In its novel use of fragmentary voices, dense allusiveness, mythic structures, urban setting, coiling irony, and unabashed difficulty, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land epitomizes the central thematic and stylistic tendencies of modern literature. Published in 1922, the poem reflects the profound sense of disillusionment that emerged in the wake of World War I, and yet, as new research has helped to show, The Waste Land is also a deeply personal poem, laden with connections to Eliot’s private life. The essays in this newly updated collection respond in a variety of ways to the complexities of this most deliberately and self-consciously complex of modern American poems.

Certainly one of the strongest of the obscure impulses behind The Waste Land is Eliot’s recurring dread that his poetic springs have run dry. April stands for a new season of poetic creation, "breeding" poems out of the detritus of his literary inheritance and notebook drafts.