How 'The Waste Land' Became the Most Quotable Book

This autumn the world will have been haunted by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land for 100 years. Discerning early readers realised they had seen—or rather, heard—an unquiet spirit of new poetry. John Peale Bishop, an American living in Paris, encountered it in the first issue of Eliot’s own magazine, The Criterion, in October 1922. “It is IMMENSE. MAGNIFICENT. TERRIBLE”, he wrote in a letter to his friend Edmund Wilson, echoing the poem’s gothic use of single words and block capitals for dramatic effect. With its many places, ages and languages, The Waste Land disturbed the piped music of modernity, its strange noises spreading out into the world as though via the BBC radio masts that began emitting voices in November 1922.