Chekhov’s Mistess

Wasteland Not Planned, Professor Says

I wrote not long ago about Lawrence Rainey’s revisits to the Wasteland, so to whet your appetite further (or to convince you this is the perfect gift for a hardworking litblogger), here’s a bit from the Guardian on his conclusions:

Prof Rainey argues in Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ that Eliot wrote the poem between January 1921, and January 1922, and that the poet did not follow a plan in its composition. Instead, Eliot improvised to stitch together more than 50 drafts.


“When The Waste Land was published, its defenders insisted that the poem was planned from the beginning and that it was a poem of extraordinary unity. Now that we can trace the processes and the choices that Eliot is making, the poem turns out to be something quite different,” Prof Rainey said.


“You can see him making false starts and because he writes in tiny units of 13 lines at a stretch he is then left with the problem of how to stitch them together. You can see that he uses incredibly obvious choices to do that.


”The Waste Land was not a seamless whole, but something more radical. It is, at once, wild and unruly, violent and shocking and yet deeply compassionate,“ he added.

It seems that Rainey went to great lengths to uncover the truth of Eliot’s patchwork:

FBI agents Bill Brown and David Attenberg gave the professor copies of the transparent templates the agency uses to identify makes of typewriters, and he used a micrometer to measure the thickness of every sheet of paper, as well as recording their height, width, watermarks, chainlines and other properties. He was able to date and to reconstruct the poem’s composition.

I haven’t seen any in-depth refutals (or support) of Rainey’s work, but it would be interesting to see what the smarties are saying if anyone out there has read any other articles on this.

Thanks to Mr. Champion for the link.

Read widely, think well, and write often

Technorati Tags: T.S. Eliot, Wasteland

comments

”’The Waste Land’ was not a seamless whole...” Wait! Stop the presses. The modernist masterpiece that celebrates the fragments is, in itself, fragmentary? I’m sorry, but this makes me a little cynical. I’m an admirer of Rainey’s work--although it’s a little dogged for me a lot of the time--and I think the composition history of the poem worthy of the kind of intense scrutiny he seems to have given it. However, it would be more interesting if the conclusion had a little more substance to it. Of course, dogged historical and textual research is, I suppose, its own reward and tends not to attract folks who want firework-y hypotheses. A more promising angle, perhaps, is in that word “improvise”: the jazz angle on “The Waste Land” is an interesting one (that’s been written about by others).

    – Anne (06/23  at  02:05 PM)

Thanks for the perspective, Anne. For me, what would normally be extraneous information is a good way to think around a complicated text - so I find this interesting in that way - although it doesn’t necessarily add to any understanding, it does make you feel like you “know” it better. I hope that makes sense.

    – bud Parr (06/23  at  03:36 PM)

Yes. Some great texts are so interesting that one wants any little tidbit about them--and I think Rainey is a good sleuth of tidbits.

    – anne (06/27  at  01:01 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: June 21, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Poetry

• Comments:3
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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