Introduction

Summary

This special issue of Essays and Studies both celebrates and reflects upon the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. After a wellattested period of editorial consideration where suggestions and cuts were made by Eliot's wife, Vivien, and by Ezra Pound, and after a relatively difficult process of negotiation around its time and place of publication, the sequence appeared in the first number of the journal Eliot edited in London, the Criterion, on 16 October 1922. This version of the work arrived without the Notes which Eliot later added to the end of the sequence – as did the edition which introduced The Waste Land to US readers, in the November 1922 issue of the Dial. The complete text as we now know it, both poetry and Notes, was first published as a book in the US by Boni and Liveright on 1 December 1922. The first UK publication of the poetry plus the Notes in book form came on 12 September 1923, when The Waste Land appeared from Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press.

Interestingly, the work was initially massively more successful in the US than in Britain; the Boni and Liveright book had already sold 1,000 copies by February 1923, sales which rapidly rose to 5,000. In contrast, the 443 copies printed by the Woolfs did not sell out totally until February 1925. The work received forty-six reviews in North America, and only twelve in the UK, of which ten were negative. A return to some of those immediate responses to the poem a hundred years after its first publication, however, reveals several threads that continue through the whole century of critical responses, including in some of the essays gathered here.

For example, the Times Literary Supplement, in which an anonymous reviewer considered the whole first issue of the Criterion where the poem appeared, compared The Waste Land to the translation of ‘Dostoevsky's “Plan for a Novel”’, also printed in that issue. The Russian novelist must have found composition ‘difficult’, the reviewer avers; there are ‘hints’ of ‘spiritual discoveries’, but these are not ‘fully revealed’, and there actually seems to be no ‘orderly planning’ in this ‘Plan’.