Archival Evidence

In both ''The Dial'' and ''The Criterion'', evidence of globalization and cross-cultural receptivity abounds. This marks a fascination with the globalization that began as a result of WWI. Soldiers had traveled abroad and seen alternative forms of society function.  Not only was there an increased aesthetic interest in global commodities, but these magazines indicate that there was an incresed interest in intellectual diversity. For example, in ''The Dial'', there are multiple European contributors, including Austrian author, Arthur Schnitzler, whose novel ''Doctor Graesler'' was translated from German into English for this publication.  Other contributors to the New York magazine were either European, or were Americans relocated to Europe.  Robert Delaunay was the French artist, whose modern-gothic painting is reproduced beside ''The Dial'''s debut of "The Waste Land" (Delaunay 472).  Delaunay was an avant-gard, Orphism artist, thus, the selection by editors to include his art within ''The Dial'' is in keeping with the culture of curiosity demonstrated by the New York readership.

Delaunay's painting represents a sense of disjointedness present in post-WWI Europe through his fragmented and sharply disjointed painting of the ambulatory of St. Severin's Cathedral in Paris. This fragmentation is echoed in the page opposite Delaunay's painting, wherein lies Eliot's Waste Land. The call to national identity in addition to a sense of brokenness within society draws parallels from the painting to the poem.