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Title:
The Waste Land
Author: T. S. Eliot
First Published in: 1922
The Waste Land, a poem by T. S. Eliot, first published
1922 in The Criterion. It consists of five secrions, 'The
Burial of the Dead', 'A Game of Chess', 'The Fire Sermon,
'Death by Water', and 'What the Thunder Said', together
with Eliot's own 'Notes' which explain his many varied
and multicultural allusions, quotations, and
half-quotarions (from Webster, Dante, Verlaine, Kyd,
etc.), and express a 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 depression and
futility; it was seriously praised by I. A. Richards as
'a perfect emotive description of a state of mind which
is probably inevitable for a while to all meditative
people' (Science and Poetry, 1926), and less seriously
hut significantly chanted 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 modern ism, art original voice
speaking through many echoes and parodies of echoes.
Eliot himself remarked that the poem could be seen not so
much as 'an important bit of social criticism', but as
'the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse
agaimt life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.'
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