Description

The Waste Land is a collaborative work created by T.S. Eliot who wrote the text/s, Vivien Eliot who both wrote and edited and Ezra Pound who edited and collated the various manuscripts together to create the poem first published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce’s Ulysses. The text itself is comprised of a variety of language discourses ranging from interiorized monologue and intimate daily speech to elegy, mythology and a World War One marching song. These are collaged together around themes related to mortality and the possibilities of death/life in/after life/death. In this essay I wish to explore the issues surrounding the dispersive prose narrative of The Waste Land in regard to Pound’s concept of language nodes or “the Vortex”. In reference to this I construct here a metonymic reading of The Waste Land and conclude in the relevance of such a reading to the recent adaptation of the original authoritative text as an online hypertext publication of the work. In this discussion I do not intend to detract from T.S Eliot’s designation as author but rather to examine the space between the original text, its primary editor Ezra Pound, and the philosophies of literary production that may have influenced its production and the course it set in English literature over the proceeding years. Its continued relevance today is furthermore embodied in its place as a hypertext on the World Wide Web.