Who wrote the poem The Waste Land?

T.S. Eliot, in 1922, and it exists in the form it does because Ezra Pound cut it roughly in half. The original manuscript had a long comic opening in a Boston bar and a great deal else; Pound went through it with a pencil, deleting hard, and Eliot dedicated it to him as il miglior fabbro - the better maker.

It arrived at the right moment and was read as a diagnosis of a broken postwar Europe, which Eliot rather resisted - he later described it as the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life, which is either false modesty or an accurate account of a poem written during a nervous breakdown while his marriage was collapsing.

The notes are the part that changed poetry's reception. Eliot added several pages of references to Dante, the Grail legends, Sanskrit and the Upanishads, apparently partly to pad the book to a printable length - and the effect was to establish an expectation that serious modern poetry comes with scholarly apparatus and needs decoding. He spent years afterwards regretting having sent people on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards.