The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose

April 4, 2005
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.

May 9, 2005
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.

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