The Cinema Show/Genesis

There are references to Romeo and Juliet in "The Cinema Show," from the 1973 Genesis album Selling England by the Pound, but this appears to be ironic shorthand for a pair of lovers rather than a specific allusion to Shakespeare's play. Instead, the literary work at the heart of the song is the "Fire Sermon" section of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. The song depicts, in turn, a young woman and a young man preparing for a date at the end of a workday, with the young man anticipating a sexual conquest. As in the poem, the song filters the episode through the perceptions of Tiresias, a figure from Greek mythology. Born a man, Tiresias was transformed into a woman for seven years before being changed back to his original gender (and concluded from the experience that women derive more pleasure from sex than men do). So, the lines: I have crossed between the poles, for me there's no mystery/Once a man, like the sea I raged/Once a woman, like the earth I gave/But there is in fact more earth than sea. In alluding to Tiresias, Eliot was specifically drawing from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Submitted by William Scheckel and by Laura in Space

He Do the Police in Different Voices/The Loud Family

Singer/songwriter Scott Miller has long cited T.S. Eliot as his "primary literary influence," and this is evident in the title of this song, from The Loud Family's 1993 album Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things. "He Do the Police in Different Voices" was Eliot's working title for a long poem that would ultimately be known to the world as The Waste Land. Eliot, in turn, seemed to be referencing Charles Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend , in which the elderly widow Betty Higden brags about her adopted son Sloppy's ability to read aloud: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices."

Submitted by Matthew Budman

Afternoons & Coffeespoons/Crash Test Dummies

The narrator of this song, from the 1993 album God Shuffled His Feet, seems to be pondering his own mortality and the physical deterioration that comes with aging. The lyrics Afternoons will be measured out/Measured out, measured with/Coffeespoons and T. S. Eliot allude to a line from Eliot's classic poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. (There's a quick reference to Jean-Paul Sartre here as well, when the singer refers to Times when the day is like a play by Sartre.)