Sharpening Juxtapositions: Ezra Pound's Depersonalizing Operation on The Waste Land

Sharpening Juxtapositions: Ezra Pound's Depersonalizing Operation on The Waste Land

This essay first defines The Waste Land both as a personal epic and the impersonal epic of humanity in the postwar world. It then proposes Pound’s alterations made the poem more impersonal in the sense both Eliot and Pound advocated with their theory of impersonality and Imagism. Finally, to verify this proposition, it analyzes the three key aspects of the amendments, closely related with the depersonalizing effects: the removal of epigraph/prelude and revision of the title, suppression of narrative intrusions, and the deletion of personal pronouns. The various artistic methods that influenced early Eliot have one objective concentration. The technique of juxtaposition is central to this, and it is in the sharpening of the juxtapositions that Pound’s principal contribution to The Waste Land lies. The manuscript version suffered from the predominance of excessively personal registers, though these are screened by the Biblical/historical façade. Pound’s editing increased the impersonal quality of the poem, concentrating its means of expression, removing superfluous elements, and heightening the contrast between different types of poetic material. Narrative sections and links were eliminated in favor of a more allusive and elliptic style. These changes helped to make the poem a more impersonal work, a collage of voices, largely subjected to irony.