ABSTRACT
The Fire Sermon' foregrounds its writerly frustrations and pretensions. Towards the end of the first paragraph of 'The Fire Sermon' the poet begins to play around with Spenser's line, deflating it - but in so doing also deflating his own achievement. Audible in the opening lines of 'The Fire Sermon' are other kinds of 'chuckle', less akin to the death-rattle. In the drafts of 'The Fire Sermon', between the paragraph beginning 'Unreal City' about Mr Eugenides, and the paragraph containing Tiresias, there originally appeared a vatic apostrophe to London. It is a vulnerable example of the 'unreality' of The Waste Land's urban vision, and no doubt Eliot excised it partly because it strikes the oracular note with a risible solemnity which does not, like many of the prophetic passages remaining in the final text, reveal any consciousness of its vulnerability.
