Connell Guide To T.s. Eliot's The Wasteland

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the most famous of modern poems. It is also famously difficult. So why has it always been so popular? What is it that has made generation after generation of readers succumb to its greatness despite its apparently baffling complexity? In this short book Seamus Perry conveys the extraordinary lyrical power of The Waste Land and shows that while its appeal is intellectual it is also emotional, intuitive, and visceral. If The Waste Land is a bleak poem full of despair, it is at the same time witty, surprising and astonishingly moving - a modern masterpiece which fulfils everything Eliot himself thought great poetry should include: "the boredom, and the horror, and the glory".