English Literature / Unit 16 ENL 1529 short lesson, about 20 seconds
The Waste Land
Captions available
The idea
The Waste Land, of nineteen twenty-two, a four-hundred-thirty-four-line poem, opens, "April is the cruellest month," and moves through a post-war "Unreal City" toward a grail-like search for renewal, ending, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" and "Shantih shantih shantih."
In practice
Fragments of a ruined civilization.
Where people slip
The poem has many voices.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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