Description
Book SynopsisNew Yorker • Best Books of 2022
The first full-color facsimile of T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land, the most influential poem in modern literature, in celebration of its centennial.
Trade Review"First published in 1971, edited by Eliot’s widow, they revolutionized the understanding of the poem’s creation, by making apparent Ezra Pound’s outsized editorial role, including many ruthless cuts, and also the input of Eliot’s troubled first wife, Vivienne. These pages—some handwritten, some typewritten, with wordless loops and slashes scrawled across the text and brusque observations at the side—have become famous in their own right.... Few Eliot fans will be able to resist." -- New Yorker, "Best Books of 2022"
"The Albemarle receipts were not included by Valerie Eliot in her 1971 edition of the drafts of
The Waste Land but have been added to this centenary edition, which seems aimed at the Eliot aficionado ready to pore over every scrap surviving in the archive and eager to discover new angles on a poem more exhaustively interpreted than any in the language—or rather languages, for it is the most polyglot of poems. This gala volume is the first to reproduce manuscripts and type-scripts in color and boasts of various ‘additional materials,’ namely those bills and the versos of three leaves: on one of these Eliot has jotted down a couple of cosmetic skin creams that he has been instructed to purchase for his first wife, Vivien, at a pharmacy on the Champs-Élysées, and on another a compressed account of the plot of The Duchess of Malfi. On the third, the verso of the ending of ‘A Game of Chess,’ Vivien has written, 'Make any of these alterations—or none if you prefer. Send me back this copy & let me have it." -- Mark Ford - New York Review of Books
