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The impact of T. S. Eliot on modern literature is an almost unique literary phenomenon. An American by birth and education, Eliot came to dominate English literary life with a completeness rivaled only by that of Samuel Johnson in the later eighteenth century. When he arrived in England in 1914, Eliot was entirely unknown. By 1922, his poetry and criticism had both altered and defined the modern literary age. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) and other early poems, Eliot successfully assimilated the achievements of the French Symbolists into English poetry. The Waste Land (1922) provided a new poetic form enabling the modern age to recognize and to express itself in the disoriented aftermath of World War I. The characteristics of The Waste Land which contemporaries encountered with extreme difficulty--presence of myth to evoke elusive emotive concepts, domination of symbolic and descriptive imagery, focus on the urban contemporary environment, innovation in form and technique, and allusive reworking of material from the entire literary tradition--became characteristics of modern poetry, displacing the Georgian poetic school and the romantic tradition of Whitman.
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