How to Read 'The Waste Land' So It Alters Your Soul

By MARY KARR

The boundary between 20th-century verse in English and its 19th-century predecessors -- Romantic poetry and the genteel Victorian stuff after it -- didn't simply dissolve. It came down with an axe swoop, and the blade was T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land." William Carlos Williams said the poem "wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it." Its publication in 1922 killed off the last limping, rickets-ridden vestiges of the old era and raised the flag of Modernism, under whose