The Waste Land. A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.

Limited Edition. Square 4to. Pp. xxxii, [4], 155, [1]. Publisher's maroon cloth, lettered in gilt to spine and with a reproduction of the author's signature gilt-stamped to front cover. Photographic facsimile of the original typescript with letterpress copy on opposing page, printed on cream stock in black and red, tan endpapers, frontispiece portrait. Edited and introduced by Valerie Eliot. Preface by Ezra Pound with his annotations. Notes. #231/500 printed copies. Included here are 3 bills [absent in the trade edition], made out to ''- Eliot Esq.'' covering the period 22 Oct to 12 Nov, 1921, by the Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville, Margate.

Very fine in matching slipcase with printed paper title label.

A missal of post-war disillusion, largely composed in Switzerland where Eliot was convalescing following a near nervous breakdown, the poem neatly divides into five parts, its multitude of voices rising exponentially into an incantatory crescendo, before it denudes itself in the Sanskrit mantra "Shantih shantih shantih." World-weary, elegiac, suffused with allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads, The Waste Land is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. The archetypal modernist poem.

[NYPL Books of the Century, p.17; Gallup B107b]