The war [first] years in the capital were formative for Eliot's career, particularly with regard to his friendship with Ezra Pound which connected him to leading figures in the international avant garde. It was Pound, in his role as a friend, editor and promoter, who did most to establish Eliot as the pre-eminent figure in the modernist movement, particularly through his decisive editorial intervention in The Waste Land. Eliot's literary career now gained momentum: Prufrock and Other Observations appeared in 1917 and made a strong impact. However, growing professional success masked personal suffering as the Eliot's marriage disintegrated, prompting a nervous breakdown in Eliot which resulted in three months' enforced rest. It was during this period that The Waste Land was composed, his bleak masterpiece of psychic fragmentation. With its collage of voices, its violent disjunctions in tone and wealth of cultural allusion, The Waste Land also resonated as a depiction of the ruins of post-war European civilisation. It was published in The Criterion, a quarterly cultural that Eliot edited until 1939. This role, along with his involvement with another important journal, The Egoist, and his position from 1925 as one of the Directors of Faber & Faber established Eliot as the leading literary critic of his time, as well as its most famous poet. His essay on the impersonality of the poet and his concept of the "objective correlative", to name but two of his best known ideas, have been part of the critical currency ever since.

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