40 Fun Facts About The Waste Land

Which season does the famous opening of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land treat as something to be dreaded?

Spring is cruel here because it forces dead ground back into life, while winter is remembered as a comforting stillness.

Which American poet edited the drafts of The Waste Land so heavily that T. S. Eliot dedicated the poem to him?

Ezra Pound compared himself to the poem's midwife, and his annotations can still be read in the published facsimile of the drafts.

Which polar explorer's account of sensing an extra companion inspired a ghostly passage in The Waste Land?

Ernest Shackleton felt a fourth presence on his exhausted march across South Georgia, and Eliot's lines about it later gave the 'third man factor' its name.

The poet of The Waste Land also wrote the light verse behind which long-running stage musical?

Cats sets Eliot's 1939 collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to music, a long way from the despair of his most famous poem.

What does Madame Sosostris, the fortune-teller in The Waste Land, use to foretell events later in the poem?

Tarot cards she turns over include a drowned sailor and a one-eyed merchant, and both figures surface again in later sections.

Which American horror writer mocked The Waste Land in a parody subtitled A Poem of Profound Insignificance?

H. P. Lovecraft called his send-up Waste Paper, and one leading scholar of his work ranks it among his best satires.

Wendy Cope's parody boils the whole of The Waste Land down to five examples of which comic verse form?

Limericks, five in all, appear as Waste Land Limericks in her 1986 collection Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.

The Waste Land ends on one word of blessing, said three times, that translates into English as what?

Peace is the meaning of shantih, a word that traditionally closes a sacred text, so a poem of ruin and thunder ends like a prayer.

Which novelist and her husband Leonard published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land at their own press?

Virginia Woolf and Leonard ran the Hogarth Press, which issued the poem in 1923 in a run of only about 460 copies.

Which Stephen King fantasy series borrows from T. S. Eliot for a volume titled The Waste Lands?

The Dark Tower reaches its third book with The Waste Lands, which reprints lines from the poem and names both its main sections after phrases in it.

The Fire Sermon, third section of The Waste Land, takes its name from a discourse preached by which religious teacher?

The Buddha used fire as an image of the pain of physical existence, and Eliot's own note ranks the discourse alongside the Sermon on the Mount.

Edmund Spenser's wedding poem Prothalamion is echoed in The Waste Land to show the modern decay of which river?

The Thames also takes in the Rhinemaidens of Wagner's Ring cycle, moved from their gold-bearing river to Eliot's polluted one.

Which blind prophet of Greek myth, who had lived as both man and woman, watches the typist's tryst in The Waste Land?

Tiresias is, by Eliot's own note, the most important figure in the poem, the one in whom all its other characters meet.

In the final section of The Waste Land, the thunder speaks its three commands in which ancient language?

Sanskrit gives the thunder its three orders, which Eliot glossed in English as give, sympathise and control.

The girl remembered in a garden in the first section of The Waste Land is named after which flowers?

Hyacinths mark the girl thought to stand for Emily Hale, the American whom Eliot had loved before he left for Europe.

Which James Joyce book, also published in 1922, has been called the most important model for The Waste Land?

Ulysses reached Eliot in draft, and he praised its use of Homer's Odyssey as a breakthrough on the scale of a scientific discovery.

A Game of Chess in The Waste Land closes on a farewell spoken by which Shakespeare heroine, who later drowns?

Ophelia's farewell from Hamlet is spliced into the everyday goodnights of working-class Londoners, turning small talk into something ominous.

Phlebas, the drowned sailor of The Waste Land, belonged to which ancient seafaring and trading people?

Phoenicians were famed merchants, and Phlebas has been read as a figure of Adonis, his drowning a kind of baptism that hints at rebirth.

T. S. Eliot's working title for The Waste Land, He Do the Police in Different Voices, comes from which Dickens novel?

Our Mutual Friend has the widow Betty Higden praise her foundling Sloppy for the way he reads the newspaper aloud, voices and all.

The Waste Land first appeared in Britain in the opening issue of which magazine, edited by T. S. Eliot himself?

The Criterion ran the whole poem at once, after Eliot was talked out of splitting it across two issues to help sales.

The Waste Land, with its fragments and shifting voices, is a central work of which literary movement?

