Jean Jules Verdenal

Jean Jules Verdenal (11 May 1890 – 2 May 1915) was a French medical officer who served, and was killed, during the First World War. Verdenal and his life remain cloaked in obscurity; the little we do know comes mainly from interviews with family members and several surviving letters.

Verdenal was born in Pau, France, the son of Paul Verdenal, a medical doctor. He had a talent for foreign languages. He was athletically inclined. Verdenal as a student was interested in literature and poetry and possessed copies of Stéphane Mallarmé's Poésies and of Jules Laforgue's Poésies and Moralités Légendaires. It was perhaps Verdenal's literary inclinations that led him to become friends with American poet T.S. Eliot, whom he met in 1910 at the Sorbonne. After they parted ways, Verdenal and Eliot corresponded through letters. Verdenal was killed on 2 May 1915 while treating a wounded man on the battlefield. This was just a week into the Gallipoli Campaign and a few days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday.

In 1917, Eliot dedicated to Verdenal his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, and added the Dante epigraph to the 1925 edition:

For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915 mort aux Dardanelles

Or puoi la quantitate
Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,
Quando dismento nostra vanitate,
Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.
[Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing.]

Imagery reminiscent of Verdenal can also be found in other works, such as The Waste Land. Although he died young and his potential as a great poet was unrealised, Verdenal's memory is preserved in the work of his friend.

In 1952 John Peter, later a novelist but then a Canadian academic, published an essay, "A New Interpretation of The Waste Land" in the journal Essays in Criticism in which he interpreted Eliot's poem The Waste Land as an elegy for a dead (male) friend. The journal got a demand from Eliot's solicitors to stop distributing the issue. The copies still on hand were destroyed and a later reprint of journal issues did not include Peter's essay. Peter wrote a letter of apology to Eliot. Seventeen years later, in 1969, four years after Eliot's death in 1965, Peter's essay was reprinted (although Peter wrote "The foregoing reprints almost verbatim an essay which was printed in Essays in Criticism in July 1952" Timothy Materer found substantial changes from the 1952 essay.) Following this reprint was another essay by Peter, titled "Postscript," where he both described the events and his feelings about the censoring and also expanding upon his original essay. In this second essay Peter identified the friend as Verdenal and quoted Eliot poems, plays and criticism to defend his position.

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