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The Waste Land and Other Poems

4.23 of 5 stars 4.23 · rating details · 22,333 ratings · 302 reviews

Few readers need any introduction to the work of the most influential poet of the twentieth century. In addition to the title poem, this selecion includes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Gerontion", "Ash Wednesday", and other poems from Mr. Eliot's early and middle work.

"In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel0s Castle (1931), "Eliot has left upon English...more

Paperback, 88 pages

Published August 4th 1955 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (first published 1922)

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Nov 18, 2012 Riku Sayuj rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Riku by: Conrad

The Unreal Wastelands & Labyrinths - What Memory Keeps and Throws Away; An Exercise in Recollection: in flashes and distortions.

____________________________

You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!

You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!

____________________________

Chimes follow the Fire Sermon:

A rat crept softly through the vegetation;
departed. A cold blast at the back, So rudely forc'd, like Philomela.
It was Tiresias', it was he who doomed all men,
throbbing between two lives, knowing which?

Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Excuse my demotic French!

****

Let us go then, him (that carbuncular young man), and you -
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

You may come or go, but speak not
of Michelangelo.

When there is not solitude even in the Mountains,
When even the sound of water could dry your thirst,
Then you can lift your hands and sing of dead pine trees.

Have you yet been led,
through paths of insidious intent,
through every tedious argument,
To that overwhelming question?

****

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Sweet Thames, sweating oil and tar,
Sweet Thames, run on softly till I end my song,
for I speak not loud or long,
for I speak not clear or clean,
for I speak in the hoarse whispers of the last man,
for it was I who murdered you,
and Ganga, right under the nose, of mighty Himavant!

You who were living is now dead.
We who were living are now dying -
With a little patience!

Break The Bough, and hang yourself from it,
Sweeney, Prufrock, The Fisher King and the sterile others,
all will follow first,
like corpses etherised on well-lit tables.

****

Remember me, me - Tiresias, once more, for we are all him,
yet not.

The present will always look at the mirror,
and see only a Wasteland,
The Past is always the heavenly spring,
running dry now.

Perspective,
Thy name is Poetry.

****

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
These fragments you have shored against my ruins.

Why is it impossible to say just what I mean!

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

shantih shantih shantih

****

____________________________

You! Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother!

____________________________

Do I dare
Disturb the universe? (less)

19 likes · like · see review

Jan 10, 2008 Trevor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, poetry

Eliot is such a pompous old fart, how could anyone not love him? When I was still in high school if you wanted to be in the group of people who had any pretensions as ‘intellectuals’ or whatever else it was we had pretensions of – Eliot was de rigueur. I know large slabs of this poem by heart and when I worked as a house painter would quote it at length at the top of my voice when I ran out of Irish songs to sing while I rolled the walls – which probably misses the point of the poem, but I love...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Janet rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land...
________________
Retracing myself through the labyrinth of the Waste Land. Making an effort this time to read other sources, think about the project of making a mosaic out of a broken world.
___________________
Thank God for the Internet--really inspiring to read these dense works and then have access to such a myriad of supplemental sources. I've read this before and always got the gist and the music, but it's really spectacular t...more

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Dec 26, 2007 Christine rated it 5 of 5 stars

'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is one of those pieces of art that sustains me. I literally don't know who I would be without it. I have been reading and rereading that poem since I was about 17, and each time I read it, I come to understand it a little bit differently. It is of course, about death and aging, but also about place ('The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes/ The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes/ Licked its tongue into the corners of the ev...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Emilian Kasemi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and dr...more

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Dec 20, 2010 Bruce rated it 5 of 5 stars

Although I have read “The Waste Land” a number of times, it has been a long time since I read it last, and I have never studied it very thoroughly, having become entranced with “Four Quartets” and devoted most of my time and attention to that magnificent poem. Reading TWL again now, I am once again impressed, however, with its imagery and wealth of allusions. Some of these allusions are ones I recognize, although many I do not. Nonetheless, I am impressed with its modernist mood of enervation an...more Although I have read “The Waste Land” a number of times, it has been a long time since I read it last, and I have never studied it very thoroughly, having become entranced with “Four Quartets” and devoted most of my time and attention to that magnificent poem. Reading TWL again now, I am once again impressed, however, with its imagery and wealth of allusions. Some of these allusions are ones I recognize, although many I do not. Nonetheless, I am impressed with its modernist mood of enervation and disenchantment, its sense of emotional exhaustion and existential dislocation. Reading it makes me want to study it in depth more carefully and to mine its implications. I shall.

