From the outset, Eliot’s work fused satire and mysticism; his denunciations of society depend for their authority on his conviction that the religious vision of his great hero, Dante, offered a securer means of interpreting and judging culture and experience than the formulae and rituals of liberal democracy. “I had not thought death had undone so many” – a direct translation from Dante’s Inferno – Eliot observes of the commuters flowing over London Bridge in the first section of The Waste Land. The commuters are obviously not literally dead; Eliot must be saying that they are spiritually dead, that they have not yet been awakened to their limbo-like state, and therefore drift like unreal zombies in a Dantescan hell. Eliot was in the employ of Lloyds Bank on Lombard Street while at work on The Waste Land, so was in fact a commuter himself – but one with a difference: like the poem’s Tiresias, he had “foresuffered all” and “walked among the lowest of the dead”; thus he was able to see through the illusions of modern life, and deliver this withering verdict on his fellow commuters.