Lan D. Ho!
"At least I know now how not to impress you." //
I Came to Game
April 21, 2011
"We should not assume that without Pound Eliot would have published some of the weaker passages in the drafts. But, as soon as one says this, one must add that it is highly doubtful whether, without Pound, The Waste Land would have been completed and published at all. The most important thing Pound gave Eliot was the support of a constant affection, encouragement, and belief. And he gave it at a time of deep discouragement verging on despair. It seems almost a miracle when one considers the circumstances in which the poem was written that it was written at all. To Eliot, struggling in ill health and overwork to combine two obligations—his sense of his vocation as a poet, and his duty to the unhappy girl he had married, who was dependent on him—Pound's unwavering belief in his friend's genius was the stimulus without which he might not have found the courage to persevere. But in addition to his selfless promotion of Eliot's interests as man and poet, Pound showed, for all his bluster and boisterousness, his slashings and damnings, an extreme selflessness and sensitivity in the kind of criticism he gave. He concentrated on making the poem as good as Eliot could make it. He gave his whole mind to the problem of 'Was this good verse?' 'Is this the right word?' 'Does this strike a false note?' 'Is this becoming monotonous?' He makes no comment on the subject matter of the poem, its religious or philosophic views, it's lack of those 'life-enhancing' qualities whose absence later critics have deplored. It was Eliot's poem he was working on, He shows his genius as a critic in the applause he gives—'Echt,' 'OK'—to the most characteristically Eliotian lines and passages. One's heart rises when one sees his 'Stet' or 'OK.' " (Helen Gardner, "The Waste Land: Paris 1922," reprinted in The Waste Land: Norton Critical Edition, 77–78)
