Hi, Desmond,
<<
The first draft came out on McRumens GU blog, when sporting with Carol late
last year. And there's still a few mistakes, an 'a' here and there that was
missed out and causes a timy judder.
>>
If you're still correcting, you might want to change this:
"the potential gibberish was salvaged by Pound, who the dedication by Eliot
reads when trasnlated from the Greek - 'the better craftsmen'."
-- it was Italian, not Greek, "Il miglior fabrio" (if I remember correctly).
Dante in the Divine Comedy, referring to Guido Cavalcanti, or someone.
Your whole post raises the interesting question of whether we're all a bit
too glib in ascribing the authorship of "The Waste Land" to Eliot, in the
sense that some of the things of interest about it -- the jump cuts and
register jumping -- might be a result (an artifact?) of Pound's editing.
This might tie in with how it's really uncharacteristic of the rest of
Eliot's poetry. Even the way reference is used, where you *have to know the
source for the text quoted or referred to, to make sense of the poem (rather
than a knowledge of the source adding to what we read), is more
characteristic of Pound in e.g. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" than Eliot elsewhere.
There's also the existence of the original MS, with Pound's annotations and
cuts, that Eliot's widow published a few years ago. Anyone seen this? I
haven't myself, which says something about my interest in "The Waste Land".
Comes down to it, I find Prufrock a lot more interesting. I chased the
original drafts for this, in The March Hare Notebooks, trying to disentangle
the American and English strands in the poem, when I couldn't be bothered to
look at the original draft of "The Waste Land".
Robin
<<
If you want a laugh, I'm going to start another thread linking to Todd
Swift's first Guest Blogger post, of a week long residency, on the Best
American Poetry blog, in which he is presenting a 'roll call of the 'best'
25 young British poets writing today, for an American audience.
http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/04/the-young-british-poets-by-todd-swift.html
>>
Yikes!! I just began to look at this -- the second and third paragraphs
have to be parodic. Or is this man serious?
"Charles Bernstein and John Ashbery are coterie poets here, read by few and
feared by most who do read them – let alone Hart Crane or William Carlos
Williams."
Is he *really saying, as that 'let alone' implies, that Brits are more
familiar with Bernstein and Ashbery than Crane and WCW? Or is it just
clumsy phrasing? Ashbery *might possibly (now) be better known here than
Hart Crane, but Bernstein better known than Carlos Williams? I find this
just a tad unlikely.
R.
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