Modernism prized allusion and sudden shifts of style, techniques that struck the poem's first readers in 1922 as startlingly new.

T. S. Eliot first wanted the epigraph of The Waste Land to be Kurtz's last moments from which Joseph Conrad novella?

Heart of Darkness was dropped after Eliot's editor doubted that Conrad was weighty enough, so a passage from an ancient Roman satire took its place.

In A Game of Chess in The Waste Land, Cockney women gossip about childbirth and infidelity in which setting?

A pub in the East End is the scene, and the talk is thought to come from conversations the Eliots overheard in their own local.

Which wounded ruler of Arthurian legend, whose injury leaves his kingdom barren, lies behind The Waste Land?

The Fisher King cannot be healed, nor his country restored, until a visiting knight asks the right question, which Perceval at first fails to do.

T. S. Eliot wrote his notes to The Waste Land partly to answer which worry of his American book publisher?

Too short for a book was the fear, so the notes padded it out, and Eliot later regretted them for the dubious scholarship they set off.

The Italian dedication of The Waste Land, praising a better craftsman, is borrowed from which medieval poet?

Dante used the phrase in the Purgatorio for the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, and Eliot first wrote it by hand in a copy of the poem he gave to its dedicatee.

Which woman of Greek myth, raped and turned into a nightingale, appears in A Game of Chess in The Waste Land?

Philomela had her tongue cut out by King Tereus to keep her silent, and the poem shows her still suffering in an uncaring world.

In which English seaside resort did T. S. Eliot draft some fifty lines of The Waste Land in a seafront shelter?

Margate was where he went to convalesce on three months' sick leave, and its sands are named in the third section of the poem.

Snatches of German from which Wagner opera frame a remembered garden scene in the first section of The Waste Land?

Tristan und Isolde, an operatic love story, brackets the memory on both sides and leaves the speaker frozen, unable to declare his love.

Mr Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant of The Waste Land, comes from which port city on the Aegean coast?

Smyrna, now the Turkish city of Izmir, was devastated by a great fire in September 1922, only weeks before the poem was published.

Which sacred river of India, under its traditional name, lies sunken as the land waits for rain in The Waste Land?

The Ganges appears as Ganga in a closing section where a parched country waiting on the thunder stands for spiritual sterility.

Which British bank employed T. S. Eliot on foreign balance sheets while he wrote The Waste Land?

Lloyds paid him £500 a year in 1922, and the poem's magazine and book editions together earned him rather more than that.

The famous opening of The Waste Land turns upside down the first lines of which medieval English poem?

The Canterbury Tales is not the only echo, since Eliot's first lines also strongly resemble the start of Walt Whitman's lilac elegy for Abraham Lincoln.

Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, which T. S. Eliot credited for the plan of The Waste Land, studies which legend?

The Holy Grail story, in Weston's reading, is a survival of pagan fertility rites, with the lance and the cup standing for the two sexes.

Which sprawling study of myth and ritual by James Frazer does T. S. Eliot acknowledge in his notes to The Waste Land?

The Golden Bough describes priests burying effigies of Osiris to bring a good harvest, the rite behind the poem's buried corpse that is expected to sprout.

Which section of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, placed fourth of the five, is the shortest in the poem?

Death by Water shows a merchant sailor's corpse caught in a whirlpool, a warning to the living to pursue a meaningful life.

In which Swiss city, under the care of Dr Vittoz, did T. S. Eliot finish the first draft of The Waste Land?

Lausanne lies on Lake Geneva, and the lake's French name, Leman, found its way into the third section of the poem.

Which ancient prophetess, long-lived but shrivelled with age, wishes only to die in the epigraph to The Waste Land?

The Cumaean Sibyl asked Apollo for as many years as the grains of sand in her hand but forgot to ask for youth, and shrank until she was kept in a jar.

The long-lost drafts of The Waste Land, missing for decades, turned out to be held by which institution?

New York Public Library had quietly bought them in 1958, but Eliot died in 1965 without knowing, and his widow was told only in 1968.

The first section of The Waste Land ends by addressing the reader in French, in words taken from which poet?

Baudelaire wrote them in the poem that prefaces Les Fleurs du mal, where he calls the reader his double and his brother.