The Waste Land (1922) is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. 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 "Shanti shantih shantih" (its last line).
Eliot probably worked on what was to become The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In a letter to John Quinn dated 9 May 1921, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish."
Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that "a year or so" before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot...
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