Eliot Among the Typists: Writing The Wane Land.

This article presents a critical analysis of "T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including Annotations of Ezra Pound," edited by Valerie Eliot. To students of twentieth-century modernism, 1971 was the year when Eliot published a facsimile edition of "The Waste Land's," pre-publication manuscripts. The event invited new accounts of the poem's genetics and fresh assessments of how those might bear on the understanding of the poem. His efforts were followed in 1977 by Lyndall Gordon's attempt at "Dating the Waste Land Fragments," a wide-ranging survey which addressed both the principal parts of "The Waste Land," and the various drafts and ancillary poems. In the end, however, Gordon remained divided over the claims of two sharply incompatible hypotheses for dating the principal parts of "The Waste Land," and concluded that the question was, at least for the present, "unresolved." "The Waste Land," is still a determinant of modernist consciousness, post-modernist also if it has come to that, and the profit may be that people shall learn a little more about the history of their own minds.