TS Eliot’s modernist masterpiece has baffled and moved readers for a century. Now the poem has inspired a whole festival. Fans including Jeanette Winterson pin down its elusive, allusive power
Of all modernist works of literature, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land is one of the hardest to piece together – as countless disconsolate English students have realised. How to crack the codes of its influences and multiplying footnotes? Are sections of it autobiographical, drawing on the poet’s nervous breakdown and volatile marriage? Why do the poem’s opening lines decree that April, with all its lush promise of spring and renewal, is the “cruellest” of months? Is it genuinely one of the greatest works in the language, or – as the poet once claimed – just “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”?
This April, audiences will have an opportunity to consider such questions afresh, perhaps even come up with some answers. To mark The Waste Land’s 100th birthday – it actually first appeared in October 1922, but a little poetic licence seems justified – a six-day festival will take over the City of London, filling 22 churches with responses to Eliot’s poem and its afterlife. The title, fittingly enough, is Fragments.
