The Waste Land Manuscript

Abstract

m HE MANUSCRIPT OF The Waste Land was a hoard of fragments, accumulated slowly over seven and a half years. Only in the seventh year did the hoard assume the proportions of a major work. The earliest fragments, which go back to T. S. Eliot's last years as a student, show a different bias from the poem that emerged in the autumn and winter of I92I-22. It is curious to read The Waste Land in terms of the rather scrappy but emphatic vision from which it evolved and certain persistent notions that were edited or obscured only at the last moment. In order to trace the growth of The Waste Land through all the stages of its composition, first grouped the fragments according to the different batches of paper Eliot used and then established a chronological order by means of a variety of clues, many of which were provided by Valerie Eliot's clear and well-annotated facsimile edition of the manuscript.' At the age of twenty-six, when Eliot was still at Harvard and living in an Ash Street attic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he wrote three visionary fragments (pp. io8-iI5) on the same quadruled paper, punched for filing.2 All three are concerned with revelation and its aftermath: the attractions and problems of or conversion. Two fragments, After the turning and So through the evening, foreshadow the climactic scene in the completed Waste Land, the dangerous initiating journey to the deserted chapel in the mountains. In the third, a voice speaks to Eliot, infusing him with divine power: I am the Resurrection and the Life ... It is easy to dismiss these earliest fragments in the manuscript as inelegant scraps Eliot sensibly discarded, but together they an-