AustLit

'Karl Stead is in his 80s now and for as long as anyone can remember he has been New Zealand’s leading literary critic. It was in the 1960s that he wrote The New Poetic, a book that shed light on T. S. Eliot by suggesting that The Waste Land was a poetry of breakdown and Four Quartets was a very uneven work not simply amenable to recuperation by the suggestion that it was deliberately so. ' (Introduction)