Written when Eliot was working as a bank clerk and heavily edited by his friend Ezra Pound, 1922's The Waste Land could probably take the prize as the most important English-language poem of the 20th century. This 75th-anniversary edition includes the full text plus notes and an afterword by scholar/editor Christopher Ricks.
The Waste Land is a highly influential 433-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 cruelest month” (its first line); “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”; and “Shantih shantih shantih” (its last line). The title is sometimes mistakenly written as “The Wasteland”. (Summary from wikipedia.org)
The Waste Land is a highly influential 433-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 cruelest month” (its first line); “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”; and “Shantih shantih shantih” (its last line). The title is sometimes mistakenly written as “The Wasteland”. (Summary from wikipedia.org)
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940169160901 |
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Publisher: | LibriVox |
Publication date: | 08/25/2014 |
Sales rank: | 1,015,302 |
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