From Ritual to Romance

The Grail legend traced back past the Christian romances to a fertility ritual — the wounded king, the waste land, the lance and the cup — by a scholar who had spent thirty years on Arthurian texts. Weston published it in 1920, and two years later T. S. Eliot named it in the notes to The Waste Land as the source of his title and much of his symbolism. Her thesis is disputed; the reading of it changed English poetry. Sixty plates after Rossetti, Duncan and others carry the Grail's mystery and ritual through four centuries of painting.