6 - The Waste Land (1922)

Summary

Like other of Eliot's longer works, The Waste Land was composed in fragments over a period of time, the earliest (which appeared in ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’) dating from 1914–15. These were afterwards put together and ‘edited’, with the decisive help of Ezra Pound, into the final version that we know today. The process of the poem's composition can be followed in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, edited by Valerie Eliot in 1971, which includes all the original drafts and Pound's annotations. The book is an invaluable insight into the way the final poem came about, and offers some interesting examples of verse which Eliot finally discarded from the poem and from his Collected Poems: we can see the poet's mind at work and assess his critical decisions (and Pound's critical advice) about the selection of passages, and the alteration of lines. But the final poem is what matters most in the end, and I shall not in this chapter attempt to give an account of the ur-version. As most critics agree, the poem is immeasurably improved in its final form, and in almost every case the material finally omitted is manifestly inferior. With Pound's help (‘il miglior fabbro’ – ‘the better craftsman’ – is Eliot's fitting tribute to him in the dedication of the poem) the poem finally ‘came together’.