The Waste Land
Waste Land, The,a poem by T. S. Eliot , first published 1922 in the Criterion .
It consists of five sections, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’, and ‘What the Thunder Said’, together with Eliot's own ‘Notes’ which explain his many varied and multicultural allusions, quotations, and half-quotations (from Webster , Dante , Verlaine , Kyd , etc.), and express a general indebtedness to the Grail legend (see in this connection Grail , and Balyn ) and to the vegetation ceremonies in Frazer 's The Golden Bough. (Eliot himself was later to describe these ‘Notes’ as ‘a remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship’, written to pad out the text of the poem when it first appeared as a little book; he admits that they were a temptation to critics, and had achieved ‘almost greater popularity than the poem itself’: ‘The Frontiers of...
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