“The Waste Land,” not “The Wasteland” or “Waste Land,” and Waste Lands,” T. S. Eliot would correct people regarding the title of his epoch-defining poem. Originally he’d had in mind another title altogether, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a phrase pinched from Dickens’s But that belonged to an earlier vision of the poem, a sort of literary vaudeville review in acts and interludes of differing registers, voices, and intensities. What Eliot ended up with—thanks especially to the committed intervention of his friend Ezra Pound—was more a symphony of ruin in five movements, an “emotional unit.” How this poem came to be, its life and times, is explored on
Adventures With Jean
I lived in New York City when it was more violent and dangerous than it is now. Needle Park was still a place where people were killed and women were raped, and the Lower East Side was a place where you wanted to be careful. Mobsters shot each other
