THE WASTE LAND by T.S. ELIOT

The first mention of The Waste Land occurs in a letter that Eliot wrote to John Quinn, the Nev York attorney and art collector, on 5 November 1919.Writing to his mother on 18 December he confided that his New Year's resolution was to write a long poem that he had had on his mind for a long time, On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Eliot, on the advice of a specialist, went to Margate, a seaside resort on the north-east coast of Kent, during October-November 1921, and thence to Lausanne, Switzerland. The Waste Land was composed partly at Margate, but mostly in Lausanne. Early in January 1922, Eliot, on the way back to London, stopped over in Paris and submitted the manuscript or the poem to Pound, who made extensive excisions and revisions, besides supplying the poem's title. A few alterations were also made at the suggestion or Vivien, Eliot's first wife. The poem was published in The Criterion in October 1922 and in The Dial (New York) in November 1922. It was published in book form by Boni and Liver fight New York), with notes supplied by Eliot,in 1992. The manuscripts of the poem along with those of some others passed into the hands of Joh Quinn and for many years was believed lost. Rediscovered in 1968 , it is now the Berg Collection of the new York Public Library by Faber in 1971.

For a long time it had been surmised that Pound's editing, had eliminated the logical connections in the Poem. But the original manuscript supplies evidence to the contrary.

Exhaustion owing to overwork, and emotional strain arising from his marriage to a mentally unstable person, had apparently produced a consciousness that was immensely conducive to creative work. The poem was composed without the usual process of gestation and rewriting. The .outcome was a long, sprawling poem of about one thousand lines. Pound made extensive deletions and altered 'many inert lines and expressions, retaining however, the final section, ' What the Thunder Said ' in its present form. Generally speaking, the poem benefited, immensely from Pound's editing, as Eliot himself warmly acknowledged. Despite its comparative brevity—it now has ' only 434 lines—Pound called it the longest poem in the English language .oWing to- its density and concentration of meaning.

The Waste Land represents Eliot's reaction against discursive poetry. It is not merely a structure of discourse from which certain links have been left out but a selection and organization of images to express deep hi felt truths.

The title of the poem evokes associations with vegetation imaginative myths and folklore which assert that the sterility of the land is due to the impotence of its ruler. Both can be cured by the questioning knight asking the tight questions at a ritual.

The central thesis of From Ritual to Romance (1920) is than medieval Grail romances arc derived from vegetation the cults. The Grail, the sacred vessel used during the Lat Supper and the lance that was used to pierce the side of Jesus after his crucifixion, arc identified by Weston with female and male fertility symbols. Eliot was particularly indebted to her for the myth of the Fisher King, of North European origin. According to Jessie Weston, the Fisher King was ruler of a land that .was blighted by an evil spell that rendered him impotent too. Only a questing knight of fabulous virtue and courage would be able to free the land and the Fisher King of the evil spell by getting the answers to a series of ritual questions.

In addition to the obvious borrowings, Eliot most probably derived the notion of the essential connection between sexual sterility and cultural malaise from Jessie Weston and Sir James Frazer. The mythological framework enables the poet to present our contemporary state of spiritual aridity as the modern waste land and points to the possibility of its transformation and redemption.

The epigraph: ' For once I myself saw with my own eyes

 the Sibyl at Clumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her, " Sibyl, what do you want ?" 'she replied, " I want to die." ' These words arc quoted from the Satyricon of the Roman writer Petronius Arbiter (1st C'entury A.D.). They arc spoken by the drunken Trimalchio, at an ostentatious feast hosted by him. 'rho most famous of the sibyls ,the Cumaean conducted Aeneas through Hades in Virgil's Aeneid. Apollo granted her immortality without 'perpetual youth and she withered into old age. In the Waste Land prophecy has dwindled into fortune telling. cf. Madame Sosostris.

Ezra Pound: (1885-1972), American expatriate Poet Nigh helped Eliot publish Prufrock.' A key figure ° in the modernist movement in English poetry, he carried out extensive revisions of the drafts of the poem. In tok en of his appreciation, Eliot dedicated the poem to him.

Il miglior fabbro: ' the greater craftsman,' words (in Italian) with which Dante hails . the troubadour (aristocratic poet minstrels of Provence, in Southern France) Provencal artist Arnaut Daniel in Purgatory (Dante, Purgatory, XXVI, I17): ...the phrase, not , only as used by Dante, but as quoted by myself,. had a precise meaning. I did not mean to imply that Pound was only that: but I wished at that moment to honour the technkal mastery and critical ability manifest in his own work, which had also done so much to turn The Waste Land from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem.' (T. S. Eliot). The poem was first published without the dedication. Eliot had these words inscribed in a presentation copy to Pound. Later they were used when the poem was reprinted in Poems 1909-192 (1925).