Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.                                          —T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” The most important poem of the twentieth century is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Famously, it gave vivid expression to the cultural crisis that followed the Great War, while providing vital insights into the mental world of the literary and artistic Modernists who went on to shape the culture of Western civilisation. More specifically, it showcased the crucial role played by Eliot’s hermetic conception of…