A stunning copy for the first edition with the important provenance of Scofield Thayer, college friend of Eliot and legendary publisher of The Dial.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain… – T.S.Eliot

The most important poem of the Modernist movement—and one of the most significant in the English language—The Waste Land first appeared in the U.K. in the October 1922 issue of Eliot's The Criterion, then in the U.S. in the November issue of Scofield Thayer's The Dial, and was finally published in book form that December.
Even prior to The Dial—what would be a key outlet for the Modernist writers of the period—Thayer's life had run in distinctly literary channels. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he had the opportunity to form relationships with his fellow poets, including e.e. cummings, Lincoln MacVeagh, Alan Seeger, and Gilbert Seldes, among others. He was also a staff member of the Harvard Monthly. After graduating from Harvard in 1913, Thayer went on to pursue postgraduate studies at Oxford, where T. S. Eliot was one of his contemporaries.

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust… – T.S. Eliot

Eliot worked on The Waste Land for years before its eventual publication in 1922, by this point having been famously shaped by Ezra Pound's edits and influence. Of this process, Eliot in a 1946 essay wrote: "It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem called The Waste Land which left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print. I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably: yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound’s critical genius." Indeed, Eliot's deep gratitude evidenced through the poem's dedication: "For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro." Taken from Dante's The Divine Comedy, the line translates as “the better craftsman,” a reference to Canto 26 of the Purgatorio.

Before the editing process with Pound had even begun, however, Eliot had secured a publisher for his masterpiece. Horace Liveright, of the New York publishing firm of Boni and Liveright, had been in Paris for a number of meetings with Pound. At a dinner in January of 1922, Liveright made offers for works by individuals who would become the titans of the Modernist movement, including James Joyce, and Eliot.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet… – T.S. Eliot

Eliot's arrangement with Thayer and The Dial was the result of the former's attempt to simultaneously increase his audience and his income. Though the deal between the two almost fell through due to a financial disagreement, an arrangement was eventually worked out, and Eliot was ultimately awarded The Dial's second annual prize for outstanding service to letters (which handily came with a prize of $2,000). In the midst of this, Boni and Liveright had brokered a deal with The Dial, which allowed the magazine to be the first to publish the poem in the U.S. if they would in turn purchase 350 copies of the book. Boni and Liveright then leveraged Eliot being made recipient of The Dial Award to their advantage, making it a prominent element of their marketing campaign, as illustrated by the jacket of the present lot.

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed… – T.S. Eliot

The Criterion and The Dial issues of Eliot’s landmark poem did not include the “Notes”, printed in this edition for the first t.mes . In the mid-1950s, Eliot recalled: “I had at first intended only to put down all the references for my quotations, with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism. Then, when it came to print The Waste Land as a little book—for the poem on its first appearance in The Dial and in The Criterion had no notes whatever—it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view today” (Gallup 30).

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order? – T.S. Eliot

In a 1922, an early reviewer deemed The Waste Land "a collects ion of flashes," noting that "there is no effect of heterogeneity, since all these flashes are relevant to the same thing and together give what seems to be a complete expression of this poet’s vision of modern life. We have here range, depth, and beautiful expression. What more is necessary to a great poem? This vision is singularly complex and in all its labyrinths utterly sincere. It is the mystery of life that it shows faces, and we know of no other poet who can more adequately and movingly reveal to us the inextricable tangle of the sordid and the beautiful that make up life" (t.mes s Literary Supplement, 26 October 1922).

Eliot—with The Waste Land forming the heart of his corpus—has, over the course of a tumultuous century, remained relevant in a way that his contemporaries, to a degree, have not. Such enduring popularity is certainly a test.mes nt to his singular genius, which continues to attract much scholarly attention. Perhaps, however, this is also due to his humanity, his unique ability to take the sordid and beautiful alike, and capture their urgency—their very necessity—as they come to shape a life.

(As noted in Connolly, the "a" is missing from "water" [line 138, page 22], while the "a" in "mountain" is present [line 339, page 41]).