On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece, a
rich cultural history of The Waste Land's creation, explosive
impact, and enduring influence When T. S. Eliot published The Waste
Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to
worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula writes,
"The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a
tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking
a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that
the ancient art of poetry had become modern." In What the Thunder
Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry
forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of
modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual
art to atonality in music. From its famous opening, "April is the
cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land," to its
closing Sanskrit mantra, "Shantih shantih shantih," The Waste Land
combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense
allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it
new." What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and
enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and
French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues
to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot's storied
circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand
Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose
innovations have proven as consequential as those of the "men of
1914." Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What
the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth
century's most influential poem.
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