D., had settled in London – produced this masterpiece of some 433 lines, incorporating numerous verse forms and taking in the post-war world from squalid encounters in bedsits to chatter in East End pubs.
After imagism ended as a movement in 1917, modernist poetry became bigger and more ambitious, and in 1922, the American-born T. S. Eliot – who, like H. D., had settled in London – produced this masterpiece of some 433 lines, incorporating numerous verse forms and taking in the post-war world from squalid encounters in bedsits to chatter in East End pubs. The allusions to nymphs, Tiresias, and Elizabethan England suggest at once a continuum with the past and a break with it – everything is simultaneously worse than it used to be, and yet the same as it ever was.