“APRIL is the cruellest month”: this famous line introduces T. S. Eliot's five-part poem, The Waste Land. Published in 1922, the poem soon made the young poet famous (Eliot, 1971). The Waste Land is a loosely connected series of images that paint a bleak, fragmented view of modern urban life. How would the psychology of creativity explain the creative process that led to The Waste Land? One common psychological approach is to focus on the writer's personality – Eliot's childhood experiences or his personality profile. A second common psychological approach is to analyze the mental structures possessed by Eliot – such as the store of metaphors, analogies, and even vocabulary that he had amassed during his years of study. In this chapter, I argue for a third approach – one that extends beyond the writer and the typewriter to encompass the collaborative interactions from whence creative writing emerges.

The creation of The Waste Land cannot be fully explained without analyzing collaborative interactions (Badenhausen, 2004). The process began when Eliot gave his good friend Ezra Pound the initial typewritten manuscript of his 800-line poem, asking for his suggestions. Before returning this first manuscript to Eliot, Pound deleted entire pages of it, moved stanzas around, and rewrote many of the lines. By the time he was done, he had shortened Eliot's initial typed manuscript by half – the published poem came out at only 433 lines.