Poetry Discussion: T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922)

Please join us for our  monthly poetry discussion, held on the second Wednesday of each month, in our third floor Mae West room. This month, we are reading T.S. Eliot's 1922 long poem, "The Waste Land."

We will have copies available to pick up at our second floor desk. A PDF copy is also attached to this page above, under "download transcript."

Please bring your printed copy to our meeting! We will be reading  and interpreting the work together. 

The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruelest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".

Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-born poet, playwright, literary critic, and publisher who became a British citizen in 1927. A leader of the Modernist movement, Eliot's experiments with style, diction, and versification revitalized English poetry. His works include The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".