Eliot’s ‘wretched old’ typewriter looms large in an analysis of The Waste Land

In 2018, the ferocious American poet-critic William Logan took time off from routinely, invigoratingly eviscerating contemporary poets to write Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past – a study of classic poems in their historical contexts. It was an informative, interesting exercise, prefaced by this significant reservation: ‘Knowledge of the circumstance is not ipso facto knowledge of the poem.’

Ezra Pound eliminated the weaker passages of The Waste Land, some of them, surprisingly, downright bad

Matthew Hollis attempts something similar: an immersion in the verité, the lost circumstances of composition. His subtitle, ‘A Biography of a Poem’, is a brilliant piece of marketing, a hook, an attractive promise of something new and original. Does it deliver? Or is it only a fancy way of describing the milieu, the ragbag of circumstance, from which T.S. Eliot’s great poem emerged?

For example, we learn that Ezra Pound suffered at the hands of frenemies. He was the foreign editor of Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe. She published four extracts of Pound’s 12-part imitation, ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, and in the very next number printed an attack on its scholarship by Professor William Gardner Hale. Premeditated sabotage. Shortly after, she accepted Pound’s resignation. When Pound’s prose Instigations (published by Boni & Liveright) appeared, it was traduced in The Dial by W.C. Blum, who averred that Pound’s prose wasn’t prose at all, but ‘funny oaths and insults’. Pound was a roving European scout for The Dial, garnering submissions from the likes of James Joyce. He asked Scofield Thayer, the editor, who Blum was, and received no reply. ‘“Blum” was a pseudonym for [Scofield’s] co-editor at The Dial, James Sibley Watson.’

What has this run-of-the-mill bad faith, interesting though it is (like many other peripheral facts assembled here), to do with the ‘biography’ of The Waste Land? Hollis writes off Pound’s substantial sequence ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’: ‘The poem would not sustain through time in the way that Eliot’s work would.’