Word: cumaean
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Waste Land was a deeply unoptimistic, un-Christian and therefore un-American poem, prefaced by the suicidal words of the Cumaean Sibyl, "I want to die." It is, we could say, the first Euro-poem. In its desolation at the breakup of the Judeo-Christian past, the poem turns for salvation to the Buddha and his three ethical commandments: Give, Sympathize, Control. But on the way to its ritually religious close ("Shantih, shantih, shantih"), it films a succession of loveless or violent or failed sexual unions--among the educated ("My nerves are bad tonight") and the uneducated ("He, the young...