The Waste Land And Other Poems

If you're skimming goodreads reviews wondering if you should read this or not, just skip this review. I bought the book because I'm a fool.

There I was, in my little local bookshop one day for their summer sale. There I was, such a fool, spotting THE WASTE LANDS from across the room, this giant edition with author's notes. “Oh look, T.S. Elliot. He was Lawrence of Arabia, you know?” I said to my friend who was with me. I'd always known that Lawrence of Arabia wrote a book or something and that the film was in some way apparently inspired by this. Awfully small little paperback for such a long film.

Reader, T.E. Lawrence and T.S. Elliot are not the same person. They were born in the same year, but in different countries and certainly had different experiences. In picking up T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land, I mistook it for what I found out later that afternoon was actually T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. By some bizarre cosmic coincidence, both works have 1922 as a year of origin (though Lawrence's work was only finished in 1922, it didn't release until 1926, apparently).

In any event, the book was bought and on my shelf and now it's read and on my shelf. Unfortunately for me, I'm not much for poetry and when I read it I feel a little like Brad Pitt in Seven—smashing my head on the limits of my intelligence. Reportedly, TS Elliot is one of the 20th Century's greatest poets and this one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. I wouldn't have known it if Google hadn't told me, because reading it didn't mean anything for me. Bummer.