Feeling the Elephant:

T.S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic

Loretta Johnson
Lewis & Clark College

This essay assembles the “Bolovian Epic” from the Columbo and Bolo verses and non-
sense letters that T.S. Eliot wrote over a period of eighteen years (1910–1928). Such an
aggregation is made possible by the publication of excised poems from the “Waste Land”
Notebook and Volumes I–IV of The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Rather than seeing indi-
vidual parts of the epic as simply obscene, I interpret the whole project and its contexts
as grounded in his appreciation for the primitive and a critical disdain for the so-called
civilized. Eliot invents a composite race of people, the Bolovians, whose influence on
modern times includes racy behavior, religious affinities, and bowler hats. Understand-
ing this bawdy, blue, or nonsense material contributes to an increasing revision of
previous scholarship defaming Eliot’s moral and cultural values.

Keywords: T.S. Eliot / Columbo and Bolo poems / bawdy verse / modernism

Moral
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
— John Godfrey Saxe,
“The Blind Men and
the Elephant”

T
.S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic is something more and something less than non-
sense between friends. Rejecting Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Sterne as
nonsense writers because their work is satiric and symbolic, G.K. Chester-
ton, whose “first-rate journalistic balladry” Eliot admired (“obituary”), calls Lewis
Carroll’s nonsense an escape into a world “populated by insane mathematicians
. . . a world of masquerade” (Chesterton). In short, “we feel that if we could pierce
110 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare
were Professors and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday” (qtd. in Ker
61, 5). Enter Eliot’s Prof. Krapp et alibi. Elizabeth Sewell, writing in 1959 — well
before the Bolovian material had surfaced — saw “Old Possum” among Mal-
larmé and Carroll as one of the “three great Nonsense practitioners” (66). More
recently, the editors have added the category of “nonsense letters” to the Index
of Volume III of the Letters of T.S. Eliot. Nonsense or not, Eliot’s Bolovian body
of work compels further inquiry into the high-low cultural split in Eliot’s oeuvre
that recent scholarship has commenced.1 While readers should form their own
opinions about these verses, they should start with the texts and their contexts.
This essay attempts to draw the “whole elephant” and to sketch the evolution of
what eventually became “The Bolovian Epic.”

THE TRUNK
The Bolovian verses carry much critical baggage. To Conrad Aiken, they are
“hilariously naughty parerga” or “admirable stanzas” (March 22). Ezra Pound
calls them “chançons ithyphallique” (IMH xvi). Bonamy Dobrèe claims, “They are
part of an elaborated joke, nurtured through years. It is about some primitive
people called the Bolovians, who wore bowler hats, and had square wheels to
their chariots” (Tate 73). Subsequent descriptions are equally diverse, ranging
from “pornographic doggerel” (Thorpe) to “scabrous exuberances” (Ricks xvi).
One critic says they have “a surprising racial, even racist, focus” (Cooper 66).
Another claims “these poems comically and obscenely portray the history of early
European expansion as an orgy of uncontrollable desire and deviant sexuality”
(McIntire 283). Depending on where one touches down, the description will be
different, not only because of the reader’s feelings, but also because Eliot’s Bolo
verses evolved as he evolved and the recipients of his verses changed. Charles
Lamb once wrote, “Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have
her nonsense respected” (374). In his lifetime, Eliot exercised this privilege in
turn with his friends Conrad Aiken, Ezra Pound, Bonamy Dobrèe, and others.
The Bolovian verses, nevertheless, are offensive to many. Eliot’s “Triumph
of Bullshit” was one of the poems that Lewis had rejected for publication. Lois
Cuddy opines that “Eliot’s pornographic verses in an ‘epic’ about ‘King Bolo and
His Great Black Kween’ indicate the extent and depth of his racial/sexual stereo-
types and eugenic prejudices.” They are written from his own “sense of emptiness,”
“puritanical principles,” and “sexual repressions.” Furthermore, these “poetic vul-
garities,” display “Eliot’s acceptance of sexual stereotypes related to black men and
women (229). Yet a look at the contexts of these poems, both as “nonsense” for
friends and as reflections on the complexities of culture, reveals an earnest belief
in the value of the “primitive mind” and even a reversal of “sexual stereotypes
related to black men and women.” The man with the prodigious bolo is not King
Bolo but Columbo. And Queen Isabella is no less a whore than his Big Black
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 111

Queen (hereafter BBQ ). As a consequence, “Eliot is today being refashioned as a

prescient and extraordinarily sensitive mediator of the major currents of twentieth
century cultural and technological change” (Murphet 31).
In brief, “The Columbiad,” as Eliot also calls it, begins in Spain, where
Columbo dines in with the King and Queen. Queen Isabella “pricks” Columbo’s
navel; in response, he defecates on the table. Columbo takes the Queen with him
on his voyage, buggers his mates, and finds, in what is now Cuba, King Bolo and
BBQ. The setting shifts to the Philippines and then to London, first to the suburb
of Golders Green, and then to Russell Square, where Eliot launches the Bolovian
Club luncheons. An important upshot of all the whoring is a bastard son named
Boloumbo, who presumably begins the European line of ancestry. The rest of the
“epic” documents Prof. Krapp’s (et al.) and Eliot’s research on the ancient history
of the Bolovians, who originate somewhere in South America. Not only the loca-
tions, but also the tables have been turned. The “scholarship” reveals that Bolovian
behavior and characteristics are the sources of many modern Western traditions,
including the wearing of bowler hats. Bolovians practiced Wuxianity, a religion
with two gods (or more, depending on the interpretation), anticipating the divine/
human controversy in Christology. Their language, in which Eliot has learned to
sing the Bolovian anthem, predates the Indo-European pronunciations of “W,” a
combination of the “Greek Ksi” and the “German schsh” (Letters III 730).
Eliot’s verses borrow from many versions of Christopher Columbus and his
adventures. “Columbo” is a common misspelling for “Colombo,” which is Italian
and Portuguese for “Columbus.” Many children know, “In fourteen hundred and
ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” but others may know some of the
sailors’ ditties or military songs, one of which has the following chorus:
Christopher Columbo,
He knew the world was Round O!
That masturbating, fornicating
Son of a bitch Columbo! (Cray 310)

