Modernism was clearly concerned with the city. The city, since Victorian times, has been the centre of not only large populations and industries, but also research laboratories and consequently debates in science. Around the turn of the 19th century, technologies powered by electricity transformed the industrial and urban landscapes in both England and America. Energy and power were scientific developments that extended into the public imagination. Alongside this was the generation of huge amounts of waste. There was a spate of publications on waste (Tim Armstrong, 1998). Contemporary re-readings of modernism demonstrate how modernism was influenced not only by philosophies of electricity, but also by the increasing visibility of waste.

When Marcel Duchamp fixed a toilet bowl in an art gallery (labelling it ‘Fountain’, 1917), he linked art to waste production in the period of high modernism. A sustained meditation on waste – economic and bodily – occurs in Eliot's celebrated poem, The Wasteland (1922). Bodily parts are objects of revulsion because of the accumulation of dirt/waste (hands, feet, bones and hair). There occurs what Tim Armstrong identifies as a ‘negative catalogue’ of debris in ‘The Fire Sermon’: cardboard boxes, cigarette ends and handkerchiefs, among others. In 1934, Yeats underwent a surgical procedure, called the Steinach Operation, using hormone extracts and such, to enable masculine ‘rejuvenation’ through alteration of glandular activity. Yeats' obsession with aging and his creative, generative and sexual powers in the later poems (‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’, ‘The Three Bushes’) have been seen as directly connected to the biological-surgical procedure and as a literary response to a technological development in medicine.