Tzara in The Waste Land

Abstract

Why no mention of Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, in discussion of Eliot’s early years in England? Eliot’s eyes were frequently trained on the battlefields of war and art across the Channel when in 1916, Tzara’s nihilistic brainchild came into being, flourished briefly after the war (deranging Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and other centres of culture), and, in 1923, after one post-climactic gasp, paled and died.¹ Since Dada uncontestably lived the wildest life that any art movement ever lived, its contemporaneity with Eliot’s early aesthetic might have provoked our speculation. Was Eliot uninterested? Would Tzara’s startling theories not have an impact on Eliot during his own stormiest years? Fundamental as these questions are, they have been neglected probably because of no more than a printer’s error. It seems well to correct the error so that the questions at least, and at last, may be posed.