The Waste Land T.S. Eliot

Background

While at Harvard College Eliot met Emily Hale, the daughter of a minister at Harvard Divinity School, through family friends. He declared his love for her before leaving to live in Europe in 1914, but he did not believe his feelings to be reciprocated.[8][9] Her influence is felt in The Waste Land, and he would renew his correspondence with her in 1927.[10][11]

Eliot married his first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood[B] in 1915, having been introduced to her earlier that year by Scofield Thayer.[13] She had a history of mental illness, and it is not clear to what extent Eliot knew about this before the wedding.[14] The marriage had a shaky start: Eliot appears to have had certain neuroses concerning sex and sexuality, perhaps evinced by the women featured in his poetry, and there is speculation that the two were not sexually compatible.[15] In late 1915 Vivienne began to suffer from "nerves" or "acute neuralgia", an illness which undoubtedly bore a mental component. Their friend Bertrand Russell took her to the seaside town of Torquay to recuperate; Eliot took Russell's place after a week, and the couple walked the shore, which Eliot found tranquil.[16] Once back in London, Vivienne was left bored and unoccupied while Eliot worked fourteen or fifteen hours a day, and in 1918 had a brief affair with Russell; it is not known if Eliot was aware of this.[17] Eliot himself, under strain from his heavy workload, concern about his father's health, and the stress of the ongoing war, was also suffering from poor health, to the extent that his doctor had ordered him not to write prose for six months.[18] In the succeeding years both experienced periods of depression, with Eliot being constantly exhausted and Vivienne experiencing migraines.[19] 1921 saw Eliot be diagnosed with a nervous disorder and prescribed three months of rest, a period which precipitated the writing of The Waste Land.[20]

Eliot had worked as a schoolteacher from 1915–1916, resigning in the hope of making a living from lecturing and literary reviews.[21] He was obliged, however, to take a job at Lloyds Bank in March 1917, earning a salary of £270 in 1918 for a role interpreting the balance sheets of foreign banks. He would work at the bank for the next nine years.[22] He began to work as an assistant editor of literary magazine The Egoist on the side, his salary of £9 per quarter partly financed by John Quinn, Ezra Pound's patron.[23] Eliot also began to write on a freelance basis for The Athenaeum and The Times Literary Supplement in 1919, which built his reputation as a respected critic and journalist.[24]

While living in London Eliot became acquainted with literary figures, most notably Pound in 1914, who would help publish Eliot's work and edit The Waste Land.[25] Eliot also met Aldous Huxley and Katherine Mansfield, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in London in 1916, although he did not meet Leonard and Virginia Woolf until two years later.[26]

Eliot's first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917 thanks to the efforts of Pound. Publishers were not confident in its success, and it was published by Harriet Shaw Weaver of The Egoist only with funding provided by Pound's wife Dorothy, although Eliot was unaware of this arrangement. It generated very little interest until after the publication of The Waste Land, and did not sell its initial run of 500 copies until 1922.[27] Poems was published in 1919 by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, again having been turned down by several other publishers.[28] By 1920 Eliot had established himself as a reputed critic, and the publication of Ara Vos Prec and the US publication of Poems generated notable press coverage.[29] His 1920 collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, met with mixed reviews, and Eliot felt it should have been revised further.[30]

Writing

Eliot probably worked on the text that became The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In 1919 he referred to "a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time" in a letter to his mother.[31] In a May 1921 letter to New York lawyer and art patron John Quinn, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish".[32]

Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that "a year or so" before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot visited him in the country.[33] While walking through a graveyard, they discussed Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success."[33]

In the autumn of 1921 Eliot and Vivienne travelled to the coastal resort of Margate.[34] Eliot had been recommended rest following a diagnosis of some form of nervous disorder, and had been granted three months' leave from the bank where he was employed, so the trip was intended as a period of convalescence. Eliot worked on what would become The Waste Land while sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter on Margate Sands, producing "some 50 lines", and the area is referenced directly in "The Fire Sermon" ("On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.")[35][36] The couple travelled to Paris in November, where Eliot showed an early version of the poem to Pound.[37] Pound had become acquainted with Eliot seven years previously, and had helped get some of Eliot's previous work published.[38] Eliot was travelling on to Lausanne for treatment by Dr Roger Vittoz, who had been recommended to him by Ottoline Morrell;[35][39] Vivienne was to stay at a sanatorium just outside Paris.[37] While under Vittoz's care, Eliot completed the first draft of The Waste Land.[40]

Editing

Eliot returned from Switzerland to Paris in early January 1922 with the 19-page draft version of the poem; his treatment with Dr Vittoz proved to have been very successful, at least in the short term.[41][42] Eliot and Pound proceeded to edit the poem further, continuing after Eliot returned to London.[43][44] The editing process removed a large amount of content. Eliot allowed Pound a high degree of control over the shape and contents of the final version, deferring to his judgement on matters such as using Eliot's previous poem "Gerontion" as a prelude, or using an excerpt from the death of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness as the epigraph (Pound rejected both of these ideas).[45] Biographer Peter Ackroyd considers Pound's focus to have been on "the underlying rhythm of the poem ... Pound heard the music, and cut away what was for him the extraneous material which was attached to it."[46] By removing much of Eliot's material, Pound allowed for readers to more freely interpret it as a less structured and didactic work, and his edits are generally considered to have been beneficial.[47][48]

Vivienne also reviewed drafts of The Waste Land.[49] The section "A Game of Chess" partly depicts scenes from the Eliots' marriage,[49] although at her request a specific line was removed – "The ivory men make company between us" – perhaps because she found the depiction of their unhappy marriage too painful.[50][51] In 1960, thirteen years after Vivienne's death, Eliot inserted the line from memory into a fair copy made for sale to aid the London Library.[52]

In a late December 1921 letter to Eliot to celebrate the "birth" of the poem, Pound wrote a bawdy poem of 48 lines entitled "Sage Homme" in which he identified Eliot as the mother of the poem but compared himself to the midwife.[53] The first lines are:

These are the poems of Eliot By the Uranian Muse begot; A Man their Mother was, A Muse their Sire. How did the printed Infancies result From Nuptials thus doubly difficult? If you must needs enquire Know diligent Reader That on each Occasion Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.

