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 collection of poems, some of which had first appeared in Poetry, Blas, Others, The Little Review, and Arts and Letters.

The Waste Land (1922) is a poem by T.S. Eliot. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Eliot took a leave of absence from his job at a London bank to stay with his wife Vivienne at the coastal town of Margate. He worked on the poem during these months before showing an early draft to Ezra Pound, who helped edit the poem toward publication. The Waste Land, dedicated to Pound, includes hundreds of quotations of and allusions to such figures as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Saint Augustine, Chaucer, Baudelaire, and Whitman, to name only a few. Divided into five sections—“The Burial of the Dead;” “A Game of Chess;” “The Fire Sermon;” “Death by Water;” and “What the Thunder Said”—The Waste Land is a complex poem that translates Eliot’s fragile emotional state and increasing dissatisfaction with married life into an apocalyptic vision of postwar England. The poem begins with a meditation on despair before moving to a polyphonic narration by figures on the theme. The third section focuses on death and denial through the lens of eastern and western religions, using Saint Augustine as a prominent figure. Eliot then moves from a brief lyric poem to an apocalyptic conclusion, declaring: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience.” Both personal and universal, global in scope and intensely insular, The Waste Land changed the course of literary history, inspiring countless poets and establishing Eliot’s reputation as one of the foremost artists of his generation. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

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.

A collection of essays analyzing Eliot's The waste land, including a chronology of his works and life.

The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is not far from a century old, and it has still not been surpassed as the most famous of all modern poems. In many ways, it continues to define what we mean by modern whenever we begin to speak about modern verse. At the same time, as Ted Hughes once observed, it is also genuinely popular, and not just among the cogniscenti or the degree-bearing. “I remember when I taught fourteen-year-old boys in a secondary modern school,” Hughes once said, “of all the poetry I introduced them to, their favourite was The Waste Land.” Not for nothing was it included, in its entirety, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), edited by Philip Larkin, a poet not known otherwise for his hospitality to modernism. The poem’s appeal is intellectual, certainly, but also visceral. It fulfils in miniature the demands that Eliot made of the great poet at large: “abundance, variety, and complete competence” – the first of those criteria of greatness all the more surprising, and moving, to find accomplished in a poem that has its starting place in so barren a human territory. The poetry is modern in a wholly self-conscious way, but the modernity of Eliot’s poem stems in large part from a strikingly powerful awareness of what’s past. In this book, the Oxford scholar Seamus Perry points out some of the fruits of that acute historical awareness – and shares his own admiration of, and pleasure in, the extraordinary voicings and counter-voicings of this perpetually great work.