other British works about the region – to consider how Central European geopolitics had an oft-overlooked yet significant impact on British literature, involving questions of western stereotypes, political engagement, and geopolitical transformation