Well, the fate of that manuscript or typescript with his blue-pencillings on it is one of the permanent-so far as I know-minor mysteries of literature.”Īsked by Donald Hall, “Did the excisions change the intellectual structure of the poem?” TSE replied: “No. And there was also a long passage about a shipwreck which I think was inspired by the Ulysses canto in Dante’s Inferno. It contained some stanzas in imitation of Pope, and Ezra said to me: ‘Pope’s done that so well that you’d better not try to compete with him.’ Which was sound advice. I think that the poem as originally written was about twice the length. When Leslie Paul asked about Pound’s revisions of The Waste Land, TSE explained: “He cut out a lot of dead matter. As a masterpiece of critical literature.)” (I wish that the manuscript of THE WASTELAND with Ezra’s criticisms and still more important, his excisions, thank God he reduced a mess of some eight hundred lines to about half its size, might some day be exhumed. The extent of Pound’s editorial work on The Waste Land had been made public when part of a letter from TSE to Ford Madox Ford () appeared in a pamphlet, The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Some Testimonies, which Farrar & Rinehart used in 1933 as publicity for their American edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos: “I owe too much to Ezra to be a critic.

But as for the poetry of “the early Pound,” there are only three or four original pieces that have made any deep impression upon me and the Pound whom I find congenial is the author of Mauberley, Propertius, and the Cantos. My greatest debt was for his improvement of The Waste Land. Pound left England, and our meetings became infrequent. This indebtedness extends from 1915 to 1922, after which period Mr. Mario Praz) and second, in his criticism of my poetry in our talk, and his indications of desirable territories to explore. My indebtedness to Pound is of two kinds: first, in my literary criticism (this debt has been pointed out by Mr. I considered them, however, the only interesting poems by a contemporary that I had found. The poems did not then excite me, any more than did the poetry of Yeats: I was too much engrossed in working out the implications of Laforgue.

Stonier’s knowledge of literary events before 1918 or so is at secondhand, since he speaks of The Egoist as having succeeded Blast.) I was introduced to Personae and Exultations in 1910, while still an undergraduate at Harvard. Stonier is mistaken, both about my relations with Pound in the past, and about my valuation of the different periods of Pound’s poetry-if, that is, I have understood Mr. Tinckom-Fernandez wrote to Harford Powel: “I like to recall that I introduced him to the poetry of Ezra Pound in College.” TSE’s recollection in On a Recent Piece of Criticism (1938) confirms that he came across Pound’s work at that time:

Ts eliot the wasteland