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The  Waste  Land 

by  T.  S.  Eliot 


read  by  Basil  Munroe  Gode 


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THE  WASTE  LAND 
by  T.  S.  Eliot 

read  by  Basil  Munroe  Godevenos 

The  Waste  Land  is  a  highly  influential  433-line  modernist  poem  by  T.  S.  Eliot.  It 
is  perhaps  the  most  famous  and  most  written-about  long  poem  of  the  20th 
century,  dealing  with  the  decline  of  civilization  and  the  impossibility  of 
recovering  meaning  in  life.  Despite  the  alleged  obscurity  of  the  poem — its  shifts 
between  satire  and  prophecy,  its  abrupt  and  unannounced  changes  of  speaker, 
location  and  time,  its  elegiac  but  intimidating  summoning  up  of  a  vast  and 
dissonant  range  of  cultures  and  literatures — the  poem  has  nonetheless 
become  a  familiar  touchstone  of  modern  literature.  Among  its  famous  phrases 
are  "April  is  the  cruelest  month"  (its  first  line);  "I  will  show  you  fear  in  a  handful 
of  dust";  and  "Shantih  shantih  shantih"  (its  last  line).  The  title  is  sometimes 
mistakenly  written  as  "The  Wasteland". 

Part  1  (00:04:53) 
Part  2  (00:05:10) 
Part  3  (00:06:36) 
Part  4  (00:06:13) 


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