The Waste Land – Critical Readings

CR Episode 127: The Waste Land, Part IV

23 May 2022 Critical Readings

The Waste Land series concludes with readings and analysis of the final two parts--"Death by Water" and "What the Thunder Said"--with special attention to the biblical and grail quest imagery, the Wheel of Fortune, and contrasting aquatic extremes.

CR Episode 126: The Waste Land, Part III

16 May 2022 Critical Readings

In this third part of the four-part series on The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, the panel reads "The Fire Sermon" and discusses cities both real and unreal, and how the abnegation of all human desire leads to the hollowing out of the psyche.

CR Episode 125: The Waste Land, Part II

2 May 2022 Critical Readings

The panel continues with the second of a four-part series on The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, reading "A Game of Chess", with special attention given to the idea of death and rebirth, and to the presence and significance of baptismal imagery.

CR Episode 124: The Waste Land, Part I

25 April 2022 Critical Readings

The panel embarks upon a four-week study of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, beginning with a discussion of the allusive connexions and the imagistic and modernist effects of the poem's opening epigram and its first section, "The Burial of the Dead".