The Waste Land and Other Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

was emerging as a bold and powerful new medium that was perhaps uniquely qualified to capture the modern temperament) : relegating large, ineffective passages to the cutting-room floor; heightening a sense of sensory immediacy and direct visual intensity; linking and juxtaposing scenes with quick, startling cuts. He identified passages he found especially effective, such as the second verse paragraph of part III, by scrawling ‘echt’ (meaning veritable, real) in the margin, and worked to lift the entire manuscript up to that standard. Pound chided Eliot when he used the word ‘perhaps’: ‘Dam per’apsez,’ he wrote in his idiosyncratic phonetic diction. He knew that this poem needed to resonate with clear, crisp certainties, not equivocation. And again, when Eliot wrote what is now line 251 (‘Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass’) in a less definitive mode (‘Across her brain one half-formed thought may pass’) Pound responded, ‘make up yr. mind.’ Pound nurtured the poem’s clear, definitive voice, which he educed from a much more tentative draft—and Eliot’s initial hesitations and uncertainties are completely understandable considering his tenuous mental and emotional condition during the first stage of composition.
    Pound had also a strong sense of what the poem’s style and meter should look like: its distinctive, hard, harsh sound and prosody emerged out of an earlier version that was more muddled and varied in style. ‘Too loose,’ he wrote by one passage, and ‘rhyme drags it out to diffuseness’ in another (both of which were cut: Eliot followed Pound’s suggestions faithfully).
    A few other interesting cuts and developments in the manuscript include an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness— the passage that conveys Kurtz’s dying words—that was brilliantly apropos but, as Eliot and Pound presumably realized, too heavy-handed : superfluous. Indeed, we hear ‘The horror! the horror!’ in The Waste Land all the more clearly, and hauntingly, for the effacement of this epigraph. Part IV, ‘Death by Water,’ a tight, condensed, Imagist concentration of Phlebas the Phoenician’s travail in the finished version, was at first a grueling, detailed sea narrative. Reading the manuscript, one appreciates that it was an important developmental effort for Eliot to have sketched out the entire fateful journey, but ultimately the keener effect was achieved when he jettisoned the long buildup and left only the quiet, slightly surreal, yet soothing denouement.
    There was one other person besides Pound who helped to shape the poem: In the margin of the draft, Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, wrote one phrase that appears in the final poem (slightly modified) as line 164: She placed an asterisk in the margin next to the passage about Lil and Albert and then wrote at the bottom of the page: ‘What you get married for if you don’t want to have children?’ This line is central to the poem in so many ways: Barrenness and the danger of a so ciety’s failure or inability to perpetuate itself in a harsh, hostile world is a prominent theme. Line 164 suggests that perhaps this failure is volitional: Are people actively choosing not to have children? Is there something about modern marriage and sexual-emotional relationships that is so dysfunctionally noncommunicative as to forestall reproduction? (Think of all the miscues and retreats in ‘Prufrock,’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night,’ and the sexual torpor, or terror, or inertia, of the Sweeney poems and ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Lune de Miel.’)
    Marriage and childbearing evoke the fusion (or here, the disjunction) between the social and the biological aspects of the most fundamental unit of society, the family. As Lil awaits her husband Albert’s return from the military and cultural devastation of the Great War, her friends in a pub discuss her readiness (or unreadiness) for the reunion. She needs