BurbankBurbank is one of the principal characters in Eliot'

"Burbank crossed a little bridge"

"thought Burbank, meditating on"

Burbank 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 twice in the poem, in the first and last quatrain. No other poems in which this character appears are known, although he is presumably related to Krumpacker in "Fragment of an Agon," who is also an American, and has like Burbank a companion.

linguistic analysis

The name 'Burbank' can be taken apart linguistically: it consists of two components, '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, also a raised shelf of ground, slope, or elevation in sea or river bed.

poetical/textual analysis

It is hard to trace Burbank through Eliot's poem. First of all, we have him with Bleistein in the title, and then in the first line we see Burbank cross a little bridge and descend at a small hotel. This is a conventional and contemporary description of Venice which, if it reminds of anyone, probably reminds most of Henry James. From the moment that Volupine arrives on the stage, however, and they fall, the scene shifts: Burbank becomes Antony and Princess Volupine becomes Cleopatra as the poem follows Shakespeare's piece. The horses which beat up the dawn are then probably Caesar's, who comes to defeat Antony - but these horses beat with even feet and come from Istria are also Phoebus, so that a certain inevitability is introduced into the poem. It is here that we lose sight of Burbank - we do not know whether he is on board Volupine's shuttered barge or not. He has fallen, but since he returns in the final stanza to ask questions we may presume that either he has returned from the dead, or only fell in love, or a combination of both.

biographical/historical analysis

The origin of the name is almost certainly American, as all currently discovered instances of that name that were contemporary to Eliot point that way. First of all, Burbank is a city belonging to Los Angeles County, south-western California, United States. At the time that Eliot is writing, the community which was founded in 1887 experienced tremendous growth in the wake of Los Angeles. The city was founded on land that had been part of a sheep ranch belonging to David Burbank, after whom it is named, and who is the second candidate for suggesting the name. A third was successful Burbank was Luther Burbank, a pioneer plant breeder.

In the literature, Burbank has been identified as Henry Adams, Henry James and Wyndham Lewis. Of these three, Henry James seems the most likely candidate, if only because he had recently died and T.S. Eliot was working on a special commemorative edition of the Litte Review on James just before or during the time Eliot wrote "Burbank with a Baedeker"; James was also the one with an intimate knowledge of, and passion for, Venice, of which his collection of travelogues Italian Hours and his two stories The Aspern Papers and Wings of the Dove bear collective witness - and indeed, the first contains many sections which remind of Burbank, and the second is alluded to in the poem's epigram.

Nevertheless, there are hints in the poem which remind of Lewis and Adams also. Eliot wrote about Adams' Education just before the Little Review special on James, and in Eductation Adams contemplates time's ruins in a similar manner to Burbank in the final stanza - calling up James, Browning, Gibbon, Tennyson and others in the proces. Eliot compared James and Adams in his March review of Adams' Education for the Atheneum, noticing that: "Henry Adams in 1858, and Henry James in 18 70 (both at still receptive ages), land at Liverpool and descend at the same hotel" and Lewis, when he wrote about his travels to Egypt compared himself romantically with Mark Antony.

Thus, Burbank may represent all Americans who have come to Europe, and not just Venice. We could include in this list the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote about Venice in his short story "The Assignation," which in turn is a spoof of another story set in Venice, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Doge und Dogaresse," from the Serapion brothers, and like James' The Aspern Papers bases itself on the rumours around Lord Byron's Venetian escapades, Jeffrey Aspern being, according to James himself, an American Byron.

critical overview

Smith recognises in Burbank the "appreciative embodiment of the enduring spirit whose works are catalogued in the guidebook," taking to him the "artistic and spiritual values" (p.50). Like "Sweeney among the Nightingales," a sad dreamer "has lost his chance for love in a world where sensitivity is no match for hard fact." Speculating that Burbank either falls unwisely in love or fails Volupine sexually, Smith believes that by making advances to her Burbank is "in effect trying to appropriate this fusion, to become a whole man … to compound flesh with spirit." Because he carries the name of the American botanist, he has perhaps a desire to hybridise. After drawing paralels between the "self-irony" of the Laforgian period and the irony pointed at Burbank, Smith defends Burbank who, "even if the ruins of time crumble only within himself… deserves that possible fusion of the real and the ideal esteemed only by the idealist."

