Seminar in Literary Interpretation

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot’s long poem, The Waste Land, is often considered to be the greatest poem in English of the twentieth century. At exactly 100 years old in 2022, the poem remains extraordinarily interesting, enigmatic, and challenging. In this seminar we will get to know the poem intimately by reading it together with some important criticism of the poem from the last century. We will also carefully read some of its major intertexts such as Dante’s Inferno; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; excerpts from the Hindu Upanishads, the Buddha’s “Fire Sermon,” and the Bible. We will also consider some of the poetry that Eliot notoriously “steals” and includes within his own poem, from figures like Baudelaire, John Webster, and John Donne. Throughout we will be assiduously refining our close-reading skills.