April is the cruellest month

The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Elliot is our poem of the week. The poem, all 434 lines, can be read here. One of my few memories from a misspent late adolescence studying modern literature was the factoid that the poem’s working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a quote taken from a Dickens’ novel. The poem’s opening lines parallel the prologue to The Canterbury Tales.