Captain Tom and Ezra

As far back as high school, when I first encountered T. S. Eliot’s poetry, his disaffection with modern society touched a chord in me. He quickly became my favourite poet and I studied him at every opportunity in university, writing my best undergraduate essay on the relation between his Four Quartets and Beethoven’s string quartets. Later in life, as I learned details about Eliot as a man—his shabby treatment of his first wife Vivienne, his secret life as Captain Tom, his deep anti-Semitism—he became a god with clay feet. But his status as one of the greatest of 20th century poets has never been in doubt.

So I was taken by a comment posted on the occasion of his 133rd birthday that this person had read somewhere that Ezra Pound once edited one of Eliot’s poems by arbitrarily crossing out every other line.

Pound did edit The Wasteland at Eliot’s request, cutting nearly half its length, but his choices were not arbitrary. While Eliot can’t have been very happy to see all that ink across his manuscript, he dedicated the poem to him. He recognized the value of a clear editorial eye and learned from it.

And so may we all!

T.S. Eliot (Left) and Ezra Pound (Right)