T. S. Eliot writes, in the opening of his epic poem "The Wasteland," April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dead tubers. (1-7) Traditionally, spring has been viewed as a positive event in life, when nature wakes up from winter's slumber. However, in this Modernist poem, April, the month when spring takes full hold, is called the "cruelest month." Why? Please explain why in the context of the important literary movement of Modernism. Please use the textbook or a credible literary source to first define the literary Modernism of the early twentieth century. Include an introduction that narrows to a thesis, citing any facts used, then body paragraphs on the paragraph plan of *main idea/topic sentence *quote from the reading *analysis (how and why your main idea and quotes come together to support your ideas), and then conclusion.

The passage in question is the opening stanza of "The Waste Land," so the words themselves serve as a kind of "April," an indication (a warning?) of what the poem will do to the mind of the reader. April is cruel by contrast to the winter, which “covered us in forgetful snow” and “kept us warm,” because April is the return of action and feeling—"memory and desire"—to a land which has been “dead” and therefore at peace. April is a time of awakenings, stirring from hibernation, hunger after a long winter. It is the time of year when work must begin again.
The speaker of the poem dreads this awakening and the work that it heralds; he dreads the relentlessness of nature, which forces the land out of stasis and back into life. He is not ready to return to life, here in his "Unreal City." In the following stanzas, he describes being jostled by crowds of people on London Bridge and feeling lost among them. Nobody acknowledges anyone else, and when the speaker tries to hail a man he recognizes, the man ignores him, and the speaker is left alone:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

In the second section of the poem, the speaker is the one ignoring someone trying to speak to him. He is traumatized by his time in the trenches of the First World War, and his trauma is blocking both his attempts to connect with others and their attempts to reach him.

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alleyWhere the dead men lost their bones.

When April drags the world from its winter sleep and "stirs [the] dull roots" of the speaker's mind, everything he is trying to repress is also stirred within him. Life is going on, relentlessly, but he is not ready to go on with it. His interlocutor demands:

“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

The speaker's mood, which pervades the poem, is one of intense alienation from the world around him. At times, he even feels alienated from himself, seeing himself as Tiresias, the blind hermaphroditic prophet of Ancient Greece, a person who sees without seeing, a man-woman who is neither here nor there, always out of place, belonging nowhere.
Alienation is a primary theme in Modernist literature. The Modernist movement was born at a time of enormous social upheaval, when advances in science and technology converged with changes in social conventions and ran head-on into the explosive violence of the First World War. The War marked the end of what has been called "the long nineteenth century," with the result that the people who lived through it saw the society they were born into utterly transformed in four short years. To the returning soldiers, especially, having survived the horrors of war, it must have seemed like they could never go home again—home had changed beyond recognition.
This sense of loss, and being lost, is a major theme in "The Waste Land." The imagery is broken and disquieting, and the speaker notes that:

the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,And the dry stone no sound of water.

There is no escape from the unease the speaker feels (and the reader is made to feel) at life in this new world. The only relief the speaker can conceive of is the numbness of winter, but April is here and will not leave him in peace.