on fortunate title changes

May 3, 2010

The original title of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (and I’m not joking) was this:

He Do the Police in Different Voices

I think we can seriously doubt whether the poem would ever have caught on with that title, even if not a word of it were changed.

[ADDENDUM: Apparently, “He do the police in different voices” is a quotation from Dickens. But it’s still a terrible title for a poem.]

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