Towards the long poem -- Writing the mother-city: Hope Mirrlees, Paris: a poem -- Battered books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley -- A poem without a hero: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land -- Machine: T.S. Eliot, "The hollow men" -- Arden to Ardennes: Richard Aldington, a fool i' the forest -- Nancy Cunard's Parallax and the "emotions of aftermath" -- Afterword: Towards the epic.