March 9, 1892

Vita Sackville-West (March 9, 1892 to June 2, 1962) was from an upper class background and was not alone in illustrating that self-confidence of breeding which can lead to Bohemian choices. This writer won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. After the war her book length poem The Garden (1946) won the Heinemann Prize. This latter prize was a short while afterwards won by Mervyn Peake for Gormenghast (1951).

Here's an excerpt from Vita Sackville-West's The Garden.
....
"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
...
Dull roots with spring rain"

Would that my pen like a blue bayonet
Might skewer all such cats'-meat of defeat;
No buttoned foil, but killing blade in hand.
The land and not the waste land celebrate,
The rich and hopeful land, the solvent land
...

Here is a review of a current edition of The Garden:

The Land had already established Vita Sackville-West's reputation as an outstanding poet in the long tradition of English pastoral; she began work on its companion piece in February 1939. 'It will have in it much more than mere gardening,' she said, 'all my beliefs and unbeliefs.' The Garden was written intermittently during the Second World War and was not published until 1946. While following the same seasonal structure as The Land, it is a much more presonal, symbolic poem, expressing a troubled fascination with the beauty of Nature's seasons overshadowed by strife and death. ...This edition contains a personal and scholarly introduction by Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson.

The best we can say about the poem excerpted here is that it shows a certain facility. Her quoting the most famous lines in English literature, and suggesting that we replace them with "the solvent land", makes any praise for this verse -- interesting. Although Eliot's poetry never achieved the greatness the lines he borrowed deserve, The Wasteland was not so jarringly diverse in quality from Chaucer's original lines. To recall the sources, here's Eliot--

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Here is the original Eliot cribbed from. Chaucer's lines--

When, in April, sweet showers fall
And pierce the drought of March,
And bathe the vein and root
Of every plant with such liquor
That genders forth the flowers

The common intelligence behind Sackville-West's lines is apparent in this comparison.