By SAMIR RAHEEM [Daily Telegraph] – Every poet needs a Virgil. Wordsworth had Coleridge; Tennyson had Arthur Hallam; and Edward Thomas had Robert Frost. However, the best-preserved example of one poet editing another is Ezra Pound’s work on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem’s manuscript, first published in 1971 and now available on a snazzy iPad app, shows Pound’s boldness. On the first page of the second part, “A Game of Chess”, he wrote disapprovingly: “Too tum-pum at a stretch”; further down he complains a line is “too penty” – too regular a pentameter. Eliot redrafted the lines until he got an “OK” in the margin. Eliot acknowledged his friend’s role when he dedicated the 1925 edition to Pound, calling him Il miglior fabbro or “the better craftsman” – a phrase from Dante.
In the week that John Burnside won the TS Eliot Prize, it seems a fitting time to investigate how poet-editors (editors who are also poets) can shape the literary landscape. All the main poetry publishers – Faber, Picador, Jonathan Cape, Carcanet and Bloodaxe – have practising poets as editors, and a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.
Often seen as the most personal and mysterious of literary forms – and therefore least likely to be guided by an outside hand – poetry is, in fact, strikingly indebted to invisible creators. What, we might ask, are the effects and risks of this little-understood practice on the nation’s verse?
One of Eliot’s successors at Faber is Matthew Hollis, a poet-editor and biographer whose account of the literary friendship between Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Now All Roads Lead to France, is the favourite to win this Tuesday’s Costa Prize.
Continued at The Daily Telegraph | More Chronicle & Notices.
