A reading of the second part of The Waste Land

‘A Game of Chess’ is the second section of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, the impact of which was profound and immediate. The title partly alludes to a game of chess played in Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women, but also to another of his plays, A Game at Chess. You can read ‘A Game of Chess’ here; below, we offer a brief summary of this section of Eliot’s poem, but we’ll stop and analyse the more curious aspects of it as we go, pointing out its most curious features.

In summary, ‘A Game of Chess’ begins with a long description of an ornately decorated room in which a woman is sitting on a ‘Chair’ like a throne (the first line of ‘A Game of Chess’ is actually an allusion to…

With the smell of autumn in the air, I am tempted to hole up in a cabin somewhere and spend my days sipping hot liquids and burying myself in my manuscript.

A friend of mine has come up with a great way to make this dream of reality. Every winter she and several of her other writing friends meet at a cabin in Maine where they spend a long weekend tucked away. She then returns refreshed with renewed passion for writing and thousands of words added to whatever project she is working on at the time. (The group met through blogging originally, which is further proof that this format is a great way for writers to make connections with one another.)

Though I am always less productive when around other people, I appreciate the way that fellowship can add to a writer’s craft. After all, many of us have a…

Extract of an interesting article from The Memo site:

Canute is tackling the decline in Braille literacy – and everyone should care.

Being able to read is one of the most precious of skills: Books free the imagination and inspire creativity – they allow people to learn independently, and relax after a hard day.

But not everyone has that luxury.

This week is National Braille Week: a week dedicated to the raised dots that allow blind people to read letters, numbers, punctuation and words.

But Braille is on the decline.

In the ’60s up to 50% of blind school children in the US were able to read Braille, but this figure is now closer to 10%.

Today one company hopes to turn this around, with a device that’s fit for the digital age.

Get ready to meet Canute.

Continue reading at:

Like a kindle for blind people

A reading of the first part of The Waste Land

‘The Burial of the Dead’ is the first of five sections that make up The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot’s landmark modernist poem. What follows is a short analysis of this opening section, with the most curious and interesting aspects of Eliot’s poem highlighted. You can read ‘The Burial of the Dead’ here. What we intend to do is provide a brief summary of what happens in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, but we’ll stop and analyse those features which are especially significant as we go, and point out the meaning of the most important allusions.

In summary, Eliot’s poem opens, famously, with a declaration that ‘April is the cruellest month’. This is because, we are told, flowers and plants grow – as you’d expect from springtime – but they grow ‘out of the dead land’. Few people…

A critical reading of a landmark modernist poem

The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is arguably the most important poem of the whole twentieth century. Written by T. S. Eliot, who was then beginning to make a name for himself following the publication (and modest success) of his first two volumes of poetry, The Waste Land has given rise to more critical analysis and scholarly interpretation than just about any other poem. Critics and readers are still arguing over what it means. In this post, we plan to give a brief introduction to, and analysis of, The Waste Land in terms of its key themes and features. We will then zoom in and look at the individual five sections of the poem more closely in separate posts. (We say ‘brief introduction’ and ‘short analysis’, but even the shortest analysis of Eliot’s The Waste Land is going to require…