Eliot’s “Fragments” is a rendition of “The Jolly Tinker” and borrows from this
chorus:
With his jolly great kidney-wiper
And his balls the size of three,
And a yard of dirty foreskin
Hanging down below his knee. (Cray 30)

Columbo merges with the jolly tinker in Eliot’s:

There was a jolly tinker came across the sea
With his four and twenty inches hanging to his knee
Chorus: With his long-pronged hongpronged
Underhanded baby fetcher
Hanging to his knee. (IMH 314)
112 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

Eliot borrows generously from common bawdy songs and joins a long list of
classical writers who indulge in sexual, obscene, erotic, bawdy, scatological, and
otherwise blue verse.
Perhaps in reverence of their famous American editor’s predilection for the
bawdy, Faber & Faber published The Faber Book of Blue Verse (1997), which was
reissued as Making Love to Marilyn Monroe (2006). As explanation of “blue verse,”
the blurb on the inside book jacket of the 1997 edition explains, “Candidly sexual
verse has always thrived in world literature, though it is as rarely written about as it
is avidly practised and read.” Apparently Faber editor Craig Raine was behind this
publication that one reviewer calls an “indigestible fudge of the familiar, the feeble
and the indiscriminately filthy” (Wheen 262). The book description of the 2006
edition states, “Dealing with the bawdy, this book offers emotional, intellectual,
confessional, and satirical tributes to that perennially fascinating subject — sex”
(Whitworth). Both editions contain Eliot’s “Columbiad: Two Stanzos,” “There
Was a Young Girl of Siberia,” and “ ’Twas Christmas on the Spanish Main,” and
include verse by such eminent authors as Geoffrey Chaucer, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, and Anon. As to the timeliness of the second edition, the book’s epigram
quotes Martial’s “You often say my work is coarse. It’s true; / But then it must
be so — it deals with you” (v). Why it is called blue, however, is not so clear. In
nineteenth century American usage, “the roughest characters . . . make the air
blue with their oaths and obscene language” or “disorderly boys . . . were making
the air blue with profane and obscene language” (“blue”). Blue shirts and blue
bloods, Eliot’s Bolo asserts, wear about the same.
That Eliot — who admired Sappho, extolled Elizabethan bawdiness, and
inserted music hall and vaudeville pranks in his serious work¾wrote blue verse is
not so unusual. His is a kind of bawdy-naughty verse that is common enough male
behavior from well before the Priapus poems of ancient Rome to well after.2 That
women are less likely to be found writing the stuff of female bonding is also not
so unusual, and as such is historical. But as Djuna Barnes’s editor, Eliot cham-
pioned Dame Evangeline Musset, “demagogic and phallogocentric lesbian” in
Ladies Almanack (1928) and helped Barnes jump censorship hurdles in the erotics
of Nightwood (Bombaci 71). But her satiric blue verse in “The Book of Repulsive
Women” (1915) has none of the hilarity of Eliot’s bawdy verse written during
the same time, and unlike Eliot, Barnes regretted writing it at all (Hardie 120).
“But are they worth reading? Does a little ‘bolo’ go a long way?” a New York
Times reporter asked Anthony Julius, the litigation lawyer specializing in defa-
mation and anti-Semitism. His doctoral dissertation, charging Eliot with anti-
Semitism, resulted in the notorious publication of T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and
Literary Form. ‘‘They are not worth reading,’’ Mr. Julius said. ‘‘They tap, in the
most puerile way imaginable, racist fantasies of the sexual superiority of blacks’’
(Lyall). Here is an example of feeling the elephant without contact, because if he
had read the verse, he would see that Columbo is the sexual superior. “And he
refuses to acquit Eliot of anti-Semitism in this case merely because the poet has
managed to be superior to the bigotry his poem evokes” (Menand).
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 113

