The Waste Land is full of different voices—as handsomely established by a long tradition of criticism, latterly crowned by the magnificent edition of Ricks and McCue (on which I draw extensively here). In the poem you can find Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Joyce—and, I am going to say, Blake. He is an incongruous participant in the chorus in various ways, not least in that while Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and even Joyce continued to sound in Eliot's work, Blake seems to have faded away as Eliot moved on; but for a short time in the early 1920s, I am suggesting, Blake played an important role in the drama of Eliot's imagination and, in particular, helped him toward the distinctive, metropolitan poetry of The Waste Land.

Blake is Eliot's greatest precursor in writing about London as a Spectacle of imprisoning hell, one of the main organizing ideas of the poem.

Of course, Blake was not the only precursor in thinking about London in an infernal and claustrophobic way. Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight” movingly lamented growing up “pent ‘mid cloisters dim,” when he should have grown up in the countryside;3 but he was only taking up an expressive line of disapproval you find in many later eighteenth-century poets, such as Cowper: is not the country air better than

In “Peter Bell the Third,” Shelley characteristically put things the other way round, turning the simile on its head: