The Waste Land 

• the adjective “waste” remind me to the idea of something sterile, a land which is inhabited, not used;
• It is a poem written by Thomas Sturns Eliot in 1922, which is an important date for modernist poetry;
• Before the poem there is a quotation written in greek and latin therefore the intelligent reader understands it is a poem written for somebody intelligent, who knows three languages: English, Greek and Latin; (great reader)
• The quotation refers to Sybilla, a fortune teller who comes from Cuma and she is priestess -> it is clear the poet used a religious code;
• It is condensate poem because in a few lines says a lot;
• TS Eliot wrote the poem for Ezra Pound, who was the best faber, and the founder of the imagist movement (image were and are important to understand better a topic);
• The structure of the poem is immediately clear, it is divided into 5 section with a title;

• “burial” is a name which comes from the verb to bury = sepellire and the title of the first section is “the dead’s burial”= la sepultura dei morti”.
• Appearance: melancholic, mysterious, creepy, sad, pessimistic
• Why TS Eliot wrote a poem for a faber? (the faber needed rationality and passionality) -> because he believed that he was able to transform something
• Why in Eliot opinion’s April is the most cruel month even if April signs the spring’s burn ( signs of life)? 
• Eliot went to the origin of the poetry because Jeffery Chaucer has already spoken about April but with a positive connotation.

** in Eliot’s opinion April is the most cruel month because it gives nutrition to flowers of the waste land

• the flowers are Lilà which are associated to the death, to funerals’ rituality
• April mix memories and desires = future and past ( simultaneous vision of time) 

• the prom is about consciousness 

 ELIOT: a drammatic monologue / it shows us the consciousness and pessimistic vision classic elements

STERILE: because it doesn’t give anything