Title of “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”

linguistic analysis

The syntactic parallelism of the title is striking, and in that particularly the presence of a colon. The syntactic structures of the title's two constituents are exactly the same - NP / PP, of one and four words respectively. We can interpret this in a number of ways: the structure of the title may suggests some form of similarity, equivalence, contrast, balance, or any combination of these. From this follows that Burbank may be contrasted or compared with Bleistein, and a Baedeker may be contrasted or compared with a Cigar. The two objects are first a consituent of their respective phrases, and there they are used to define the two characters introduced in the title. This holds with the history of the title of this poem, which was first only Bleistein with a Cigar. (q.v.) What the second object means is less clear.

textual/poetic analysis

The name Bleistein is German, and means 'lead-stone'. The name Burbank sounds American and can, like Bleistein, be torn apart into two: bur and bank. A bur is a clinging seed-vessel or flower, and by analogy also a person who is hard to shake off; a bank is, apart from the place where Eliot worked, "a raised shelf of ground, slope, or elevation in sea or river bed." These two names imply a contrast - there is something recent and temporary in Burbank's name, something which implies youth and change, like a young seed in new earth, whereas Bleistein's name makes him sound hard and lasting, like a vein of lead in an old rock. The best known such contrast is perhaps in Blake's The Clod and the Pebble, and I suggest we are meant to think of a similar complementary contrast here: two views on life, one 'innocent/naive' the other 'experienced/cynical'.

Besides by their names, the two characters are identified by two props: Burbank by a Baedeker, Bleistein by a cigar. What can we make out of these two items and acts in terms of similarity and contrast? A Baedeker is a guidebook to popular holiday resorts, which seems to make Burbank a tourist. Smoking a cigar suggests an act of contemplation, which, if we combine it with Burbank reading a Baedeker, might be of the same object or place - Venice. A cigar also suggests a kind of luxury or wealth, although it is at this time not certain if this was believed to be so at that time - people of many different classes smoked cigars. A contrast in that respect cannot altogether be evoked either, because if Burbank can afford being a tourist in Venice in the early 1900s this generally implied a certain kind of wealth. Hence the contrast between independent contemplation, and the studying of Venice through a Baedeker seems to be the one implied by Eliot.

This fits in with the similarity we noticed earlier between the names Burbank and Bleistein, and Blake's Clod and Pebble - the contemplator is experienced, thinks. The tourist looks to his guidebook for information about what he sees before him, of which he knows little to nothing himself. Later in the poem we receive a number of suggestions that appear to confirm this hypothysis.

historical/biographical analysis

The poem was first published under the title Bleistein with a Cigar, in Arts and Letters, summer 1919. The latest recorded reference to the poem as "Bleistein" is in July 1919, in a letter to Mary Hutchinson and in the context of its publication in Arts and Letters. One of the first things this suggests is that initially and for a very considerable period of time, i.e. from its conception probably late 1918 till July 1919, Eliot considered Bleistein the poem's principal character. Only by late September 1919, in a letter to John Quinn, Eliot refers to the poem as "Burbank" and it is since then that the poem also changes perminantly to its currently known title. This suggests that Eliot's perception of the poem, and particularly the weight of the two characters in the poem, changed considerably: by September 1919 Eliot considered the two characters equivalent, equally important, hence also the choice of the colon. Presumably he wrote the Bleistein section first, and then wrote the Burbank section around it to provide Bleistein with a contrasting background. Eventually the added Burbank section became as weighty and important as the Bleistein section, and a balanced whole turned up. Eliot then apparently decided to reflect that balance in the title, amongst others with the use of the colon.