The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
Published 1922 · 291 pages · 7,219 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Poetry
How hard is The Waste Land to read?
The Waste Land scores 92 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 88 out of 100
- Multilingual, archaic.
- Sentence structure: 90 out of 100
- Fragmented verse.
- Abstraction: 92 out of 100
- Myth, culture, sterility.
- Information density: 95 out of 100
- Layered allusions.
- Narrative indirection: 95 out of 100
- Fragmented voices.
- Symbolic density: 98 out of 100
- Everything symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 85 out of 100
- Modernist irony.
- Resolution withholding: 90 out of 100
- Shantih.
- Structural complexity: 95 out of 100
- Five sections.
How The Waste Land is regarded
The Waste Land holds a literary regard score of 96 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.