The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a long poem by the American-British poet T. S. Eliot, published in 1922 and running to 434 lines across five sections, The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water and What the Thunder Said. Written in the aftermath of the First World War and while Eliot was recovering from a nervous breakdown, the poem juxtaposes fragmented voices, abrupt shifts of scene and register, and a dense web of quotation and allusion, drawing on sources ranging from Dante and Shakespeare to the Grail legend, Buddhist scripture and contemporary popular song, to render a vision of spiritual sterility and cultural fragmentation in postwar Europe. Eliot's friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound edited the manuscript extensively before publication, cutting roughly half its original length, an editorial intervention Eliot himself credited as decisive to the poem's final form. Published first in Eliot's own journal The Criterion and then in the American magazine The Dial, The Waste Land is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the twentieth century and a defining text of literary modernism for its technique of collage, allusion and multiple voices.