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Ezra Pound leaned back in his wicker chair , tapping a blunt carpenter's pencil against the typed margins of page four . In the freezing studio on the Rue Notre - Dame - des - Champs , the woodstove offered little warmth against the Parisian January mist . Across the table lay a disorderly pile of typed sheets , bearing the handwritten title * He Do the Police in Different Voices * . T . S . Eliot had delivered them upon returning from a psychiatric sanatorium in Lausanne : exhausted , trembling , and uncertain whether the sprawling verses constituted a masterpiece or the incoherent wreckage of a nervous breakdown . What Pound held between his ink - stained fingers was not yet a modernist monument , but a diffuse , uneven confession . Rarely had one poet surrendered such absolute editorial authority to another . Where an ordinary friend might have offered gentle encouragement , Pound wielded his pencil with surgical ferocity . In section three , Eliot had composed over eighty lines of ornate , eighteenth - century heroic couplets parodying Alexander Pope , detailing the morning toilette of an aristocratic lady named Fresca . To Eliot , the imitation seemed a brilliant demonstration of poetic versatility ; to Pound , it was unforgivable padding . With three violent diagonal strokes , Pound cancelled the entire passage , scrawling a single word in the margin : " B - ll - cks . " What Eliot required was not polite reassurance , but a ruthless structural eye capable of liberating the essential rhythm from Victorian clutter . Pound saw that the poem's revolutionary power resided in its sudden fractures , its polyphonic voices , and its jagged juxtaposition of colloquial speech with ancient scripture . Whenever Eliot lapsed into discursive explanation or comfortable narrative bridges , Pound struck through the lines . In section four , Eliot had written an elaborate , seventy - line account of a Gloucester fishing schooner wrecked on an Arctic reef . Eliot hesitated over cutting such polished description ; Pound did not . He pruned the narrative down to ten devastating lines about Phlebas the Phoenician , turning an ordinary sea yarn into a mythic meditation on mortality . Only when the derivative rhetoric was pared away did the true architecture of * The Waste Land * emerge . It was Pound's radical editing that transformed a private breakdown into the defining spiritual portrait of the post - war generation . Pound laid down his pencil , gathered the bruised , heavily annotated leaves , and tied them with brown twine . " Il miglior fabbro , " Eliot would later dedicate the book : the better craftsman . The title belonged to Eliot , but the scalpel had belonged to Pound .
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