Eliot Pound Collaboration On The Waste Land example essay topic

Richard Ell man Pound's criticism of The Waste Land was not of its meaning; he liked its despair and was indulgent of its neo-Christian hope. He dealt instead with its stylistic adequacy and freshness. For example, there was an extended, unsuccessful imitation of The Rape of the Lock at the beginning of "The Fire Sermon". It described the lady Fresca (imported to the waste land from "Gerontion" and one day to be exported to the States for the soft drink trade). Instead of making her toilet like Pope's Belinda, Fresca is going to it, like Joyce's Bloom. Pound warned Eliot that since Pope had done the couplets better, and Joyce the defamation, there was no point in another round.

To this shrewd advice we are indebted for the disappearance of such lines as: The white-armed Fresca blinks, and yawns, and gapes, Aroused from dreams of love and pleasant rapes. Electric summons of the busy bell Brings brisk Amanda to destroy the spell Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool, Fresca slips softly to the needful stool, Where the pathetic tale of Richardson Eases her labour till the deed is done... This ended, to the steaming bath she moves, Her tresses fanned by little flute " ring Loves; Odours, confected by the cunning French, Disguise the good old hearty female stench. The episode of the typist was originally much longer and more laborious: A bright kimono wraps her as she sprawls In nerveless torpor on the window seat; A touch of art is given by the false Japanese print, purchased in Oxford Street. Pound found the dc or difficult to believe: "Not in that lodging house" The stanza was removed. When he read the later stanza, -Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit; And at the corner where the stable is, Delays only to urinate, and spit, he warned that the last two lines were "probably over the mark", and Eliot acquiesced by cancelling them.

Pound persuaded Eliot also to omit a number of poems that were for a time intended to be placed between the poem's sections, then at the end of it. One was a renewed thrust at poor Bleistein, drowned now but still haplessly Jewish and luxurious under water: Full fathom five your Bleistein lies Under the flatfish and the squids. Graves' Disease in a dead jew's / man's eyes! Where the crabs have eat the lids... That is lace that was his nose Roll him gently side to side, See the lips unfold unfold From the teeth, gold in gold... Pound urged that this, and several other mortuary poems, did not add anything, either to The Waste Land or to Eliot's previous work.

He had already written "the longest poem in the English langwidge. Don't try to bust all records by prolonging it three pages further". As a result of this resmithying by il miglior fabbro, the poem gained immensely in concentration. Yet Eliot, feeling too solemnized by it, thought of prefixing some humorous doggerel by Pound about its composition. Later, in a more resolute effort to escape the limits set by The Waste Land, he wrote Fragment of an Agon, and eventually, "somewhere the other side of despair", turned to drama.

From "The First Waste Land". In Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land". Princeton, Princeton UP, 1973. Hugh Kenner So it would have been about mid-January 1922, in London, that The Waste Land received its final form, and likely its title too.

The state of the manuscripts Eliot had unpacked after his return from the continent may be readily summarized. "The Burial of the Dead" had lost its Cambridge opening but was otherwise lightly annotated. "A Game of Chess" had had its opening heavily worked over by Pound, to tighten the meter, and Vivien Eliot had supplied a few suggestions for improving the pub dialogue. "The Fire Sermon" was a shambles; it needed much work. "Death by Water" had been cut back to ten lines. "What the Thunder Said" was "OK".

Pondering these materials, Eliot perceived where the poem's center of gravity now lay. Its center was no longer the urban panorama refracted through Augustan styles. That had gone with the dismemberment of Part. Its center had become the urban apocalypse, the great City dissolved into a desert where voices sang from exhausted wells, and the Journey that had been implicit from the moment he opened the poem in Cambridge and made its course swing via Munich to London had become journey through the Waste Land. Reworking Part, and retyping the other parts with revisions of detail, he achieved the visionary unity that has fascinated two generations of readers. He then went to bed with the flu, "excessively depressed".

(Pound Letters, appendix to No. 181.) He was anxious. He thought of deleting Phlebas, and was told that the poem needed Phlebas "ABsolootly."The card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor". He thought of using "Gerontion" as a prelude, and was told not to. "One don't miss it at all as the thing now stands". (Pound Letters, No. 182.) What seems to have bothered him was the loss of a schema. "Gerontion" would have made up for that lack by turning the whole thing into "thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season".

