What do you get a Nobel Prize-winning poet for his birthday?
The poet, in this case, is T.S. Eliot, and this year he would have turned the intimidating age of 125. It’s a tough question, but New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon has got an answer: a new re-issue of the first edition of Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land.
It’s a jumbled, odd and beautifully dissonant poem ”” well-loved, but sometimes hard to like. The opening lines might be the most famous phrase in modern literature: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”