First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression." As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays. In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience.

A collection of T.S. Eliot’s most important poems, including “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” T. S. Eliot is one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century. His unique and innovative evocations of the folly and poetry of humanity helped reshape modern literature, with poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” included here, and most notable, the title poem, “The Waste Land,” his groundbreaking masterpiece of postwar decay and redemption. Since its publication in 1922, “The Waste Land” has become one of the most widely studied modernist texts in English literature. Gathering together many of Eliot's major early poems, distinguished Harvard scholar and literary critic Helen Vendler presents an invaluable portrait of T. S. Eliot as a young poet and examines the artistry and craft that made him a Nobel laureate and one of the most significant voices in modern verse.

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.

divThis groundbreaking book of literary detective work alters our understanding of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land. Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem but also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot’s greatest achievement and on the poem’s place in the modern canon. Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, The Waste Land turns out to be something quite different: something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet’s intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew./DIV

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"

A guidebook to the allusions of T.S. Eliot's notorious poem, The Waste Land , Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up utilizes the footnotes as a starting point, opening up the poem in unexpected ways. Organized according to Eliot's line numbers and designed for both scholars and students, chapters are free-standing and can be read in any order.

The extraordinary career and devastating life of T.S. Eliot. In the midst of the roaring twenties, Eliot, an obscure bank clerk, intervenes to save a gay man being badly beaten and is thrust into a journey of sexual awakening. But even as love opens the floodgates for his poetry, he is set on a crash course with the homophobic society he will do anything to join.