T.S. Eliot Reads: The Waste Land

Roz Kaveney – TS Eliot’s The Waste Land: the radical text of a wounded culture

Siegfried Sassoon once wrote a poem complaining about a concert whose audience listened to The Rite of Spring as if it were “by someone dead / like Brahms”, instead of rioting and yelling abuse. Indeed, most of the great works of 20th-century modernism have become part of the canon. People may still occasionally make disobliging remarks about Picasso, say, but we are used to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land – it is assimilated, and no longer regarded as an awful warning of the debased, degenerate way in which things are heading.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/waste-land