About this edition

The text

The poem is given as it stands in the first book edition, published by Boni & Liveright in New York in December 1922, including Eliot’s notes, which were written for that edition; the poem had appeared in The Criterion (October 1922) and The Dial (November 1922) without them. That text is in the public domain in the United States, where this site is published. In the United Kingdom and the European Union the poem remains in copyright until the end of 2035, seventy years after Eliot’s death.

The 1922 text differs in small ways from the one in later Faber editions. This edition keeps the 1922 readings and notes the later ones where they matter: “Quando fiam ceu chelidon” at line 429 (later “uti,” the word in the Latin poem); “aetherial” at line 416 (later “aethereal”); the note on “Shantih,” which in 1922 calls the English phrase “a feeble translation of the content of this word” and later “our equivalent.” The pub talk’s “dont” and “wont,” “alright” at line 161, “tonight” at line 111 and “smoothes” at line 255 are the 1922 book’s own spellings, kept as they stand. The dedication to Pound was not printed until 1925 and is included here because Eliot wrote it into Pound’s copy in January 1923. Three slips of the press in the copy scanned are set right: “Der Heimat zu” at line 32 was printed with a broken t, reading “Heimai”; “The hot water at ten” at line 135 lost its a; and “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth” at line 339 reads “mount in” in many copies of the first printing, the a having dropped out as the sheets ran. Typographic quotation marks and a few spellings have been regularised from the transcription on Project Gutenberg, which was checked against a scan of the 1922 printing.

The line numbering

The 1922 printing numbers every tenth line in the margin. On page 42, in Part V, “If there were water” is set flush right as the run-over of “From doors of mudcracked houses” and is not counted, so from line 346 the printed numbers run one behind: 350 stands beside “A spring,” 360 beside “When I count, there are only you and I together” (the poem’s 361st line), and the last line, “Shantih shantih shantih,” is “line 433” although the poem has 434. Eliot’s notes mostly follow the printed count, but not always: the note on the hermit-thrush is numbered 357 and the note on the Antarctic expedition 360, which fit the true count, while the others after that point, 366–76, 401, 407, 411, 424, 427, 428, 429, 431 and 433, fit the printed one. On this site the margin counts the lines as they are, and each note is attached to the line Eliot meant.

What was written for this edition

The annotations, the translations of the sources, the descriptions of the voices, the tagging of water and drought, the pathways and the section “ways in” were written for this site. Every claim about the poem’s composition can be traced to one of: the facsimile edition of the drafts (Valerie Eliot, ed., 1971); The Letters of T. S. Eliot, volume 1; The Poems of T. S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (2015), whose commentary is the standard reference; Lawrence Rainey’s The Annotated Waste Land (2005); Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot (2015); and Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022). The recordings are linked, not copied, from the libraries and archives that hold them. The source texts are quoted from public-domain texts, in the passages the poem draws on, with a link to the whole work.

