Most anybody who has heard a thing or two about modern poetry can probably tell you that T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) is famous for writing The Waste Land. If that person knows a little bit more about the subject, he may add that it was Eliot who said the world ends “Not with a bang but a whimper.” An aficionado might well tell you that The Waste Land, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), and Paul Valéry’s La jeune Parque (The Young Fate) are the founding works of literary modernism. They form “a boundary stone where the old culture passes into the new,” as Valéry’s learned translator Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody declares in the introduction to The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry (2020). A century after the publication of Eliot’s masterpiece in 1922, it remains the defining work of modern poetry in the English language, much as James Joyce’s contemporaneous Ulysses continues to stand as the supreme modern novel in English.