A summary of one of Eliot’s quatrain poems – by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘The Hippopotamus’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s quatrain poems, written just after the First World War and published in his 1919 volume, Poems. By turns comical and serious, sincere and playful, high satirical and almost nonsense-like, ‘The Hippopotamus’ shows a very different T. S. Eliot from the one we glimpse in The Waste Land. It is even more interesting as a satire against the Church in light of Eliot’s later conversion to the Church of England, in 1927. You can read ‘The Hippopotamus’ here; below is our analysis.
The ‘quatrain’ poems which make up all but one of the English poems in Poems (the volume also contains a few poems written in French) were inspired by the French example of Théophile Gautier (1811-72), whose volume Émaux et Camées Eliot had been encouraged to read by Ezra Pound. The hard, sculptured feel to these quatrain poems was the result of Pound’s influence: this precise and controlled kind of poetic form was something which Pound thought Eliot could work with to good effect.