Heavily cut from manuscript drafts by Ezra Pound—to whom Eliot dedicated the poem as il miglior fabbro ('the better craftsman')—and first published in October 1922 in The Criterion and The Dial.
Spans 434 lines across five sections: 'The Burial of the Dead', 'A Game of Chess', 'The Fire Sermon', 'Death by Water', and 'What the Thunder Said', with Eliot's notes added in December 1922.
Weaves fragmented voices of postwar London with the Fisher King and Grail myth (from Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance), Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante, and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.