The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' is widely considered the most important poem written in English in the 20th Century. In an attempt to see it 'whole', Matt Simpson considers this complex work in great detail, bringing to life its many arcane-seeming allusions and trying to link together the many disparate fragments out of which it is made. He interprets it primarily as an elegy, a despairing window on lost friendship, disillusion, the breakdown of communal values and the poet's own health, and consequently as a quest for purpose, meaning and possible redemption in an intimidating world.