Eliot Among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land

Abstract

To students of twentieth-century modernism, 1971 was the year when Valerie Eliot published a facsimile edition of The Waste Land’s pre-publication manuscripts. The event invited new accounts of the poem’s genetics and fresh assessments of how those might bear on our understanding of the poem.1 One year later Hugh Kenner and Grover Smith published two essays which, while differing sharply in premises and procedures, reached a consensus that Part III, “The Fire Sermon,” was the earliest portion of the poem to have been written, probably around midsummer 1921, followed first by Parts I and II, then by IV and V, the latter completed in December 1921.2 Their efforts were followed in 1977 by Lyndall Gordon’s attempt at “Dating The Waste Land Fragments,” a wide-ranging survey which addressed both the principal parts of The Waste Land and the various drafts and ancillary poems.3 In the end, however, Gordon remained divided over the claims of two sharply incompatible hypotheses for dating the principal parts of The Waste Land, and concluded that the question was, at least for the present, “unresolved” (“DTWLF,” 146). In 1979 there was still another consideration of the dating by Peter Barry.4 Barry urged a complicated chronology which assigned priority to the first leaf in the typescript for Part I, a passage recounting a rowdy night on the town in Boston (assigned to April–May 1921), followed by all of Part III (September–October), then the rest of Part I and all of Part II (early November), and finally Parts IV Lawrence Rainey, founding editor of Modernism/Modernity, has written Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (1991) and Institutions of Modernism (1999). His monograph Revisiting The Waste Land and his edition of The Annotated Waste Land, with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose will both appear in April 2005 (Yale University Press).