While there, Eliot worked on the poem, and possibly showed an early version to Ezra Pound when the Eliots travelled to Paris in November 1921 and stayed with him. He and his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, travelled to the coastal resort of Margate, Kent, for a period of convalescence. Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success." Įliot, having been diagnosed with some form of nervous disorder, had been recommended rest, and applied for three months' leave from the bank where he was employed the reason stated on his staff card was " nervous breakdown". While walking through a graveyard, they discussed Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that "a year or so" before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot visited him in the country. In a May 1921 letter to New York lawyer and patron of modernism John Quinn, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish". After a fourth section, "Death by Water", which includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, "What the Thunder Said", concludes with an image of judgement.Įliot probably worked on the text that became The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. "The Fire Sermon", the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and Eastern religions. The second, "A Game of Chess", employs alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes experientially. The first, "The Burial of the Dead", introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, as well as Shakespeare, Buddhism, and the Hindu Upanishads. Įliot's poem combines the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with vignettes of contemporary British society. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language " Shantih shantih shantih". It was published in book form in December 1922. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.