‘April is the cruellest month.’ The opening line (although it’s worth remembering that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the full line) of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land is often quoted, especially every time that spring month comes around again. But three years before the publication of Eliot’s poem, a woman named Helen Hope Mirrlees was writing a poem, simply titled Paris: A Poem, which strikingly anticipates many elements of The Waste Land, including the focus on April not as a month of hope and rebirth, but as a time of cruelty and wickedness.