Now, on December 20, 2010, I want to update this review, having just reread this book:

"I find it good from time to time to reread Eliot’s poetry. He is the spokesman for High Modernism and, although neither currently politically correct nor much in favor in the academy, he articulated a vision of the chaos and disintegration of the modern era and presented a startlingly original kind of poetry that inevitably influenced subsequent literature. I have many “favorites” among his poems; how can one not be captivated by “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, for example? “The Waste Land” is clearly considered by most people as his most important achievement, although it is not the verse that most appeals to me. But I am enchanted by Eliot’s allusiveness, by his erudition, by his understanding of culture as both fragmentary and pervasive. I return again and again to this seminal poem, always understanding more of it, always awed by its insights and comprehensiveness. Without knowing this poem, one cannot hope to fully appreciate what to me is his greatest achievement, the lovely and profound “Four Quartets” (not included in this present volume). This latter is one of my very favorite works in English literature – I have audio recordings of it by both Ted Hughes and Alec Guinness, each providing differing and intriguing perspectives – and I reread it or listen to it again at least every year. Eliot is a poet who can be and is both loved and loathed – he is politically conservative, religiously orthodox, elitist, and insufficiently appreciative, for many people, to cultural contributions outside the “dead white male” European tradition - but for anyone interested in literary theory or literary history, he cannot be ignored. I find his work intriguing and perennially compelling, always provocative and challenging, endlessly invigorating."(less)

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May 09, 2012 Krissa rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Although I wouldn't usually recommend spending three months of your life focused on one poem, the three months of my college education where I did so with the Wasteland weren't for naught. I still love opening up this poem and choosing a passage and remembering how it felt to untangle one line from another, flipping back and forth between sections to see where those lines tied to others, and just marveling at the sheer manic genius of Eliot.

I mean, you could also go on vacation to France for thr...more

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Dec 21, 2008 Valerie rated it 5 of 5 stars

I once won 50$ for reciting The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a coffee shop. Making this the only one of my books to pay for itself in a material way.

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Jan 04, 2012 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics, kindle, poetry, depressing, love, moving, favorites

"There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair...more

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Aug 27, 2010 Caroline rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, poetry, nook, read-in-2010, nook-own

On the plus side of this, the entire time reading it I could hear Nick Cave narrating the poetry, for whatever reason. Something about the tone of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" evoked good old Nick Cave for me, and it stuck throughout this collection. I wish that, alone, would have sold me on loving it (instead, now I'm listening to my collection of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds on shuffle).

Sadly, despite some really amazing imagery and lines, I found this collection largely to be uninte...more

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May 25, 2009 Anne rated it 5 of 5 stars

Right, so upon first reading the poem, I have to admit that I was very much not a fan. I still have my reservations about Eliot (and whether or not the whole poem was just snobbish pretentiousness), but I am easily swayed, and we had a brilliant lecturer for the poem. He was a tall stick of a Scotsman, but had the most amazing voice. It was like listening to the smell of porridge--all warm, soft, and hearty. He clearly was passionate about the poem, and his readings of passages really opened it...more

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Mar 07, 2013 Kristin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

Read this long ago - I think in high school - and never logged it on here. Love it. Loss, childhood, the desecration of things once held sacred and like most of the work from the early Modernists it's about accepting change.

1 like · like · see review

May 02, 2013 Kristin E. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry, 20th-century-fiction

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

Eliot's writing to me is nectar; of the particularly sugary sort that you get intoxicated by and find yourself hungering for in the daftness of drowsy but content afternoons. Ash-Wednesday, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land are all indubitably favorites of mine.

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Apr 21, 2013 Pamela rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bizarre, classics, confusing, hmmm, poetry, readin2013

The Waste Land is one of those pieces of literature that somehow--magically, almost--confers major lit cred on anyone who's read it and liked it. I don't particularly desire the admiration of the lovely folks who spend months-years-decades studying this poem (although I admire their dedication), so here it is: although there were parts of the poem (and also The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I liked a lot more) that were beautiful, and I can see why some lines are so very quotable and in...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Lucrecia rated it 2 of 5 stars

La Tierra baldía me pareció un poema interesante por diferente, por su aparente sinsentido. Es muy fácil de leer pues su lenguaje está formado por palabras sencillas y no por términos complicados. Sin embargo, es muy difícil de entender pues el autor mezcla pasado, presente y futuro; escenas cotidianas con escenas inexistentes.

