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Text of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot with annotations, references, map, and Eliot's notes.
From The Waste Land (Boni & Liveright, 1922) by T.S. Eliot. This poem is in the public domain. The Waste Land - April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.
T. S. Eliot opens The Waste Land with an epigraph taken from a Latin novel by Petronius. The epigraph describes a woman with prophetic powers who has been blessed with long life, but who doesn’t stay eternally young. Facing a future of irreversible decrepitude, she proclaims her longing for death.
‘ The Waste Land ‘ is considered defining poem of literary modernism as it employs experimentation in form while portraying the decadent contemporaneous time instead of Victorian idealism. ‘ The Waste Land ‘ has such vast and complex references that Eliot had to provide end notes to the poem.
The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is arguably the most important poem of the whole twentieth century. It remains a timely poem, even though its origins were very specifically the post-war Europe of 1918-22.
May 1, 1998 · May 1, 1998. Most Recently Updated. Mar 24, 2021. Copyright Status. Public domain in the USA. Downloads. 1846 downloads in the last 30 days. Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.
Poem Guide. The Hearers to Collection: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Who are all these people? Where is this waste land they inhabit? What is this chaos of impressions we are privy to? Wherefore such madness? By Tyler Malone. Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images.
