T. S. Eliot -The Wasteland and Four Quartets [Paul Scofield]

Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888–January 4, 1965) was an American poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.


David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008), better known as Paul Scofield, was an English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his performance as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, a reprise of the role he played in the stage version at the West End and on Broadway for which he received a Tony Award.

Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, "Burnt Norton", was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral. After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, and "East Coker", "The Dry Salvages", and "Little Gidding" were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career.

The Waste Land is a 434 line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite what is seen by some as the poem's obscurity – its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures – the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and (its last line) the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih."