THE WASTE LAND: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.

Second printing. Publisher's original blue cloth with gilt titles at the spine, in dustwrapper. With reproductions of pages from Eliot's manuscript throughout. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents, with the ownership name of James Booth (former Professor of English at the University of Hull and the biographer, editor and former colleague of Philip Larkin) in pencil on the title page, are otherwise clean throughout. Complete with the rubbed and creased original dustwrapper which is a little marked. Not price-clipped (£6 on the front flap).

"When the New York Public Library announced in October 1968 that its Berg Collection contained the original manuscript of 'The Waste Land' which T. S. Eliot had sent to John Quinn exactly 46 years before (in October 1922), one of the most puzzling mysteries connected with twentieth-century literature was solved. It was thought that the manuscript had disappeared; Eliot himself never knew what had happened to it after Quinn's death [...]. The interest of the manuscript lies in the material that was discarded [...] when the poem was finally published and in the notes made upon it not only by Ezra Pound but by Eliot himself and by his first wife" (from the jacket). The transcript was prepared with meticulous care by Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow, who also provides notes and cross-references. Laid out with the facsimile and transcript on facing pages, with Eliot's corrections and annotations printed in black, Pound's in red, and Vivien Eliot's additions printed in italics, the finished poem is printed following the drafts. "The publication of 'The Waste Land' in facsimile, as it was handed to Pound in January 1922, displays how a "piece of rhythmical grumbling" and largely topical satire was transformed by Eliot's own alterations and by Pound's drastic surgery into a poem that seemed to its first readers impersonally expressive of a whole post-war generation. [...] It is impossible to praise too highly the work of the printer, Vivian Ridler, in presenting the facsimile and transcript, and the skill of Mrs Eliot in transcribing the often extremely confused and at times virtually illegible witness of the drafts." (Helen Gardner in the 'New Statesman', July 1 1971)

Stock code: 24940

£35

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Published:

London: Faber and Faber.
1972

Category

Poetry
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