![]() ![]() He offers a chronology of its composition, from Eliot’s first passing reference to “a poem that I have in mind,” in November 1919, through its simultaneous publication in The Criterion and The Dial in October 1922. More than any previous editor, Rainey provides the reader with every resource that might help explain the genesis and significance of the poem. ![]() Here is a book of 260 pages built on a poem of 433 lines-a text-to-commentary ratio appropriate to the Bible or the Greek classics. The appearance of Lawrence Rainey’s scholarly new edition of the poem- The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose-serves to sharpen this paradox. By the same token, even though The Waste Land has been making Aprils cruel for eighty-three years, it remains more modern than any poem written since. Dante and Donne, he argued in his essays, were closer to the twentieth-century poet than Tennyson and Whitman. Yet as Eliot himself proved, poetic time, like Einsteinian time, is relative. Eliot when he completed his masterpiece in 1922. ![]() According to the calendar, The Waste Land is more distant from us today than In Memoriam and Leaves of Grass were from T. ![]()
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