War and empire

This chapter considers the connection between modernist poetry and the historical realities of war and empire. While the Great War of 1914-18 was not identified primarily with the specific ideals or dominant ideologies of empire, as the Boer War had been, the global dimensions of this First World War included action in theaters relevant to old and new colonial domains. The record the war leaves in Eliot's poetry of the late 1910s is similarly visible mainly as an end-of-empire feeling. In this imaginative circumstance, Eliot extends the poetics of decadence as the most contemporary of his modernist improvisations. The major poems of this period represent a sense of the contemporary moment that Eliot reveals in the opening lines of the poem he composed at the end of the decade, at the official end of the war.