The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (December 1922)

The Waste Land—one of the most important poems of the 20th century—began as a “hoard of fragments,” according to its author. T. S. Eliot began working on the long poem in 1914 and closely guarded this, the only draft, for the seven-and-a-half years he worked on it. Only his first wife, Vivien, and his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound were privy to the minutiae of Eliot’s process. The manuscript comprises a mix of 64 typed and handwritten pages on a variety of different papers.