The Waste Land.

ELIOT, T.S.

Item Number: 130812

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922.

First edition of one of the most influential works of the 20th century, number 562 of 500 copies, the Eliot family copy. Theodora Eliot Smith was T.S. Eliot’s niece, ownership inscription for front free endpaper, with an autograph card signed, “T.S. Eliot 1.X.1951,” printed portrait of Eliot on left hand side. Octavo, original black flexible cloth, lettered in gilt. In near fine condition. Housed in a custom clamshell box. A unique example, most rare and desirable.

The Waste Land expresses with great power the disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of fragmentary vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The depiction of spiritual emptiness in the secularized city--the decay of urbs aeterna (the "eternal city")--is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The poem initially met with controversy as its complex and erudite style was alternately denounced for its obscurity and praised for its modernism.