Wastelandbooksauctions

Love for Poetry and  The Waste Land Of T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land (1922), sometimes mistakenly written as The Wasteland, is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem 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 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).

References in popular culture

• Martin Rowson has produced a comic-strip adaptation of The Waste Land, in the style of a Raymond Chandler story.
• Genesis's track Cinema Show on their album Selling England by the Pound takes its plot, diction and several direct references from The Waste Land.
• P. J. Proby has recorded a spoken word version for Savoy Records.
• Stephen King took a great deal of inspiration from The Waste Land, and even quotes several lines in a few of his books, especially that of the Dark Tower series. He even shares the name of the poem with one of his books, though that one is entitled The Waste Lands, as opposed to The Waste Land.
• Lisa Simpson makes a reference to this poem in the episode Moe'N'a Lisa.
• Two novels by Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward, take their titles from from a couplet in Part IV of The Waste Land, Death by Water:

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

• The movie Children of Men shares The Waste Land's closing line, "Shantih Shantih Shantih" as well as many common images and themes.
• Actress Fiona Shaw performed The Waste Land as a one-person show at the Liberty Theatre in New York to great acclaim.

//

Ezra Pound in 1913. In 1922 he helped Eliot with the editing of The Waste Land.

Listen to "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot Free mp3 download from ThoughtAudio.com