A poem in five parts - "The burial of the dead", "A game of chess", "The fire sermon", "Death by water" and "What the thunder said". It is a statement of post-war depression and negativity, a protest against the older generation by the surviving young of the day.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in the USA, moved to Oxford and stayed in England till his death in 1965. While writing poetry, he worked in a bank and becoming a foremost writer for Faber and Faber, publishers. In this poem he became the voice of the disillusioned after the First World War. It was thought to be a forerunner of the 'modernist' movement, but Eliot preferred to say that it was merely 'rhythmical grumbling'!