ABSTRACT
Eliot's seizure of the "jazz-banjorine" is, on its face, self-abnegating. The banjo, popular in stage entertainment and parlor music, lacked the cultural cachet of the lute; in fact, it had a reputation as a crude instrument with little expressive range. Yet when Eliot offers to play his jazz-banjorine, there is a deeper claim to power underlying his modesty. Eliot's self-portrait as a performer on the jazz-banjorine stakes his claim to authority and currency. For to have any truck with jazz at all around 1920 was not only to participate in a particular discourse but to take sides in an ideological battle over the significance and value of modernity. By asserting an alliance with jazz-by offering to play his jazz-banjorine at Mary Hutchinson's soiree-Eliot depicts himself as a similarly barbarous invader, confessing his atrocity but expecting, like jazz, to triumph. Eliot's patented cadences-his characteristic rhythms, and the tonal contours of his lines-were discovered in the sounds of popular music circa 1911.
