The Waste Land

by T. S. Eliot

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About this book

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot is a poem in five parts: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water and What the Thunder Said. Notes on the poem follow, and the poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro, under a Latin and Greek epigraph.

The first part opens with the line 'April is the cruellest month' and a memory of drinking coffee in the Hofgarten after a shower over the Starnbergersee. In another passage Madame Sosostris, a clairvoyante with a bad cold, shows cards that include the drowned Phoenician Sailor and the one-eyed merchant. A passage set among rock and mountains repeats the wish 'If there were water'. German lines and quotations from other languages appear within the text.

About the author

T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was an American-born British poet, critic, and playwright who became the defining voice of literary modernism. Works such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets reshaped English poetry, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.