Best known as the book which inspired the basic symbolism of T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land, Jessie Weston's From Ritual To Romance is, it its own right, a classic of modern thought. An eminent medieval scholar, Miss Weston had the genius to apply the great insights of Sir J.G. Frazer's Golden Bough to the study of the mysterious legend of the Holy Grail. This conjunction of the discoveries of cultural anthropology and the literature of the medieval legend and romance has been rich in its fruits in later criticism, and in the work of a whole generation of poets and writers since 1920.

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