T.S. Eliot- A Remembrance in April

Living in a time almost a century after its inception and in a place several time zones away from where it was conceived, it's easy to misinterpret one of the most famous lines in all of English Literature. It's easy to imagine a scenario where you opened the book and read the first line of the poem and thought 'If only he'd bothered visiting Bangladesh, he would know how true his words were.' Ignoring the comical irony though, it's pretty obvious what Eliot would have done had he been witness to the unforgiving heat, the incessant strikes and the hailstorms of April: make an obscure reference about it and then write an essay as a footnote.

The Wasteland has long since been heralded as one of the most iconic poems of the 20th century and, indeed, one of the most iconic, ever. With World War I in the background, it's easy to see what led him to write The Wasteland. But the end result was something else entirely, a literary masterpiece from one of the frontrunners of the modernist revolution in English Literature. Even long before The Wasteland, Eliot had captured the ever-disintegrating heart of his contemporary audience with The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.

It is a brave man who claims to know the depths of Eliot's writing. Even after all these years, he is the center of many an academic storm with scholars taking several stances on his works. Amidst all the fanfare, it's easy to forget the type of person Eliot was and the state of mind he generated when working on his best works. The perpetually depressed, tortured genius type might seem like a good thing from the outside looking in, but it's hard to imagine the depths of depression required to churn out the words he did. So here's to one of the best minds to have ever written in English, we acknowledge, in solemn camaraderie, the cruel month that is April.