T. S. Eliot is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as poet, literary critic, dramatist, and editor/publisher. In 1910-1911, while still a student, he wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and other poems which are landmarks in the history of literature. In these college poems, written with virtually no influence from his contemporaries (William Butler Yeats was well known, but not yet modern; Ezra Pound at this time was neither well known nor modern), Eliot articulated distinctly modern themes in forms which were both a striking development of and a striking departure from those of nineteenthcentury poetry. Within a few years, he had composed another landmark poem, "Gerontion" (1920), and within a decade, the century's most famous and influential poem, The Waste Land (1922). While the origins of The Waste Land are in a sense personal, the voices projected are universal. Perhaps without having intended to do so, Eliot diagnosed the malaise of his generation and indeed of Western civilization in the twentieth century.
