This all-new Signet Classic contains many of T.S. Eliot's most important early peoms, leading to perhaps his greatest masterpiece, The Waste Land , which has long been regarded as one of the fundamental texts of modernism. By combining poetic elements from many diverse sources with bits of popular culture and common speech linked in a fragmented narrative, Eliot recreated the chaos and disillusionment of Europe in the aftermath of WWI. * The Waste Land is a modernist literary masterpiece. * Contains a number of early poems, including Spleen, The Death of St. Narcissus, The Love Song of J. Prufrock, Preludes, Gerontion, The Hippopotmaus , and Sweeny Among the Nightingales . * T.S Eliot is the winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, and is one of America's greatest poets. * Edited and with an Introduction by Helen Vendler, a foremost scholar of moderism at Harvard University who writes regularly for the New Yorker and The New Republic . * Vendler is also the author of books on other essential poets, including W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, George Herbert, and the forthcoming The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnete .