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"