The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot, if not this century's greatest poem in English, is certainly its most famous. Long, difficult and often enigmatic, it is full of quotations. It flits into parodies of other men's poems and prose, and is widely quoted, often unconsciously by some people who may think that the title, which has passed into the language, means a vacant lot. The poem is taught in English-lit classes, and could be called the Odyssey or the Divine Comedy of the pre-Ginsberg generation.
In ways too obscure or subtle to analyze, this great work, written in 1922, vibrated like a tuning fork to the pitch of high-strung post-World War I survivors. They were the generation who responded with masochistic enthusiasm to the question, "Who would have thought Death had undone so many?" and who liked to be told elsewhere that they were "hollow men, the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw."
Like a land mine under a cathedral, the original manuscript of The Waste Land has been hidden at the New York Public Library. Only a few people have known that it is there. Eliot himself believed it to be lost, and is thought to have hoped for oblivion for it. It was exploded last week with the publication of a biography of an avant-garde patron, New York Lawyer John Quinn. He owned the Eliot document, and his estate turned the material over to the library. It will take many sabbatical years of the Eliotian scholastic industry to measure the full meaning of the work.
The initial blast was the revelation that The Waste Land was originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices. There is no clue to what Eliot meant by this unfortunate title. An off-the-cuff guess is that Eliot was alluding obscurely to cockney slang or to a vaudeville routine. Another speculation is that this was a working subtitle expressing Eliot's preoccupation with authority: one of the main theological theorems of The Waste Land is that God, who utters words like datta (give) and shantih (the peace that passes all understanding), speaks neither sense nor English but, like men, in many voices and even in bad grammar.
The famous dedication of The Waste Land is "For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro," which even nonscholars of Italian can figure out to mean "the better craftsman." In this context, "craftsman" means "editor." It is well known that Eliot's great friend Poet Ezra Pound had been a severe editor who cajoled, bullied or advised Eliot to cut out half of what Pound described, with characteristically inaccurate flamboyance, "the longest poem in the English langwidge" (434 lines in the final version). A facsimile edition of Eliot's first draft, riddled with Pound's penciled comments, will be published in September 1969. Until that time, the draft, with other notes and the unpublished manuscript, will remain encapsulated: the New York Public Library has declined to allow scholars or journalists to do more than inspect (without taking notes) a few pages selected from its hoard.