Al leerlo, sentí como si fuera una serie de sueños que se escribieran tal cual los percibimos mientras dormíamos: objetos que hablan, muertos que aparecen, siluetas que se...more

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Feb 07, 2012 Ben Dutton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I picked up a box set, Faber and Faber Poetry Essentials a number of months ago, and this collection by T. S. Eliot is just one of the entries in the ten box set. It is a small sampling of Eliot’s Collected Poems, including the most famous works – The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Ash Wednesday and Journey of the Magi amongst others.

I had not read much of Eliot before this – I knew The Waste Land, and perhaps that was it. I admit to enjoying this collection immensely; Eliot is...more I picked up a box set, Faber and Faber Poetry Essentials a number of months ago, and this collection by T. S. Eliot is just one of the entries in the ten box set. It is a small sampling of Eliot’s Collected Poems, including the most famous works – The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Ash Wednesday and Journey of the Magi amongst others.

I had not read much of Eliot before this – I knew The Waste Land, and perhaps that was it. I admit to enjoying this collection immensely; Eliot is the recognised genius of modern poetry, and beginning with Prufrock I was enveloped in the rhythm and cadence of his work. Though not always clear what is occurring, Prufrock struck me as a series of somewhat disconnected – but more connected than you think – thoughts within a day in the life of Prufrock; the leaps Eliot makes are psychological, intuitive, rather than logical.

“I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

There is humour to the insights. Following Prufrock Eliot’s work seems to become more structured, wearing his learning more clearly – his poems become puzzles to unlock, the apotheosis of which seems to be The Waste Land, a stunning piece of work that reveals more upon each reading. There has been allusion in Eliot’s work, even in Prufrock, but here it is a real game, a challenge to know more than Eliot. This can distance some, I am sure, but for the true reader of poetry, a joy, it is what makes poetry such a powerful force. Even so, there is simplicity here, a plainness to some of the images that almost conceals how crafted and beautiful they are:

“And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”

That from The Waste Land. A simple image that sparks so much.

I will say little more on Eliot now as his Collected Poems is to be read in the future and I will save my thoughts for then.(less)

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Jan 02, 2012 Lettie Prell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

To read The Waste Land is to become comfortable with death. I read it every year, yes, usually in April. I love the language, the shifting voices from the near-comic, to mysterious, to threatening, to grand. Years ago I brought the poem to a table of friends. I read just the last section, What the Thunder Said, but I explained it before I read it. I described it as the death throes of the poem, and at the end there would be brief bursts from works throughout the ages -- sampling in the parlance...more

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Jul 10, 2012 Petergiaquinta rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

Of course this is a five-star volume of some of the finest poetry ever written in the English language...okay? Please don't hurt me.

Over the past several days I have been re-reading (or slogging though) Prufrock, Gerontion, the Waste Land and the other poems in this collection. And why exactly would I do that? Why would anyone do that without a professor and a syllabus involved in the undertaking? Just think of it as a sort of self-conducted experiment involving brain research, or consider it a...more Of course this is a five-star volume of some of the finest poetry ever written in the English language...okay? Please don't hurt me.

Over the past several days I have been re-reading (or slogging though) Prufrock, Gerontion, the Waste Land and the other poems in this collection. And why exactly would I do that? Why would anyone do that without a professor and a syllabus involved in the undertaking? Just think of it as a sort of self-conducted experiment involving brain research, or consider it a self-inquiry into how full of crap I am now compared to when I bought The Waste Land and Other Poems as an undergrad some thirty years ago...This all began with my major project of the summer, cleaning my basement, which essentially means vacuuming up pounds of mouse shit and taking many things out of boxes and then putting them back into boxes, sometimes the same boxes, sometimes not. And in one box, there was a bunch of poetry including T.S. Eliot: the Quartets, the Cats book (which I finally decided to read for the first time), and of course the Waste Land. And I wondered to myself, "Now that I am 30 years older and wiser, do you suppose I can understand Eliot better than I did back when I pretended I could?"

And the answer is no, I can't, which is rather disappointing to discover about myself.

So, despite reading hundreds of books over those intervening 30 years including a healthy dose of lit crit, despite a master's degree (even with one of the three questions on my comps asking for a comparison of Prufrock and "My Last Duchess"), despite living in Nepal for two years and ingesting a headful of Buddhist and Hindu thought along with hundreds of Indian comic book versions of the Mahabharat and the Ramayan, despite teaching AP Lit to scores and scores of high school students (wait, that might account for some of the problem here), despite suffering through eight years of George W. Bush, and despite repeated viewings of The Fisher King and The Big Lebowski, I am no closer to puzzling out what the hell Eliot is talking about in The Waste Land now than I was back in my dorm room when I was trying to impress the ladies by claiming that T.S. Eliot was one of my favorite poets.

