Why is April “the Cruelest Month”? T.S. Eliot’s Masterpiece of Pandemic Poetry

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April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
-T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

As we enter the month of April in what amounts to a global quarantine, expect to hear a lot of people quoting TS Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” And by “hear” I mean “see memes on social media.” Because we don’t often hear folks say much of anything anymore. That is the dark irony of April that Eliot captured so brilliantly. This may be the first April in anyone’s memory where Eliot’s opening lines make sense.

To understand why April the “cruelest month” for Eliot, we need to understand that he is not making a general argument about Aprilness. April is not inherently cruel. But Eliot is ventriloquizing on behalf of the inhabitants of the world of his poem — a bizarre, high-Modernist fantasy realm called “the Waste Land” — a land that has been profoundly shaped by a global pandemic.

Eliot wrote his famous poem in the aftermath of the last global pandemic to shut down the world. He and is wife caught the Spanish Flu in December of 1918, and he wrote much of the poem during his recovery. Literary critics have just recently started to explore the profound influence that the global pandemic had on the…