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Hello, in October 1922, the latest edition of London's literary magazine The Criterion hit the shelves.

In it was a new poem by a little known American poet. The poet was Thomas Sterns Elliott and the poem The Wasteland.

It turned out to be among the most influential poems ever written in English.

The Wasteland found a new way to express the modern world in all his bruising, gleaming cacophony.

Yet Elliott himself has been accused of willful obscurantism, misanthropy and of high-minded despair at the porosity of 20th century living.

But could someone who captured modern life so well really dislike it so much?

And when he looked out at the world of radio and cinema, a radical art, a joist, Stravinsky, a universal suffrage, did TS Elliott see only her barren featureless playing.

With me to discuss the Wasteland and modernity, a Lawrence Rainey, professor of English and American literature at the University of York,

Fran Briaton, reader in English at Queen's University of Belfast, and Steve Conner, professor of modern literature and theory at Birkbeck College, London.

Steve Conner, the Wasteland was published as I said in 1922, just after the First World War. Could you give us the context, the cultural, the social context in which it was conceived and published?

I think we can see this as the kind of confluence of history that wasn't quite over and a new world that in Matthew Arnold's words was powerless to be born.

There's a kind of curious log jam there.

We've got the political map of Europe being radically redrawn in the, you know, abiding chaos of the aftermath of the First World War rampant inflation in Germany in 1921.

Closer to home, the Irish Free State is declared in 1921, there'll be civil war in Ireland for three years.

The aftermath of the Russian Revolution is causing revolutionary upheavals right across Eastern Europe.

It's a time also of social upheaval, particularly focused upon women, the suffrage that you've spoken about.

Women's rights and votes for women was put on hold during the war, but in 1918, indeed women over the age of 30 were given the vote in Britain, closely followed by an extension of the other vote to women in America, Germany, Russia, and elsewhere.

A lot of sense as after the Second World War that social changes that had been enforced by the war meant that somehow the world could not simply be resumed in the way that it had been before.

And yet at the same time, the sense that everything had been blown apart, there was also, I think, a sense that somehow it was all oddly and an unreal kind of way still holding together, like some bomb had gone off but left everything standing.

But you suspected that behind the facades, you know, there would be nothing. So that strange sense of unreality has in a way the world just carries on, especially in the UK.

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