Valerie Eliot to Mary and Conrad Aiken, 17 June 1969: “You may have heard that Ezra turned up unexpectedly in New York, but even the sight of the manuscript recalled nothing.” Peter du Sautoy to Gallup, 5 Jan 1970, on Gallup’s booklet T. S. Eliot & Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters: “Of course the sad end of the story is (though naturally you couldn’t say so) that Pound remembers nothing of The Waste Land manuscript and was unable to give Valerie any help. But he has written for her a charming little preface.”
Valerie Eliot: “Although Pound was unable to volunteer information, it seemed to assist his memory if possible interpretations were put forward. There was not only the intervening period to contend with, but also an emotional block caused by his anguish that he had ever criticized Eliot. ‘He should have ignored me. Why didn’t he restore some of the cancelled passages when Liveright wanted more pages?’” TLS 18 May 1973. Pound’s final tribute to TSE, and his last appreciation, appeared as the Preface to The Waste Land: A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts.
PREFACE
The more we know of Eliot, the better. I am thankful that the lost leaves have been unearthed.
The occultation of the Waste Land manuscript (years of waste time, exasperating to its author) is pure Henry James.
“The mystery of the missing manuscript” is now solved. Valerie Eliot has done a scholarly job which would have delighted her husband. For this, and for her patience with my attempts to elucidate my own marginal notes, and for the kindness which distinguishes her, I express my thanks.
EZRA POUND
Venice
30 September 1969
Ezra Pound died in Venice on 1 November 1972.
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
The Waste Land: Commentary
This Commentary intercalates notes on (a) the text of The Waste Land printed in the present edition; (b) the draft readings shown in the editorial composite (WLComposite), with line numbers in bold; (c) variants from printed texts and from the drafts (for which see Textual History); (d) TSE’s own “Notes on the Waste Land”; (e) fragments of verse related to The Waste Land other than those printed among the “Uncollected Poems”. The Commentary covers these in sequence:
Title
Introductory paragraph of TSE’s Notes
Unadopted epigraph
Epigraph
Dedication
PART I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
1–54 (“First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place”)
[I] 1–76
PART II. A GAME OF CHESS
[II] 77–172
PART III. THE FIRE SERMON
229–85 (“Admonished by the sun’s inclining ray”, including “We fear’d that we had bitch’d him quite” in note to 270–298)
285 ^ 286 insertion, ms4 (“From which, a Venus Anadyomene”)
286–98 (“The Scandinavians bemused her wits”)
Fresca couplets, after 298 (“When the rude entrance of the Tarquin, day”)
[III] 173–214
334–48 (“London, the swarming life you kill and breed”)
[III] 215–311
PART IV. DEATH BY WATER
475–557 (“The sailor, attentive to the chart and to the sheets”)
[IV] 312–21
PART V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
[V] 322–433
[Poem I 53–71 · Textual History II 359–408]
TSE’s “Notes on the Waste Land” are given precedence but are not repeated in full. They are accorded a capital where this is sufficient to make the meaning clear (“as he wrote in his Notes”), or designated TSE’s Notes. When Valerie Eliot’s notes from her edition of the drafts are given verbatim, they appear in quotation marks. Other information from them is retained with the attribution “WLFacs notes”. Ezra Pound’s markings of TSE’s drafts are all to be found in the Textual History, and are occasionally annotated in the Commentary. Pierre Leyris’s French translation, published in Poèmes 1910–1930 (1947), contained notes by John Hayward, with TSE’s imprimatur. Except for matter already included in TSE’s Notes, these are incorporated, with the attribution “Hayward”, and are occasionally corrected silently from his typescript (King’s).
Hayward begins with a general note, quoting from Gardner 1942 and from TSE’s comparison of poetry and music:
Subject matter: “The problem of history and the time process is one of the great themes of The Waste Land, where it is mingled with the desire for cosmic and personal salvation. No poem has ever shown a greater sense of the pressure of the past upon the present and of its existence in the present” (Helen Gardner).
Basic theme is death-in-life.
Technique: “I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure … The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music. There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement”, The Music of Poetry (1942).
[Poem I 53, 323 · Textual History II 372]
Title The Waste Land: Jessie L. Weston of the “Wasting of the land”: “As a matter of fact, I believe that the ‘Waste Land’ is really the very heart of our problem; a rightful appreciation of its position and significance will place us in possession of the clue which will lead us safely through the most bewildering mazes of the fully developed tale”, From Ritual to Romance (1920) ch. V. Her synopsis of ch. II ends: “Importance of Waste Land motif for criticism.” The chapter concludes that in the Grail romances “the forces of the ruler being weakened · · · the land becomes Waste” and that readers should “concentrate upon the persistent elements” so that eventually “the constituent elements will reveal their significance.” Augustine’s Confessions bk. II ends: “I sank away from Thee, and I wandered, O my God, too much astray from Thee my stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a barren land.” Bk. III then begins: “To Carthage I came” (see The Waste Land [III] 307).
