Question

Waste Land by Thomas Stearns Eliot

Answer 1

The A poem by T. S. Eliot, first published 1922 i Criterion and a few days later in The Dial. It consists of five sections, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’, and ‘What the Thunder Said’. Eliot’s own ‘Notes’ source his many allusions, quotations, and half-quotations (from John Webster, Dante, Paul Verlaine, Thomas Kyd, etc.), and indicate his general indebtedness to the Grail legend and to the vegetation ceremonies in Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The poem was rapidly acclaimed as a statement of the post-war sense of futility; and hailed as a kind of protest against the older generation by the undergraduates of the day. Complex, erudite, cryptic, satiric, spiritually earnest, and occasionally lyrical, it became one of the most recognizable landmarks of modernism. Eliot himself found the poem’s reputation a burden, and described it as ‘just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.’ Valerie Eliot’s edition, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (1971), showed the detailed textual advice offered by Ezra Pound (through which the poem’s length was very considerably reduced).