Literature Network » T. S. Eliot

Books: Did he dare to eat a peach? PAINTED SHADOW: A LIFE OF VIVIENNE ELIOT Carole Seymour-Jones Constable, pounds 20, 682pp: T S Eliot championed `impersonal' poetry. But what if his masterpiece encodes the secrets of his miserable marriage - and

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20011103
Author:Jonathan Bate

T S Eliot's The Waste Land is the most famous poem of the 20th century, the epitome of literary modernism. It is conventionally read as, in its own phrase, "A heap of broken images". Its fragmentary quotations from the masterworks of past culture and dark allusions to myths of sterility are taken to be symbolic of the entropy of western civilisation in the wake of the Great War.

Generations of students have been taught to read the poem in accordance with the principles laid out in Eliot's own criticism (which was itself the shaping force of academic EngLit for half a century). In "Tradition ...

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