Culture Thursday: April is the cruelest month

Well, howdy Barflies!

What is April? Why, April is National Poetry Month! And what better way to open this month of lyricism than to explore the most seminal poem of the early 20th century: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. 

In The Waste Land, Eliot made a complete break with the Romantic tradition. He did away with the "thee" and "thou" so prominent in the poetry of Keats, Shelley, Browning, and the rest. Written in the aftermath of the carnage of the First World War, he sought to make sense of the death and destruction, of the collapse of European civilization, torn between reaction and revolution. To do this, he stitched together references and allusions, interspersing the English with quotations from German, French, and ancient Italian. The poem is fragmentary, mirroring the fracturing of Europe. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." 

It is a bleak poem. But it's beauty shines out. Eliot tries to make sense of how a civilization could commit mass suicide. And he constructs a new poetic language, one suited for changed times and circumstances, a language which seeks to resurrect a culture brought to the brink by its own hubris.

First, the poem read by the late, great Sir Alec Guinness. And then a lecture on the poem.

Let the words wash over you like a wave of music. For that's what poetry is: music in words.

If you want to read along, you can do so here.

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