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.“The Uranian Muse,” The Waste Land, and “il miglior fabbro” From the beginning, Ezra Pound was an indispensable force in Eliot’s career, nowhere more so than in the creation of The Waste Land. He would help to shape it at a time when Eliot was most dependent on him. To be sure, Eliot had been writing his long poem over a very long time and could be said to have finished it in Lausanne. He had shown a copy to Pound in Paris in November , when he was en route to Switzerland, and he carried the completed manuscript back to Paris on January  when he joined Vivien there, leaving for London on January . Eliot, writing in , remembered Pound’s role:“It was in  that I placed before him in Paris the manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem . . . which left his hands, reduced to about half its size. . . . 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 penciling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound’s critical genius” (, ). As we know, Eliot got his wish, although he did not live to see the manuscript resurface to be published in the facsimile edition of , where we can see Pound’s penciling. Pound’s “critical genius” was acknowledged earlier by Eliot with a meaningful, memorable epithet. Upon the poem’s book publication in America (), Eliot inscribed this [13]     () “The Uranian Muse,” The Waste Land, and “il miglior fabbro,” ; () Publication of The Waste Land, ; () “Out into the World”: The Waste Land Reviewed, ; () Pound’s Financial Scheme for Eliot: “Bel Esprit,” ; () Birth of The Criterion,  dedication in one copy:“For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro,” but the dedication did not see print until , with publication of Poems –. The words (“the better craftsman”) are spoken to Dante by Guido Guinicelli as a salute to the twelfth-century troubadour poet, Arnaut Daniel:“‘O brother,’ said he, ‘this one whom I distinguish to thee / with my finger’ (and he pointed to a spirit in front) / ‘was a better craftsman of the mother tongue’” (Purgatorio, Canto , lines –). Pound’s role in shaping The Waste Land is the focus of my  book, T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons, which made full use of the manuscripts in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts. I overlooked the relevance to my enterprise, however, of Pound’s poem “Sage Homme,” which was included in a letter Pound sent from Paris to Eliot in London. He wrote at the top, “ Saturnus An I.” It has been dated“ December ”in brackets by D.D.Paige in Pound’s Letters () and by Valerie Eliot in The Letters of T. S. Eliot (). Both Peter Ackroyd and Lyndall Gordon believe January  the more likely date. This is probably correct, based on the contents of the letter and Eliot’s no doubt prompt reply, dated January ?, . However, for Pound, as he wrote to Mencken on March , , “The Christian era ended at midnight on Oct. – of last year.You are now in the year I. p. s. U” (Pound, L, ). Pound chose that date because Joyce finished Ulysses “on Mr. Pound’s birthday [October , ].” Therefore,  would still be part of “An I.” But since Joyce was presented with the first published copy of Ulysses on his birthday, February , , the year  certainly qualifies (Ellmann, ). In any event,“An I” is associated with the appearance of Ulysses. As Wayne Koestenbaum, in his study of male literary collaboration as “textual intercourse,” has pointed out: “Pound dates his letter  Saturnus,An , signifying that ,the year Ulysses was published, is the Year One of modernism, and that Joyce’s epic gave birth to a new world. The Latin date An , spelled out, reads An Unus. Pound’s playful reference to an(un)us as modernism’s birthsite brings the poem’s scene of gestation even closer to anal intercourse” (Koestenbaum, ).“Saturnus ”refers to the Roman god Saturn,protector of the sowers and the seed, later identified with the Greek Titan Cronus, father of Jupiter/Zeus. The festival in his honor, beginning on December , was traditionally the merriest of the year, with no war, the slaves freed, and presents exchanged, and commemorated the Golden Age, a time of peace and happiness. In addition to evoking the season, did Pound want to indicate the beginning of a new Golden Age? In the letter containing “Sage Homme...

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