And hey, it's not you, Thomas Stearns; you tried. You gave me those notes for the Waste Land. No, it's me. I'm just realizing that despite those 30 years of seeming growth and development on my part I'm no smarter at understanding your poems than I was the year I bought them at a used bookstore in Evanston. However, I might suggest that those notes of yours to the Waste Land need some notes themselves, and then those notes probably could use a few notes as well. And, by the way, I wouldn't have minded if you had added a few of those notes for Gerontion or Marina or Ash Wednesday, either. Just sayin'...

But if I'm no smarter a reader today of Eliot, I think I'm a better one and a more patient one. I can take my time to hear much better what Eliot is doing than when I read these poems for the first time. I don't think I felt the rhythm as well, or at all, thirty years ago or even knew how to read those lines to bring out the sound devices. I know I didn't hear all the music of Eliot's poetry before, and I'm surprised today at how beautiful those lines sound even if they are incomprehensible to mere mortal readers much of the time.

And, by way of a postscript here, I wish somebody would add the cover of my edition of the poems to the Goodreads database. I have the 1979 Harvest/HBJ edition where T.S. is in close-up, shot from the waist up, hunched over his cane and looking more like your creepily dapper great-uncle Stan over for Christmas dinner than the author of Journey of the Magi.

(less)

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Jul 28, 2012 Jeffrey rated it 4 of 5 stars

Having heard The Waste Land referenced so frequently as one of those foundations of modernism I'd been curious to read it for some time and had built up a certain idea of what I thought the poem would be like. My expectation and the reality didn't quite align, but one thing that was indeed delivered as promised was the opacity of the work. What a puzzle it is! I tend to enjoy allusive, deliberately cerebral writing, but as a whole I found The Waste Land's convolutions a bit too big of a challeng...more

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Dec 22, 2011 John Kenworthy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Admittedly I find reading material in odd places. I always kind of knew about T.S. Eliot from peripheral reading. But never really got into him until I was reading The Groucho Letters by Groucho Marx. One of the letter sequences was from and to Eliot. When Grouchos insisted on calling the poet Tom, my aversion to my assumed stuffiness of Eliot's work simply withered away. Not with a whimper either.

When Andrew Lloyd Webber later turned some of Eliot's poetry into Cats, I almost went the other wa...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Christopher Herz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Tough to separate the man from his work, but in the case of The Wasteland, I think it's necessary if you want to enjoy the language.

What I enjoyed most about The Wasteland was the difficulty you had getting through it if you didn't understand the references he was making. It was a true work that challenged you throughout - no wonder he would sell out football stadiums when he read from it.

Just incredible in every way - both in story, language, and meaning.

The poem was actually written for Josep...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well, I may pick this bad boy up again sometime in the future because I'm still verryyyy confused at some parts. However, the parts that I did understand (with the aid of my wonderful professor, of course) I felt very moved and connected to.

We really only read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and TWL because they were our primary focus in the particular class I'm taking, so my review will focus on those two poems as well.

The Waste Land:
Eliot projects the lives of many different individuals,...more

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Feb 25, 2013 J. rated it 4 of 5 stars

As Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' defined the Beat Generation. T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' defined Modernism.

First of all the best edition if you are primarily interested in the wasteland is Lawrence Rainey's annotated version 'The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose' by T. S. Eliot and Lawrence Rainey. For modernism see 'Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One' by Kevin Jackson.

But if you're like me and you just want to know the basics the internet is your friend and then...more

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Jan 01, 2012 Ellie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry, literary

I have read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land many times over the years. I've been reading it again over the holidays. Today, I read the annotated version, carefully reviewing the notes & notes on the notes (thanks to google) as well as listening to recordings on YouTube-including a wonderful version with female and male voices (Eliot himself along with Ted Hughes). After all that, I took a break (read something different). Then, I sat back and forgot everything I knew, put aside everything I thou...more

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Aug 16, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-reads

I won't pretend - not even to myself - to be erudite enough to navigate "The Waste Land" with anything like skill. Perhaps if you gave me six months, a Latin and Greek grammar, unlimited access to Wikipedia and the direct phone number to the Yale Lit department. I'm quite at home with "Prufrock," however, and my confidence there propped me up well enough to get me through the rest of the collection. While acknowledging the surpassing excellence of the titular poem (and my absolute desire to go a...more

