Description: While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921 Thomas Stearns Eliot began constructing what would become the definitive poem of the modern condition, and one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over 20th-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Holy Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis on an ailing civilization, and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot, with considerable editorial assistance by Ezra Pound, unfolds a nightmarish, kaleidoscopic landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voices (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective.This Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic edition collects all of the poems in Eliot's first three volumes of verse, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a hallmark of post-symbolist irony; Eliot's piercingcritiques of modern civilization (Sweeney Among the Nightingales, Gerontion, and Preludes); and Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service and Whispers of Immortality, compelling expressions of the search for a sustaining faith.

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