The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose; Second Edition

by T. S. Eliot; Edited, with Annotations and Introduction, by Lawrence Rainey

• ISBN13: 9780300119947
• ISBN10: 0300119941
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2006-08-28
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

One of the twentieth century's most powerfuland controversialworks,The Waste Landwaspublished in the desolate wake of the First World War. This definitive edition of T. S. Eliot's masterpiece presents a new and authoritative version of the poem, along with all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composingThe Waste Land,seven of them never before published in book form. The volume is enriched with period photographs and a London map of locations mentioned in the poem. Featured in the book are Lawrence Rainey's groundbreaking account of howThe Waste Landcameto be composed; a history of the reactions of admirers and critics; and full annotations to the poem and Eliot's essays. The edition transforms our understanding of one of the greatest modernist writers and the magnificent poem that became a landmark in literary history.

Author Biography

Lawrence Rainey is professor and chair in modernist literature, department of English, University of York. He is the author of Revisiting “The Waste Land” and Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, both published by Yale University Press.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION	1	(56)
A Note on the Text	45	(12)
THE WASTE LAND	57	(78)
Editor's Annotations to The Waste Land	75	(52)
Historical Collation	127	(8)
ELIOT'S CONTEMPORARY PROSE
London Letter, March 1921	135	(6)
The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism	141	(3)
The Lesson of Baudelaire	144	(2)
Andrew Marvell	146	(12)
Prose and Verse	158	(8)
London Letter, May 1921	166	(6)
John Dryden	172	(11)
London Letter, July 1921	183	(5)
London Letter, September 1921	188	(4)
The Metaphysical Poets	192	(10)
Notes to Eliot's Contemporary Prose	202	(49)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY	251	(10)
GENERAL INDEX	261	(6)
INDEX TO ELIOT'S CONTEMPORARY PROSE	267