Many critics highlight the fact that Eliot wrote The Waste Land while he was suffering a nervous breakdown. Another group of post—World War I writers disillusioned by the war, the surrealists, attempted to create literary works while their minds were in alternative states, a condition often reached by deliberate attempts to affect their consciousness, such as through hypnosis. The Magnetic Fields (1920), a series of prose poems by French poets André Breton and Phillipe Soupault, was created during one of these mental experiments, a marathon project that lasted eight days.

Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," first published in the magazine Poetry (1915) and later collected in Prufrock, and Other Observations (1917), is considered one of Eliot's most important works. Like The Waste Land, the poem mixes classical references with other modern images. The poem details the ramblings...