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The September 2002 update

The major change in this update is that new categories of links have been created that identify the content better. This may speed up your study of the poem by allowing you to discriminate among commentary pages and select only pages of interest to you.

• There used to be two types of commentary for the lines in the poem, a general commentary and commmentary for the site author's own views. Now you can identify which links bring you to commentary about the poetry and Eliot's biography before you select the link.
• Where there used to be two types of pages describing the history of the poem, pages showing what was in the drafts and where Eliot reused material, there are now also pages that compare the lines in the poem to other Eliot poems and pages that describe the changes made to the poem since its first publication.
• New webpages have been created for these new page types and older pages have been recategorized. The general reader may not care but what went on with the recategorization is described below anyway.

Added these supplementary texts:

• John Webster, The White Devil, act 5, scene 4
• John Webster, The White Devil, act 5, scene 6
• John Webster, The Devil's Law-case, act 3, scene 2
• Jesse L. Weston on Buddha as the Fisherman from From Ritual to Romance, chapter 9
• Jesse L. Weston example of using "Waste Land" as two words in From Ritual to Romance, chapter 11
• Hermann Hesse, "The Brothers Karamazov" essay (the last two paragraphs in the original German)
• W.C. Firebaugh translation of The Satyricon
• Henry Clarke Warren translation of "The Fire Sermon"
• F. Max Muller translation of "The Fire Sermon"
• Thomas Parnell translation of "Pervigilium Veneris"
• Norman R. Shapiro translation of Baudelaire's "Au Lecteur"
• William A. Sigler translation of Baudelaire's "Au Lecteur"
• William A. Sigler translation of Baudelaire's "Les Sept Viellards"
• Marie Larisch's account of her meeting with Richard Wagner
• Joseph Rosenzweig translation of Act 1 of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
• T.S. Eliot, "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service"
• T.S. Eliot, "Sweeney Erect"
• T.S. Eliot, "Sweeney among the Nightingales"

Pages giving commentary on the lines of the poem (includes the two new page types of Poetry and Biography):

• Poetry pages (a new page type):
  • New poetry pages
    Line 418 - The boat
  • Pages moved to become poetry pages
    • Line 1 - April is the cruellest month
    • Line 60 - Unreal City
    • Line 77 - William Empson on Eliot's ambiguity
    • Line 215 - F.O. Matthiessen on Eliot's way of surprising the reader
    • Line 319 - Rhyming in Part IV
    • Line 322 - Repetition and contrast in the opening of Part V
    • Line 331 - The water-dripping song
    • Line 339 - S sounds
• Biography pages (a new page type):
  • New biography pages
    • Line 10 - Eliot's visit to Munich
    • Line 31 - Verdenal on Wagner
    • Line 37 - Hyacinth garden
    • Line 68 - Bells and spectors
    • Line 198 - Sweeney's tale of Eliot and Sweeney
    • Line 342 - The summer of 1921
    • Line 411 - Eliot on F.H. Bradley
  • Pages moved to become biography pages
    • Line 261 - Eliot's mandolin
    • Line 309 - Buddhist influence
    • Part V - Automatic writing
    • Line 376 - Bertrand Russell's nightmare
    • Line 408 - Eliot's desire for privacy
• Commentary pages
  • New pages:
    • Line 189 - Compares gashouse with grail castle
    • Line 424 - Philip R. Headings on "fish" and "fisher" symbolism
• Commentary pages (site author's opinions)
  • New pages:
    • Line 118 - The wind under the door.
    • Line 120 - Nothing again nothing.
    • Line 126 - Connecting the hyacinth girl with the drowned sailor.
    • Line 221 - Sappho

Pages describing the history of the poem (includes the two new page types of Changes and Comparisons):

• Changes made to The Waste Land (a new page type):
  • New pages:
    • Dedication
    • Note to line 433 - "The Peace which passeth understanding"
• Comparisons between Eliot's poems (a new page type):
  • New pages:
    • Line 2 - Lilacs in Eliot's poetry
    • Line 264 - Choruses from 'The Rock'
    • Line 398 - Prufrock's cat
• The drafts to The Waste Land:
  • New pages:
    • Line 231 - The young man carbuncular
    • Line 369 - Polish plains
• Origin of lines (no changes):

These allusion pages were added or modified:

Pages expanded:
• Line 74 - Allusion page expanded for Webster's The White Devil
• Line 118 - Allusion expanded for Webster's The Devil's Law-case
• Line 119 - Allusion expanded for Dante's Inferno, Canto V (Paolo and Francesca)
Pages added:
• Line 120 - Webster's The White Devil
• Line 197 - Day's The Parliament of Bees and the Actaeon myth
• Line 198 - Eliot's Sweeney poems
• Line 407 - Webster's The White Devil
• Line 411 - Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIII (The turning of the key)
• Line 431 - Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (contains Philip R. Headings' comments)

New miscellaneous pages:

• Line 34 - Wo weilest du? (Marie and Richard Wagner)
• Line 209 - Mr. Eugenides
• Line 261 - Mandoline
• Line 320 - O you who turn the wheel and look to windward
• Line 359 - Humor - Who is the third who walks always beside you?

New explanations for words in lines to the poem:

• Line 118 - Wind
• Line 261 - Mandoline
• Line 419 - Oar

New extra pages:

• The Waste Land - Three Words
• Possible allusions to Walt Whitman

Help pages:

• Each page type now has an explanation of what is is for.
• Most page have a link to the page describing its page type.
• There is now a page from which you can link to descriptions of all page types.

Described and listed books by Headings, Ackroyd, Reeves and Lamos.

Not really of interest to the general reader are these changes, listed here to allow the site author to trace the history of the site, The following old pages were changed to different types (Additionally, a few pages became linked to different lines but retained their page types.)

These commentary pages for these lines became poetry pages:

1, 60, 77, 215, 319, 322, 331, 339

These commentary pages for these lines became biography pages:

Part V, 261, 309

These commentary pages for these lines became comparison pages:

264, 398

These kommentary pages for these lines became poetry pages:

60

These origin pages for these lines became changes pages:

dedication, 433

These origin pages for these lines became comparison pages:

2

These miscellaneous pages for these lines became biography pages:

37, 376, 408, 411

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