Just finished .. not just ‘reading’ it but experiencing it, journeying into it … an epic encounter with a truly epic poem. Diolch Matthew. I’ve always been fascinated by the friendship between TSE and Ezra Pound and the latter’s role in the poem.

Matthew was born in Norwich 1971 – he was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber from 2012 to 2023. His second collection, called ‘Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023 and was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023.

The ‘designer’ cover of my 2003 copy of TWL (& Other Poems)

I like this cover – very original. I think Ezra Pound would approve! Vanessa Willoughby: The poem’s final form was heavily influenced by Ezra Pound, who made extensive cuts and revisions to Eliot’s manuscript. Eliot once said of his mentor and friend, who he first met in 1914 in Europe, “Mr. Pound is more responsible for the 20th‐century revolution in poetry than is any other individual.”

T S Eliot: © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Ezra Pound: By Ezra Pound, from New Directions Pub. acting as agent, copyright © 2015 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Berg Collection: © The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature The New York Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

If Eliot is the poem’s mother, then perhaps Pound was right to claim the role of obstetrician:
“If you must needs enquire
Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.”

Quote from Ezra Pound’s “Sage Homme,” a poem included in his 24 December 1921, letter to T.S. Eliot celebrating The Waste Land.

Tyler Malone writes: The evidence of Pound’s contributions hasn’t much altered the mythos surrounding the text one way or the other. Some still diminish Pound’s contributions, and others oversell them. Decades after the publication, an English professor in a graduate seminar I took referred to The Waste Land as “the best poem Ezra Pound ever wrote.”