‘Not only is life sterile and futile, but men have tasted its sterility and futility a thousand times before. TS Eliot, walking the desert of London, feels profoundly that the desert has always been there. Like Tiresias, he has sat below the wall of Thebes; like Buddha, he has seen the world as an arid conflagration; like the Sibyl, he has known everything and known everything in vain.’
So wrote Edmund Wilson of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land
when it was first published in 1922. HP Lovecraft called it ‘a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general’ and wrote a scathing parody called ‘Waste Paper: A Poem Of Profound Insignificance’. Come along to the next Poetry Room and tell us what you think. You might even find yourself changing your mind…
We’ll be looking at The Waste Land
, and, if there’s time, some of the shorter poems in the Faber collection, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, Journey of the Magi and Landscapes.
Looking forward to seeing you at Blackwell’s on Tuesday 28th April at 6.30pm. No cruelty allowed.
