The Waste Land

'April is the cruellest month,' begins this poem in five parts, which moves through a broken modern world of voices: a fortune-teller with a wicked pack of cards, a nervous woman in a rich room, two women gossiping in a London pub at closing time, a typist and her careless lover, crowds flowing over London Bridge, 'so many, I had not thought death had undone so many', and finally thunder over a dry land in the East. Fragments of Dante, Shakespeare, the Buddha and the Upanishads are woven together.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), an American who settled in London, published the poem in 1922, after his friend Ezra Pound helped cut it down, and it became the defining poem of modernism; Eliot received the Nobel Prize in 1948. It is difficult, but it rewards being read aloud, and Eliot added his own notes. Read his earlier Prufrock first.