Between Perpetrating a Hoax and Charging One: American Politics in the Waste Land

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Between Perpetrating a Hoax and Charging One: American Politics in the Waste Land

We’ve recently had a flurry of attention to the centenary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, perhaps the most consequential poem of the twentieth century. It was reviewed in the first issue of Time magazine under the headline, “Has the Reader Any Rights before the Bar of Literature?” As the anonymous author concluded the short appraisal: “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax.”    As the reception of many modern artworks reveals,…