The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a highly influential 433-line poem by T. S. Eliot. The title is often mistakenly written as The Wasteland.

Related Topics:
Poem - T. S. Eliot

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Eliot was one of the figureheads of early modernist writing, along with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is one of the most famous and most written-about poems of the 20th century, dealing with the decline of civilization and the impossibility of recovering meaning in life. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem—its slippage 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 "Shantih shantih shantih" (its last line.)

Related Topics:
Modernist - James Joyce - Virginia Woolf - Ezra Pound - 20th century - Civilization - Satire

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