The Waste Land is a highly influential modernist poem published by T. S. Eliot in 1922 in the first issue of The Criterion, a literary magazine.
Source: Wikipedia
Writing
Eliot probably worked on what was to become The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In a letter to John Quinn dated 9 May 1921, Eliot wrote that he had a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish.
Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that a year or so
before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot visited him in the country. While walking through a graveyard, they started discussing Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Aldington writes: I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success.
Eliot, having been diagnosed with some form of nervous disorder, had been recommended rest, and applied for three months' leave from the bank where he was employed..
The reason stated on his staff card was nervous breakdown. He and his wife Vivien travelled to the coastal resort of Margate for a period of convalescence. While there, Eliot worked on the poem, and possibly showed an early version to Ezra Pound when, after a brief return to London, the Eliots travelled to Paris in November 1921 and were guests of Pound.
Eliot was en route to Lausanne, Switzerland, for treatment by Doctor Roger Vittoz, who had been recommended to him by Ottoline Morrell; Vivien was to stay at a sanatorium just outside Paris. In Lausanne, Eliot produced a 19-page version of the poem. He returned from Lausanne in early January 1922. Pound then made detailed editorial comments and significant cuts to the manuscript. Eliot would later dedicate the poem to Pound.