Description

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The text of Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot’s own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves.

For ease of reading, this Norton Critical Edition presents The Waste Land as it first appeared in the American edition (Boni & Liveright), with Eliot’s notes at the end. "Contexts" provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land’s sources, composition, and publication history. "Criticism" traces the poem’s reception with twenty-five reviews and essays, from first reactions through the end of the twentieth century. Included are reviews published in the Times Literary Supplement, along with selections by Virginia Woolf, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Charles Powell, Gorham Munson, Malcolm Cowley, Ralph Ellison, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Denis Donoghue, Robert Langbaum, Marianne Thormählen, A. D. Moody, Ronald Bush, Maud Ellman, and Tim Armstrong. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

About the Author

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T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was one of the fathers of modernism and a defining voice in English-language poetry. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Michael North is a Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, and Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation, as well as many articles on various aspects of twentieth-century literature.