Hello and welcome to this episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about the wasteland by T.S. Eliot.

I was just quite conscious of the fact that for all of the chronicles stacking up now, we've never really had one that has just

been a pure poem. We've obviously had epic poetry like the Niebelung and like Beowulf,

but in terms of just a pure good old bit of

verse, not so much. And so I just wanted to focus in on the Wasteland. Now, the Wasteland is obviously

one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, even amongst, you know, against some of

Eliot's later work like the four quartets,

the wasteland is still considered by some to be his absolute masterpiece.

And it's very, very easy to see why, even though it is admittedly a very difficult piece of work.

But hopefully we can unknot it today as we go through it all bit by bit.

It's probably worth just saying a few things about the circumstances that arose to create this

poem in the first place as well, because the wasteland, as I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear,

was written by Ely it at a time when he was

really living through a personal low in his life. He was immensely overworked at his job at Lloyd's

bank and took three months off. He also was dealing with a great amount of stress and dysfunction within his

marriage with his wife Vivian. And even though she helped him somewhat with this poem and in

working on it, he's quoted as saying that basically their marriage is what rose to his state of mind that gave birth to the

wasteland. So it's a very, very personal poem of his. It's very, very emotive. But also,

what's more as well, it's not simply an allegory for Elliot's own life. There's a great amount

that it has to say about modernity, about

individuality, about the lost generation, and about Western civilization. It makes for very,

very rich reading, and it's a poem that in particular you really profit from reading over it

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