Really interesting interview, thanks for posting, I particularly liked the anecdote about what happened to the original Wasteland manuscript.

INTERVIEWER

Does the manuscript of the original, uncut Waste Land exist?

ELIOT

Don’t ask me. That’s one of the things I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. I sold it to John Quinn. I also gave him a notebook of unpublished poems, because he had been kind to me in various affairs. That’s the last I heard of them. Then he died and they didn’t turn up at the sale.

It's actually viewable here with Pound's notes:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-of-t-s-eliots-...

Some background:

https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/ezra-poun...

> "[Pound] was a marvelous critic because he didn't try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do."

makes it sound like a damned shame Pound went down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole.

(I am adding "able to put oneself in the shoes of others" as yet another thing which I can no longer regard as an infallible bulwark against totalitarianism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199995 )

Interesting tidbit on the importance of keeping a day job:

I think that for me it’s been very useful to exercise other activities, such as working in a bank, or publishing even. And I think also that the difficulty of not having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of concentration. I mean it has prevented me from writing too much. The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts. That would be my danger.

A hacker 'tude: Oh, yes, one wants to keep one's hand in, you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper. One doesn't want to lose one's skill.