‘These fragments you have shelved (shored)’: Pound, Eliot and The Waste Land

Abstract

The completion of The Waste Land in the winter of 1921–22 has long been acknowledged as the crucial moment in the Pound/ Eliot relationship. It was Pound, rather than the ‘excessively depressed’ Eliot, who saw the poem as ‘the justification of “the movement”, of our modem experiment since 1900’.³ Until the award of the Dial prize, Eliot endorsed Pound’s valuation: ‘I think it is the best I have ever done, and Pound thinks so too’, he wrote to John Quinn on 25 June 1922, but by 15 November he was speaking of it as ‘a thing of the past so far as I am concerned’.⁴ His notorious disclaimers (‘their illusion of being disillusioned’; ‘rhythmical grumbling’; ‘a personal grouse’; ‘bogus scholarship’; ‘just as structureless, only a more futile way’)⁵ are scattered across the following decades, punctuated, from 1933 onwards, by tributes to Pound’s editing of the manuscript.

Pound is that curious thing, a person without a trace of originality of any sort. It is impossible even to imagine him being any one in particular of all the people he has translated, interpreted, appreciated…. By himself he would seem to have neither any convictions nor eyes in his head…. Yet when he can get into the skin of somebody else… he becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot.

Wyndham Lewis¹

And it was evident that the writers did not resent the puzzle they thought I had set them — they liked it. Indeed, though they were unconscious of the fact, they invented the puzzle for the pleasure of discovering the solution.

T. S. Eliot²