Poetry
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot · 1922
Synopsis
Four hundred and thirty-three lines in five parts, with no continuous narrative, preceded by an epigraph from Petronius. April is declared the cruellest month. A woman remembers a summer by a Bavarian lake and a sledge ride in the mountains, a fortune-teller draws the cards, a crowd flows over London Bridge in the fog of a winter dawn, a woman reports at closing time what she said to a friend whose husband is coming home from the army, a typist receives a small clerk. Tiresias, blind, an old man with women's breasts, sees everything. A Phoenician sailor drowns.
Context
The poem was completed at the end of 1921, at Margate and then at Lausanne, where Dr Vittoz was treating its author. Ezra Pound, to whom it is dedicated, cut a large part of it; the manuscript, rediscovered in 1968, appeared in facsimile in 1971 with his annotations. The poem appeared in October 1922 in The Criterion, in November in The Dial, which awarded it its annual prize, and then in book form from Boni & Liveright, with notes that Eliot would say were added to lengthen a book that was too short. Virginia Woolf and her husband published it in London in 1923.
Who it is for
A long poem, with no plot or stable narrator, rich in borrowings from other languages; an annotated edition helps. Translated by Pierre Leyris as early as 1947, and by others since.
Prizes and reception
Dial Prize in 1922; regarded as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century and a foundational work of modernism.
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