Which American poet wrote 'The Waste Land'?

T.S. Eliot wrote “The Waste Land,” the landmark modernist poem first published in 1922. Although Eliot is often associated with English literature, he was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a British citizen in 1927, making the quiz’s description of him as an American poet defensible.

The poem is 434 lines long and is deliberately fragmented, shifting among speakers, languages, historical periods, and literary traditions. Its famous opening, “April is the cruellest month,” introduces a work preoccupied with cultural exhaustion and spiritual dislocation after World War I.

Eliot’s friend and fellow modernist poet Ezra Pound edited the manuscript substantially, which sometimes causes confusion about authorship. Pound helped shape the final poem, but Eliot wrote it. The title also reflects ideas drawn from Jessie Weston’s 1920 study of Grail legends.

“The Waste Land” first appeared in Eliot’s magazine The Criterion in Britain and in The Dial in the United States. It remains one of the central works of twentieth-century English-language poetry.