The Waste Land: Facsimile Edition

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Reference
Review: For those who believe that T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' is a critical part of twentieth century liturature, Valerie Eliot's book about the creation of that poem is a must-read, be it for a scholar or the general reader.

The book nicely reproduces the original drafts of Eliot's Poem, complete with annotations and recommendations by Eliot's good friend and advisor Ezra Pound. Through these early drafts, the reader can see both the large amount of text that was cut and the fact that the final part of the poem "what the thunder said" went virtually unchanged from the first draft to publication. If you hope to understand the challenging, complex text of 'The Waste Land', this is a fine place to begin.

Rating:
Summary: Waste Land born by "Caesarian Operation", and mystery solved
Review: Valerie Eliot's publication of her late husband's Waste Land manuscripts affords the reader an opportunity to delve beneath the mysteries surrounding this truly remarkable poem. Hailed as the "greatest poem of the 20th century", a masterpiece which "captured the disillusionment of a generation"; indeed, as the "justification" of Ezra Pound's modernist "experiment", yet referred to by Eliot, himself, as "just a piece of rythmical grumbling", the Waste Land is sure to spark off in any reader a burning desire to know more than Eliot's powerful words can ever themselves explain.

Written primarily during a "rest cure" on "Margate Sands" ("I can connect Nothing with Nothing") and Laussanne, Switzerland; following what Eliot's London doctor diagnosed as a "nervous breakdown", but which the poet refferred to in his letters as an "aboulie", or state of "emotional derangement"; it is little wonder that the poem is not an easy one to come to grips with. In the years following it's publication, countless readers and critics, following the "clues" left by the poet in his now infamous "Notes", have charged off in pursuit of answers and meanings in places they shall never be found. Eliot later explained to his friend, Pound, on whom the poet had bestowed the task (or honour, in this critic's opinion) of editing his original manuscript - that his "Notes" had done little more than lead his readers on a wild goosechase after holy grails and other crazy things which had little bearing on the poem itself. The fact that Pound, the editor, chose, and was permitted by the author, to slash out over half of the original Waste Land fragments in an operation which he described as the "Caesarian Operation" speaks volumes for itself. For it was in this operation that Pound's theories on Vortisism and Imagisme, and Eliot's own theories on poetic "impersonality" and committment to the "Great Tradition" were fused. The result - the final masterwork, the "cult" poem we know today. In the manuscript publication, the missing pieces to Eliot's inticate puzzle are at last to be found .If you are an Eliot fan, or have any interest whatsoever in the Modernist movement, or the inner workings of a creative genius' mind - this book is an absolute MUST !