It’s hard to think of a more famous opening in 20th-century poetry than “April is the cruellest month” — which continues, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring ...

It is one of the grimmest monuments of suffering and despair ever penned. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” might also be one of the most difficult texts to interpret. But whatever the author was doing ...

One hundred years ago this December, "The Waste Land" was first published. T.S. Eliot’s famous poem has been described as highly influential, irregular, and innovative. Its theme — the spiritual and ...

(RNS) — Some years ago, I was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” in a literature survey class, as I always do. On this day, students seemed even more befuddled by this notoriously difficult ...

T.S. Eliot’s poem sprawling, convoluted 1922 poem “The Waste Land” is revered as one of the essential works of 20th century modernism, but a century later it can strike new readers as forbiddingly ...

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” to quote the description in Robert Crawford’s mesmerizing new book, was — and is — a poem of “ruin, brokenness, pain and wastage,” but these same words could easily ...

The lulling rhyme and sonorous language drew me in, and I was prepared to experience a beautiful poem written in a singular, compelling voice. But instead, I soon found myself confused, if not ...

The Waste Land was first published in The Criterion, a magazine that Eliot edited, in October 1922, and as a book two months later. Ever since, it has been regarded as the pre-eminent modernist poem ...

Ralph Fiennes, currently starring in a New York production of a new David Hare play about power broker Robert Moses, will visit the 92nd Street Y in New York on December 5 to read T.S. Eliot’s ...