The Waste Land in Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon

Jul 18, 2025 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it it was amazing

Shelves: spirituality, serendipity, imagination, purpose, disaster, post-apocalypse, humor, death, happiness, quest

In The Waste Land, a poem some have called his masterpiece and the world's toughest poem, T. S. Eliot explores both the broken world we live in and the wisdom of the world, and he tries to find a way to use the wisdom of the world to give us consolation and reconciliation as we move through our lives. Eliot uses references from Western writers like Shakespeare and Baudelaire as well as ancient stories like that of Philomel and the search for the Holy Grail. In addition, he brings in references t ...more

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Oct 22, 2016 Kristel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry

I was impressed with this long poem about the crumbling of civilization, specifically Western Culture. I did need to do some study as there is a lot of references to poems, plays, Shakespeare, Dante, etc.

"April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgotten snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers."

"The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf clutch and ...more

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May 30, 2021 Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... rated it liked it

Shelves: classics, poetry, read-in-2021

I am not sure what I just read. The words and rhythm are beautiful. But I didn't understand it beyond that. ...more

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Oct 02, 2022 Dan rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-multiple-times, nobel-prize-winners, 2022, 2022-rereads

A reread/semi-deep dive on The Wasteland dovetails nicely with my overall poetry reading project. It came out the same year that Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay, which I'm currently reading, was published, and the Edwin Arlington Robinson Collected Poems that I'm slowly working my way through won the Pulitzer. Those two, written in such tightly metered verse, contrast sharply with this, a long poem that is remembered far more than either of them. It's a good reminder that there are multiple good A reread/semi-deep dive on The Wasteland dovetails nicely with my overall poetry reading project. It came out the same year that Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay, which I'm currently reading, was published, and the Edwin Arlington Robinson Collected Poems that I'm slowly working my way through won the Pulitzer. Those two, written in such tightly metered verse, contrast sharply with this, a long poem that is remembered far more than either of them. It's a good reminder that there are multiple good modes for poetry, even if the poetry world was more shaped over the decades by the Eliot. I intended to read this after reading Eliot's first two collections so as to keep the timing closer to when I finish the Robinson, but I think the timing worked out well.

I read this at least once for school and at least once when I read Eliot's complete poems in 2002. I've seen its influence on everything from other poems to one of my favorite fantasy novels (Last Call by Tim Powers) in the interim. But as a corollary to my larger reading project, I got the syllabus for a master's level poetry class and thought I'd read through the poems and essays from it. It primarily focuses on post-1945 poetry but the first readings were intended to contrast that with modernism. (Weirdly this was placed next to a John Ashbury poem that was under 30 lines.)

So I read this a couple times today (with a googled cheat sheet for the tranlations of the multiple languages used) and listened to a recording of Alec Guinness reading it and watched two or three YouTube videos about it. The best of those was a documentary from the 80s featuring Peter Ackroyd and others. It said that this was the most famous poem of the 20th Century in English, a distinction that belongs to The Road Less Travelled (and it's not close). More up for debate, a poet they interviewed stated that Eliot was far better than Yeats, which I get some people think, but I'm firmly in the other camp. That said, it was invaluable to get some of the context for the poem and to go through multiple readings of it. I think I cracked into it, not in the sense that I fully understand it (not sure that anyone does), but I was able to feel the shape of what it was going for and to see why it's considered great. It is.

If someone said that having to do so much extra work to read a poem was ridiculous, I would say, maybe so. But the effort does pay off. Nonetheless, I'll be reading this again this week, I suspect, and again once I do read his first two collections. ...more

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