Writing

Abstract

Abstract It is tremendously important that great poetry be written, it makes no jot of difference who writes it. —Ezra Pound (1954, p. 10) When the young American poet T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922— while still only 24 years old—it won him an international reputation. The Waste Land has no plot, but is instead a loosely connected series of images that capture the disillusionment and disgust at the death and destruction caused by World War I. The disconnected organization of the poem reflects the fragmented and confused nature of modern urban life. Eliot later proved that he was no one-shot wonder; he had a long, productive, and influential career in the decades after this first great success, capped with a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Most of us assume that Eliot created The Waste Land. After all, his name is on the title page, and he was the one who cashed the check for the royalties. And after all, isn’t poetry one of the most solitary, private forms of creativity? Not in this case. The Waste Land was a collaborative creation; two other poets significantly modified Eliot’s first typed manuscript: his friend and colleague Ezra Pound, and his wife, Vivien Eliot.