If Eliot is the poem’s mother, then perhaps Pound was right to claim the role of obstetrician:
“If you must needs enquire
Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.”

Quote from Ezra Pound’s “Sage Homme,” a poem included in his December 24, 1921, letter to T.S. Eliot celebrating The Waste Land.

This online exhibit, Better Craftsmen, Not Gods, is a critical examination of the development of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. One manuscript of the poem, as annotated by Ezra Pound and Vivienne Eliot prior to the poem’s 1922 debut publications in The Criterion and The Dial, was lost and later rediscovered and added to the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection. Written between 1919 and 1922 and twice the length of the poem as published, this manuscript included the five core movements of the final poem plus three additional, unpublished movements and eight more miscellaneous poems ranging from five to 73 lines that Eliot might have included in the book. 

Written in dialogue between them, scholar Tyler Malone and digital archive editor Robert Eric Shoemaker track the development of The Waste Land through this manuscript and editorial correspondence among Eliot and his collaborators as a demonstration of the interrelation of this influential poem to other works and minds, thus illuminating the inherently collaborative and complex nature of the editing and crafting of poetry. The exhibit also addresses the personalities, prejudices, and politics that influence the legacy of poets who, for good and for ill, became canonical through their influence on others. Pound was a fascist sympathizer and some of Eliot’s writing to tokenized, stereotyped, and degraded others, particularly people of color and those of Jewish descent. Better Craftsmen, Not Gods asks readers to consider the influence of the canon on their own relationships to texts, to poets, and to the nature of being a responsible literary citizen in the 21st century.

The exhibit curators thank Carolyn Vega of the New York Public Library; Peter London of HarperCollins; and Francesca Wade, a scholar who assisted at the Yale Beinecke Library, for their invaluable help and support in researching this exhibit. 

A special thank you to Meg Forajter, permissions coordinator at the Poetry Foundation, for her efforts to acquire permissions for all the materials in the exhibit.