T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
(TWL), Dedication
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.
See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio 26:115-117 (ca. 1321;
tr. Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, 1867):
‘O brother, said he, ‘he who I point out, ...was of the mother tongue
a better smith.’”
This is Dante’s tribute to 12th century Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel. For
Eliot’s further tribute, see TWL 428, where Dante’s Daniel speaks from
purgatory. See also Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910),
Pound’s first book on literary criticism in which he translated Dante’s
phrase "il miglio fabbro" as “the better craftsman” and commended
Daniel for his “refusal to use the ‘journalese’ of his day.”
Eliot added this dedication to EZRA POUND in 1925, in Poems, 1909-1925
(Faber), three years after The Waste Land's initial publication. This was also
the first edition in which Eliot included explanatory endnotes. After they met in
1914, Pound was influential in getting Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock published in Poetry Magazine in 1915. See Valerie Eliot, Letters of
T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988). Pound was even more actively involved as
a reader and editor for The Waste Land. See note at TWL 69, and for a
sample of Pound’s editing see notes 166, 212, 219 and 293; for a fuller effect,
see T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, a Facsimile & Transcript of the Original
Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited and with an
Introduction by Valerie Eliot (1971).
See also Pound’s 1921 letter to Eliot just before The Waste Land was
published, in V. Eliot, Letters. In a 48 line poem he called “Sage
Homme,” Pound congratulated his friend for creating the poem but took
his due credit for helping with the delivery. Pound’s poem begins:
These are the poems of Eliot
By the Uranian Muse begot;
A Man their Mother was,
A Muse their Sire.
How did the printed Infancies result
From Nuptials thus doubly difficult?
If you must needs enquire
Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.
For a delayed response, see Eliot, Ezra Pound (Poetry, Sept. 1946):
I have sometimes tried to perform the same sort of maieutic task; and I
know that one of the temptations against which I have to be on guard,
is trying to rewrite somebody's poem in the way I should have written
it myself if I had wanted to write that poem. Pound never did that: he
tried first to understand what one was attempting to do, and then tried
to help one do it in one's own way.
T. S. Eliot gets the top billing for The Waste Land, but the first of his
endnotes immediately credits both Jessie Weston and James Frazer.
Eliot (1925):
Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental
symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s
book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).
Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate
the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I
recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any
who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another
work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has
influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I
have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone
who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the
poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.
Eliot’s opening note refers to ANTHROPOLOGY, the study of humanity
across cultures and time and a discipline that was reaching a new level
of popular appeal in the early 1920s, thanks in part to the works of
Weston and James Frazer (see below, and see also Eliot’s later
reference to anthropology at his endnote for TWL 218).
See Jessie L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913), offering
this summary of THE GRAIL LEGEND:
In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life)
has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry
Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility
by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the
Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions about
the Grail.
Weston concluded in From Ritual to Romance 2 (1920) that
the woes of the land are directly dependent upon the sickness, or maiming,
of the King, and in no wise caused by the failure of the Quester.
See the Grail allusions at TWL 31-35, 201, 266-306, 386-390 and 424-426.
See also James Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and
Religion, 3d Ed (1914). Frazer’s work looks at ancient fertility cults and the
traditions of ritual sacrifice that have influenced our modern culture.
Volumes V & VI of that edition present a two part study of Adonis, Attis and
Osiris, respectively Greek, Phrygian and Egyptian gods of vegetation who
are said to live and die annually.
The themes of REVEGETATION, RENEWAL AND THE EFFECTS OF
SPRING will be revisited at TWL 1, 4, 7, 71, 187, 198, 327 and 351 and
at notes 1, 51, 55, 186, 197 and 389.
By citing Frazer’s work, Eliot introduced a multi-leveled allusion to the
literary ESCORTS of Aeneas’s Sybil, Virgil’s Aeneas and Dante’s Virgil.
Frazer prompted this by naming his book and illustrating its cover with an
explicit nod to the “sylvan landscape” of J. M. W. Turner, The Golden
Bough (1834), a painting that was also featured in an 1856 edition of Virgil,
Aeneid (19 BC; publ. H. Graves & Co). For the painting’s story, see
Aeneid 6 (tr. John Dryden 1697). Aeneas, in search of a new home
after leaving his destroyed city of Troy, encounters the Sybil at Cumae.
The Sybil agrees to act as his escort into hell, where he hopes to find the
ghost of his father, but to enter, Aeneas first must give Proserpina, Queen of
the Underworld, the bough of a golden tree that replenishes itself as
branches are taken from it.
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from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)
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