One of the remarkable qualities of The Waste Land is its ability to resonate across time and space, transcending cultural and historical boundaries. As we mark its centenary, it is fitting that we take stock of the poem's continued relevance in our contemporary world. The contributors to this anthology guide us through the labyrinthine paths of The Waste Land, highlighting its capacity to speak to our own spiritual dilemmas, anxieties, and yearnings.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years.

The history of human waste. How I learned to love the excrement; The early history of human excreta; Treasure nigh soil as if it were gold!; The water closet dilemma and the sewage farm paradigm; Germs, fertilizer, and the poop police -- The present: a sludge revolution in progress. The great sewage time bomb and the redistribution of nutrients on the planet; Loowatt, a loo that turns waste into watts; The crap that cooks your dinner and container-based sanitation; HomeBiogas : your personal digester in a box; Made in New York; Lystek, the home of sewage smoothies; How DC water makes biosolids BLOOM; From biosolids to biofuels -- The future of medicine and other things; Poop : the best (and cheapest medicine; Looking where the sun doesn't shine; From the kindness of one's gut : an insider look into stool banks -- Afterword : breathing poetry into poop.

Newly revised and in paperback for the first time, this definitive, annotated edition of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land "includes as a bonus""all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composing his masterpiece. Enriched with period photographs, a London map of cited locations, groundbreaking information on the origins of the work, and full annotations, the volume is itself a landmark in literary history. "More than any previous editor, Rainey provides the reader with every resource that might help explain the genesis and significance of the poem. . . . The most imaginative and useful edition of "The Waste Land" ever published."--Adam Kirsch, "New Criterion ""For the student or for anyone who wants to get the maximum amount of information out of a foundational modernist work, this is the best available edition."--"Publishers Weekly"

Richard Savage returns in the sequel to ""Lions of the Grail"". 1316 AD. Richard Savage thought he had left the war in Ireland behind but Edward Bruce will not let him just walk away. He wants the Grail Savage stole from him back. To force Savage to return it he takes what is dear to him - his daughter Galiene. Savage must return to Ireland, but the seas are ruled by a ruthless pirate. Ireland is now a land devastated by war and decimated by famine. Carrickfergus castle stands besieged by the Scottish army, the garrison on its knees, and Scottish invaders ravage the countryside. Savage and Alys re-unite with old comrades on a desperate raid to save their daughter and turn the tide of war

Widely regarded as "The Poem of the Century, "The Waste Land is an "infinitely mysterious poem," which, according to John Xiron Cooper, "is a poem we have learned to handle, but not a poem, we have tamed." It is true that publication of the poem marked a watershed moment in the history of British poetry. Soon after its appearance, first in the inaugural volume of The Criterion (October 1922), a quarterly British literary magazine, founded and edited by Eliot himself, in London, and next in the American publication The Dial in New York (November 1922), the poem came to be regarded as one of the seminal works of modernist poetry, and Eliot as a very important literary figure of the time. Eliot earned the Dial Award of $2,000. It is important to note that The Waste Land has no definite structure. It is a poem that does not have a plot. Nor does it have a beginning nor an end. The poetic fragments mirror the fragmentation of life in the cities of Europe, devastated by World War I. It can be termed as "a heap of broken images," a poem, as asserted by Harold Munro, "a potpourri of descriptions and episodes." Since the poem is based on Tiresias's visions which come to him in spurts, The Waste Land seems to be fragmented or disjointed. The reader is expected to string all these fragments together to derive meaning. The Waste Land is also a multi-voiced poem, it has a multitude of voices, voices spoken in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, German, and Italian. It is also richly allusive and polyvocal. It alludes to several texts such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, Shakespeare, Buddhism, Hindu Upanishad and others. The mind-boggling allusiveness and profundity of the text just went over the heads of his readers, who were initially baffled by a string of quotations and reference to a variety of sources in multiple languages like Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Sanskrit. They could hardly grasp Eliot's 'aesthetics' of fragmentation and juxtaposition, which can be taken as an inextricable part of the poem's symbolic significance. The Waste Land is basically a peopled landscape; many characters, several of whom are women, roam around freely in the wasteland. It is interesting to note that "all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias." All these women have their own individual story to narrate, their own voice for people to listen to. Such women like Marie, a niece and confidante of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, Lil, the mother-of-five whose unhappy marriage is discussed by her friend in a London pub, the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, the typist girl, who is "bored and tired," the nymphs, who happened to be the friends of the loitering heirs of city directors vary from each other in terms of their age, class, educational level or socio-economic status. The Waste Land is fragmented into five sections: 'The Burial of the Dead, ' 'A Game of Chess', 'The Fire Sermon, ' 'Death by Water' and 'What the Thunder Said.'

In this Companion, an international team of leading T. S. Eliot scholars contribute studies of different facets of the writer's work to build up a carefully co-ordinated and fully rounded introduction. Five chapters give a complete account of Eliot's poems and plays from several distinct points of view. The major aspects and issues of his life and thought are assessed: his American origins and his becoming English; his position as a philosopher; his literary, social, and political criticism; and the evolution of his religious sense. Later chapters place his work in a number of historical perspectives; and the final chapter provides an expert review of the whole field of Eliot studies and is supplemented by a listing of the most significant publications. There is a useful chronological outline. Taken as a whole, the Companion comprises an essential handbook for students and other readers of Eliot.