13. The Waste Land by TS Eliot

Recipe for one ‘Waste Land’: throw a bunch of aimless jottings into a bag, send the bag to Ezra Pound with instructions to pick out the best bits, season with some unhelpful notes, et voilà. It certainly shouldn’t have turned out a masterpiece, and the fact that it did was very much down to Pound – and to the title change. The poem was originally called, rather unbelievably, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ (a quote from Our Mutual Friend). Pound recognized that it was in danger of becoming a burlesque, axed two-thirds of it, notably the opening sequence set among Sweeney-types in a brothel, and made the prophetic voice of Tiresias (‘April is the cruellest month…’) begin and dominate the poem. What could thus have been a piece of transient social satire was transformed into the twentieth century’s greatest English poem, reflecting in its title - taken from Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance - the waste and desolation of post-war Europe.

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