Langdon Hammer continues his Yale lecture on T.S. Eliot with a close reading of The Waste Land, part of the Modern Poetry course (ENGL 310). He walks through the poem's four sections in order, from The Burial of the Dead through A Game of Chess and The Fire Sermon to What the Thunder Said, describing the shifting landscape and cast of figures who move through it. Hammer focuses on the poem's couples and dialogue scenes, reading them for romantic and sexual distress as a way into the poem's psycho-sexual undercurrents. The lecture closes with a summary of how the separate units fit together and a discussion of the editing process behind the final text, including Ezra Pound's role in cutting and shaping Eliot's drafts into the poem as published. Recorded in Spring 2007 as part of Open Yale Courses.