The Waste Land  

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The Waste Land (1922) 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 20th century literature. 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

• Doris Lessing's novel The Grass is Singing
• William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley uses Eliot's lines on Madam Sosostris as an epigraph
• In the promotional advertisement in DC Comics and Vertigo comics for the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, the character Morpheus is featured with the quote "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
• Martin Rowson has produced a graphic novel adaptation, also entitled The Waste Land, which is a parody of Eliot's poetry and Raymond Chandler-style detective fiction.
• Genesis's track "The Cinema Show" on their album Selling England by the Pound takes its plot, diction and several direct references from the poem.
• P. J. Proby has recorded a spoken word version for Savoy Records.
• Graham Nelson's work of interactive fiction Curses contains a section in which the narrator reads the poem and is transported into the Unreal City.
• Stephen King was inspired by The Waste Land, and quotes several lines from it, in his Dark Tower series. One volume is entitled The Waste Lands.
• In The Simpsons episode "Little Girl in the Big Ten," a poetry club employee sound-checks a stage microphone with the line "Test... test... Roses are red... April is the cruellest month... CRUELLEST MONTH..." before handing the mic off for the introduction of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.
• Two novels by Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward, take their titles from from a couplet in "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 poem'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.<ref>Ben Brantly, "Memory and Desire: Hearing Eliot's Passion," New York Times, 18 November 1996.</ref>
• Tim Powers based his book Last Call largely on The Waste Land's archetypes, and used references and quotes from the book in the text.
• William S. Burroughs quotes lines from the poem in several of his books, particularly the line: "Hurry up please, it's time."
• Evelyn Waugh drew on the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." for the title of his critique of 1930's London society A Handful of Dust. Waugh also pays tribute to the poem in Brideshead Revisited in which Anthony Blanche perches himself on a balcony at Christ Church, Oxford whilst reading "passages from The Waste Land through a megaphone to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river." He reads from Part III, "The Fire Sermon": "'I, Tiresias have foresuffered all,'" he sobbed to them from the Ventian arches -

Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead....

• Robert R. McCammon used a portion of the poem in his novel, Swan Song.
• H. P. Lovecraft wrote a lengthy parody entitled "Waste Paper: a poem of profound insignificance."
• The band King Crimson uses an audio sample of The Waste Land filtered through a Warr guitar in the first third of their improvisation "The Deception of the Thrush."
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events Book the Eleventh, The Grim Grotto, the poem is used to decode a telegraph message.
• The band Frankie Goes To Hollywood's second album Liverpool contains the song "Warriors of the Wasteland."
• The band Ted Leo and the Pharmacists use the line "Oed und leer das meer" from "The Burial of the Dead" in the song "Biomusicology," a track on their album The Tyranny of Distance.
• The band Darkest Hour use a recitation of the poem in the instrumental The Light At The Edge Of The World on their 2007 album Deliver Us.
• The song "Playboy" by the band Hot Chip begins with the lines "April, the cruelest month."
• Patti Smith wrote a poem, "Death by Water," published in her 1972 book, Seventh Heaven.