The festival will be stranded into five, multi-part evening “celebrations” and audiences are encouraged to drift among individual events, sampling, say, a new setting of lines from the poem by the Orkney-born composer Erland Cooper en route to concerts of sea shanties or gospel music. The festival concludes with a tribute to the music hall star Marie Lloyd at Wilton’s, whom Eliot passionately – perhaps incongruously – admired as a “genius” and whose obituary he composed a week before The Waste Land first came out.

Another is assembled around Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written in a Nazi prisoner of war camp and likewise shot through with a sense of precarious faith in the bleakest of circumstances. One event features a piano transcription of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which Eliot heard the year before the poem came out and which affected him profoundly. Instead, Doran and his fellow director Liam Browne have programmed a jamboree of artistic reimaginings, many of them musical, blending – as the poem does – down-and-dirty popular culture with the highest of art.

Photograph: Matthew AndrewsĪnyone wanting dry textual analysis should look elsewhere: there is not a single straightforward reading of the poem on offer. Unreal city: Ruby Philogene prepares to sing Wagner in St Vedast alias Foster Church. The title, fittingly enough, is Fragments. To mark The Waste Land’s 100th birthday – it actually first appeared in October 1922, but a little poetic licence seems justified – a six-day festival will take over the City of London, filling 22 churches with responses to Eliot’s poem and its afterlife. This April, audiences will have an opportunity to consider such questions afresh, perhaps even come up with some answers. How to crack the codes of its influences and multiplying footnotes? Are sections of it autobiographical, drawing on the poet’s nervous breakdown and volatile marriage? Why do the poem’s opening lines decree that April, with all its lush promise of spring and renewal, is the “cruellest” of months? Is it genuinely one of the greatest works in the language, or – as the poet once claimed – just “a piece of rhythmical grumbling”? O f all modernist works of literature, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land is one of the hardest to piece together – as countless disconsolate English students have realised.

The waste land