T.S. Eliot’s Descent Into ‘The Waste Land’

“The Waste Land,” the most influential poem of the 20th century, was published 100 years ago in T.S. Eliot’s highbrow journal The Criterion. This wildly original and difficult long poem portrays with imaginative authority the modern world as a spiritual desert. Wretched people devoid of religious belief lead a meaningless existence. By describing the bitter mood, after World War I had destroyed a belief in European civilization, the poem touched raw nerves.