“Can’t he add anything?”: Reading the Notes

Abstract

On the strength of Ezra Pound’s recommendation, American publisher Lawrence Liveright offered, in January 1922, to publish The Waste Land sight unseen. When he did get a copy of the poem, though, he was worried about its length: “I’m disappointed that Eliot’s material is as short,” he wrote Pound. “Can’t he add anything?” (Rainey 24). As Lawrence Rainey has explained, this question appears to have prompted the notes, which were meant to solve the problem of a poem that though long, was perhaps not quite long enough to publish on its own as a book. We don’t know a lot about what Eliot was thinking as he put the notes together or whether he wondered about restoring any of the more than two hundred lines that Pound had cut from Waste Land drafts; Pound was not, as far as we know, involved in the production of the notes and Eliot seems to have finished them in a whoosh, not long before they were due to the publisher: “I shall rush forward the notes to go at the end,” he wrote to patron John Quinn on 19 July, working under an end-of-the-month deadline.