Very interesting assertion that these would be the most familiar opening lines of any poem in the 20th century.

Even if one only read English poems, as the author did, how about

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both

Anyone who liked this article and like (or are curious about) the poem should check out the great Fiona Shaw's reading of it [1].

You can find recordings by many fine actor such as John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, and many others, and they tend to be dull, monotonous affairs. Shaw is very different. She's is an incredible actress, and since the 1990s she's been perfecting the poem as a kind of one-woman show where she reads it as the voices of many characters, which is what the poem (as I understand it) is.

[1] https://youtu.be/lPB_17rbNXk

I've been fascinated with The Waste Land ever since junior year of high school, when my creative writing teacher saw a copy of it on my desk and said "why do you have that, you'll never understand it". (I mean, fair enough.)

This is interesting backstory! My perception of the poem is that it's sort of a fractal of backstory and that everywhere you look you find 2000-word articles on its historical antecedents, from Eliot's life, from the history of Europe, from friends of his lost in the war, &c.

There's a whole book on this that's very similar to the article:

https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-Biography-Poem/dp/03932402...

If you're bored, you can also kick back and bounce sections of it off Claude or GPT5 (or both and have them argue with each other).

I wonder how directly you can connect Ludwig to the Fisher King.

> I will show you fear in a handful of dust

this gets quoted often as well. Always a fan of TS Eliot. The musical Cats didn't do his book justice, but still

That article is fantastically well written. What a trip.

Checkout BOOMTOWN game of you liked wasteland. It's a hidden complex game.

Anyone else play wasteland on the apple II? Would have been around '88. Not sure what the link is about.