The Waste Land: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Waste Land, credited to T. S. Eliot, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

Librivox recording of The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot. Read by Basil Munroe Godevenos The Waste Land is a highly influential 433-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the 20th century, dealing with the decline of civilization and the impossibility of recovering meaning in life. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem, its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures, the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruelest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and "Shantih shantih shantih" (its last line). The title is sometimes mistakenly written as "The Wasteland". (Summary from wikipedia.org)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Waste Land
• Author credits: T. S. Eliot
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 4
• Listed recording duration: 22:52

Catalogue topics

• poetry

Track guide

1. The Waste Land - Part 1 — 4:54
2. The Waste Land - Part 2 — 5:11
3. The Waste Land - Part 3 — 6:37
4. The Waste Land - Part 4 — 6:14

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.