I think that Pound deserves a lot of credit for tightening up and
improving the poem.  But I don't think he deserves credit or blame for
the poem itself.  Pound himself, I don't remember where, gave Eliot full
credit for the poem.  And I agree with you, Eliot was already proceeding
along a course of intense fragmentation before Pound saw it.  The main
thing Pound did was cut away excess and trim fluff.

Timothy Materer wrote:

> I sent the following message to the TSE list a week ago and received
> no reply. Maybe EPOUND members will have a reaction?
>
> What do listmembers think of giving Pound credit or blame for shaping
> The Waste Land? For example, Lyndall Gordon regrets that Pound's cuts
> eliminated many of Eliot's references to positive religious
> experiences. Recently, in "Avant-Garde Eliot" (21st-Century
> Modernism, in the Blackwell Manifestos series, 2002), Marjorie
> Perloff argues that Eliot was actually more avant-garde in Prufrock
> than in The Waste Land because the latter's "fragmentation,
> parataxis, and collage structure . . . is largely the product of
> Pound's severe cuts."
>
> This opinion makes Eliot seem rather passive. Most poets, I imagine,
> show their poems to friends; and the decisions about the final form
> are still their own. Would the poem have seemed any less fragmented
> and collage-like if passages such as Song, Dirge, Exequy, Death of
> the Duchess and even the sea voyage had been incorporated in the poem?
> --
>
> Timothy Materer, 107 Tate, English Department
> University of Missouri, Columbia MO 65211
> Fax: 573 882-5785
> The James Merrill Electronic Discussion Forum
> http://www.missouri.edu/~engtim/jm.html
> --"THIS FICTIVE SPACE WE HERE INHABIT IS / THE STOP TO TIME"
>

--

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