Later the long note about Tiresias attempted the same strategy: "What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem". The lost schema, if we have guessed about it correctly, had originated in a preoccupation with Dryden as the poem grew outward from "The Fire Sermon". If Vergil had once sponsored the protagonist's journey as Homer sponsors the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, Vergil was pertinent to a poem prompted by Vergil's major English translator, John Dryden. Ovid, who supplied Tiresias and Philomel, and told the story of the Sibyl's terribly longevity which may underlie the line about fear in a handful of dust, was a favorite of Dryden's, and (on Mark Van Doren's showing) pertinent to Dryden's London and Eliot's. Wren's churches, notably Magnus martyr, were built after the fire An nus Mirabilis celebrates, which is one reason Eliot works Magnus Martyr into his Fire Sermon.

And in disposing ornate diction across the grid of a very tame pentameter, Eliot's original draft of the opening of Part II had rewritten in the manner of French decadence a Shakespearean passage (.".. like a burnished throne") that Dryden had rewritten before him in a diction schooled by his own time's French decorum. No classroom exercise is more ritualized than the comparison of Antony and Cleopatra and All for Love. But the center from which such details radiate had been removed from the poem. What survived was a form with no form, and a genre with no name.

Years later, on the principle that a form is anything done twice, Eliot reproduced the structural contours of The Waste Land exactly, though more briefly, in Burnt Norton, and later still three more times, to make the Quartets, the title of which points to a decision that such a form might have analogies with music. That was post facto. In 1922, deciding somewhat reluctantly that the poem called The Waste Land was finished, he was assenting to a critical judgment, Pound's and his own, concerning which parts were alive in a sheaf of pages he had written. Two years afterward, in "The Function of Criticism", he averted to "the capital importance of criticism in the work of creation itself", and suggested that "the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing".

He called it "this frightful toil", and distinguished it from obedience to the Inner Voice. "The critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the labour of the artist". (Selected Essays, "The Function of Criticism", IV.) For it does no discredit to The Waste Land to learn that it was not striving from the first to become the poem it became: that it was not conceived as we have it before it was written, but re conceived from the wreckage of a different conception. Eliot saw its possibilities in London, in January 1922, with the mangled drafts before him: that was a great feat of creative insight. In Paris he and Pound had worked on the poem page by page, piecemeal, not trying to salvage a structure but to reclaim the authentic lines and passages from the contrived. Contrivance had been guided by various neoclassic formalities, which tended to dispose the verse in single lines whose sense could survive the deletion of their neighbors.

When they had finished, and Eliot had rewritten the central section, the poem ran, in Pound's words, "from 'April... ' to 'shantih' without a break". This is true if your criterion for absence of breaks is Symbolist, not neoclassical. Working over the text as they did, shaking out ashes from amid the glowing coals, leaving the luminous bits to discover their own unexpected affinities, they nearly recapitulated the history of Symbolism, a poetic that systematized the mutual affinities of details neoclassic canons had guided. From "The Urban Apocalypse" in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land". Lynda ll Gordon During the final stages of The Waste Land's composition Eliot put himself, for what was to be the last time, under Pound's direction. On 18 November, on his way to Switzerland, Eliot passed through Paris and left his wife with the Pounds who were then living there.

It seems likely that Eliot showed Pound what he had done in Margate. Pound called Eliot's Lausanne draft 'the 19 page version' which implies that he had previously seen another. He marked certain sheets on two occasions: once in pencil, probably on 18 November, once in ink, on Eliot's return from Lausanne early in January. Pound undoubtedly improved particular passages: his excisions of the anti-Semitic portrait of Bleistein and the misogynist portrait of Fresca curtailed Eliot's excessive animus, and his feel for the right word improved odd lines throughout.

