“April is the cruelest month” in T.S. Eliot’s 1921 poem The Waste Land because, as spring brought signs of new life and renewal, Europe was in a crumbling, dying mess in the wake of World War I. Eliot wrote his most famous work while recovering from a nervous breakdown, in the peak of marital distress, and six years prior to his conversion to Anglicanism.
Eliot said that his intention was to express the same kind of suffering in The Waste Land that Beethoven had in his final string quartets. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” Eliot pens in his first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” referring to the post-war generation’s reckoning with death and spiritual irrelevance, a theme later explored in Evelyn Waugh’s first seriously Catholic novel, A Handful of Dust (1934).
The Waste Land, in five parts, was trimmed down significantly with Ezra Pound’s help but is still a notoriously difficult read. The best way to understand the poem’s endless allusions — obscure in some places, impenetrable in others — is to have both the text and a glossary to hand. However, it’s also possible to appreciate the poem on a more basic level: its lyrical flow, jarring juxtapositions, and surprising images. If interested in doing so, I recommend listening to this reading by Alec Guinness.