Reading T.S. Eliot and reading about T.S. Eliot were equally formative experiences for my generation. One of the books about him which greatly appealed to me when I first read it in the 1960s was The New Poetic¹ by the New Zealand poet and critic, C.K. Stead. The title referred to that movement, critical and creative, which was instituted in the late nineteenth century against discursive poetry, and which Stead judged to have culminated in England with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. One of his purposes was to show how in The Waste Land Eliot made a complete break with those popular poets of the day whom Eliot's contemporary, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would have called "the purveyors of ready-made meaning"² — bluff expositors in verse of arguments or narratives which could have been as well conducted in prose. Stead also provided instruction and delight by sussing out titles and reviews of books which "the new poetry" was up against: such as Anna Bunston's Songs of God and Man, perceived by the literary pages to have "freshness and spirituality"; Augusta Hancock's Dainty Verses for Little Folk which were "written in the right spirit"; and Edwin Drew's The Chief Incidents in the Titanic Wreck, which "may appeal to those who lost relatives in this appalling catastrophe". These popular volumes (of February 1913) were possessed of a strong horsepower of common-sense meaning. The verse was a metrical piston designed to hammer sentiment or argument into the public ear. This was poetry that made sense, and compared to its candour and decent comprehensibility, The Waste Land showed up as a bewildering aberration. In fact, Eliot's poem was hardly available enough to the average reader even to be perceived as an aberration.