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The Waste Land (Wisehouse Classics - Original Authoritative Edition)
The Waste Land (Wisehouse Classics - Original Authoritative Edition)
The Waste Land (Wisehouse Classics - Original Authoritative Edition)
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The Waste Land (Wisehouse Classics - Original Authoritative Edition)

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The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot. It is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central text in Modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are “April is the cruellest month”, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”, and the mantra in the Sanskrit language “Shantih shantih shantih”.
Eliot’s poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. Because of this, critics and scholars regard the poem as obscure. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.
The poem’s structure is divided into five sections. The first section, The Burial of the Dead, introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, A Game of Chess, employs vignettes of several characters—alternating narrations—that address those themes experientially. 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. After a fourth section that includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, What the Thunder Said, concludes with an image of judgment.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 22, 2016
ISBN9789176371909
The Waste Land (Wisehouse Classics - Original Authoritative Edition)
Author

T. S. Eliot

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

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    Book preview

    The Waste Land (Wisehouse Classics - Original Authoritative Edition) - T. S. Eliot

    THE WASTE LAND

    THE WASTE LAND

    by

    T. S. Eliot

    W

    Wisehouse Classics

    T. S. Eliot

    The Waste Land

    Executive Editor

    Sam Vaseghi

    Published by Wisehouse Classics – Sweden

    ISBN 978-91-7637-190-9

    Wisehouse Classics is a Wisehouse Imprint.

    © Wisehouse 2016 – Sweden

    www.wisehouse-classics.com

    © Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photographing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

    "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis

    vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:

    Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεĩν θέλω."

    For Ezra Pound

    il miglior fabbro

    Contents

    I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

    II. A GAME OF CHESS

    III. THE FIRE SERMON

    IV. DEATH BY WATER

    V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

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