T S Eliot’s The Waste Land is a defining text of 20th-century literature. But what do we make of it now? To what extent is it about a post-war wasteland, or about the journey of the human soul? Is it a series of fragments, or one poem with many voices? Why does it have notes? Is it a poem of unrelieved despair, or one with glimmers of hope? Is the joke on us, for taking it so seriously? Nicholas Sagovsky, canon emeritus of Westminster Abbey, where he lectured on ‘T S Eliot and the Human Journey’, continues to struggle with a poem that has haunted him all his life. This event is part of a series at the festival on ‘books I’ve always meant to read’.