![Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword via The Public Domain Review [Shared]](http://welchwrite.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/wrightwood-roses.jpg)
Who would have thought that the humble crossword puzzle would have been seen as evil and useless as today’s video games back when they were invented. It only goes to show that everything old is new again and one generation complaining about the one following has never gone out of style. – Douglas
Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword – The Public Domain Review
![Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword via The Public Domain Review [Shared]](http://welchwrite.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/crossword-craze-double.jpg)
Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada’s lively grids.
Read Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword – The Public Domain Review