Master and Protege: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

From the Foreword by Philip Dossick:


With its publication in 1922, The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot (arguably the single most influential long-form poem of the twentieth century), Eliot's reputation began to grow to near-fabled proportions. 


By 1929, and for the next three decades, he was the dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world. 



But it might not have always been so.  


Early drafts of The Waste Land, originally entitled, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” were a sprawling chaotic mess. To say they needed the guiding hand of an editor of genius would be an understatement. 


Fortunately for Eliot, Ezra Pound was that kind of editor.

The final creation—the incomparable poem we know as The Waste Land, reflects almost as much Pound’s vision of Eliot’s poem as of Eliot’s himself.