Malory: “so befelle there grete pestilence, and grete harme to bothe reallmys; for there encresed nother corne, ne grasse, nother well-nye no fruyte, ne in the watir was founde no fyssh. Therefore men calle hit—the londys of the two marchys—the Waste Londe”, Morte d’Arthur XVII iii (J. Padmanabha, letter, TLS 17 Mar 1972). TSE to L. C. Knights, 28 Dec 1933: “I have agreed to review one book for the Spectator, but that was only under extreme temptation, as it is my favourite book—that is, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and I could not resist the opportunity of having this new edition.” This was the Shakespeare Head Malory, and TSE’s review called for three further editions: “(1) a cheap edition of the text; (2) a scholarly edition with a full commentary by some person as learned as Miss Jane Harrison or Miss Jessie Weston; and (3) a children’s edition. Such an edition was in my hands when I was a child of eleven or twelve”, Le Morte Darthur (1934). TSE’s copy of Charles Morris’s King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table: A Modernized Version of the “Morte Darthur” is autographed “T. S. Eliot. First Year Class. Smith Academy” (1899–1900). The Everyman (a cheap edition of the text) is given among TSE’s books: Bodleian list (1934). “For instance, two of my own favourite authors are Sir Thomas Malory and Racine”, After Strange Gods 27.
The exact title. To Ezra Pound, 30 Aug 1922: “not ‘Waste Land’, please, but ‘The Waste Land’”. To Lucille Goldthwaite, Librarian for the Blind at the New York Public Library, 16 Apr 1931: “I shall be very glad to give you the permission for which you ask in your letter, so long as you will see that not only the text itself, but the title, is correctly transcribed, as I note that it is incorrectly given in your letter.” To his Spanish translator Angel Flores, 22 Feb 1928: “The title, by the way, is not ‘The Wasteland’ but ‘The Waste Land’. The only exact translation of the title is one wh
ich my French translator, Jean de Menasce, discovered, although alas! too late to use in his version—‘La Gaste Lande’. This is absolutely the exact equivalent as it alludes to the same mediaeval fiction.” (Letters 4 63 claims that Menasce changed his original title of L’Esprit May 1926, La terre mise a nu, to La terre gaste when reprinting in Philosophies, but Philosophies ran only 1924–25.) To Bonamy Dobrée [28 Oct] 1932: “The New England landscape is very beautiful in autumn · · · but the paysage is, after all, not humanised. Vermont: a beautiful and austere desert (gaste lande) which human beings seem to have scratched at for three hundred years and then given up in despair.”
Mario Praz: “Professor Renato Poggioli, in a private conversation, suggested a possible reminiscence of Inf. XIV 94, where Crete is called ‘un paese guasto’”, T. S. Eliot and Dante in The Flaming Heart (1958) 359; the Temple tr. is “a waste country”.
Earlier than The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Poetry had published Madison Cawein’s Waste Land (Jan 1913) and James Stephens’s The Waste Places (Aug 1914). For William Morris’s The Hollow Land, see note on the title The Hollow Men.
TSE pronounced the title with the emphasis on the third word, as did Valerie Eliot. Recordings by TSE’s contemporaries also emphasise the third word.
[Poem I 53, 323 · Textual History II 372]
TSE’s Notes, opening paragraph Miss Jessie L. Weston: (1850–1928); scholar and translator of Arthurian texts, who since 1894 had published more than a dozen such books. She was a member, along with J. G. Frazer, of the Folk-Lore Society, which TSE joined on 22 Nov 1922 (Folk-Lore Dec 1922); see note to title of Part I, The Burial of the Dead. the Grail legend: McRae: “Although the Grail legends vary, and no definitive version exists, all concern a Christian knight—Gawain, Percival, or Galahad—who finds himself in a mysterious, hidden castle. In the castle, the knight has a vision of a grail, a spear, and a beautiful woman. In some versions he gains information about a king who is debilitated by a wound in his thigh. This king, known as the Fisher King, is impotent, and for that reason his land is barren. The various Celtic and medieval European legends from which the Grail legend is derived are similar in kind to both the classical myths of the dying god and to the Mystery traditions described by writers such as Ovid, so many turn-of-the-century scholars such as James Frazer, whose work inspired Weston, conflated them.” At Harvard in 1907–08 TSE studied with William Henry Schofield (see note to Mr. Apollinax 6), and used his English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer, in which ch. V, “Romance”, includes sections on “The Cycle of Lancelot”, “The Quest for the Holy Grail” and “The Death of Arthur”. In 1908–09, TSE took William A. Neilson’s course “Studies in the History of Allegory”. TSE: “mythology is dangerous literary material. It should either be a mythology in which the author more or less believes or a mythology in which some people once believed. A mythology cannot be created for literary purposes out of whole cloth”, Mr. Doughty’s Epic (1916). From Ritual to Romance: when on 16 Aug 1937 TSE promised to send his brother some of his “most valuable books” for Eliot House, Harvard, this was among the dozen: “My original copy, which I used in preparing The Waste Land.” Pages 138–39 and 142–43 had not been cut open (Grover Smith 70). To Bonamy Dobrée, 14 Nov 1957: “Now as to From Ritual to Romance: the Committee feel that it ought to have an introduction by some person whose name matters in the world of folklore and Arthurian legend. The book does no doubt date, but it is difficult to think of anyone capable of the right introduction. C. S. Lewis, when