T. S. Eliot's 'Coriolan' and Wyndham Lewis' 'Hitler'

T. S. Eliot’s response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s has often been critiqued as equivocal and indifferent. Against that view, this essay argues that Eliot’s Coriolan (1931–32) is a political satire responding to Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler (1931), a sympathetic account of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the National Socialist movement. Coriolan I “Triumphal March” satirizes the Beer Hall Putsch and the street tactics of the Nazi Party; Coriolan II “Difficulties of a Statesman” parodically recalls Hitler’s “struggles” in Mein Kampf. Taking inspiration from Beethoven’s heroic Coriolan overture (1807) and Max Klinger’s monumental statue Beethoven (1902), Eliot’s poetic series ironically replaces a heroic Hitler with a heroic Beethoven to envisage a realm of peace in place of war.