A short introduction to a classic poem in the form of five facts
1. T. S. Eliot’s working title for The Waste Land was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, which he took from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. The modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is probably best-known for his 1922 poem The Waste Land, but if things had been a little different, the poem might have been published with the less catchy title ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, a line spoken by Betty Higden about the character Sloppy in Charles Dickens‘s 1865 novel. The eventual title is a nod to myth, and particularly the story of the Fisher King, the Arthurian figure whose land has been laid waste – hence The Waste Land, a metaphor for modern-day Europe in the wake of the First World War and the Spanish flu that killed millions of people.