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In Memory of Donald Gallup (1913-2000), Bibliographer of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
To students of twentieth-century modernism, 1971 was the year when Valerie Eliot published a facsimile edition of The Waste Land's pre-publication manuscripts. The event invited new accounts of the poem's genetics and fresh assessments of how those might bear on our understanding of the poem.' One year later Hugh Kenner and Grover Smith published two essays which, while differing sharply in premises and procedures, reached a consensus that Part III, "The Fire Sermon," was the earliest portion of the poem to have been written, probably around midsummer 1921, followed first by Parts I and II, then by IV and V, the latter completed in December 1921.2 Their efforts were followed in 1977 by Lyndall Gordons attempt at "Dating The Waste Land Fragments," a wide-ranging survey which addressed both the principal parts of The Waste Land and the various drafts and ancillary poems.3 In the end, however, Gordon remained divided over the claims of two sharply incompatible hypotheses for dating the principal parts of The Waste Land, and concluded that the question was, at least for the present, "unresolved" ("DTWLF," 146). In 1979 there was still another consideration of the dating by Peter Barry.4 Barry urged a complicated chronology which assigned priority to the first leaf in the typescript for Part I, a passage recounting a rowdy night on the town in Boston (assigned to April-May 1921), followed by all of Part III (September-October), then the rest of Part I and all of Part II (early November), and finally Parts IV and V (November-December). Finally, in 1984, Ronald Bush offered a reading of the poem which echoed Smiths and Kenners thesis assigning priority to Part III, and relied on Gordons conjecture that a specific fragment, the one beginning "London, the swarming life," might date from as far back as 1918.5
By 1985, however, debate had come to a standstill, and since then a lack of new evidence or argumentation has effectively put a halt to discussion. What had once seemed a new dawn has turned into a lunar landscape, with critics condemned to retracing the dusty tracks left by Kenner, Smith, Gordon, and Barry. At the same time, as Christine Froula has...