Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.
For Ezra Pound
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The Waste Land is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem published by T. S. Eliot in 1922. 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 cruellest month
(its first line); I will show you fear in a handful of dust
; and the Sanskrit Shantih shantih shantih
(its last line).
The poem was first published in the UK, without the author's notes, in the first issue in October 1922 of The Criterion, a literary magazine started and edited by Eliot. The first appearance of the poem in the US was in the November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine (actually published in late October). In December 1922, the poem was published in the US in book form by Boni and Liveright, the first publication to print the notes. In September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by Eliot's friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land in an edition of about 450 copies, the type handset by Virginia Woolf.
Eliot originally considered titling the poem He do the Police in Different Voices. In the end, the title Eliot chose was The Waste Land. The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes, purporting to explain his metaphors, references, and allusions. Some of these notes are helpful in interpreting the poem, but some are arguably even more puzzling, and many of the most opaque passages are left unannotated. The notes were added after Eliot's publisher requested something longer to justify printing The Waste Land in a separate book.
The poem's initial reception was mixed; though many hailed its portrayal of universal despair and ingenious technique. Edmund Wilson's influential piece for The New Republic, The Poetry of Drought, which many critics have noted is unusually generous in arguing that the poem has an effective cohesive structure, emphasizes autobiographical and emotional elements.