Helen Vendler

"While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T.S. Eliot finished what would become the definitive poem of the modern condition, and one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through...