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Eliot’s “Unreal City” is modern London. The urban scene that makes up the final piece of the first section of The Waste Land is set in the city’s financial district where Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank. Eliot’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, and Dante’s Inferno merge into a hellish tableau.
- Undead Eliot: How “The Waste Land” Sounds Now
As editor, critic, and builder of poetic landmarks from...
- T. S. Eliot
The 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot...
- The Imaginative Man
In 1926, at the height of modernism’s golden age, a young...
- Cousin Nancy
By T. S. Eliot. Share. Miss Nancy Ellicott. Strode across...
- Aunt Helen
By T. S. Eliot. Share. Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden...
- The Canterbury Tales
Whan that Aprille with his shour e s soot e , The droghte of...
- The Boston Evening Transcript
By T. S. Eliot. Share. The readers of the Boston Evening...
- Undead Eliot: How “The Waste Land” Sounds Now
Text of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot with annotations, references, map, and Eliot's notes.
A dramatic monologue that changes speakers, locations, and times throughout, "The Waste Land" draws on a dizzying array of literary, musical, historical, and popular cultural allusions in order to present the terror, futility, and alienation of modern life in the wake of World War I.
This site includes a hypertext version of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot and supporting materials including annotations, a map of locations in the poem, and links to full texts for many of Eliot's sources.
- Female
- Poetry Analyst
- I. The Burial of the Dead. April is the cruellest month, breeding. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring. Dull roots with spring rain.
- II. A GAME OF CHESS. The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass. (…) Spread out in fiery points.
- III. THE FIRE SERMON. The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf. Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind. (…) But at my back in a cold blast I hear.
- IV. DEATH BY WATER. Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell. And the profit and loss.
The Waste Land. Summary & Analysis. 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.
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The idea of incorporating the primitive fertility rite into the poem was suggested by a study of the history of religion which suggested a new interpretation of the Grail legend.1 In the mediaeval legend of the Grail the hero comes to a waste land which is visited by a whole series of evils.