Publication

Negotiations over the publication of The Waste Land started in January 1922 and lasted until the late summer.[54] Horace Liveright, of the New York publishing firm of Boni & Liveright, had a number of meetings with Pound while in Paris, and at a dinner on 3 January 1922, with Pound, Eliot and James Joyce, he made offers for The Waste Land, Ulysses, and works by Pound.[55] Eliot was to receive a royalty of 15% for a book version of the poem planned for autumn publication,[56] although Liveright was concerned that the work was too short.[57] Eliot was still under contract with his previous publisher Alfred Knopf, which gave Knopf the rights to Eliot's next two books, but in April Eliot managed to secure a release from that agreement.[54]

Eliot also sought a deal with magazines. He had become friends with Scofield Thayer, editor of literary magazine The Dial, while at Milton Academy and Harvard College, and Eliot had offered the poem to Thayer for publication shortly after returning from Lausanne in January.[58] Even though The Dial offered $150 (approx. £30–35) for the poem, 25% more than its standard rate, Eliot was offended that a year's work would be valued so low, especially since he knew that George Moore had been paid £100 for a short story.[59] The deal with The Dial almost fell through (other magazines considered were The Little Review and Vanity Fair),[60] but with Quinn's efforts eventually an agreement was reached where, in addition to the $150, Eliot would be awarded The Dial's second annual prize for outstanding service to letters, which carried an award of $2,000.[61][62]

In New York, in late summer, Boni & Liveright made an agreement with The Dial allowing the magazine to be the first to publish the poem in the US, on the condition that they purchase 350 copies of the book at discount (increasing the cost to The Dial by $315).[63] Eliot suggested that the "possibility of the book's getting the prize" might allow Boni & Liveright to use the publicity increase their initial sales.[64]

The poem was first published in the UK in the first issue (16 October 1922) of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the US in the November issue of The Dial (actually published around 20 October).[65] Eliot had initially suggested spreading the poem over four issues of The Dial, having doubts about its coherence as a single piece, and had considered publishing it across two issues of The Criterion in order to improve sales, but Pound objected.[66] In December the Boni & Liveright book edition was published in the US, with an initial run of 1,000 copies and, very soon afterwards, a second edition, also of 1,000 copies.[66] The first book edition was the first publication to print Eliot's accompanying notes, which he had added to pad the piece out and thereby address Liveright's concerns about its length.[65][67] In September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by Eliot's friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land in a run of approximately 460 copies.[68] Eliot, whose 1922 annual salary at Lloyds Bank was £500 ($2,215),[69] made approximately £630 ($2,800) with The Dial, Boni & Liveright, and Hogarth Press publications.[70]

Eliot sent the original manuscript drafts of the poem as a gift to John Quinn, believing it to be worthwhile to preserve the effects of Pound's editing; they arrived in New York in January 1923.[71] Upon Quinn's death in 1924 they were inherited by his sister Julia Anderson, and for many years they were believed lost. In the early 1950s Mrs Anderson's daughter Mary Conroy found the documents in storage. In 1958 she sold them privately to the New York Public Library. It was not until April 1968, three years after Eliot's death, that the existence and whereabouts of the manuscript drafts were made known to Valerie Eliot, his second wife.[72] In 1971 a facsimile of the original drafts was published, containing Pound's annotations, edited and annotated by Valerie Eliot.[73]

Initial reception

The initial reviews of the poem were mixed.[74] Some critics disparaged its disjointed structure, and suggested that its extensive use of quotations gave it a sense of unoriginality.[75] F. L. Lucas wrote a particularly negative review in the New Statesman, stating that "Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all";[76] The Guardian published a review calling it "waste paper",[77] and the London Mercury considered it incomprehensible.[78] William Carlos Williams considered it to have had a negative influence on American literature, writing that it had "set [him] back twenty years".[78]

Gilbert Seldes, who first published the poem in the US, and Pound, its editor, both defended it, as did Conrad Aiken, who described it in a 1923 review as "one of the most moving and original poems of our time",[79] although he found the form incoherent.[80] Seldes commissioned a review from Edmund Wilson, which was positive, and other admirers included E. M. Forster and Cyril Connolly.[75][81] Contemporary poets and young writers responded to the poem's modern style and content, a mini-phenomenon later described as "a cult of 'The Waste Landers' ".[81]

Subsequent reviews and criticism debated the value of some of Eliot's innovations. His notes and quotations were one source of disagreement: they were considered either "distracting or confusing if not pedantic and unpoetic", or "the very basis of a new and significant poetic technique".[82] Similarly, the structure of the poem, or lack thereof, continued to generate debate, as did interpretations of the themes themselves.[82] I. A. Richards praised Eliot on these points in his 1926 book Principles of Literary Criticism,[83] describing his imagery technique as "a 'music of ideas'",[84] and in the 1930s Richards' commentary was taken further by F. R. Leavis, F. O. Matthiessen and Cleanth Brooks, who believed that, despite its apparent disjointedness, the poem contains an underlying unity of form—for Leavis represented by the figure of Tiresias, and for Matthiessen and Brooks by the Grail mythology.[85] This view became dominant for the next three decades.[86]