Efforts to revivify or revolutionize the arts coincided with these other efforts.
The world had changed radically between 18, a century that was and continues to be regarded as an age of revolution in virtually all fields of human endeavor and on all fronts of human concerns. Other motives and issues compelled these younger artists as well, of course. Modernists such as Eliot, Pound, and Joyce were obsessed with the idea that the literary artist could create a text in any medium, be it the novel, poetry, or a theatrical piece, that would freely and enthusiastically break all the rules and fly in the face of centuries of conventional wisdom and traditions, all for the sake of creating equally enduring works of literature that did more than just comment on human experience-that, instead, could effectively mirror its most obscure psychological and spiritual sources and dimensions. No one would dispute that The Waste Land stands among the handful of literary works from this time-other examples including most notably Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Eliot’s close friend, literary confidante, and erstwhile mentor, the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, and Ulysses, the highly experimental, innovative, and epic novel by Irish novelist James Joyce-that typified modernism in English language literature, both from the point of view of its most energetic practitioners and its most ardent detractors. 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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