In 1922 “The Waste Land” was exhilaratingly modern and since then, say some critics, nothing more modern has been written. Eliot, a 34-year-old American - although he found Britain so congenial that he spent most of his adult life there and posed as a middle-class Englishman with a bowler hat and rolled-up brolly.Īnalysis of “The Waste Land” would fill a library commentary on his other poetry, plays, and literary criticism, plus endless biographies, would fill several libraries. Yes, 1922 was worse.Īrticulating the dread and despair of the 1920s was a poem aptly named “The Waste Land”. Americans were suffering under Prohibition. The Bolsheviks were consolidating their rule in Russia after a civil war in which 10 million died. Another 40 million or so died in the Great Influenza Epidemic. The world had just recovered from the First World War, in which 40 million people died. One hundred years ago, the future looked grim. There are quite a few contenders, but one of them surely is 1922. Chaos in American politics, in British politics.
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