The Waste Land 100th Birthday Celebration

Join us at the State Library to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Critical Practice (JMCCCP) who will co-host a celebratory event with the University of Adelaide’s Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film.

This landmark of Modernist literature has puzzled and awed readers ever since it first appeared in The Dial in November 1922—polyglot, cosmopolitan, formally heterogeneous, recondite, dramatic, epic, intertextual, allusive, enigmatic, satiric, despairing, the poem reaches heights of intensity and feeling few have scaled since.

We will conduct a full reading of the poem, feature musical performances of the poem’s musical references, have a round-table discussion by poets of the place of the poem in contemporary poetry, and a discussion by literary scholars of its place in the cultural history of the twentieth century and beyond. Prepare to re-encounter one of the incontestable masterpieces of world literature on its centenary.

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