consulted about the matter several years ago, made the appalling suggestion that instead of reprinting the book we should merely add quotations from it to the notes to The Waste Land. As my own preference would be to abolish the notes to The Waste Land, the idea of enlarging them with chunks of Jessie Weston appalled me, but that was the attitude of a scholar and mediaevalist. Can you suggest anyone who would be a suitable introducer in the academic world? I certainly won’t want to do it myself because after all I was not concerned with the validity of her thesis, but with the value of the imagery as a spring-board!” No Faber edition appeared. The Golden Bough: Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) published the first edition in two volumes in 1890; the third edition comprised twelve (1906–15). Jain 1991 138: “Frazer’s work belongs to the evolutionary school of English anthropologists who used the comparative-historical method to demonstrate that religion was a product of the mind and not something that had been supernaturally revealed · · · By tracing the connection between primitive rites and customs and the ‘higher’ forms of religion, especially Christianity, the anthropologist could show that religion had evolved from primitive to more civilized forms. Existing religious beliefs, similarly, could be traced back to their primordial roots and explained away as survivals of the older superstitions.” TSE at Harvard, on Frazer: “This historical investigation, and the comparative work, are what give us such results as we can be said to get. Of the second sort of labour J. G. Frazer is unquestionably the greatest master. No one has done more to make manifest the similarities and identities underlying the customs of races very remote in every way from each other · · ·
[Poem I 53, 323 · Textual History II 372]
I have not the smallest competence to criticize Dr. Frazer’s erudition, and his ability to manipulate this erudition I can only admire. But I cannot subscribe for instance to the interpretation with which he ends his volume on the Dying God”, The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual (1913). TSE recalled this graduate paper in Savonarola (1926), remarking that in it he had attempted to show “that no interpretation of a rite could explain its origin. For the meaning of the series of acts is to the performers themselves an interpretation; the same ritual remaining practically unchanged may assume different meanings for different generations of performers; and the rite may have originated before ‘meaning’ meant anything at all.” Reviewing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring: “The Vegetation Rite upon which the ballet is founded remained, in spite of the music, a pageant of primitive culture. It was interesting to any one who had read The Golden Bough and similar works, but hardly more than interesting · · · Even The Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation”, London Letter in Dial Oct 1921. In an article for Vanity Fair, TSE focused on Henry James, F. H. Bradley and Sir James Frazer: “with every fresh volume of his stupendous compendium of human superstition and folly, Frazer has withdrawn in more and more cautious abstention from the attempt to explain · · · It is a work of no less importance for our time than the complementary work of Freud—throwing its light on the obscurities of the soul from a different angle; and it is a work of perhaps greater permanence, because it is a statement of fact which is not involved in the maintenance or fall of any theory of the author’s · · · He has extended the consciousness of the human mind into as dark a backward and abysm of time as has yet been explored”, A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors (1924), subheaded “Writers Who, Though Masters of Thought, are Likewise Masters of Art”. To Frederic Manning, 24 Jan 1927: “I think that I agree with you about Frazer. It is perhaps premature to say what his influence will be; as you suggest, he can be used in more than one way. But I do not think that there is any doubt that his influence will not have been very great, certainly as great an influence, and perhaps wider and more enduring, as that of Freud.” To Derek Phit Clifford, 6 Apr 1934: “As for your aversion to The Golden Bough as a source of inspiration for poets, I am inclined to think that that period is over and done with.” Henry Eliot to TSE, 12 Sept 1935: “It is a point of interest to me, at just what date your views of religion changed from the attitude taken in your blasphemous poems. (I have some doubts as to whether these poems fairly reflect your actual personal attitude at the time). I feel pretty sure that you were not a convert in 1921, remembering your enthusiasm at that time for The Golden Bough. I feel equally sure, for other reasons, that you were a convert in 1926. Bet
ween these two dates you wrote The Waste Land.” TSE: “Frazer’s great work is somewhat paradoxically named: Frazer was a rationalist, and therefore comes to no conclusions except those which rationalism expects to find”, jacket material for The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948).
Unadopted epigraph “Did he live · · · ‘The horror! the horror!’” | CONRAD: Heart of Darkness pt. 3.
Pound to TSE [24 Jan 1922]: “I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation.” TSE [26? Jan]: “Do you mean not use Conrad quot. or simply not put Conrad’s name to it? It is much the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative.” Pound [28? Jan]: “Do as you like about my obstetric effort. Ditto re the Conrad; who am I to grudge him his laurel crown.”
[Poem I 53, 323 · Textual History II 372]
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 72
