One hundred years ago this month, TS Eliot was in the final stage of composing his masterpiece, The Waste Land, whose publication centenary we celebrate next year. The 433-line poem is one of those craggy, difficult monuments of “high modernism”, as the period was once grandly termed. However, unlike the forbidding lengths of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Eliot’s poem can be swallowed whole in about 25 minutes. When I introduce The Waste Landto undergraduates, I soft-pedal its difficulties by suggesting they not bother looking up allusions or googling help, and I ask them simply to listen to a professional actor or poet reading the poem on YouTube. Hearing the music of the poem without at first worrying about its obscure meanings is the fastest way to get hooked on the haunting weirdness of the thing. (I was puzzled when my students glommed on to a recording by Alec Guiness. Apparently Star Wars fans, their fall into The Waste Land was precipitated by Obi-Wan Kenobi’s delivery.)