The Waste Land - Part 1

May 9th, 2007 | Posted in T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land (1922) is a highly influential book-length poem by T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the 20th century. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem – its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures – the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are April is the cruellest month (its first line); I will show you fear in a handful of dust; and the Sanskrit Shantih shantih shantih (its last line.) If you would like to study the intricacies of this complex poem, visit Exploring The Waste Land. Portrait of T. S. Eliot by Wyndham Lewis