The twin concerns of primitive and metropolitan life nourished T.S. Eliot’s imagination through his childhood and student years and developed to mould and underpin his writing. Ranging from Dr Sweany of St Louis and Eliot’s intense interest in anthropology to his interest in Victorian urban writing and popular American models, this book throws new light on Eliot’s major works, particularly on The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. In understanding how a great poet obsessively and continually brought together “savages’ and the sophisticated as well as slum-dwelling members of modern urban society, we can see his work afresh as possessing remarkable and profound excitement as well as unusual integrity.