I’ve been reading Hannah Sullivan’s The Work of Revision, and really enjoying it. Here are a couple of excerpts from her chapter on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, centering on Ezra Pound’s editorial input on the poem.
She makes a good case that Eliot’s style of revision indicated a profoundly different aesthetic than the excisive revisions that Pound (apparently vigorously) put forward. It’s a bit of a counter-narrative to the story of a team-up; rather Pound’s revisions antagonized Eliot’s original vision, creating a poem somewhat apart from both of them, but perhaps more in Pound’s camp.
Walker Sampson 