The Waste Land Will Be Re-issued on the 50th Anniversary of Eliot's Death

What was your first reaction to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land? On the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot's death, and impending re-issue of the collection, The Independent's Sean O'Brien recounts what makes this epic poem so great.

As a child, I was handed anthologies like James Reeves's The Rhyming River, where I encountered Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. One Christmas I received TS Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which I loved reading aloud. Much later I recognised it as Eliot's workout book for formal and rhythmic dexterity, but meanwhile Macavity and Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat took up residence in my imagination and my hearing, along with the melancholy of Lear's "Dong with the Luminous Nose" and "The Jumblies". We recited the last of these in infant school.

My mother was a headteacher and I also browsed in the publishers' inspection copies that arrived in her office. The sum of this reading was both very English and in some ways strange to the point of madness (think of Lear; think of Carroll). So when Eliot's poems for adults appeared in the classroom in my teens, with his foggy evenings, his smoke-dimmed secret streets and the sense of something not quite being said, the sound and the landscape seemed almost familiar, like a musical district hitherto hidden round the corner from where I lived.

Eliot, I learned, was American but had somehow made himself English. I was hooked and carried on reading. By the time my A-level group encountered The Waste Land as background reading I viewed it as my personal property. It was the flagship of poetic modernity, published in 1922, consisting of 433 lines (after Ezra Pound had taken his blue editorial pencil to it), plus notes. [...]

Proceed with your trousers rolled at The Independent.