T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
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T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
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Re: T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
#2Re: T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
#3INTERVIEWER
Does the manuscript of the original, uncut Waste Land exist?
ELIOT
Don’t ask me. That’s one of the things I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. I sold it to John Quinn. I also gave him a notebook of unpublished poems, because he had been kind to me in various affairs. That’s the last I heard of them. Then he died and they didn’t turn up at the sale.
It's actually viewable here with Pound's notes:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-of-t-s-eliots-...
Some background:
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/ezra-poun...
Re: T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
#4Re: T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
#5I think that for me it’s been very useful to exercise other activities, such as working in a bank, or publishing even. And I think also that the difficulty of not having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of concentration. I mean it has prevented me from writing too much. The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts. That would be my danger.
Re: T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
#6Re: T. S. Eliot, the Art of Poetry No. 1 (1959)
#7Really interesting interview, thanks for posting, I particularly liked the anecdote about what happened to the original Wasteland manuscript. INTERVIEWER Does the manuscript of the original, uncut Waste Land exist? ELIOT Don’t ask me. That’s one of the things I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. I sold it to John Quinn. I also gave him a notebook of unpublished poems, because he had been kind to me in various affa…
makes it sound like a damned shame Pound went down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole.
(I am adding "able to put oneself in the shoes of others" as yet another thing which I can no longer regard as an infallible bulwark against totalitarianism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199995 )