Authorial intervention

No sooner have I written of my liking for Eliot and his footnotes than I read Alan Garner in the Guardian saying pretty much the opposite about The Waste Land.

He didn't like it as a schoolboy:

I thought it was a con because any poem that needs notes has not been properly worked

and he doesn't much like it now:

Perhaps I'd be a little less dismissive now, but I don't withdraw all of it.

Hmm. Spooky.