CHAPTER ONE THE MODERNIST POETICS OF URBAN MEMORY AND THE STRUCTURAL ANALOGIES BETWEEN “CITY” AND “TEXT”: THE W ASTE LAND AND BENJAMIN’S ARCADES PROJECT JENS MARTIN GURR Let me begin by juxtaposing two passages: The first is from Kevin Lynch’s influential exploration of mental representations of cityscapes in his 1960 The Image of the City. Here, he speaks of urban environments as surroundings in which [a]t every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. (Lynch 1960, 1-2, emphasis added) The second passage is from Michael Coyle’s essay on The Waste Land: The sense of meaning escaping one on every side, the sense that at any given point there is more going on than the reader can take in, is integral to the experience of the poem. (Coyle 2009, 166; cf. also Lamos 1998, 111 et passim, emphasis added) Taking as a point of departure these corresponding observations on the excess of simultaneous semiosis in both city and text, this essay sets out to read modernist urban poetry and poetics in light of roughly contemporary early urban studies. For reasons of space, I have to confine myself to The Waste Land as the paradigmatic urban text of the period and will have to leave out Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, Hart Crane and others.