TS Eliot's papers were scrutinised
to reconstruct the poem's order of
composition. Picture: HarperCollins.

After a two-year journey across the US and Europe, the examination of more than 1,200 sheets of paper and a consultation with a pair of FBI agents, Professor Lawrence Rainey of York University's English faculty claims to have solved the mystery of how TS Eliot constructed his iconic modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land. Once thought to have been planned by Eliot from beginning to end, Rainey (a longtime Eliot scholar, whose Annotated Waste Land came out in April this year) now claims that the final version of the poem was the result of numerous false starts and was cobbled together from more than 50 different drafts. Read the full story here.