The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot(1922)
Extract
April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.
April is the cruellest month, and the modern city is a heap of broken images where the dead are planted in gardens and clairvoyants catch cold. Published in 1922, this poem assembles fragments of myth, liturgy, overheard talk, and Sanskrit scripture into a structure mirroring the shattered consciousness of postwar Europe. London Bridge is falling down. The Fisher King sits upon the shore. Voices overlap in many languages, and beneath them runs the question of whether anything can be redeemed from ruin. Ezra Pound cut the manuscript nearly in half; what remained was all nerve and juxtaposition, cohering through rhythm rather than story. It did not describe modernism so much as enact it, making fragmentation a new and terrible form of beauty.
If you loved this
Eliot spent twenty years answering his own despair, and these poems are the response.
Ginsberg writes the next generation's waste land, but screams where Eliot whispered.
Pound fragments civilisation even further, and never finds the shore Eliot reaches.