BurbankBurbank is one of the principal characters in Eliot'

"full fathom five your Bleistein lies"

"But this or such was Bleistein's way"

Bleistein is one of the principal characters in Eliot's poem "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," where he figures in the title and one in the poem. A lot of controversy exists around this character, because of the supposed anti-Semitism towards him in this poem, and in "Dirge" (a poem that Eliot excised out of The Waste Land at the advice of Ezra Pound). Bleistein is presumably related to Klipstein in "Fragment of an Agon," who has, like Bleistein, an American companion.

linguistic analysis

Like Burbank, the name 'Bleistein' can be taken apart linguistically: it consists of two components, 'Blei' and 'stein' both of which are regular German words, blei meaning "lead" and stein "stone."

poetical/textual analysis

biographical/historical analysis

critical analysis

Smith states that Bleistein "typifies the commercial travelers, loitering like rats, or like the peasants in a Piranesi etching, among the towering monuments of creative intellect." (p. 50-1) He and Klein are but straw men. (p.54) Williamson adds that Bleistein is a tourist, like Burbank (p. 102). Like Burbank, he indicates both the kind of materials that came together in this poem and the disparate character of the impression, which "adumbrates historical causes." He is commercial, not localised nor sensitive to local history, and, "as we are obliged to conclude," repulsive. Moody adds that Bleistein is "the heir to three civilisations - ancient, middle and modern, one might say" and that he looks like an ape, and "has an eye like the first slime before ever man of Venice were made." He translates the name as "leadstone" and parallels him to Burbank, because "the bewitching moment of passion, and the end of the endless process of biological and cultural evolution, equated, are found equally wanting." Bush adds that we see Bleistein through Burbank's "refined yet debilitating sensibility."

According to Sigg, quite unlike Browning's all-seeing, all-knowing poet, Bleistein also compares unfavourably with Antony and Cleopatra, and even with Burbank. Although shallow, Burbank packs his compendious if meager Baedeker, which at least shows his minimal interest in understanding what he encounters. He merely attends to culture; new money pretends to it; a decayed aristocracy trades on it. Bleistein, however, tours equipped only with a cigar and knows not what he sees. Here appears a characteristic aestheticist moment, which finds Eliot illiberally making social judgments on cultural grounds. Bleistein does not look at a picture; this is no ekphrasis. He views Venice itself: a "perspective" of Canaletto, not one of his canvases. But Bleistein fails to appreciate its beauty or how closely it and Canaletto's paintings - faithfully rendered turbid, glaucous water and mottled, flawed façades as well as Venetian splendor - resemble one another.

To illustrate this point, Sigg refers to Henry James' Italian Hours, from which he quotes at length the passage in which James explains how Venice is both model and painter:

the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to the other. … All Venice was both model and painter, and life was so pictorial that art could n't help becoming so. With all diminutions life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an extraordinary freshness to one's perception of the great Venetian works. You judge of them not as a connoisseur, but as a man of the world, and you enjoy them because they are so social and so true. (Italian Hours, p. 21-2)

This leads Sigg to conclude that James meant to say that "anyone can see how ideal and beautiful Venice is." Sigg interprets Bleistein posture as being a shrug, the protrusive eye as an agressive one, and concludes that: "Eliot implies that the inability to appreciate art and beauty constitutes grounds for exclusion from the human species." Sigg, however, does not draw a direct line from this poem to After Strange Gods; in a note he quotes the following passage from Criterion:

"If your values are religious, then you may say that it is better that a million bodies should burn rather than one soul; if they are aesthetic, you may say that it is better that a million lives should be lost rather than one cathedral; if your values are humanitarian, that it is better that art and religion should perish rather than one man die of hunger"