Waste Land, drunk poet

Nor is it a simple matter of journalists and letter writers being drunks and poets needing to abstain. Who can forget Ezra Pound’s lines about:

How Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed –
Tissue preserved – the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the whisky warmed.

Some writers, of whom Scott Fitzgerald is a triumphant example, actually do their best work when drunk. I suspect that Eliot’s The Waste Land was written, much of it, when drunk. / A.N. Wilson, Telegraph 7.7.03