Four remarks on the poem

A timeline

1888
Thomas Stearns Eliot born in St Louis, Missouri, 26 September.
1910–11
A year in Paris; friendship with Jean Verdenal, a French medical student. August 1911 in Munich, where ‘Prufrock’ is finished.
1911–14
Harvard graduate study: Sanskrit and Pali with C. R. Lanman, the Upanishads, Buddhism, and F. H. Bradley’s philosophy.
1914
Eliot arrives in England; meets Ezra Pound in September.
1915
Jean Verdenal killed at the Dardanelles in May. Eliot marries Vivien Haigh-Wood in June. ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ is set in type for Poetry (Chicago) and withdrawn; its opening lines are reworked in lines 25–30 of the poem.
1917
Joins Lloyds Bank’s Colonial and Foreign Department in the City of London in March. Prufrock and Other Observations published, dedicated to Verdenal.
1918
‘Dans le Restaurant’ published in the Little Review; its last stanza, in French, is the source of the ten lines of ‘Death by Water’ that Pound let stand.
1919
December: Eliot tells his mother his New Year’s resolution is ‘to write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time’.
1921, spring
Parts I and II drafted, under the title ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’.
1921, summer
Eliot’s mother, sister and brother visit London for ten weeks. His health breaks down.
1921, October–November
Lloyds grants three months’ sick leave. Eliot goes to Margate in the middle of the month and stays until 12 November; on 4 November he tells his friend Sydney Schiff that he has written ‘some fifty lines’ of Part III, sitting in a shelter on the seafront.
1921, November
To Paris, where Vivien stays; then alone to Lausanne for treatment by Dr Roger Vittoz, a Lausanne doctor who treated nervous disorders by exercises in concentration. Parts IV and V written there.
1922, January
Back through Paris. Pound goes over the typescript there and again by post, cutting it hard; Eliot accepts nearly all of it. Pound’s verdict, in a letter of 24 January: ‘Complimenti, you bitch.’
1922, June
Eliot reads the poem aloud at the Woolfs’. Virginia Woolf: ‘He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it.’
1922, September
Smyrna burns, 13–22 September, a month before the poem is published. The fire is not in the poem; Mr. Eugenides, ‘the Smyrna merchant’ of line 209, was already in the typescript Pound edited in January.
1922, October
First publication, without notes, in the first number of The Criterion, Eliot’s own new magazine.
1922, November
American publication in the November number of The Dial, again without notes. The Dial’s award for 1922, $2,000, is announced in the December number.
1922, December
Boni & Liveright publish the first book edition in New York on 15 December, 1,000 copies, the first printing to carry the notes. Eliot said in 1956 that he had expanded them to make the book long enough.
1923, January
Eliot inscribes Pound’s copy of the Boni & Liveright edition to him as il miglior fabbro, ‘the better craftsman’, Dante’s words for the poet Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio XXVI; the phrase becomes the printed dedication in 1925.
1923, September
The Hogarth Press edition, hand-set by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at Richmond, about 460 copies.
1925
Poems 1909–1925 prints the dedication to Pound for the first time. Eliot leaves Lloyds for Faber & Gwyer.
1933
Eliot records the poem at Columbia University, on aluminium discs, the earliest surviving reading. The discs were long dated 1935, and the PennSound archive still labels them so; the Poetry Archive dates them 1933, following the scholar Lacy Rumsey and the work of Richard Swigg (2012) and Jason Camlot (2019).
1940s
Eliot records the poem again; this later reading, dated 1946 by the Poetry Archive and issued on record, is the one most often heard.
1956
In a lecture at Minneapolis, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, Eliot calls the notes ‘bogus scholarship’ and regrets having sent readers on ‘a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail’.
1965
Eliot dies in London, 4 January.
1968
The New York Public Library announces that it holds the typescript, long thought lost, with Pound’s and Vivien Eliot’s comments written on it. Eliot had sent it in 1922 to the New York lawyer and collector John Quinn; after Quinn’s death in 1924 it passed to his sister and then to his niece, who sold it to the library in 1958; the purchase was not made public for ten years.
1971
Valerie Eliot, his widow, edits a facsimile edition of the drafts, showing Pound’s cuts and comments.
2015
Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue publish their annotated edition, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, in two volumes.
2022
Centenary. The 1922 text is in the public domain in the United States; in the United Kingdom it remains in copyright until the end of 2035.

How the site works

The whole poem is on one page. The row headed Read with above the text, the lenses, sets what is shown beside each line: Eliot’s notes, the sources, the speakers, the translations, water and drought, the places, the hours, or the cuts from the drafts. The keys 1 to 9 switch lenses; Escape closes anything open. Marked phrases open a card in the margin (or under the line, on a phone). The thin strip at the edge of the screen stands for the whole poem, one mark per line, coloured by the lens in use; click it to move to a line. The dark setting, called the violet hour after line 215, follows your system’s preference and can be switched with the small dot in the bar at the top of the page.

Two ways of reading are for going slowly. “Line by line” dims everything but one line and brings whatever belongs to it into the margin: its source, Eliot’s note, a change of speaker, a translation. The arrow keys move between lines, or it can move on by itself at reading pace. In the Voices lens, clicking a speaker follows that voice alone through the poem, so that you can read everything one speaker says from beginning to end: the woman in the chair in Part II, the thunder, the Thames-daughters.

Type, drawings and pictures

The type is EB Garamond (Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo), Cormorant Garamond (Christian Thalmann) and Courier Prime (Alan Dague-Greene for Quote-Unquote Apps), all under the SIL Open Font License and served from this site. The tarot pack, the frontispieces to the five parts and the buildings on the map were drawn for this edition. The photographs and paintings come from Wikimedia Commons and are credited here:

Map

The river is drawn from OpenStreetMap data for the Thames (relation 2263653), © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL; places were geocoded with Nominatim. Coastlines on the world map are from Natural Earth (public domain).