"There are no poetic 'subjects' in this book, no conventional nightingales and daffodils, and there is no acceptance, either, of the traditional rules of meter and rhyme. As one discerning critic has said: 'We have here, in short, poetry that expresses freely a modern sensibility, the ways of feeling and the modes of experience of one fully alive in his own age'. "The main poem in this collection is 'The Waste Land' (1922) to which Mr. Eliot has...

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard...