TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is 100 years old this year, and will be celebrated this month with a six-day festival across 22 churches in London, aptly called Fragments.

Considered one of the most influential poems of the 20th century, and a flagship modernist piece, The Waste Land remains a prominent yet bemusing work. Literary modernism—holding as its credo the famous slogan by Ezra Pound, ’Make It New’—sought to innovate writing by breaking from traditional forms. The Waste Land—which Eliot dedicated to Pound, and which Pound edited heavily—champions this imperative through a non-linear five-part structure, interweaving diverse cultural allusions and literary references, using multiple languages, while experimenting with dramatic monologue and free verse forms, in prophetic and satirical tones. These multifarious commingling features give the poem a patchwork form and kaleidoscopic effect which defy interpretation. As festival co-curator Séan Doran suggests, ‘It’s kind of a dream work.’

Combining the Arthurian motifs of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with contemporary British vignettes evoking post-war themes, the poem shifts jarringly between ancient and modern modes. A scholarly summary of the poem’s narrative structure can be found here, as a string of character voices and a prevailing narrative drone exploring themes of fragmentation and decay, relationships and sex, and war. Conveying on the whole a sense of loss, The Waste Land reads as a lament for industrial life—illustrative of the disillusionment that characterised the post-WW1 Lost Generation writers, of which Eliot was part.

While the poem was published in October 1922, it is no doubt being celebrated in April due to its famous opening lines, which encapsulate the strange complexity of the spring. Eliot, in fact, wrote the poem while struggling with a nervous condition and a tumultuous marriage. These lines—steeped in the strain of their time and resounding in the century since—seem oddly relevant still, in our perplexing post-industrial age.

Lines from The Waste Land
by TS Eliott

FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
(It. ‘the better craftsman’)

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.