There is surely a certain glamour in ruminating on one's woes. In particular, many people enjoy being part of a beleaguered ideological minority that feels itself to be both morally superior and tragically ignored. TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) perhaps best exemplifies the modernist phase of this eternal lament. Following the horrors of the First World War, the future convert to Anglicanism conjured up a harrowing poetic vision of London, both physically and spiritually undone. One narrator feels himself “neither/ Living nor dead” and knowing “nothing”. Another grieves the “stony rubbish” of the temporal sphere, which humanity cannot hope to explain.