[citation needed] Madison Cawein lived in Louisville his entire life, with the exception of three years spent in New Albany, Indiana, as a teenager.

[8] In 1912 Cawein was forced to sell his Old Louisville home, St. James Court (a 2+1⁄2-story brick house built in 1901, which he had purchased in 1907), as well as some of his library, after losing money in the 1912 stock market crash.

[11] In 1913, a year before his death, Cawein published a poem called "Waste Land" in a Chicago magazine which included Ezra Pound as an editor.

"[citation needed] Cawein's "Waste Land" appeared in the January 1913 issue of Chicago magazine Poetry (which also contained an article by Ezra Pound on London poets).

[13] Cawein's poetry allied his love of nature with a devotion to earlier English and European literature, mythology, and classical allusion.