The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
One of the twentieth century’s most powerful—and controversial—works, The Waste Land was published in the desolate wake of the First World War. This definitive edition of T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece presents a new and authoritative version of the poem, along with all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composing The Waste Land, seven of them never before published in book form. The volume is enriched with period photographs and a London map of locations mentioned in the poem.
Featured in the book are Lawrence Rainey’s groundbreaking account of how The Waste Land came to be composed; a history of the reactions of admirers and critics; and full annotations to the poem and Eliot’s essays. The edition transforms our understanding of one of the greatest modernist writers and the magnificent poem that became a landmark in literary history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eliot's own notes to his masterpiece were described by Eliot himself, as Rainey here relates, as padding that took on a life of its own as the controversies surrounding the poem took off in the '20s. That's just one of the tidbits in this terrific edition of a modernist work that retains its power to shock, as well as a high degree of allusive difficulty. Rainey's essay and notes describe the poem's genesis and printing history, and carefully-without damaging the poem's many ambiguities-elucidates most if not all of its textual knots. The setting of the poem itself follows that of Eliot's preferred edition. One still misses the now out-of-print manuscript version of the poem (complete with Pound's interventions), but for the student or for anyone who wants to get the maximum amount of information out of a foundational modernist work, this is the best available edition.