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Mar 31, 2013 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've read the first two chapters several times over in the past. I kept coming to a point where I would stop because I would have so many thoughts moving around in my head chaotically. I wanted to figure out each piece of it, and came to the conclusion that I would have to finish it when I had time to delve into all the obscurity and references. This poem is a perpetual puzzle with a very specific mood. I finally decided to just read through it. I took some notes and did some research along the...more I've read the first two chapters several times over in the past. I kept coming to a point where I would stop because I would have so many thoughts moving around in my head chaotically. I wanted to figure out each piece of it, and came to the conclusion that I would have to finish it when I had time to delve into all the obscurity and references. This poem is a perpetual puzzle with a very specific mood. I finally decided to just read through it. I took some notes and did some research along the way, but I was just scratching the surface. There is so much depth, and the references range from German, to French, to Latin, and to other languages if I'm not mistaken. There are definitely religious references as well. Even if you don't understand it all right away, the poem, read in fluid progression has a very vivid and beautiful rhythm to it. The mood was somber, a little paranoid and neurotic throughout. I sensed a little social criticism in parts. There was also, what I interpreted as a person's inner conversation, in its attempts to understand questions that confounded it. The poem moved quickly in both topic and scenery. Moving from deserts, to the English countryside (I think), from indoors to out, to rivers, and mountains. The scenery was vivid in places, at least in my head they were.. I felt that throughout the story, Eliot reminded us of our mortality, and it's connection in an ever revolving cycle, to renewed life. He showed us the harshness and cruelty of nature in this way. That it could give us this awareness of our own mortality, and once you had the full realization of this, the world became a wasteland, where you could no longer find water and were doomed to an inevitable death. The water is now appropriated for new roots. This is how I interpreted the overall feeling of the poem at least. This is one of the hardest reviews I've done. While there are undoubted moods and themes that prevail, they are at once so obscure, they could mean different things to different people. Some of the verses are just brilliant...especially in the first couple chapters in my opinion.

“Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

This was without a doubt my favorite excerpt from the poem...and possibly from any poem I've read. It meant something very profound to me, but I will not divulge on that. I believe you should take this excerpt in the context of the what comes before it. Overall, I enjoyed the challenge, and I loved the obscurity and the inner monologue. This is one that will stay with me, and one that I will be figuring out for a long time.(less)

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May 19, 2011 Jen rated it 4 of 5 stars

My lukewarm love affair with Eliot started in high school when I came across an excerpt from "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" in high school. My first--and continuing--thought was, "This guy is so crazy he's awesome." Reading "The Waste Land" and the other nine poems collected here hasn't changed that thought. I will have to come out and say, though, that "The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" aren't my favorites. Perhaps this disbars me from English major status, but th...more

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Jan 23, 2012 Darin Ciccotelli rated it 4 of 5 stars

The whole enterprise of "liking" or "really liking" books on Goodreads feels profoundly stupid when you find yourself giving four stars to The Waste Land. I mean, it's beside the point to "really like" The Waste Land, isn't it? That's kind of like "liking" oxygen or music. They just exist, don't they?

Anyway, I will say that I read this to prepare for John Beer's book, and I came away with two insights: 1.) I'm much more interested in The Waste Land now that I'm older, as it reads to me like a de...more

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Mar 31, 2013 i! rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, reread, 2013

"The Waste Land" is obviously the heavy-hitter here so it's easy to ignore the 'lesser' poems in the collection. "Gerontion" was one of my favorites when I first read Eliot's works. It's one of Eliot's more overtly, rigidly structured poems, which appealed to me a great deal. A mise en abyme (the poem fully lives up to lives up to this) is created in which the desolate European landscape echoes the speaker's room, which echoes the speaker's mind doubles and redoubles the bleakness of the poem. T...more

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May 05, 2012 Elena rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: absolute-favourites, beautiful-writing, poetry, read-in-2012, need-to-re-read-pronto

I can't even begin to describe what impact T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are having on me at this stage of my life. It's astounding and unbelievable what influence these two men had on each other's creativity. I can never thank mister Pound enough for editing The Waste Land so nicely. I find all of Eliot's early works absolutely fascinating. They resonate so well with my personality and my literary tastes, the language simply flows through me and the literary contexts and references nail every singl...more

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About T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individ...more

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

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“After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.” — 9 people liked it

“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.” — 8 people liked it

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The Waste Land and Other Poems

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