Eliot, T.S.

The Waste Land. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922

8vo (192 x 124 mm, uncut). Half-title, colophon numbered; marginal annotations in pencil throughout, lightly toned, one or two stray smudges. Publisher's black flexible cloth stamped in gilt; lacking the dustjacket, rear joint cracked but holdin🎶g, spine ꦺlightly sunned, some rubbing at extremities, stray white mark to upper cover.

First edition, first issue of the most important modernist poem. This copy is numbered 14 of the 1000 press-numbered copies, about half of which were issued in this binding. The present copy features the word "mountain" correctly spelled in line 339 (p. 41), confirming that it was indeed printed early in the run. As noted by Connolly the letter "a" in "water" is missing in line 135 (p. 22), which has here ꦅbeen corrected in pencil—though this typographical variation does not determine priority.

Eliot worked on The Waste Land for years before its eventual publication in 1922, by this point having been famously shaped by Ezra Pound's edits and influence. Of this process, Eliot in a 1946 essay wrote: "It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem called The Waste Land which 📖left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print. I should like to think that t🐓he manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably: yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound’s critical genius."

As first published in The Criterion and The Dial, Eliot’s landmark poem did not include the “Notes” printed in this and subsequent editions. In the mid-fifties Eliot recalled, “I had at first intended only to put down all the references for my quotations, with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism. Then, when it came to print The Waste Land as a little book—for the poem on its first appearance in The Dial and in The Criterion had no notes whatever—it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed 🙈matter, with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view today” (quoted in Gallup, p. 30).

The present copy belonged to the American writer and leftist activist Waldo Frank, who wrote extensively for The New Yorker and The New Republic in the𒁃 1920s and 1930s, and features his annotatio𓆏ns throughout.

REFERENCE:

Connolly 30b; Gallup A6a

PROVENANCE:

Waldo Frank (ownership signature🌸 to fron💃t free-endpaper)