In spite of or because of Eliot’s detractors, numerous scholars have begun

reevaluating Eliot’s reputation as an elitist, racist, anti-Semite, sexist, misogynist,
etc. Such studies also attest to what Jason Harding describes as Eliot’s lifelong
interest in censorship and an earnest “commitment to obscene verse” (86). When
the excised pages from the “Waste Land” Notebook (hereafter “the Notebook”)
were published in Inventions of the March Hare, the feared negative reaction never
really materialized. The initial responses amounted to “laconic labeling” and
“tepid apologetics” ( Johnson 14). Since then, many of the diatribes against Eliot’s
socio-political conservatism and bigotry seem outdated and narrow. Hence, the
call in this essay to “feel the whole elephant.”
Although single bawdy verses are rife, especially among men and sailors, few
develop into epic proportions. The Bolovian Epic rivals Eliot’s other long poems in
length, and it promotes not only a mock epic hero in Columbo, whose genitals are
larger than life, but also chronicles those epic voyages that result in the founding
of a new race, not with the seeds of Trojans, but with Columbo and his men. The
following summary of events presents the unfolding of the epic in chronological
order, from the “Columbo and Bolo verses” excised from the Notebook (dated no
earlier than 1910) to the mock scholarship in letters to Bonamy Dobrèe (as late as
1928). They tell the tale of Columbo’s voyages to and from America, with a few
new details. Indeed, these limericks and lewd stanzas may be more epochal than
epical. In mock seriousness, Eliot frames the seventeen Notebook stanzas (mostly
octavos) as Elizabethan drama. They begin, “Let a tucket be sounded on the
hautboys. Enter the king and queen.” Then commence the obscenities. In Spain,
Columbo is treated for syphilis by a “bastard jew named Benny” when he “filled
Columbo’s prick / with Muriatic Acid” (IMH 315, 149). Later Columbo seeks
help from the ship’s physician concerning another symptom of syphilis. “ ‘ It’s this
way, doc’ he said said he / I just cant stop a-pissin [sic]” (Letters I 231). Columbo
and his mariners of song are well-known for their whoring. “One Sunday evening
after tea / They went to storm a whore house,” and from a “seventh story window,”
“bitched” Columbo with a “pisspot” (IMH 315). Ed Madden says that Columbo
and sailors may have had pumps of argyrol and muriatic acid [dilute hydrochloric
acid] “rammed up their penises” to treat their syphilis (151).
When they set sail for America, “Queen Isabella was aboard / That famous
Spanish whore.” With only Queen Isabella aboard and a boy named Orlandino,
the horny crew have to make do until they reach land (IMH 315). In Cuba, they
encounter King Bolo and his thirty-three “swarthy” bodyguards. They “were
called the Jersey Lilies / a wild and hardy set of blacks” and like Columbo, are
“undaunted by syphilis” (IMH 316). Madden calls them “the phallically well-
endowed bodyguards of King Bolo,” but “swarthy,” “wild,” and “hardy” does
not mean “well-endowed.” Columbo is. There are many reversals in these verses:
Columbo is equipped with his prodigious bolo, and neither the New World nor
the Old World gave the other syphilis. They both had it.
Eliot’s version of the famous voyage of “fourteen hundred and ninety two”
reverses other traditional accounts. Although all Bolovians are black, New World
114 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

natives are not. According to Christopher Columbus, however unreliable, “their

eyes are very beautiful and not small . . . and themselves far from black” (39).
In another encounter, Columbus observes, “Both men and women are of good
stature, and not black. . . . So honest are they . . . without any covetnouss for the
goods of others, and so above all was that virtuous king” (131). One of the kings
was named “Bohio” (131–136). Eliot’s Bolovians, on the contrary, are fat, black,
and promiscuous. Bolovians are black because they are natives and primitive, and
described with such essentialist terms as are associated with Africans. C. Southam
guesses, perhaps inadequately, that:
Bolo is King Shamba Bolongongo (known today as Shyaam aMbul aNgoong, died
c.1628), ruler of the Kuba tribes, legendary for the number of widows and children
he left. Eliot could have come across his name in “Notes ethnographiques (1911) by
the Hungarian ethnographer and explorer Emil Torday; and he could have seen a
wooden figure of Bolongongo . . . [at] the British Museum.” (103)

But the Bolovians’ white counterparts, who are “civilized,” act the same, if not
more obscenely. Bolovians are presented as less degenerate than Columbo and
his crew, including Queen Isabella. As such, Eliot foregrounds the degeneracy of
hereditary aristocracies.
Despite Eliot’s early reputation for being a stiff or resembling “The Under-
taker,” this man in a four-piece suit was always partially in costume. “But we know
that Eliot was also a great lover of popular culture, and his imagination drew as
much from forms of ‘low’ culture . . . as from conventionally ‘high’ forms . . .”
(Cuda 6). The Columbo and Bolo verses exploit “low brow culture” that he fre-
quently encountered at the Old Music Hall in Oxford and in American vaudeville
on Broadway and other venues, in which all members of a family play in the act.
Eliot admired George M. Cohan, particularly in “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” who
always ended his act: “Ladies and gentlemen, my mother thanks you, my father
thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I assure you, I thank you” (Kenrick 122).
“The Aristocrats,” of which there are many variations, is about a vaudeville family
who try out their transgressive act on a theater agent. The agent then witnesses
unspeakable incestual, sexual, scatological, and taboo stunts. Stunned, the agent
finally finds his words, and asks, “What are you called?” The father answers, “The
Aristocrats” (Danielle 401). Such is the inscrutability of the aristocracy. A reversal
of this modern version is “The Coloured Aristocrats,” a musical act popular in the
1900’s. “As the title implies, the company are a troupe of coloured artistes, but
they deserve to rank quite above the average” (“Comments”).
He himself a member of the white American hereditary aristocracy, Eliot
grew up with the family motto. “per saxa per ignes fortiter et recte [by rocks, by
fires, boldly and rightly]” and the family crest “an elephant’s head, couped argent,
collared gu,” as researched by Walter Graeme Eliot in 1887 (W. Eliot 8). Eliot,
who has been called “a scion of New England intellectual aristocracy” (Harding
2), believes, apparently, in an intellectual aristocracy, not one by inheritance. In
1944, Eliot wrote to the editor of the London Times his views on aristocracy:
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 115

We are to have an aristocracy, not of families, but of individuals; and those indi-
viduals will have been turned into aristocrats, not by their parents, but by their
schoolmasters, employing some system of selection to be elaborated . . . for govern-
ment by the best men is surely the aspiration of every society, whatever its social
organization. (Eliot “Aristocracy”)

