The Waste Land
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A great book. First published AD 1922, written in English
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".
Your reading
What it draws on
The PersiansClassic
Aeschylus, 471 BC
'I had not thought death had undone so many', Eliot's line for the crowds crossing London Bridge, comes from Dante; and behind Dante stands the messenger in Aeschylus' Persians, reporting that never had so many men died in a single day.
Source: Wikipedia, The Persians
“Eliot, in The Waste Land, "The Burial of the Dead", line 63 "I had not thought Death had undone so many" echoed line 432 of the Messenger account in The Persians: "However, you can be sure that so great a multitude of men never perished in a single day", which is also similar to Dante's line in Inferno, Canto III, lines 56–57: ch'i' non averei creduto/Che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.” Read it there
UlyssesGreat book
James Joyce, AD 1922
Eliot read Ulysses in instalments while working on his poem, and praised its 'mythical method': an ancient story laid beneath the modern city to give it shape. The Waste Land does the same with London, in fragments and many voices.
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