SOURCE: "Edward Carpenter and The Waste Land'," in The Review of English Studies, Vol. XXXIV, No. 135, August, 1983, pp. 312-5.

In the following essay, Brown explores evidence that T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was informed by a reading of Carpenter's Towards Democracy.

It seems likely that in the period 1916-17 T. S. Eliot read Edward Carpenter's long Whitmanesque poem Towards Democracy, for several passages in The Waste Land are interestingly anticipated in Carpenter's poem.

Now remembered, if at all, as an early advocate of homosexual rights, Carpenter's reputation in socialist and radical circles was at its height in the decade leading up to the First World War. 'A major Socialist propagandist' capable of drawing 'as many as two thousand people to a Sunday meeting of a Labour church or to a lecture in the Sheffield Hall of Science',¹ Carpenter spoke at meetings of groups representing all shades of...