LY231 Left Bank Lit: "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot

Though T. S. Eliot lived primarily in London, his formative year in Paris (1910–1911) immersed him in French Symbolism and the cosmopolitan ferment that would later nourish the Left Bank modernists. In this way, he serves as both precursor and distant cousin to the writers of the Lost Generation—an intellectual link between their lived bohemianism and the emerging high modernist movement.

Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) stands as one of the defining works of that movement, distilling the fragmentation, despair, and search for meaning that followed the First World War. Structured as a collage of voices, languages, and literary echoes, the poem merges myth and modern life into a dense tapestry of cultural and spiritual exhaustion. “April is the cruellest month,” its famous opening line, sets the tone for a world haunted by sterility yet yearning for renewal. Though written in London, The Waste Land resonates with the same sensibility that haunted the cafés of Paris—a generation seeking coherence in chaos. For your series, it bridges Flanner’s documentary clarity and Stein’s exuberant self-mythologizing: the poetic center of gravity around which modernism itself turned.