This groundbreaking book of literary detective work alters our understanding of T. S. Eliot's poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land. Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem he also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot's greatest achievement and on the poem's place in the modern canon. Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, The Waste Land turns out to be something quite different: something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet's intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew.

Lawrence Rainey is professor and chair in modernist literature, Department of English, University of York. He is the author of Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, published by Yale University Press.

'[A] work of critical intelligence respectful of the literary sophistication of this full-grown Modernist... [It] is in the passages where Rainey demonstrates the "local, contingent, and retrospective" nature of the poem's composition that his research rises from original scholarship to creative criticism, entering sympathetically into the lyrical process and restoring the written fact of the poem to the reader.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement