Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke'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.

T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is a monument of modernist poetry built out of fragments. But the poem also turned 100 in 2022, and so Chris and Suzanne wonder: What does it mean to read this poem today? What still delights us, and what frustrates us? And what are the various languages, dialects, and registers all doing in this poem, rubbing up against each other like that?

SHOW NOTES.

T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land. (And Eliot’s endnotes, usually published alongside the poem.)

Also a new edition of a facsimile of the original drafts of The Waste Land, with Ezra Pound’s notes, was published for the centenary.

And you can listen to Eliot reading the poem.

Other works by Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Hollow Men. Four Quartets. Murder in the Cathedral. The Cocktail Party.

Support us on Patreon and hear Chris and other Megaphonic hosts talking about the 1965 epic The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Jessie Weston.

The Beatles: Revolution 9.

Our episode on Ulysses.

Rothenberg & Joris, eds.: Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1.

Some books that have been published for the centenary:

Matthew Hollis: The Waste Land: A Biography of the Poem.

Jed Rasula: What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern.

Robert Crawford: Eliot After The Waste Land.

Next: Bernadette Mayer: Midwinter Day. [Bookshop.]

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