The Waste Land, with revisions by the author, Ezra Pound (1885–1972), and Vivien Eliot (1882–1947)

The Waste Land—one of the most important poems of the 20th century—began as a “hoard of fragments,” according to its author. T.S. Eliot began working on the long poem in 1914 and closely guarded this, the only draft, for the seven-and-a-half years he worked on it. Only his first wife, Vivien, and his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound were privy to the minutiae of Eliot’s process. The manuscript comprises a mix of 64 typed and handwritten pages on a variety of different papers. The pages shown here, the first lines of each of the five sections, include changes by Eliot as well as further comments and revisions by Vivien Eliot and Ezra Pound.