Pound was proud of his hand in The Waste Land and wrote: If you must needs enquire Know diligent Reader That on each Occasion Ezra performed the caesarean Operation. I think that Pound's influence went deeper than his comment during the winter of 1921-2, going back rather to 1918, 1919, and 1920 when he and Eliot were engaged in a common effort to improve their poetry. Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920) is a covert dialogue with Eliot, a composite biography of two great unappreciated poets whose flaws are frankly aired. Pound criticizes a Pru frock-like poet too given to hesitation, drifting, 'maudlin confession', and aerial fantasy-the phantasmal sea surge and the precipitation of 'insubstantial manna' from heaven. As though in answer, Eliot put aside his most confessional fragments, 'Saint Narcissus' and 'Elegy', and in 192 l overlaid private meditation with documentary sketches of contemporary characters-a pampered literary woman, Fresca (like Pound's Lady Valentine), Venus Anadyomene (another Mauberly character), Cockneys, a typist with dirty camisoles, and a scurfy clerk.

The Pound colouring in these sketches did not quite suit Eliot. Where Pound is exuberant in his disgust, Eliot becomes callow or vitriolic-and Pound himself recognized this in his comments on typist and clerk: 'too easy' and 'probably over the mark'. Eliot's characters are not as realistic as Pound's. They are projections of Eliot's haunted consciousness-they could be termed humours.

Unlike the satirist, Eliot does not criticize an actual world but creates a unique 'phantasmal' world of lust, cowardice, boredom, and malice on which he gazes in fascinated horror. The Waste Land is about a psychological hell in which someone is quite alone, 'the other figures in it / Merely projections'. From Eliot's Early Years. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Marjorie Perl off It is against this background that we must reconsider the Eliot-Pound collaboration on The Waste Land. For despite all the stylistic changes that Pound brought about in Eliot's long poem, changes that have recently been submitted to careful study-the thematic strains of the original Waste Land are not significantly altered in the final version.

Indeed, one might argue that Pound's excisions and revisions made Eliot's central themes and symbols more prominent than they would otherwise have been, buried as they were under the weight of such satirical intrusions as "He Do the Police in Different Voices" (Part 1) or the Pope an couplets about Fresca at her toilet at the beginning of Part II 1.37 Consider what happens to "Death by Water", which Pound reduced from ninety-two lines to ten. The first section, written in quatrains rhyming a bab, introduces a parodic version of Ulysses in the person of a foolish sailor on shore leave, regaling his cronies in the public bars, who are "Staggering, or limping with a comic gonorrhea", with stories of the "much seen and much endured". In the margin of the manuscript, Pound wrote, "Bad-but cant attack until I get typescript". The second section, written in rather slack Tennysonian blank verse, is the dramatic monologue of the sailor, telling of a fishing expedition from the Dry Salvages north to the Outer Banks of Nova Scotia. Even as the sailor meditates on the significance of a mysterious Sirens's ong heard one night on watch (lines 65-72), a song that makes him question the relationship of reality to dream, the ship hits an iceberg and is destroyed. After this ending ("And if Another knows, I know I know not, / Who only knows that there is no more noise now"-) comes the "Phlebas the Phoenician" lyric, which is the only part of the original that remains in the finished poem.

Pound seems to have decided that the long account of the sailor's voyage was an unnecessary digression. But when Eliot wrote from London, "Perhaps better omit Phlebas also" Pound replied, "I DO advise keeping Phlebas. In fact I more'n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor. And he is needed ABSOLOOTLY where he is.

Must stay in". Pound understood, in other words, that "Death by Water" is the essential link between the Madame Sosostris passage and the following lines near the end of Part V: Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order Phlebas' "death by water" is the necessary prelude to the hints of rebirth contained in these lines, whereas the actual sea voyage, as described in the cancelled narrative portion, is irrelevant to the poem's life-in-death theme. Curiously, then, Pound seems to have understood Eliot's purpose better than did Eliot himself. In discussing Pound's "operation upon The Waste Land", Eliot notes: I have sometimes tried to perform the same sort of maieutic task; and I know that one of the temptations against which I have to be on guard, is trying to re-write somebody's poem in the way I should have written it myself if I had wanted to write that poem. Pound never did that: he tried first to understand what one was attempting to do, and then tried to help one do it in one's own way.

This is an important distinction. Pound did not try to transform The Waste Land into the sort of city poem he himself might have written. Rather, he helped Eliot to write it in his own way. "What the Thunder Said", for example, is left virtually untouched by Pound, for here Eliot discovered his quest theme and brought it to a swift and dramatic conclusion.

