Eliot published it in 1922, aged thirty-four, and modern poetry began. The poem was originally twice as long; Ezra Pound cut it, and Eliot dedicated it to him as 'il miglior fabbro.' What remains is a collage of voices, languages, myths, and modernist despair: the drowned Phoenician sailor, the typist and the clerk, the rats in the alley, April as the cruellest month. The notes Eliot appended have spawned libraries of interpretation. But the poem works before you understand it, through rhythm and image and the sense that something has broken that will not be repaired.