What the Thunder Said - How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern

On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot-s modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land-s creation, explosive impact, and enduring influenceWhen T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. -But,- as Jed Rasula writes, -The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.- In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music. From its famous opening, -April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,- to its closing Sanskrit mantra, -Shantih shantih shantih,- The Waste Land combined singular