Surely, if nothing else, the notion that it is barely readable, let alone intelligible, is a part of The Waste Land’s reputation among readers. BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONSĮliot’s The Waste Land is undoubtedly the most renowned if not notorious literary achievement in poetry in English of the 20th century, a poem so celebrated even in its own time that it generated a whole slew of legends, misinformation, and general myths about its origins, intentions, and impact on the contemporary scene of postwar Europe in the early 1920s, a scene of which the poem has by now come to be regarded as a perfect reflection.

Virtually overnight The Waste Land became a focal point and rallying cry for the culture wars of its time and brought Eliot a celebrity and iconic status that he would never live down and, within a short time, would be adamantly refusing to live up to.

Published in October of that year in Eliot’s own literary review, the Criterion, in London and in the Dial in New York, it was then released in book form in December of that year by the New York publishing house Boni & Liveright. Nothing could have prepared either the literary world in general or the curious reader who had been following Eliot’s career to date for the publication, in late 1922, of The Waste Land.

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