Exploring The Waste Land
A draft page linked from The Waste Land, Part I

In the draft of The Waste Land

Ezra Pound persuaded Eliot to remove the first 54 lines of The Burial of the Dead (these can be seen by using the extrnal link below.)

In the draft the first line of The Waste Land was "First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place." Then Eliot described (though a narrator) a night of mischief by some young men. The location was likely Boston and Cambridge in Massachusetts and the men likely were attending Harvard (as Eliot had). There are many mentions of popular songs in this deleted section, introducing this theme used throughout The Waste Land. At the end of this section the men take a cab but there is eventually a foot race involving the cab driver and one of the young men. In the last line the narrator says "So I got out to see the sunrise, and walked home." (This section can be seen at another website by using the external link below.)

Note that in the published version of The Waste Land we have locations in Europe, Africa and Asia. In this section and the deleted section of Part IV we have North American locales. The only remnant of this locale is the mention of the hermit-thrush, a North American bird. See the hermit-trush references on line 356 of the poem and in Eliot's hermit-thrush note.

Citation:  "The Facsimile"   pp. 4-5


External Links (shown in AUXILARY window):
Hints for using external links are available in the either the DEFINTIONS frame or this frame.

Links:

L 255 - First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place.
A picture of the deleted first page of the draft of The Waste Land


Exploring The Waste Land
File name: dq00I.html
File date: Sunday, September 29, 2002
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