If, on one rather surprisingly uncruel April morning, TS Eliot were to rise from his resting place in East Coker, reach for a pair of headphones and a turntable, and set about playing a DJ set, what would he play? Would he remix memory and desire? Would Tiresias have a solo? Would the beat drop come before or after “Weialala leia”?

These were questions asked this weekend – in the year that marks the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land. f r a g m e n t s, a celebration of the poem, was timed not to coincide with its initial appearance (it was printed in The Criterion in October 1922, and in book form in December), but with the opening lines that even the most Eliot-averse will likely recognise: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land”.

Appreciation of Eliot is, notionally, the order of the five-day festival. Across 22 churches in the City of London, writers, actors, and musicians are paying homage to the poem that has had an unrivalled cultural afterlife. In St Clement Eastcheap, DJ Sotusura played the music of Alexandria, Athens, and London – a reference to the poem’s “unreal” cities – while, a short walk away in St Mary Woolnoth (a church mentioned in the poem), a gospel choir sung an infectiously joyful setting of Psalm 63.

On Friday evening, the church of St Magnus the Martyr – one of the many Christopher Wren churches in the celebration – was filled with the sound of Erland Cooper and the Shards choir singing a work that featured Eliot’s lines. By Saturday afternoon, the sound was of the actor Toby Jones reading poems chosen by former winners the T. S. Eliot prize: Don Paterson, Roger Robinson, and Hannah Sullivan among them.

These performances were brief, 15-minute fragments. Between them, the audience moved to the next church in a crowd not-unlike the one Eliot described “flow[ing] over London Bridge”. Across the weekend, the crowds didn’t thin: I had not thought Eliot-devotion had undone so many.

The brevity of the performances allowed for almost as much variation as there are voices in the poem: from sea shanties (“the drowned Phoenician Sailor”) to Bach’s Partitas on violin, no spurious link to Eliot was left unmade. All that was missing was a “clairvoyante” performing tarot readings.

Even the most disappointing of tributes were at least somewhat rescued by their surroundings. Playing in St Mary Abchurch was a film celebrating the “the nature of our brain activity”. The link to Eliot was beyond tenuous: the fact that The Waste Land is a poem that “stretches our brains”. But sitting under a Wren ceiling is as good a place as any to muse on Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism some five years after the publication of The Waste Land.

It is, admittedly, difficult to pay fitting tribute to Eliot. He is, after all, the critic who lauded the absence of the artist. In his 1919 essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, he claimed that to be an artist is to partake in a “continual extinction of personality”, a point the novelist Andrew O’Hagan made eloquently in his discussion this weekend.

But does this excuse the frequent, rather disconcerting absence of Eliot in an event for his poem’s centenary? Some of the fragments made no mention of the poem at all – and, even the best performances (Tamsin Greig, Fiona Shaw, and Toby Jones reading poetry, and Sam Lee singing traditional folk songs) were marked by an incoherence that oscillated between delightful variety and sheer confusing muddle.

At its best, the celebration struck the perfect note between appreciation and continual re- imagining: Pierre-Yves Macé’s sound installation is as challenging and complete an interpretation of the poem as anyone could ever dream of. But, at its worst, it felt as if Eliot was here little more than a façade for art that had not even attempted to engage with his own.

He famously claimed that “no poet … has his complete meaning alone”; that he should be read in “relation to the dead poets and artists”. But seeing Eliot alongside the living poets, artists, and musicians only affirmed his brilliance. These fragments may have shored up Eliot’s reputation against his ruin but, as ever, the true wonder is still on the page.

Until April 12; thewasteland2022.com