ABSTRACT
In a poem which is now generally regarded as the high water mark of modernism, T.S. Eliot ([1922] 2015, p. 71) wrote: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. At the time he was not setting out a modernist manifesto, but simply acknowledging that the economic and political situation following WWI could no longer be comprehended using the artistic, conceptual and political resources available. He could only regather some fragments from the past and set them against the incomprehensible tragedy of the ruin that constituted the beginnings of ‘the Short twentieth Century’. Death on an unprecedented scale had blighted Europe; a peace deal had been cobbled together ensuring the political humiliation and economic deprivation of the people of Germany; and the experience of disconnection had become endemic. The particularity of Eliot’s sense of dislocation – ‘On Margate sands,/ I can connect/Nothing with nothing’ (Eliot [1922] 2015, p. 66)—can in retrospect be seen as a general structure of feeling that helped define what we now term ‘modernism’.
