The Waste Land

1923

Special Collections PS3509 L43 W3 1923

Richmond: Printed and Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press

The Waste Land was published first in The Criterion in 1922 and in this first English edition the following year. It is open to the Chapel Perilous passage in Part V. In romance, knights who seek the Grail must enter this frightening and dangerous place and be tested by supernatural forces. Eliot’s chapel, however, is empty; it is home only to the wind. Rather than being an obstacle to the quester, the benign chapel offers hope: a cock crows, lightning flashes, and a gust brings rain to the parched land.