In assessing Pound's response to The Waste Land, critics invariably cite the famous letter to Eliot (24 December 1921) in which Pound says: "Compliment i, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies, and cogitating an excuse for always exuding my de formative secretions in my own stuff, and never getting an outline. I go into nacre and objets d'art". But the fact is that, despite these self-depreciating words, Pound knew well enough that The Waste Land, like "Gerontion", was not his sort of poem. As Eliot himself observes, after thanking Pound for "helping one to do it in one's own way,"There did come a point, of course, at which difference of outlook and belief became too wide". From The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage.

Princeton, Princeton UP, 1981. Louis L. Martz And yet it was evident, even in 1936, that 'Burnt Norton' was adapting the five-part structure of The Waste Land, for that structure was signalled by the use of a short lyric as part IV of the sequence. But what did it mean, what does it mean, to feel the five-part structure of The Waste Land working within so different a poem To answer this question it may help to review the process by which The Waste Land gained its peculiar structure, emerging from the hands of Ezra Pound, as Eliot says, reduced to half manuscript length. First of all, without Pound's editorial intervention, we would not have the short lyric, 'Phlebas the Phoenician', appearing by itself as part IV of The Waste Land, and thus, presumably, we would not have the short lyrics constituting the fourth sections of all the Four Quartets - the short movement that helps to create analogies with Beethoven's late quartets. Indeed we might not have the Phlebas lyric at all, without Pound's advice, for Eliot, upset by Pound's slashing away at the eighty-two lines preceding this lyric in the manuscript, wrote to Pound, 'Perhaps better omit Phlebas also' Pound was horrified: Eliot seemed not to understand the central principle of the poem's operation.

'I DO advise keeping Phlebas,' Pound replied. 'In fact I more'n advise. Phlebas is an integral part of the poem; the card pack introduces him, the drowned phoen. sailor, and he is needed Absolootly where he is. Must stay in. ' What Pound describes in that vehement answer is the sort of organization that Eliot later called musical, in his lecture 'The Music of Poetry', delivered in 1942, just as he was completing Four Quartets: 'The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music,' Eliot says: There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments ['different voices', we might say]; 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 of subject-matter. So, in The Waste Land, after the embers of lust have smouldered in 'The Fire Sermon' - 'Burning burning burning burning'- the death of Phlebas by water provides a moment of serenity, quiet, poise, as Phlebas enters the whirlpool in whispers to a death not to be feared, but foreseen and accepted.

The lyric acts as the lines about the still point act in the two poems of 'Coriolan', where, first, amid the turmoil of the crowd at the parade, the people think they find their answer in the military leader: 'O hidden under the dove's wing, hidden in the turtle's breast, / Under the palm tree at noon, under the running water / At the still point of the turning world. O hidden. ' But then, ironically, it appears in the second poem that the difficulties of a statesman have led him also to seek the still point: 'O hidden under the... Hidden under the...

Where the dove's foot rested and locked for a moment, / A still moment, repose of noon. ' The lyric of Phlebas acts as such a moment of repose, a nodal moment, tying together the strands of the poem, as Pound explained. And the fourth part, the short lyric, in all the Four Quartets, performs a similar function of poise and knotting, as the poem finds a temporary rest where themes and images and voices merge for a moment. One voice of great importance speaks at the close of the Phlebas lyric, which is not simply a translation from Eliot's poem in French, Dans le Restaurant, for the closing lines are quite different. The French poem ends in an offhand, conversational tone: 'Figure-vous donc, c'tait un sort pn ible; / Cependant, ce fut jad is un bel homme, de haut taille. ' (Imagine then, it was a distressing fate; / Nevertheless, he was once a handsome man, of tall stature).

In The Waste Land Eliot has changed the tone from conversational to prophetic by evoking the voice of St Paul addressing 'both Jew and Gentile' in his epistle to the Romans (ch. 2, 3): 'Gentile or Jew / O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. ' A similar effect is created by Pound's critical slashing away of all those weak and in part offensive Pompeian couplets at the outset of part of The Waste Land manuscript. 'Do something different,' Pound advised. So Eliot did: he penciled on the back of the manuscript page a draft of the new opening passage, 'The river's tent is broken... ' - lines that stress the eternal presence of the river within the waste land, culminating in the line that echoes the voice of the psalmist in exile: 'By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept', with its attendant question, 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land' (Psalm 137: 4). A similar concentration upon the emergence of the prophetic voice is created by the removal of the monologue that opens The Waste Land manuscript, the monologue of the rowdy Irishman telling of a night on the town in Boston.

