A Poem a Day

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You may be interested in this brief essay on this poem, which I wrote for the newsletter of the TS Eliot Society (UK):

“The Triumph of Bullshit” is the title of one of the early poems by Eliot, referred to as “scabrous exuberances” by Christopher Ricks, no stranger himself to the word bullshit.

The poem was written or transcribed in around 1910, when Eliot was still unpublished (apart from work in in the Smith Record and the Harvard Advocate).

But there exists no record of the term in literature prior to Eliot’s use of it in his poem’s title. So we must assume that he assimilated it, along with other “demotic” phrases, which he must have heard rather than read, and which he used in his later poetry.

The Oxford English Dictionary is uncertain about the origin of bullshit; and, indeed, the similar use of the abbreviated and earlier term, bull. “No foundation appears,” it records, “for the guess that the word originated in ‘a contemptuous allusion to papal edicts’

“Nor,” it continues, “for the assertion of the ‘British Apollo’ (No. 22. 1708) that ‘it became a Proverb from the repeated Blunders of one Obadiah Bull, a Lawyer of London, who liv'd in the Reign of K. Henry the Seventh’.”
On February 2, 1915, Wyndham Lewis refers to the poem in a letter to Ezra Pound. "Eliot has sent me Bullshit & the Ballad for Big Louise." (He is referring to "The Triumph of Bullshit" and "Ballade pour la grosse Lulu.”) "They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry,” he writes.“ ... I am longing to print them in Blast”.
This was the short-lived Vorticist magazine, largely written by Lewis himself. Issue 1 contained the Vorticist Manifesto; with statements such as “We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours”, it might have seemed an appropriate home for Bullshit.
But Lewis wrote that he would “stick to my naif determination to have no 'Words Ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger.'”
None of these do actually occur in the poem; nevertheless, the second and final issue of Blast, published on 20th July 1915, included instead Eliot’s poems Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night – perhaps, it could be argued, a better indication of his future work.
We tend to think of bullshit as American. And of course, Eliot had not yet succumbed to the civilising influences of our shores. (In the same poem, he encourages his critics to “stick it up your ass”, which, in both senses, is fundamentally American.)
Yet it has been suggested that the term itself gained wider usage, during the subsequent Great War, thanks to Antipodean soldiers, when the British emphasis on spit and polish, or “bull”, was mocked, by adding the suffix “shit”.
It was, however, another American who subsequently explored and defined the word, one William G Perry; like Eliot, an alumni of Harvard, where perhaps bullshit is persistent.
Perry defined the verb “to bullshit” as: “To discourse upon the contexts, frames of reference and points of observation which would determine the origin, nature, and meaning of data, if one had any”.
Bullshit is not a word one would immediately ascribe to our “punctilious” poet. We still tend to think of Eliot as Virginia Woolf described him – “in his four-piece suit”. Yet surely there is something humanising about acknowledging his use of such language? Along with the pleasure of knowing that we are quoting TS Eliot, the next time we dismiss something as bullshit.

Anyone who is now encouraged to discover more about TS Eliot and his works is invited to visit our website at The TS Eliot Society UK, where there is a wealth of links and resources for enthusiasts and scholars.

Typing as cadence--interesting. One had thought most people nowadays used television or automobiles, in which areas by the way, North Korea is far ahead--that is, far behind--of South Korea. Computer keyboard or something along the lines of an old Olympia Portable?

Scabrous fun!

Love to hear this read by Groucho Marx!