Reading Ash-Wednesday today is a relatively simple matter. We understand its place in Eliot's corpus and in his biography. We at least have Four Quartets as the terminus ad quem towards which we can now see the earlier poem pointing (cf. Gardner, T. S. Eliot 78). But in 1930 Ash-Wednesday was a difficult and curious performance for a poet celebrated as the supreme ironist of his generation (Howard, ‘Mr Eliot's Poetry’ 146), a poet able to raise the most fashionable neuroses to the level of lyric song, and one noted also for his curious learning and the snooty inability to resist showing it off (Lucas, review of The Waste Land 116). He was celebrated enough to provoke nasty parodies that could lead a publisher, like Ernest Benn for example, to invest the money in producing a book he thought he could sell to an appropriately amused and knowing audience. Herbert Palmer's parody of Eliot in 1931 called Cinder Thursday reminds us that one way of gauging a celebrity's standing ‘in the world’ is to measure the amount of capital that is invested (always, of course, with a view to being able to turn a profit) in the enterprise of derision:

THE SAHARA

(With apologies to T. S. Eliot)