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Preludes
This week we feature the poem "Preludes" from the Penguin Classics collection The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot…
This week we feature the poem "Preludes" from the Penguin Classics collection The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot.
While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective.
Books featured in this episode:
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The Waste Land and Other Poems T. S. Eliot Frank Kermode Paperback Penguin Classic $9.00 Read more... |
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"The World Is Too Much With Us" and "The Solitary Reaper"
We continue our celebration of romantic poetry with poems by William Wordsworth.
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