This year marks the centenary of another anniversary, little known to the Greek public. In October 1922, the American T. S. Eliot published his important poetic work, The Waste Land, which brought the lyric word into the modern era.

Eliot settled as a young man in England and received her citizenship and the dominant religion. He was a conservative intellectual who sought the historical origins of European culture and studied, like few others, the anthropological basis of artistic discourse. The Waste Land laments the moral and cultural losses inflicted on Europe by the First World War. Its creator will begin by looking for meaning in his own ungrateful life of that time. The American poet Ezra Pound stripped Eliot’s original teaching of many personal references, thus giving it a broader content and appeal to the general public. Eliot acknowledged his contribution and called him “the best craftsman” in the dedication.

Fraser’s wonderful anthropological exercise, The Golden Bough, provided Eliot with many references to ancient superstition, love, and death. But in the “Desert Land” death without resurrection, and the renewal of nature does not affect the ugliness of urban centers.

The legend of the Holy Grail, the search for which by the knights of the round table symbolizes the longing for the salvation of the soul, is associated with the guardian of the ship, the fisher king and his lost fertility.

The play begins with the fear with which the people perceive April and prefer the dead winter, “warming us, preserving a little life with its dry rhizomes. Spring disturbed the dead, awakening memory and desire.

Since the poet experienced a troubled marriage, the sexual act acquired for him the sadness of infertility and the expectation of rebirth. Equally significant is the concept of water as a salvation for the thirsty and a threat to seafarers. Flivas from Phenicia, who kills himself to gain eternal life, finds himself at the bottom, where “currents whisper his bones.” Here Eliot recalls Shakespeare’s words from The Tempest.

The fear of death is a constant motif of the work. Hope for life reappears at Emmaus, where the mysterious hooded figure accompanying Jesus’ disciples is Jesus himself. For the poet, the invisible God is humanity’s only hope.

The end of the play does not promise salvation, but confirms the fall of the faith of modern man.

The memory of the great classics leads the poet’s pen to repeat Dante’s dictum: “So many, I did not think that death had done away with so many.” Eliot is not referring here to the dead in Hades, but to the living dead that cross London Bridge and lead to a meaningless life. Numerous references in this difficult-to-understand poem make it easier for the reader to trace the author’s philological experience. After all, Eliot’s life takes place mostly in his mind.

After the image of a decaying civilization, the protagonist approaches the chapel among the steep mountains. The chapel is dangerous from the cup legend, but without the fear it evoked. Dry bones no longer scare anyone. The prison of the self, in which everyone finds himself who refuses to share the suffering of others, can be opened by sympathy, which breaks the locks of pride. But in the Wasteland all orders are dead.

The protagonist, who asks for the water of life, takes the form of a legendary fisher king, but lives in the ruins of a fragmented world.

The end of the Desert does not promise salvation, but confirms the fall of the faith of modern man.

Fleivas of Phoenicia, who died wanting to touch immortality, “was once flexible and beautiful, like you,” Eliot reminds his contemporaries. And all the rest of us “who lived now are dying without patience.”

* Mr. Thanos Veremis is an honorary professor at EKPA.