Nancy D. Hargrove
Mississippi State University

Geoffrey Whitworth, a British dance critic, begins his little book on Nijinsky, published in
1913, by quoting a passage from the 1910 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which
bemoans the current stagnant state of the dance: "'It seems unlikely that we shall see any
revival of the best period and style of dancing until a higher standard of grace and manners
becomes fashionable in society.'" Whitworth then points out that this prophet has proved to
be "most happily at fault" in his gloomy forecast, for dance was experiencing tremendous
changes, advances, and innovations even as the passage was being written, so much so that
"[d]uring the last few years a mighty revolution has had to be worked in our ideas concerning
the whole art of the dance . . . ; [we have been] forced to develop a completely fresh set of
aesthetic standards so as to keep pace with the development of a tradition which for us,
previously, had been little more than a dead and obsolete form." ¹ These contemporary
comments communicate something of the excitement aroused by the new developments in the
world of dance in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, an "incredibly lively time for
the dance, which had never before generated so many new ideas or attracted so many
people." ² Most of the excitement emanated from two sources: Isadora Duncan and Sergei
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Both gave performances during T.S. Eliot's 1910-11 year in Paris,
so that, although no hard evidence exists, he certainly heard about them and almost certainly
saw them. He could hardly have escaped an awareness of the daring experiments not only with
dance movements themselves but also with the accompanying music, sets, literature, costumes,
and plots and, perhaps most of all, with the integration of the arts and the collaboration of
various types of artists in their productions. Further, he had two opportunities to see Duncan
during his early years in London, and he did attend performances of the Ballets Russes, as
revealed in various sources. He also commented in several essays written in the 1920s both

Nancy D. Hargrove, "T.S. Eliot and the Dance", Journal of Modern Literature, XXI, 1 (Fall 1997 ), pp. 61-88.
© Foundation for Modern Literature, 1997.

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