Eliot’s elitism is of the learned. His quarrel is “less with the rise of the lower
classes than with the rise of the middle. . . . The tendency of our culture is not the
extremes of the aristocracy or the lower classes, but to the deadened equilibrium
typical of bourgeois society.” In fact, the Bolovian verses contradict Eliot’s alleged
“cultural elitism and traditionalist mandarinism” (Lehman 70). In fact, “Eliot
was in reality no friend of the sacralization of high culture that readers came to
associate with him . . . [he] was productively engaged with popular culture in some
form at every stage of his working life” (Chinitz, “Vast” 68).
Eliot’s aim is not to simplify the primitive mind. “It would be wise not to
simplify a complicated relationship,” William Harmon says, between “Eliot’s
attitude toward the primitive mentality” and Levy-Bruhl’s definition in Mental
Functions in Primitive Societies (1910), which pits the Western mind against
the primitive one. Eliot’s position “is somewhat complicated” (Harmon 801).
In fact, David Spurr explains that for Eliot, the primitive “is both a legitimate
object of representation and means by which to adumbrate his vision of an
ideal cultural order: permanent, organically unified, transcending history”
(278). Without the King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella episodes, the Bolovian
poems would be quite different. And as portrayed in the verses, Columbo is
the least virtuous of all; he makes King Bolo look good. Gabrielle McIntire
puts it this way: “Bolo is thus curiously distant, geographically and temporally
speaking, and present: he is simultaneously the imaginary native King of Cuba
from Columbus’s day, and a timeless caricature of sovereignty with infinitely
changeable historical locations” (16). Eliot explains himself in his 1923 essay,
“The Beating of a Drum.” Primitive man beat a drum and then found a reason
for it. Modern man has many reasons, but he has “lost the drum.” Later in The
Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism he states, “Poetry, I dare say, begins with a
savage beating a drum in the jungle” (95).
In a way, bolo is Eliot’s drum. He discovered the word “bolo” in his youth and
over time with continued usage, he found meanings for it. Eliot’s first encounter
with bolos and bolomen is probably in St.  Louis, but he also came across the
term in his fine arts course at Harvard with E.W. Forbes (1910). “Bolo” is “the
ground for gilding,” Eliot wrote in his class notes. “Bole” is a variety of reddish
clay, derived from the Greek for a lump of earth ( Johnson 21). The term “bolo”
for “knife” comes to the Philippines through Spanish occupation, as “bola” means
“ball” in Spanish. In this instance “bolas” short for “boleadoras” is “a weapon
consisting of two or more heavy balls secured by strong cords, hurled by the Indi-
ans and gauchos of southern South America” (“bolas”). “Bola” derives from the
Latin “bulla” or “knob,” from which the wax used in sealing envelopes becomes a
116 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

ball, and the meaning behind “Papal bull.” Whether “bolo” means a knife, tool,
penis, ball, or balls, it is easy to see how Eliot enjoyed the double entendres. Eliot
may have may have meant many things when he wrote “BULL” next to Hegel’s
comment on the “sincerity of the German people” (IMH 308).
But the salient meaning of “bolo” is that of a savage knife, a phallic weapon,
used in making war. “Bolo” was in common usage from the second half of the
nineteenth century to the time of Eliot’s writing, in terms of a machete-like
knife (“bolo, n1”). In newspaper coverage of the Spanish-American War, bolos
were in the headlines. For example, “Bolomen surprised an American outpost
near Guagua, killing two privates” (“bolomen”). Or the bolo is “a very beautiful
specimen of that curious weapon of war which has figured so often in the official
reports of the war in the Philippines” (“specimens”). Even President Theodore
Roosevelt received a bolo knife from the “bad Dattos” of the Moroe tribes.” This
“bad Datto” or chieftain confesses, “I have killed three people with this bolo,
but now I have no further use for it. I am under American rule and intend to be
peaceful” (“President Greatly Pleased” 5). With the taming of the Dattos, the
civilized Dattos may proceed.
To demonstrate that war weapons can be used for peace, the newspaper article
“The Brownie and the Bolo” (1904) defines the bolo as a marvelous all-purpose
tool:
Perhaps the most novel sight to be seen in America these midwinter days is that of
the native Filipino carpenters hard at work in building their city at the World’s Fair
at St. Louis. . . . The word carpenter suggests hatchet and saw, auger and plane. The
Filipino carpenter uses none of these tools. With only his bolo — which some per-
sons facetiously term a corn-knife — constructs complete houses, roofs, walls, floors,
partitions, and all. Railcar loads of bamboo trees and nipa leaves were delivered from
the Philippines. “Then brownie got out his bolo and set to work. . . .” (“Brownie”)

Midst this wonder of the Filipino “savage,” Eliot made some of his own conclusions.
Hence, his Cuban Bolos are equated with the Filipinos, Igorots, or Moroes
precisely because they are considered primitive. After Eliot visited the Philippine
Exhibit at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904, he wrote the short story, “The Man
Who Was King” (1905), about “a white man” who comes into contact with the
“primitive” society of the Matahiva (in French Polynesia). Although the natives
first make him king, because he appears at first to be civilized and superior to
them, they soon realize that his moral core is rotten. They subsequently depose the
man and put their own king back in power (Narita 273 in D’Haen). Something
of the virtue or lack of virtue in white colonials, kings, and queens emerges in the
early Bolovian verses, albeit the kings fare better than the others.
It is difficult to accept such statements as “Eliot’s verse expresses revulsion of
the carnal world” (Douglass 150) when one reads the Bolovian Epic. Sex is clearly
part of the fun and there is no revulsion in these verses, except perhaps in the
reader’s response to them. Columbo’s sexual preferences are indiscriminate and
definitely with consequences, but he enjoys sex, oftentimes violently, with both
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 117

