John [Hughes - one of the lawyers fighting Smithfield] wades through court record and finds the contract. Every plaintiff is portrayed as saintly; every industry representative is described as either greedy, duplicitous, incompetent, or a mixture of all three. Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruelest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" and the Sanskrit mantra "Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata" and " Shantih shantih shantih". The typist home at teatime' section was originally in entirely regular stanzas of iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of abab—the same form as Gray's Elegy, which was in Eliot's thoughts around this time.

Five "test case" jury trials in federal court in Raleigh, North Carolina, some selected by the neighbors, some selected by the lawyers for the Smithfield Foods subsidiary that owned the hogs and arranged for their care.The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot's interest in exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue.

The games are set in post-apocalyptic open worlds and features turn-based combat similar to that of the earlier Fallout games (also developed by Interplay), of which they are a spiritual predecessor. I picked this up from the library thinking it would be like one of Addison’s previous novels, which I really loved.

I thought it was interesting learning about how such a big lawsuit goes to trial; about the lengths the plaintiffs had to go to to meet the burden of proof and the sheer extent of Smithfield's smear campaign against them. The cultural degeneration from Shakespeare to popular music is emblematic of the decline and debasement seen throughout The Waste Land. But in the wasteland of Eliot’s modern world, amid the ruins of the World War I, the Chaucerian image of a fertile, resurrective April becomes suffused with cruelty.