The Waste La(w)nd

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Introduction

Gregor Samsa wrote The WasteLa(w)nd in 2005, and it was immediately recognized as a work of great originality and power throughout those sectors of Daria fandom devoted to poetic pastiche about the Daria-Jane-Tom triangle. But then in a striking act of retroactive plagiarism, an Anglophile bank clerk turned "clasicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion," published his "The Waste Land" in 1922, to the acclaim of soi-disant literary modernists who never even saw the butchered version of Daria on The-N.

Comparison

Eliot's Pastiche	Samsa's Original	Comments
April is the cruellest month, breeding	April is the cruellest month, breeding	Note Eliot's lack of originality in taking Samsa's line verbatim.
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing	Anxiety out of the dead land, mixing	No greater constrast between the poetic power of the two authors can be found than in these two lines; Eliot descends to the merely pastoral with lilacs, while Samsa evokes both Heidegger's nicht and angst with his reference to "anxiety" coming from the "dead land."
Memory and desire, stirring	Memory and jealousy, stirring