Queens and many others. And there appears to be little difference in the behavior
of kings and queens. Columbo, however, tops them all.
Among the Cuban jungle
They found King Bolo & his queen
A-sitting on their bungholes.
She put the question to the lad
The first mate, cook, and bo’sun,
But when she saw Columbos balls
She jumped into the ocean. (IMH 317)

On his return voyage, Columbo sits on the toilet “areading in the psalter,” he grabs
the boson’s wife “and raped her on the bowsprit” (IMH 317). As to the “aestheti-
cism of rape,” it has been claimed, “Eliot in particular feared and was disgusted by
what he perceived to be the anarchy of increased democratization, and throughout
his work the image of the raped woman articulates these feelings” (Stockton 29).
In this case, perhaps the one feeling the elephant is touching the wrong animal.
Columbo’s lust, like colonial expansion, cannot be satisfied. Even Queen
Isabella, who merges in character with BBQ , and the boson’s wife, are not enough
quarry to mine for Columbo.
He took his cock in both his hands
And swore it was a beauty.
The cabin boy appeared on deck
And scampered up the mast-o
Columbo grasped him by the balls
And buggered him in the ass-o. (IMH 317)

Back in Spain Columbo quarrels with the Queen. “They terminated the affair/ By
fucking on the sofa.” Although his syphilis acts up again, Columbo is undaunted.
“He spun his balls around his head / And cried ‘Hooray for whores!’ . . . Exeunt
the king and queen severally” (IMH 319).
The Columbo and Bolo verses that follow those excised from the Notebook
are written to Aiken, while Eliot was studying in Marburg. Exeunt the Spanish
royalty; Enter the Germans. At this stage in the Bolovian process, Eliot intro-
duces Herr Professor, Prof. Dr. Krapp, et al., who have helped him in the editing
of his Columbo verses. “The bracketed portions we owe to the restorations of the
editor, Prof. Hasenpfeffer [Ger. for “stewed rabbit”]. “With the assistance of his
two inseparable friends, Dr. Hans Frigger (the celebrated poet) [slang for fucker]
and Herr Schnitzel (aus Wien) [phallic as in wiener].” Eliot adds, “There seems
to be a double entendre, about the last two lines, . . . yet we hope that such genius
as his may penetrate even this enigma” (Letters I 46–47). When Eliot reports to
Pound that Lewis has rejected his verse, he quips, “I understand that Priapism,
Narcissism etc. are not approved of, and even so innocent a rhyme as . . . pulled her
stockings off / With a frightful cry of ‘Hauptbahnhof!!’ is considered decadent”
(Letters I 94). “Hauptbahnhof ” means the main railroad station where the trains
118 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

come and go all day long, which reminds one of Freud’s symbol representing
sexual intercourse in a dream in which a man is in a “tunnel through which the
trains went in and out in various directions” (Freud 848).
Also in this German phase, the C’s in the Bolovian verse become K’s. “I am
keen about rhymes in -een,” Eliot writes to Aiken. As for King Bolo’s kween, “Her
taste was kalm and klassic.” He adds, the “Katholick Anthology” [The Catholic
Anthology 1914–1915], containing five of his poems, including “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock,” was not selling very well, and the idea of a “kwaterly” was
still up in the air (Letters I 137–138).
Whether Eliot really wanted to publish his Bolo verses or not is debatable.
Randi Salomon reads from Cuda and McIntire that “Eliot labored in vain to
publish these juvenile efforts for decades and evidently continued to work on them
for over fifty years (!), exchanging them regularly with friends and clearly feeling
an attachment to them that does not seem immediately justified on their own
merits” (409). Richard Schuchard says Wyndham Lewis “jokingly told Pound
that he wanted to print them” (87). Perhaps Eliot thought there was good chance
Lewis would see that his blast at the aristocracy would fit nicely into the new
little magazine, Blast. But Lewis betrays his conservatism in his now infamous
refusal to publish any “Words Ending in -Uck, -Unt, and -Ugger” (Pound 8).
It is ironic that, except for “buggered,” “fuck” and “cunt,” let alone other words
ending in those syllables, do not occur in the poems Eliot sent. Nonetheless,
Eliot’s humor differed from Lewis’s, for good reason. Lewis, whose own work
had been censored, accepted Pound’s poem, “Fratres Minores,” containing the
outlandish line: “with their minds hovering above their testicles” (qtd. in Aji 1).
Five years later, Eliot writes to James Joyce, “I wish Miss Beach would bring out
a limited edition of my epic ballad on the life of Christopher Columbus and his
friend King Bolo, but:
Bolo’s big black bastard queen
Was so obscene
She shocked the folk of Golder’s Green. (Letters I 562)

Southam points out that Golders Green train terminal was newly opened near
Hampstead in 1907. Like “Hauptbahnhof,” “Golder’s Green” connotes busy
trains and tunnels. In addition to the whorish traits of queens, a general theme
throughout the Bolovian Epic is the prodigious genitalia of Columbo and women’s
inability to resist him, either due to rape or desire.

