ABSTRACT
The relationship between the performer and the audience was especially close during the singing, for it was important for the audience to identify as well as to laugh at the performer, and by laughing to simultaneously critique and affirm the way of life that was being represented. Perhaps, the most salient fact about audience participation was the persistent display of sympathy for allusions to sexual impropriety and the satirical portrayal of public and private life in performance. Eliot's theory about working-class art seems, on the surface at least, in conflict with his theory of artistic production. On the one hand, he contextualized working-class culture; on the other, he desired a classless, timeless art that was to take its place in the "tradition." Comparing some of the sexual caricatures with poetry initially intended for publication provides an example of what Eliot meant when he characterized making art as a process of "refinement.".