George Williamson adds that Burbank is a tourist (p. 102). 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 romantic and, as we "are obliged to conclude," naive.

According to Moody, Burbank "has the air of one of James' cultivated consciousnesses. Burbank is more Hamlet than Iago and "thinks, apparently, of Ruskin's thoughts on Venice, and wonders who was responsible for its decline." Moody then asks, without answering, whether he realises that "the lion of Venice is also the lion of Mark the Evangelist, and that Ruskin wrote not of the laws but of the spiritual life necessary for an architecture, and a culture?"

For Bush, Burbank is an Adams-like compatriot who "succumbs to the New Englander's inability to understand either the beauty or the evil of the Old World. … Burbank is immature, all intellect and no sensation. In the words of the Adams review, he is a New England Paul Dombey, asking questions when mere questioning is no longer appropriate." Bush then compares Burbank with something Eliot wrote about George Wyndham in the Sacred Wood:

The world was an adventure of himself. It is characteristic that on embarking a subaltern for Egypt he wrote enthusiastically: "I do not suppose that any expedition since the day of Roman governors of provinces has started with such magnificence; we might have been Antony going to Egypt in a purple sailed gally." This is precisely the spirit which animates his appreciation of the Elizabethans. … Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he was an Imperialist (SW, 27)

It is here worth mentioning what Bush wrote in a discussion preliminary to the discussion of "Burbank", where Bush mentions that Eliot called Wyndham a "Romantic Patrician," just as he would later call Henry Adams a "Sceptical Patrician" which we can compare with Bush' later remark in the discussion of "Burbank" on how Henry Adams, unlike Henry James, "is divorced from the emotional aspect of his experience." Bush quotes this passage which Eliot wrote about George Wyndham:

Wyndham was a Romantic; the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it.
… Romanticism is a short cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back upon themselves. George Wyndham had curiosity, but he employed it romantically, not to penetrate the real world, but to complete the varied features of the world he made for himself …
… An understanding of Elizabethan rhetoric is as essential to the appreciation of Elizabethan literature as an understanding of Victorian sentiment is essential to the appreciation of Victorian literature and of George Wyndham. (SW 31-2)

Returning to the discussion of Burbank, Bush continues that "Burbank" expresses the sentiment "we might have been Antony," but that Burbank the character is an extension of Eliot, not of Wyndham, and that his mind ends up by reminding us of New England. According to Bush, the section with the references to Shakespeare renders Burbank's "own sensibility. Blind to the moral world of his citations, Burbank is possessed by their sound. And swept up by such a 'romantic' response, he not surprisingly apprehends sensuality as subhuman. With this, Bush refers back to his earlier analysis of Eliot's essay in the Sacred Wood, where Bush concluded that:

Though he holds that the Elizabethans were rhetorical realists (that is, their rhetoric did not affect their feeling or their thought), Eliot discovers how easy it is for a Victorian mind of a certain inclination to ignore that discrimination and romanticize Elizabethan eloquence as it romanticizes the rest of experience. Once such a mind had internalized Elizabethan practices, it would be more divorced from its experience than ever. It would, in Eliot's words, be confirmed in (the phrase cannot be over-emphasized) "the pathology of rhetoric" (SW, 30).

Bush analyses the parallels between The Aspern Papers and "Burbank," concluding that in both works, "the protagonist fails to see this Venice, and does not understand his own actions." This Venice is the one which in James' novella functions "to objectify the inevitability of failed desire and failed hope in human affairs." Finally, after quoting at length a section from The Aspern Papers in which its protagonist "dreams of a romanticized Romeo" just like "Burbank dreams of Antony," Bush concludes that each therewith distorts both Shakespeare and his own life and that we may speculate "that Eliot intended to make the poem a Jamesian weighing of American idealism against European realism."

Crawford investigated Eliot's school notes and essays, and concludes that the situation is that of "the outsider meeting the pleasures of a different, reputedly splendid civilisation."

Sigg notes the difference in size of Burbank's conquest contrasted with Antony's: "Only a 'little' bridge transmits Burbank to his 'small' hotel; never having risen, he nonetheless 'descended' and then 'fell.'