The Waste Land is one of the major poems of the twentieth century. Published in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s landmark work of modernism may ‘only’ be just over 430 lines or around 20 pages in length, but its scope and vision are epic in terms of historical and geographical range, […]
Tag: T. S. Eliot
A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Murder in the Cathedral is often called T. S. Eliot’s first play, but technically, it wasn’t even his second. But before we address this, let’s take a closer look at the play itself. Murder in the Cathedral is probably Eliot’s best-known play, and his […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins’
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses one of the most famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ‘April is the cruellest month’ – the five words which don’t, strictly speaking, constitute the ‘first line’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, as […]
Key Quotations from The Waste Land Explained
The Anglo-American modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was arguably the most influential poet of the twentieth century, and his 1922 poem The Waste Land is regarded variously as the greatest modernist poem, one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, and a powerful depiction of post-war despair and […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘Immature Poets Imitate; Mature Poets Steal’
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a famous quotation from T. S. Eliot ‘Talent borrows; genius steals.’ This four-word slogan has often been attributed to Oscar Wilde, although it wasn’t one of Wilde’s quips. But then Wilde is, like Mark Twain […]