The Waste Land.

ELIOT, T.S.

Item Number: 2771

Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1923.

First edition, first state of one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Octavo, original marbled blue boards. One of about 460 copies hand-printed by the Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Some light fading to the extremities and the spine paper lacking as usual, still a nice bright copy.

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.