The Waste Land
Editing

Eliot returned from Switzerland to Paris in early January 1922 with the 19-page draft version of the poem; his treatment with Dr Vittoz proved to have been very successful, at least in the short term. Eliot and Pound proceeded to edit the poem further, continuing after Eliot returned to London. The editing process removed a large amount of content. Eliot allowed Pound a high degree of control over the shape and contents of the final version, deferring to his judgement on matters such as using Eliot's previous poem " Gerontion " as a prelude, or using an excerpt from the death of Kurtz in Conrad 's Heart of Darkness as the epigraph (Pound rejected both of these ideas). Biographer Peter Ackroyd considers Pound's focus to have been on "the underlying rhythm of the poem... Pound heard the music, and cut away what was for him the extraneous material which was attached to it." By removing much of Eliot's material, Pound allowed for readers to more freely interpret it as a less structured and didactic work, and his edits are generally considered to have been beneficial.

Vivienne also reviewed drafts of The Waste Land. The section "A Game of Chess" partly depicts scenes from the Eliots' marriage, although at her request a specific line was removed – "The ivory men make company between us" – perhaps because she found the depiction of their unhappy marriage too painful. In 1960, thirteen years after Vivienne's death, Eliot inserted the line from memory into a fair copy made for sale to aid the London Library.

In a late December 1921 letter to Eliot to celebrate the "birth" of the poem, Pound wrote a bawdy poem of 48 lines entitled " Sage Homme " in which he identified Eliot as the mother of the poem but compared himself to the midwife. The first lines are:

These are the poems of Eliot By the Uranian Muse begot; A Man their Mother was, A Muse their Sire. How did the printed Infancies result From Nuptials thus doubly difficult? If you must needs enquire Know diligent Reader That on each Occasion Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.
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