The Waste Land

“April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

The Waste Land is a seminal work of modernist poetry by T.S. Eliot. Written in 1922, this five-part poem is a portrait of its time, a work that expresses the disillusionment of the modernist era and the desperation that the generation of writers of that time was feeling.

This poem comes from the area just after the first world war, an era in which the world was in...