A century on, modernist poem’s visions of a desiccated landscape still resonate today
Weather plays a key role in TS Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land. Its centenary is being celebrated now, even though it was published in October 1922, because of the poem’s famous opening line: “April is the cruellest month ...”
April is notoriously changeable and can bring anything from warm sunshine to plant-killing frost. Eliot finds it cruel, though, because it forces the world, which has slept peacefully through winter, back to life, “stirring dull roots with spring rain”.
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