Scholar cracks 'Waste Land' mystery - with help from the FBI
Posted on 21 June 2005
Though the rediscovery in 1971 of a sheaf of T S Eliot's rough drafts and manuscripts electrified the literary world, it failed to help scholars to work out in what sequence he wrote the poem.
None of the papers were dated and, because Eliot used three different typewriters, scholars had been unable to unravel the secret story, until Professor Lawrence Rainey, of the University of York, took up the challenge.
With forensic precision, he examined more than 1,200 leaves of paper, including 638 pages of letters, Eliot had written between 1912 and 1922. Professor Rainey, of the University's Department of English and Related Literature, visited 22 international libraries and several private collections in a two-year journey across Europe and the USA.
His research needed specialist tools. FBI agents Bill Brown and David Attenberg gave him copies of the transparent templates the Agency uses to identify makes of typewriters, and he used a micrometer to measure the thickness of every sheet of paper, as well as recording their height, width, watermarks, chainlines and other properties.
The Waste Land was not a seamless whole but something more radical
Professor Lawrence Rainey
He compared data about the papers used in Eliot's letters and essays with corresponding data from The Waste Land manuscripts to reconstruct the poem's composition.
In his new book Revisiting 'The Waste Land' Professor Rainey describes the journey of exploration that culminated in Eliot's extraordinary poem. He proves that Eliot wrote The Waste Land between January 1921 and January 1922, and that the poet did not follow a plan in its composition. Instead, Eliot improvised to stitch together more than 50 drafts.
"When The Waste Land was published, its defenders insisted that the poem was planned from the beginning and that it was a poem of extraordinary unity. Now that we can trace the processes and the choices that Eliot is making, the poem turns out to be something quite different," Professor Rainey said.
"You can see him making false starts and because he writes in tiny units of 13 lines at a stretch he is then left with the problem of how to stitch them together. You can see that he uses incredibly obvious choices to do that.
"The Waste Land was not a seamless whole but something more radical. It is, at once, wild and unruly, violent and shocking and yet deeply compassionate."
Professor Rainey's conclusions unsettle traditional views of the poem and demonstrate that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew.
Notes to editors:
- Revisiting 'The Waste Land' by Lawrence Rainey is published by Yale University Press at £22.50. For further details please contact Katie Harris, Senior Publicist on tel: 020 7079 4900; fax: 020 7079 4901; email: katie.harris@yaleup.co.uk