Valerie Eliot's facsimile edition of the drafts makes a real contribution to the understanding of the poem's evolution and inner process; and it enables us to give a meaning to Eliot's saying that he wrote The Waste Land simply to relieve his own feelings. Yet it leaves us guessing still about some of the basic matters of fact. What is the precise chronology of the various materials which Eliot presented to John Quinn in 1922 as ‘the MSS of the Waste Land’? The arrangement in the edition corresponds as closely as possible to the finished version, with the extra pieces following in no particular order. But this has the effect of concealing the stages of the poem's evolution. Moreover, the clues by which we might recover them have been effaced in the process of photographic reproduction. The originals appear to have been enlarged or reduced, and intensified or lightened, in order to achieve a nearly uniform size of page and degree of inking; and the editorial description of them doesn't give all the necessary detail. For accurate scholarship of course there can be no substitute for the originals; and criticism based upon facsimiles should in any case be cautious. But we need not be left quite so much in the dark. Then there is the problem of the exact form in which Eliot placed the materials before Pound in Paris in December 1921.