Word: pound
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...legend, Shakespeare, the prophet Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Dante's Inferno, Rupert Brooke, Richard Wagner, Verlaine, Aeschylus, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Oliver Goldsmith originally helped make the poem the perennial undergraduate's hunt-and-peck guide to instant culture. But there appear to be no direct transplants from Pound. Except for an odd "an" or "who," he inserted only two words into The Waste Land: "demobbed" for "coming back out of the Transport Corps," and "demotic" to replace "abominable" when Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant of "The Fire Sermon," made an indecent proposition "in abominable French...
...What Pound did do was cut, clipping off as many as 40 lines in a clump. His special target was a heavy-footed parody of Pope's Rape of the Lock. Though the couplets concern the ablutions of a fleshly lady named Fresca, they show Eliot at his most priggishly professional, and Pound briskly informed Eliot: "You cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope...
...Pound's marginalia, scribbled, indeed, with a stumpy pencil, mark the trail of an editor with a fine merciless eye for padding, preciosity or false prosody: "3 lines Too tum-pum at a stretch," one scribble reads. With the notation "1880," Pound skewered an anachronism in which Eliot called for "a closed carriage" in 1922; the carriage promptly became a "closed car at four." W.H. Auden once observed that Eliot was part church warden, part twelve-year-old boy. Pound was on the side of the boy. His objections to Eliot's frequent use of "may" and "perhaps...
Genteel Dropout. Except for scholars, libraries and a few former English majors now adrift in commerce, these disclosures alone do not justify the coffee-table price fixed on the book by its publishers. Pound was a good editor, as well as the best and most generous teacher and preacher of modern poetic practice ever. Eliot had already started cutting radically, and Pound cut to the bone, giving The Waste Land pace and density. But except for a score of lines, part of a much longer description of a sea voyage that Pound cut from the "Death by Water" section...
...period, roughly 1916 to 1922, when The Waste Land was in preparation. What emerges is a portrait of the artist as the most scrupulous, harried and genteel academic dropout of the half-century. After studies at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford. Eliot gave up his Ph.D. degree (as Pound had before him) to write poetry. He married a neurotic woman who eventually went mad. To support them, he lectured, edited, wrote occasional literary pieces, taught at the High Wycombe Grammar School for "?140 per annum with dinner," eventually gravitating to a job at Lloyds Bank...