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The Waste Land
Revisions & Annotations
T.S. Eliot
Biography
- Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis Missouri on September 26 1888, he was the seventh child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot
- He studied literature and philosophy in France and Germany before traveling to England shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914
- 1922, “The Waste Land” is published in The Criterion , which was Eliot’s quarterly until the year 1939
- Eliot died on January 4, 1965; his ashes are interred as he requested in the west end of the parish church of East Coker
The Waste Land
- Eliot’s goal was for poetry to stray away from the typical outpouring of a poets soul and emotions and focus more on the vision that poetry is a true escape from personality rather than an expression of it (Coote)
- The poem is said to have been drafted during the autumn of 1921 from a “convalescent preoccupied partly with the ruin of post was Europe and partly with this own health and the conditions of his own servitude to a bank in London, partly with a hardly exorable apprehension that tow thousand years of European continuity had for the first time run dry” (Knoll) “both the most controversial and the most influential poem of the twentieth century” (Knoll)
The Sections
- Epigraph
- “NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis Ego ipse oculis
mes vidi in ampula pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibulla ti qeleis” respondebat illa: Apoqanein qelv”
- 5 sections:
- The Burial of the Dead
- A Game of Chess
- The Fire Sermon
- Death By Water
- What the Thunder Said
Influences
- Eliot evokes Joyce’s “mythical method” that was
used in Ulysses which he said is a way “in
manipulating a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity”
- some factors that influenced The Waste Land:
- “Fluency in French and German, his study of western and non western literary and religious texts in their original languages. His rigorous knowledge of philosophy, his exacting critical intellect, his keen sensitivity to colloquial rhythm and idiom, his ability to fuse anguished emotional states with sharply etched intellectual satire- all of these contributed to his crafting on of the twentieth century’s most distinctive and influential bodies of poetry” (Greenblatt 2287) Eliot’s editor and major influence
Revision in T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
All images scanned from T. S. Eliot The Waste Land: A Facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot
Ancient Rome
Annotatio An emendation to a law as suggested by a magistrate Must be signed by the Emperor Bypasses the official deliberative processes “If any woman who has lost her husband should hasten to marry another man within the period of a year she shall be branded with the marks of disgrace and deprived of both the dignity and rights of a person of honorable and noble status” (Theodosius, 401-450CE)
Medieval Times
Amplificatio – “the intervention and enlarging upon a prior subject” Rubrication – the addition of a title or head onto a manuscript by a scribe
- guides the reader
- differs from manuscript to manuscript, no convention Illumination – the addition of pictures to a manuscript but another scribe
- guides the reader
- differs from manuscript to manuscript, no convention
Romance de la Rose Moving Forward…
- “the first footnote to Elizabethan England, a biblical margin note gets knocked to the bottom of the page to make room in the Book of Job.”
- Footnotes move beyond annotation: The Dunciad, Barney’s Version, translations, personal comments…
- “In Justice Breyer's Opinion, A Footnote Has No Place” New York Times, July 28, 1995
Looking Ahead
“We all know that we sometimes add a footnote simply to avoid having to retype or restructure the entire text.” -Derrida What is the future of footnoting in the digital age?
“Strategic Preorientations”
Text # of pages Main text 14 Eliot’s notes 4 Photos 14 Editor’s notes 51 Historical collation Prose and essays 5 131- Derrida: “He [footnoter/annotator/translator] can also be the author, who thus subordinates himself to himself, who becomes his own auxiliary and hierarchizes his own text in deciding what is to be principal and what is to be secondary” (194). (1) Dedication: … For Pound’s role in shaping the poem, see the Introduction, 23-25. (2) 10: [Hofgarten]: The arcade is the Arcade Café )see Fig. 2), situated within the Hofgarten (see Fig. 3). “colonnade” referred to in line 9 (see Fig. 1), while just beyond the (3) 49: See his comments on it in “Prose and Verse,” 162. (4) 197: [The sound of horns and motors]:... See the next note. (5) 204-206 {Jug... Tereu]: See note to line 103.
Commentary
Updike: “Throughout the notes, a personal, almost confessional disquietude”
Translation
Addenda “Self-exegesis”
Updike: “The dangers of self-exegesis are: (1) A race of soft readers, spoon-fed on identified allusions, and (2) A race of poets more interested in annotating their works than in writing them” (28-9).
Footnote
Derrida: “The note does not pose questions; it informs, it makes things known” (198). Does Eliot want us to do everything? Anything? Nothing?