THE ABDOMEN
What is going on in the Bolovian Epic? Saloman says, “If even T.S. Eliot is con-
cerned with love, history, and passion, then surely we have gone past the point
where modernism can be construed as highbrow or elite” (411–2). But “love, his-
tory, and passion” are hardly the subjects of these verses. They are sketches from
“the other side of the tracks.” One critic says Eliot’s “dirty verse” should not be
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 119

separated from Eliot’s “serious verse,” “as if Eliot were schizophrenic” (Stayer 321).
Indeed, the Bolovian Epic is part and parcel of Eliot’s oeuvre. Like many other
features of Eliot’s verse, the poems are inspired by historical, even classical, bawdy
verse and lyrics, including sailor songs, not to mention biography.
Eliot’s affinity for sailor songs and sailing began in childhood. His cousin,
Samuel Eliot Morison, who became a naval historian at Harvard, wrote Admiral
of the Ocean Sea (1942), a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones:
A Sailor’s Biography (1959). Morison recalls that as children Eliot and his brother
studied the sailing history of Cape Ann. “Eliot eventually came to believe that
his first American ancestor was in a shipwreck” (qtd. in Miller 42). In the head
note to “The Dry Salvages,” Eliot writes, “ — presumably les trois sauvages” pun-
ning on “salvages,” who or what survives a shipwreck, and “savages” (191). Later
in life, Morison was named Rear Admiral of the United States Naval Reserve, a
title in which Eliot took special delight. To wit, there is no reason to think that
“high-toned highbrows” or “elites” were exempt from profanity, which in fact is
probably one of the few commonalities across the classes.
Eliot’s royal Bolovians begin as the natives Columbus encounters in Cuba.
Later, they are Filipino natives, and by the time they are communicated to
Dobrèe, they are a primitive people living in the land of Bolovia and subject to
German anthropological scrutiny, with which Eliot pretends to contend. Never-
theless, there is also a concision of time and space. In one of Eliot’s letters to Aiken
(1916), BBQ , free with her favors, is cavorting in modern London:
K. B. b. b. k.
Was awf ’ly sweet and pure
She said, ‘I don’t know what you mean!’
When the chaplain [Charlie Chaplain] whistled to her. (I 138)

In a letter to Pound (1922), Eliot writes that BBQ “Would frisk it on the village
green, / Enjoying her fantastikon” (Letters I 736). Eliot puts a lewd spin on the
lines from a “The Sidewalks of New York”:
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie Rorke,
Tripped the light fantastic,
On the sidewalks of New York. (Finson 308)

Eliot has changed the “c” to “k,” and “Fantastikon” is Lithuanian for “fancy,” as
in what gives pleasure. It should also be noted that “Queen” in American songs
also means “sweetheart,” as in Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful dreamer, queen of my
song” (Finson 40).
An important innovation in Columbo’s contribution to history is the birth
of his bastard son Boloumbo.
They said ‘King Bolo’s big black queen
Will soon become a mother[’]
120 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

They said ‘an embryonic prince

Is hidden in her tumbo;
His prick is long his balls are strong
And his name is Boloumbo.’ (Letters II 209)

Eliot also invents the gendered “basstart.” “Basstart is the feminine form of
bassturd. Brock is a bassturd” (Letters II 209).
At this point in the Bolovian manuscripts, the location shifts to the Philip-
pines, the source for “bolo” and more sailor songs. “The Philippine Hombre,”
for example, was composed, according to the editors of The Navy Book of Song,
“when Navy, Army and Marine corps. were busy ‘pacifying’ the newly acquired
Philippines.” This song contains the stanza:
His padre was buen Filipino,
Who never mixed tubig with vino,
Said, “No insurrecto, no got gun nor bolo . . .” (The Navy 105)

The American occupation of the Philippines captured Eliot’s attention when

he was younger, as we have seen earlier. In 1922, Pound writes, “Your admirer
[John Peale] Bishop thinks of collecting Bawdy Ballads, of War and Peace” (qtd.
in Letters I 768n). Pound is teasing Eliot, because Bishop balked at publishing the
“Waste Land” for the high brow Vanity Fair. Eliot replies the next day reporting,
received a letter from your friend Watson most amiable in tone
For below a voice did answer, sweet in its youthful tone,
The sea-dog with difficulty descended, for he had a manly bone.
(From ‘The Fall of Admiral Barry’) (Letters I 736)

The sound of the Rear Admirals’s cabin boy gives him an erection or a manly
bone. “Manly bone” echoes the name of the tube station Marylebone, the route
that ends in Golders Green, where BBQ once frolicked, hence perhaps another
reference to penises (trains) entering vaginas (train stations or tunnels).
However, there is another allusion, which in this case refers to buggery and
pederasty. What Eliot called “the rape of the bishop” in a letter to Pound, refers
to John Peale Bishop’s failure to print “The Waste Land” in Vanity Fair. Pound
writes back Eliot urging him in jest to publish the bawdy verse, but Eliot replies,
no longer in terms of the Columbo’s exploits and buggery, but in reference to
American “colonists” in the Philippines:
‘In old Manila harbour, the Yankee wardogs lay,
‘The stars and stripes streamed overhead, & the band began to play;
‘The band struck up the strains of the old Salvation Rag,
And from the quarter mizzentop there flew REAR ADMIRAL BARRY’S flag.’
(Letters II 768)
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 121

