The Antiphon The University of Maryland. In 1954, once Barnes had completed writing the play, she sent it to T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, who had previously published "Nightwood" and with whom she had developed a strong friendship. Eliot was initially very uncertain of the play's merits, indeed in a letter responding to it he explained that he had struggled to fully comprehend it. Nonetheless, he enlisted the poet and critic Edwin Muir to read the manuscript, who claimed the play "a work of genius and utterly absurd." Muir did, however, suggest some editorial changes, especially to the first act,
T. S. Eliot in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in "The Times Literary Supplement" on 21 June 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to "poetry"." In October 1922, Eliot published "The Waste Land" in "The Criterion". Eliot's dedication to "il miglior fabbro" ("the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication. It was composed during a period