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Introduction

The Waste Land^[A] is a 434 line^[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century."^[1] Despite what is seen by some as the poem's obscurity – its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures – the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and (its last line) the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih."^[C]