The most inspired and generous use of the scalpel

Het tweede deel met de brieven van TS Eliot is uit. Daarin vooral de briefwisseling rond Ezra Pounds drastische, belangeloze, definitieve en allesbepalende ingreep in The Waste Land:  "The climax of this first volume is the selfless brilliance of Ezra Pound’s editing of the sprawling poem that would be distilled into The Waste Land . Eliot was aware of his growing importance. “There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England,” he wrote to his mother. But would his original draft have conquered the world the way the revised Waste Land did, in a carefully orchestrated onslaught, with magazine and book publication in New York and London? I doubt it would have; so Pound’s editing is probably the most inspired and generous use of the scalpel in recent poetic history. As Pound himself wrote, “These are the Poems of Eliot / By the Uranian Muse begot . . . / Know diligent Reader / That on each Occasion / Ezra performed the caesarean Operation”. (IrishTimes) (foto: Henri Cartier Bresson)