I have been diagnosing the ways in which two exemplary modernist writers thought about time, memory, and desire in their fictional, poetic, and autobiographical writings, making the case that in writing the present of the avant-garde both Woolf and Eliot obsessively turned to history and memory, and when they did so they found themselves called upon to articulate a poetics of desire. Differing from a number of critics who have emphasized a sense of disconnection, discontinuity, breach, and rupture in modernist postures toward the past, I have been arguing that modernism's looking to the past denotes both a return and a departure. Intrinsic to the modernist project was a new, widely shared awareness that their relation to the past could only ever be belated, self-conscious, and palimpsestic – a building on and among ruins whose vitality remains.