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A review by aleffert
The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose by T.S. Eliot
5.0
The Waste Land is a super phenomenal poem. I say this knowing almost nothing about poetry, so I guess take that with a grain of salt, but the Literary Establishment seems to agree with me. It is full of wonderful lines and evocative imagery. It is weird and haunting. It is also incomprehensible. This annotated edition doesn't really help with that. I'm pretty sure that the poem is meant to be hopelessly obscure and is basically Eliot showing off. But the annotations do at least explain the content of what Eliot is talking about if not the form. It turns out basically every third line is a reference to something or other and it is quite nice to see what he's referring to, the bits not in english, doubly so. They're much better than Eliot's own annotations, which are also included in this edition and are mostly useless and occasionally deliberately obfuscatory.
The book's introduction provides a lot of background on the construction of the poem, mostly on the chronology side and less on the insightful side. It spends a lot of time talking about how much Eliot ended up getting paid for the poem and its publishing history, which I guess is interesting in a boring sort of way. Between the introduction and the collection of miscellaneous writings that follow the poem you get the impression of Eliot as a mild curmudgeon. You also get an impression of Ezra Pound, who edited the Waste Land, as a kindly guardian angel of poetry. Since both Eliot and Pound were bitter depressive anti-semites, I feel like it gave me false impression On the other hand, that information is easy enough to find on wikipedia.
Anyway, the poem is great. The edition is great. Eliot and Pound are jerks.
The book's introduction provides a lot of background on the construction of the poem, mostly on the chronology side and less on the insightful side. It spends a lot of time talking about how much Eliot ended up getting paid for the poem and its publishing history, which I guess is interesting in a boring sort of way. Between the introduction and the collection of miscellaneous writings that follow the poem you get the impression of Eliot as a mild curmudgeon. You also get an impression of Ezra Pound, who edited the Waste Land, as a kindly guardian angel of poetry. Since both Eliot and Pound were bitter depressive anti-semites, I feel like it gave me false impression On the other hand, that information is easy enough to find on wikipedia.
Anyway, the poem is great. The edition is great. Eliot and Pound are jerks.