The poetry of T. S. Eliot and his successors not only reaches a certain limit but also passes beyond that limit when it challenges standard approaches to the role of the poetic subject in the constitution of literary meaning. Walter Benjamin provides the first major attempt to deal with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in terms of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the traumatic, thus inaugurating a unique conception of cultural memory, but his approach to Baudelaire also looks forward to a new poetic that decenters the literary text. In this chapter, T. S. Eliot’s work as a poet is read in the shadow of Benjamin, but also to test the limits of what is generally identified with literary Modernism. Thus, Eliot’s major poem, The Waste Land, is shown to evoke a unique understanding of the poetic image as an encounter with time and experience. A short poem by Ezra Pound is later used to suggest how the archaeology of mythic layering decenters cultural history and even anticipates the textual poetics of Francis Ponge. The conclusion suggests that Eliot’s own poetry, beginning with The Waste Land, can no longer be read as an expression of late Romanticism.