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.]