Which avant-garde features are to be found in Prufrock that are not to be
found in the version of The Waste Land that Eliot showed Pound?
Tim Romano


At 12:22 PM 1/10/03 -0600, 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"