It began with the contrary observation that ‘April is the cruellest month’ and went on to shock and baffle readers. A critic lowers some of the barriers to entering the world of one of the most loved, misunderstood, scorned, parodied and quoted poems ever written

Poetry, a century ago, had a popular audience. To this audience, The Waste Land, published in 1922, came as a shock. No rhyme, no recognised form, it broke all the rules. An English poem with Latin, Greek and Italian in the Dedication, then German, French and Italian, and an Indian language? And the poem seems to end in confusion and despair.

The shock of 1922 has passed, but the un-familiarity remains. Our approach to the poem is obscured by its epoch-making reputation. Like other “modernisms”, it remains difficult, and is full of fragmentary quotations and allusions. More people think they know about it than have read it. Ezra Pound, who reduced the length of T.S. Eliot’s text by one-third, called it “the longest poem in the English language”.

One cannot be fair to such a poem in two pages. But some of the obstacles that put readers off the poem can be removed. The Christianity prominent in Part V of the poem, “What the Thunder Said”, for example, may be no obstacle for Tablet readers, but seems to be missed by many other readers. The last part is focused on Christ’s Passion and its possible consequences.