Word: pound
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...hrer was that kind of fellow. But T.S. Eliot! Could that austere poet's most celebrated work actually have sprung from sweaty sessions with pencil stubs and mutual gropings after the mot juste! It has always been painful to imagine, even though for 50 or so years Ezra Pound has been acknowledged as much more than The Waste Land's literary godfather...
...manuscript turned up in New York. A brief critical glimpse-but no note taking-was permitted then, answering some questions, raising others. Now the poet's wife, Valerie Eliot, has brought out a facsimile edition of the original Waste Land. Complete with notes, a color key to distinguish Pound's editing from Eliot's, progressive handwritten and typed versions of the text, it clearly shows what Eliot, Pound, and even Eliot's unstable first wife Vivien contributed...
...legend, Shakespeare, the prophet Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Dante's Inferno, Rupert Brooke, Richard Wagner, Verlaine, Aeschylus, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Oliver Goldsmith originally helped make the poem the perennial undergraduate's hunt-and-peck guide to instant culture. But there appear to be no direct transplants from Pound. Except for an odd "an" or "who," he inserted only two words into The Waste Land: "demobbed" for "coming back out of the Transport Corps," and "demotic" to replace "abominable" when Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant of "The Fire Sermon," made an indecent proposition "in abominable French...
...What Pound did do was cut, clipping off as many as 40 lines in a clump. His special target was a heavy-footed parody of Pope's Rape of the Lock. Though the couplets concern the ablutions of a fleshly lady named Fresca, they show Eliot at his most priggishly professional, and Pound briskly informed Eliot: "You cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope...
...Pound's marginalia, scribbled, indeed, with a stumpy pencil, mark the trail of an editor with a fine merciless eye for padding, preciosity or false prosody: "3 lines Too tum-pum at a stretch," one scribble reads. With the notation "1880," Pound skewered an anachronism in which Eliot called for "a closed carriage" in 1922; the carriage promptly became a "closed car at four." W.H. Auden once observed that Eliot was part church warden, part twelve-year-old boy. Pound was on the side of the boy. His objections to Eliot's frequent use of "may" and "perhaps...