The literary achievement of Eliot’s ambitious work begins with the revolutionary poetry emerging in the late 19t century. A radical generation of young intellectuals found the cloying optimism, pleasant wisdom, and predictable rhyming and rhythmic structures of high Victorian/Edwardian poetry irrelevant and ironic within a complex emerging modern world of industrialization, rampant materialism, spiritual indifference, and broad economic inequities. Calling themselves modernists, these angry and uncompromising university-educated artistes sought to boldly break with any inherited assumptions about the form and function of poetry. Poetry was not a vehicle for sharing personal confessions or for pontificating about how to live moral lives. They perceived in art—literature, music, painting, sculpture—the last, best hope for Western civilization to right itself and to reclaim the grandeur and moral authenticity of its great past.

Modernists openly and vehemently disdained market appeal. Their works were thus highly experimental, daring, often purposely obscure, dense, and challenging as they viewed popularity and sales as hallmarks of shallow poetry. The movement embraced change and encouraged shocking readers into awareness. “Make It New” became its credo, as propounded by Ezra Pound—an American expatriate living in London instrumental in guiding the massive revisions of The Waste Land.