[HN Gopher] The First Eighteen Lines of the Waste Land (1989)
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The First Eighteen Lines of the Waste Land (1989)
Author : benbreen
Score : 8 points
Date : 2026-01-23 22:02 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (yalereview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (yalereview.org)
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Anyone else play wasteland on the apple II? Would have been
| around '88. Not sure what the link is about.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| It's about the poem by T.S. Eliot.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land
| adzm wrote:
| > 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
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
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