The lulling rhyme and sonorous language drew me in, and I was prepared to experience a beautiful poem written in a singular, compelling voice. But instead, I soon found myself confused, if not ...

It is one of the grimmest monuments of suffering and despair ever penned. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” might also be one of the most difficult texts to interpret. But whatever the author was doing ...

(RNS) — Some years ago, I was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” in a literature survey class, as I always do. On this day, students seemed even more befuddled by this notoriously difficult ...

It’s hard to think of a more famous opening in 20th-century poetry than “April is the cruellest month” — which continues, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring ...

The Waste Land was first published in The Criterion, a magazine that Eliot edited, in October 1922, and as a book two months later. Ever since, it has been regarded as the pre-eminent modernist poem ...

The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot, if not this century’s greatest poem in English, is certainly its most famous. Long, difficult and often enigmatic, it is full of quotations. It flits into parodies of ...

Suffering from mental and physical exhaustion, the poet T.S. Eliot in 1921 spent a few weeks convalescing in Margate, an English seaside town. In a shelter on the seafront, he began writing what was ...