According to the editors of the Letters, Rear Admiral Barry docked his flagship in
Manila Harbor in 1909. “He was forced to resign . . . following an alleged liaison
with a cabin boy” (Letters II 768n).
After this correspondence, Eliot’s letters to Pound no longer contain the Bolo
humor. He does refer to Pound’s support for Major Douglas, who theorized the
benefits of social credit, as the Messiah of Golders Green, but for the most part the
correspondence is all business. Working with Pound on his contributions to The
Criterion, Eliot urges him not to write anything that will sink the journal. Bolo is
absent, although he playfully signs a short letter in 1925, “Tar Baby” and addresses
Pound later as “caro lapino” [“dear rabbit,” as in Brer Rabbit] (Letters II 799, 808).
The next phase in the evolution of the Bolovian Epic begins with Eliot’s
correspondence with Bonamy Dobrèe, in which the primitive race of Bolovians
are in South America and under German scrutiny, as well as Eliot’s. Eliot writes
to Dobrèe:
Your confusion of the Crocodile and Camel recalls the behaviour of the primitive
inhabitants of Bolovia. A notoriously lazy race. They had two Gods, named respec-
tively Wux and Wux [a progenitor of the Greek “wanax,” meaning divine king?].
They observed that the carving of Idols out of ebony was hard work; therefore they
carved only one Idol. In the Forenoon, they worshipped it as Wux, from the front; in
the Afternoon, they worshiped it from Behind as Wux. (Hence the Black Bottom.)
Those who worshipped in front were called Modernist; those who worshipped from
behind were called Fundamentalists. (Letters II 509)

They are noted for wearing bowler hats and practicing economically a duotheistic
religion, using one idol for the two gods.
Eliot’s comic sketches include men wearing bowler hats, which Eliot had
begun to do himself. In a story by Vivien, the husband character wears a bowler
(Letters II 633n). In 1927 William Force Stead remembers Eliot “attired in a smart
suit, a bowler had, and grey spats” (Letters III 582). A New York Times headline in
1913 reads: “BOWLER HAT COMES BACK TO PICCADILLY.” According
to the article, “Of the first 100 men counted in Piccadilly yesterday, sixty-one
were wearing bowler, known as the derby” (“bowler”). What is more, despite its
“ugliness,” it not only is useful, “but the bowler after all was worn by the Greeks,
and they worshipped beauty and were the most artistic race in history. What was
beautiful enough for Athens ought to do for London” (“bowler”). What with
the discovery of the Bolovian race, Londoners’ cultural roots need not stop with
the Greeks. Furthermore, Bolivian art catalogers may want to consider that the
bowler hats worn by traditional peasant women of the Altiplono, upper Andean,
culture do not derive from “English men who visited Bolivia wearing the tradi-
tional English Bowler hat during the mid 19th century” (“traditional”). Rather,
as Eliot intimates, all cultures may derive from the Bolovians. In 1904, a St. Louis
Republic headline reads: “Shall the Igorrote don the clothing worn in civilized
countries?” (see Figure 1). Since the Bolovian Epic demonstrates the use of the
122 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

Figure 1: St. Louis Republic 3 July 1904: 1.

bowler hat in “uncivilized countries,” Eliot reverses the question. Bolovians are
“a race of comic Negroes wearing bowler Hats” who wore them because “their
Monarch wore a top hat” (Letters III 567).
He also explains that their ancient theology includes “monophysites, duophy-
sites, hecastophysites and heterophysites” (Letters III 568). Early Christians (c. 450
CE) were divided by the single nature (divine) or dual nature (divine and human)
of Jesus Christ (monophysitism). Bolovians, however, were even more divided.
Hecastophysites and heterophysites believed that their god had one hundred or
more different natures, respectively. Eliot translates his nonsense to Dobrèe:
“monophysites reject the dual nature of Christ), duophysites support the divine
and human nature of Jesus, the rest are made up)” (Letters III 567).
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 123

This third stage of the Bolovian epic focuses on the nature of the primitive
Bolovians. Eliot has discovered their national anthem, and later learns the tune.
He adds, though, that his hypothesis (“hupothe3/8is 3/4 3/4 3/4 -”), regarding
the religion has been thwarted by the discovery of a Bolovian idol. According to
“Prof. Breitenstrater” [German for “broad” + “straighter”?], it has four arms and
legs and duck feet, four testicles and two penisses, a speedometer, and other tools
for traveling. “Eliot goes on to say that the Professor does not take contradiction
lightly, so he is “preparing a complete new theory of Bolovian Theology based
upon this new discovery, but I still expect to shew a complete Orthodoxy.” Eliot
ends the letter with an invitation to lunch and a silly list of things he has to buy
(Letters III 595–6). The next day, Dobrèe writes back, “Oh my God! I spent yes-
terday evening among Berhard Bherensohnians! Oh Montreal! I take off my hat
to the Bolovians” (Letters III 597n).
The rest of the Bolovian research is constructed out of shards of clues that
determine that in such society “there is in effect No distinction between Cosmic
and Comic. . . .” and as Eliot explains the discovery begins with “Chris Columbo
[who] lived in Spain” (Letters III 613). Eliot writes to “Bungamy” that the research
continues and follows Dobrèe’s suggestion that much of modern society may con-
tain more of the Bolovian tradition than previously thought. After commenting
on Dobrèe’s “Zur Kipling-Forschungen” [research on Kipling] for the The Monthly
Criterion, Eliot turns to “Zur Bolovischen Ur-Kunde” [on the Origin of Bolo-
vian Customs]. He has sent to “Leipziger Akademie fuer Bolowissenschaftslehre” his
“ ‘Polemisches gegen Schnitzel’ ” [“Polemics against Schnitzel”] in which he connects
the game of Polo to the Bolovians, who use “llamas instead of ponies” (Letters
III 622). This research concludes, “it is certain the Bolovians knew the game of
water-polo, which they practised on occasion of public rejoicing (v. the Boloviad
Canto V, v. 352 ff.) and consequently a fortiori they must have known Polo”
(Letters III 622). The introduction of llamas at this point confuses the claim that
Bolovians are African. Eliot writes later, “It took Chris. Columbo 3 months to
reach Bolovia” suggesting that like all the geography in the Boloviad, the “where”
is debatable (Letters III 631).
In determining that the whole modern human race could be descended from
Bolovians, Eliot expresses his desire to “start a Bolovian Club . . . Morley is to
be President. . . . I think it will be only fair to warn him that as President he will
be expected to wear [a] Top Hat” (Letters III 680–681). Later Eliot writes that
“Morley is reformed and al- / Ways wears a Bowler or Melon.” Since Morley, a fel-
low director of Faber and Gwyer with Eliot, was otherwise considered the “Pope
of Russell Square,” he would have to doff his mitre for Bolovian Club meetings.
The idea of a Bolovian Club has reinvigorated Eliot to write more verse, and the
following demonstrates slight evolution from 1914 to 1927:
124 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 4

