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

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....




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Waste Land" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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