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An Unexpected Beginning: Sex, Race, and History in Eliot's Columbo and Bolo Poems

2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.2002.0031

1080-6601

Gabrielle McIntire,

Travel Writing and Literature

In the period from 1909—1922 when T.S. Eliot was writing and publishing poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," and The Waste Land—poems that firmly established his reputation as one of the major poets of the century—he was simultaneously composing a long cycle of intensely sexual, bawdy, pornotropic, and satirical verse that has only recently come to light. Centered on the seafaring adventures of a colonial explorer named "Columbo" (Eliot uses a pseudo-Italian version of Christopher Columbus's name) and his encounters with two native inhabitants of Cuba, "King Bolo and his Big Black Bassturd Kween," these poems comically and obscenely portray the history of early European expansion as an orgy of uncontrollable desire and deviant sexuality. Columbo's voyages and his first contacts with the King and Queen of Cuba take place by, through, and for sex, and they figure sodomy, masturbation, miscegenation, scatological rituals, and rape as the modus operandiof colonial expansion. Eliot continued to write this extensive cycle throughout his life, and portions of it he shared privately with a homosocially arranged coterie of male writers, including Conrad Aiken, Clive Bell, Bonamy Dobrée, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound.Taken as a corpus, the poems (untitled by Eliot) allegorize Eliot's concerns with his nascent reputation as a poet, his anxious desire for publicity, his exile from the United States, and his uneasy relation to issues of race, sex, and colonialism. They explode reigning myths about Eliot's asexuality, and they [End Page 283] demand radical rereadings of the place of sex, race, history, and desire in Eliot's poetic and critical oeuvre.