T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is undoubtedly one of the finest literary achievements of the twentieth century. The version of the poem most often read and studied today differs from the one first published in October 1922 in the literary magazine The Criterion. Indeed, to today’s readers, something is missing from that first version. In December 1922, the poem was published for the first time in book form in the USA by Boni and Liveright, and this time 52 endnotes were appended.
Decades later, Eliot declared the notes a ‘remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship’ in a 1956 University of Minnesota lecture. He explained that the notes had been added at the behest of the publisher Horace Liveright. This disclosure, and Eliot’s notes more generally, have generated a great deal of discussion. Critic Hugh Kenner went so far as to warn prospective readers to discard the notes as much as possible since ‘they have bedevilled discussion for decades’ (in Bloom 2006, p. 150).
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