Analysis Of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a complex and fragmented poem that underwent major revisions before it was published in 1922. The published version we see and read today is actually shorter in comparison to what Eliot had originally written. According to James Torrens’s article “The Hidden Years if the Waste Land Manuscript,” Eliot had mailed “54 pages of The Waste Land, including the unused parts” to John Quinn, a “corporation lawyer in New York City,” which had shortly disappeared after Quinn’s death in July of 1924 (Cuddy 60). Eliot’s lost pages were not uncovered until the early 1950s (Ford`) In 1971, a facsimile of the original drafts of “The Waste Land”, edited by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, was published and revealed how much the poem was edited and compressed by Eliot along with Ezra Pound,
He actually began the third section with seventy-two lines of rhyming couplets describing a lady named Fresca. According to the editorial notes in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, the opening passage (see figure 2) that Eliot initially written was in imitation of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (Eliot 127). When in reading this passage I found myself confused and unsure of what exactly Eliot was trying to convey within the seventy lines. As seen in figure 2, the stanzas have a red line through them indicating Pound’s suggestion of removing the passage from the poem. In Richard Ellmann’s article “The First Waste Land,” he writes how Pound advised Eliot “that since Pope had done the couplets better…there was no point in another round” therefore leading to the removal of the seventy-two lines and replacing them with the published version where the section opens with the vivid description of a dry, cold, and garbage cover (Cuddy