Eliot worked on what would become The Waste Land while sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter on Margate Sands, producing "some 50 lines", and the area is referenced directly in Part III of the poem ("On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.") The couple travelled to Paris in November, where Eliot showed an early version of the poem to Ezra Pound. Eliot had been recommended rest following a diagnosis of some form of nervous disorder, and had been granted three months' leave from the bank where he was employed, so the trip was intended as a period of convalescence. In the autumn of 1921 Eliot and his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, travelled to the coastal resort of Margate. Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success." While walking through a graveyard, they discussed Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that "a year or so" before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot visited him in the country. In a May 1921 letter to New York lawyer and "art patron" John Quinn, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish". In 1919 he referred to "a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time" in a letter to his mother. History Writing Eliot in 1923Įliot probably worked on the text that became The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. After a fourth section, "Death by Water", which includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, "What the Thunder Said", concludes with an image of judgment. "The Fire Sermon", the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition, influenced by Augustine of Hippo and Eastern religions. The second, "A Game of Chess", employs alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes experientially. The first, "The Burial of the Dead", introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy, and features abrupt and unannounced changes of narrator, location, and time, conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. Eliot employs many allusions to the Western canon: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare, Milton, Buddhist scriptures, the Hindu Upanishads and even a contemporary popular song, "That Shakespearian Rag". ![]() Įliot's poem combines the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with vignettes of contemporary British society. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins". ![]() It was published in book form in December 1922. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.
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