Book Club - July

My cousin's wife was reading this on our camping weekend, and honestly, the name alone intrigued me.  Then she told me it has to do with letters written by T.S. Eliot, and I became more interested.  I really like historical fiction that pulls from real sources to tell a story.

Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888, he moved to England in 1914 and renounced his American citizenship in 1927.  He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."

The Waste Land is considered "one of the most famous and influential poems of the century," written in 1922.

It's a long one, consisting of five parts, and can be read Here.

Here's a segment I quite like:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?  Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you,

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Some analysis suggests this "Burial of the Dead" section is in reference to the loss of life in World War I as well as those who succumbed to the Spanish Flu.  "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

Wiki