About The Waste Land website

Ways to use this site


Read the poem

The left-hand frame is the most important: It always displays the text of The Waste Land. Use the scroll bar in the middle of the screen to move through the poem.

You can jump straight to any of the five sections by clicking on its name, shown at the start of the poem.

On most browsers you can change the size of the font, allowing you to see more or less of the poem at once. On Internet Explorer, choose fonts from the view menu and choose a small font to see more of the poem.

Search for specific words or phrases

One of the nicest things about using an electronic version of a text is that the computer can search for words and phrases for you. Most browsers have this facility.

On Internet Explorer, First click in the frame you want to search in. Press Ctrl F, and type in the phrase you want to look for.


Read the notes

Eliot's notes appear in the right hand frame. There are two ways to access the notes: Clicking on a line number in the poem will call up the relevant note. If Eliot's notes are no longer displayed in the right hand frame, you can bring them back using the option in the menu bar at the top.

You can scroll through the notes independently of the poem. Clicking on the line numbers in the right hand frame will call up the appropriate part of the poem in the left hand frame. So you can use the notes to navigate around the poem.

Click here to view the notes.


Explore the hyperlinks

This is one of the most powerful features of this website. If you click on an underlined phrase in the poem, one of several things may happen.


Trace the key words

The key words list was created by first building a fequency count of all the words in The Waste Land, and then filtering out non-content words. The most frequent words were added to the key word list. You can look at the occurence of each word in its context simply by clicking on the quotation.

Click here to view the key words lists.

Buy the Books

You can link directly to Amazon's best Eliot texts directly from here. You can choose from books at Amazon.com (suitable for American purchasers) or Amazon.co.uk (more convenient for European and British visitors). The choices are slightly different, so have a look at both sets.

Click here to visit the bookshop