Now while Columbo and his men
  Were drinking ice cream soda
In burst King Bolo’s big black queen
  That famous old breech l(loader).
Just then they rang the bell for lunch
  And served up — Fried Hyenas;
  And Columbo said “Will you take
    tail?”
  Or just a bit of p(enis)?” (Letters I 46)
DEIPNOSOPHISTIC [of dinner table talk]
Now while Columbo and his Crew
  Were drinking (Scotch & Soda),
In burst King Bolo’s Big Black Queen
  (That Famous Old Breech-loader).
Just then the COOK produced the Lunch  — 
  A Dish of Fried Hyeneas;
And Columbo said: ‘Will you take Tail?
  Or just a bit of Penis?’ (Letters III 718)

The beverage is more sophisticated, and the diners now have a cook, but the
meal is the same. And once a breech-loader [a firearm in which the cartridge
or shell is inserted or loaded into a chamber integral to the rear portion of a
barrel], always a breech-loader. Eliot informs Dobrèe that it has been recently
discovered that BBQ was also called “CHOCOLATE CLEOPATRIA” due to
her “immortal longings” for her Antony who was Columbo (Letters III 720). He
reminds Dobrèe,
DON’T FORGET/ To sport your bowler among the heathen Tarbouches
That bowler is derived partly from Bolo. Why is it called (in Franc) ‘melon’. Because
Why was it called Bowler? For one reason, the Bolivian game of Bowls was played
in the ripe melon season. (Letters III 721)

THE TAIL
There are at least two references to Bolovia in the fourth volume of the Let-
ters, in which Eliot reports that “There is no relation between Wuxianity and
Islam.” But he waits to hear about the rumor that the “King of Aphganistan”
was refused an honorary degree because he wore a brown top hat.” Eliot com-
mends him for not wanting to be “associated with a local ‘hatter.’ ” Eliot includes
a drawing [not shown] of his “old friends” “Bolo Rex and Pansy Regina” [variable
pronunciations?] along with these verses:
‘Tis WUX that makes the world go round,
And sets the balls a-rolling;
WUX fills with ecstacy our soul,
Our soul in whole consoling.’ (Letters IV np)

But BBQ:
Was very seldom sober -
Between October and July
And then until October;
Ah Yes King Bolos Big Black Queen
Was call’d a Heavy Drinker:
T. S. Eliot’s Bolovian Epic 125

But still she always kept Afloat

And nobody could Sink her. (Letters IV np)

Thus end the published Bolo verses to date. But Eliot had his “Bolovian peri-
ods,” one of which produced children’s verse: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Although “ ‘Macavity: the Mystery Cat’ is no licentious sailor (though he does tear
up plans of ‘the Admiralty’), but like Columbo and Bolo, he ‘has broken every
human law’ ” (Hart 389).
There will, however, be more publications of the Bolo verses, at which point
this summary will only be a beginning. In 1941 Eliot wrote to Clive Bell “I may
even take in hand the long neglected task of putting in order the epical ballad on
the life of Chris Columbo (the famous Portuguese navigator) and his friends King
Bolo and his Big Black Queen” (Letters III 509n). Once Italian, now Portuguese,
even Christopher Columbus comes in different colors. In Eliot’s Bolovian Epic,
of course, there is much more to be discovered and explored. For the time being,
however, until more verses and commentary come to light, it helps to remember
that Eliot himself is the elephant, and his writing is characterized by the hands
one lays on him. As he explained to Dobrèe, “My family tradition is that we are
descended from the White Elephant; not the Siamese, but the Indian White
Elephant’ ” (Letters III 597). All this and more, no doubt, can be learned about
Eliot’s life and work. And this overview becomes just one more description by a
blind (wo)man.

Notes
1. Julian Murphet observes, “A certain revisionist trend has been visible in Eliot studies these last
ten years, patiently resituating the austere snob of legend within the broad cultural-material history
of his protracted moment of maturation. Scholars as various as David Chinitz, Juan A. Suárez,
Sebastian Knowles, David Trotter, Loretta Johnson, Barry Faulk, and Melita Schaum [who] have
contributed significant advances to our knowledge of Eliot’s engagement with a variety of popular
cultural forms and traditions, from music hall, jazz and department stores to gramophones and the
cinema” (31). In addition to works cited in this essay, see: Chinitz, “T.S. Eliot and the Cultural
Divide”; Faulk; Knowles; Suárez; Trotter; and Schaum.
2. For what goes on in the verse between medieval English writing men, see Clark. For a literary
history of the influence of Petronius’s bawdy on men of letters, especially Eliot, see Schmeling and
Rebman.

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