This was excised by Eliot himself, perhaps under Pound's influence, perhaps because Eliot himself saw that the rowdy vitality of those singing, drinking men who stage a footrace in the dawn's early light does not accord with the voice that follows, the voice of one who is so reluctant to live that April becomes the cruelest month. That excision brings us quickly to the voice of a modern Ezekiel, speaking the famous lines: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images. Then these lines of true prophecy play their contrapuntal music against the voice of the false prophet, Madame Sosostris. But I need to explain what I mean by the prophetic voice. With William Blake, we should discard the notion that the prophet's main function is to foretell the future. If, like Blake, we think of the biblical prophets, we will recall at once that they spend a great deal of time in denouncing the evils of the present, evils that derive from the people's worship of false gods and the pursuit of wealth and worldly pleasures.

Prophecies of the future appear, but these are often prophecies of the disasters that will fall upon the people if they do not mend their evil ways. Denunciation of present evil is the primary message of the Hebrew prophet: he is a reformer, his mind is upon the present. But then he also offers the consolation of future good, if the people return to worship of the truth. Thus the voice of the prophet tends to oscillate between denunciation and consolation: he relates visions of evil and good, mingling within the immense range of his voice the most virulent excoriation and the most exalted lyrics.

This, I think, is exactly the sort of oscillation that we find in Pound's Cantos and The Waste Land. From "Origins of Form in Four Quartets". In Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot's Four Quartets. Ed. Edward Lobby. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

David Chintz The Waste Land is a much more complex case-in part because the poem that Eliot wrote and the poem that was published differ considerably. The Waste Land would have openly established popular culture as a major inter text of modernist poetry if Pound had not edited out most of Eliot's popular references. Though Pound, like Eliot, assailed the "very pernicious current idea that a good book must be of necessity a dull one", he did not consider contemporary popular culture seriously as a potential antidote to literary dullness. His work on The Waste Land simply made the poem more Pound ian: he collapsed its levels of cultural appeal while leaving its internationalism and historicism intact, recasting the poem as the first major counteroffensive in high culture's last stand. To be sure, almost all Pound's emendations improve the poem, and Eliot acceded to the recommendations of "il miglior fabbro" in virtually every instance. Still, part of Eliot's original impulse in composing The Waste Land was lost in this collaboration precisely because Pound's relation to the cultural divide differed from Eliot's own.

Had Eliot improved rather than deleted the passages condemned by Pound, he might have given literary modernism a markedly different spin. The manuscript of The Waste Land shows Eliot drawing on popular song to a greater extent than he uses the Grail myth in the final version. For the long idiomatic passage that was to have opened the poem he considered several lyrics from popular musicals. "I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me / There's not a man can say a word agin me", he quotes from a George M. Cohan show; from two songs in the minstrel tradition he constructs "Meet me in the shadow of the watermelon Vine / Eva Iva Uva Emma line"; from The Cubano la Glide he takes "Tease, Squeeze lovin & woo in / Say Kid what " re y' doin. ' " The characters' nocturnal spree then takes them to a bar that Eliot frequented after attending melodramas in Boston: Blew into the Opera Exchange, Sopped up some gin, sat in to the cork game, Mr. Fay was there, singing "The Maid of the Mill".

Pointing out that these lines are "the first examples in the draft of [Eliot's] famous techniques of quotation and juxtaposition", Michael North suggests a direct connection between the miscellaneous format of the minstrel show-or, one might add, the English music hall-and the very form of The Waste Land. But the hints of popular song that survive in the published Waste Land are eclipsed by the more erudite allusions that dominate the poem. Thanks to the deletion of the original opening section, for example, the first line places the poem squarely within the "great tradition" of English poetry. A long poem called The Waste Land that begins, "April is the cruellest month", largely shaped the course of literature and criticism for years to follow. One can only imagine the effect of a long poem called He Do the Police in Different Voices beginning, "First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place". From "T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide".

PML A 110.2 (March 1995).