Tiresias
The poem’s witnessing consciousness, having been man and woman.
Modernism · Poem · 1922
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot
A collage of drought, quotation, and broken voices after war. Fertility myth and pub talk share the same cracked ground.
Modernist long poem
April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.
Characters
The typist and the clerk
A loveless scene that stands for a whole city’s anesthesia.
Themes
Sterility
A culture that can quote everything and renew nothing.
Fragmentation
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
Motifs
Desired, feared, remembered—the missing and dangerous element.
Sacred systems laid over a dirty river.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.