The Portrait of a Lady and Dialogism by TS Eliot There seems to be an air of paradox in bringing a theory about the novel as a genre and the most famous Anglo-American modernist poet as a entire. Mikhail Bakhtin's seminal study of "Discourse in the Novel," written in 1934-35 and finally appearing in English translation in 1981, offers us an account of the difference between "poetic discourse" and "novelistic discourse." The division is not strictly a difference between the novel and poetry as genres. Often in Bakhtin we find that the novel assimilates all genres including poetry, which he himself calls the process of “embedded genres” as one of the main characteristics of the novel. Bakhtin also believes that even non-narrative poetry can possess a degree of "dialogism" for which he rates the novel so highly. Among his examples of dialogized verse are the lyric poetry of Jules Laforgue, who exerted a great influence on TS Eliot, and of François Villon, exalted as a poetic model by Ezra Pound. Even in modern literary practice we witness a rapprochement between the novel and poetry in the first decades of this century. In “How to Read” Pound declares: “I believe that no man today can write really good verse if he does not know Stendhal and Flaubert.” it brings us back, so to speak, the speeches of the individual characters of the novel while the rest of the text is cut. Their longer works can therefore be seen as attempts to recreate those missing novels. The original or working title of The Waste Land was "He Do The Police In Different Voices", borrowed from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which is an example of the English graphic novel and according to Bakhtin is central to the history of development because it is «externally very vivid and at the same time historically profound». Its epigraph is meanwhile borrowed from Petronius' Satyricon, a work that Bakhtin considers the source of the novel prose that comes together. Even the novels of the modern period seem to take on the characteristics of poetry, modern novelist heroes spend their time staring into headlights (Woolf), while time turns on their biscuits on the grass (Beckett).