by T. S. Eliot

Content Synopsis

“The Waste Land” is perhaps the most important poem of the 20th century, one that has been read as the definitive statement of literary Modernism and as an epitaph for Western culture. Eliot's poetics of allusion calls on the reader to draw connections between his poem and the Western European literary canon. As such, “The Waste Land” reshapes one's understanding of any number of works of literature that came before it. Eliot himself, perhaps best describes the impact of “The Waste Land” in an essay written a few years before the poem was published, claims: “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it” (Selected Essays 15). Eliot's poem is just such a “happening,” a new work of literature that changes how one reads literature as a whole.

The epigraph to “The Waste Land,” a quotation from Petronius' “Satyricon,” announces the themes and methods that Eliot will employ in the poem itself. A braggart traveler claims to have seen the Cumaean Sibyl, a woman to whom the gods gave immortal life, but not immortal youth, such that time wore her to a wasted shell. The Sibyl hangs in a cage, and the local boys taunt her, asking “Sibyl, what do you want?” She replies, “I want to die.” The Sibyl might be read as a symbol for Western civilization, which has wasted away to a shrunken, caged version of its former glory. The epigraph contains two languages, Latin and Greek, and several voices: those of the narrator, the boys, the sibyl, and, somewhere behind these three, Petronius himself. “The Waste Land,” like its epigraph, is structured around the juxtaposition of languages and voices.

The first of “The Waste Land's” five parts, “The Burial of the Dead,” begins “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain” (lines 1–4). The lines are a perversion of the beginning of Chaucer's “The Canterbury Tales:” “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” (1–2). For Chaucer, April brought a literal and spiritual rebirth, delivering life-giving rain and inspiring “folk to goon on pilgrimages” (12). In Eliot's poem, April with its “spring rain” is instead cruel, in that it recalls a former life (memory) and an unattainable one (desire). Winter, on the other hand, “kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow” (5–6). Non-existence and forgetfulness are less cruel than rebirth and memory.

Eliot's narrator becomes more distinctly individualized in the next few lines as he recounts a summer trip across Germany. He recalls drinking coffee in the Hofgarten, and suddenly a snatch of conversation, perhaps overheard from the next table, makes its way into the poem: “Bin gar kein Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch” [I am not Russian, I'm from Lithuania-a true German] (12). Eliot is, however opaquely, teaching his reader how to read the poem. One must recognize this voice and language as belonging to a different speaker than the man in the Hofgarten. As with the epigraph, the lines reward the reader who bothers to translate them: they speak of a blurring of cultures and languages that is a recurring theme of the poem. A second narrator, a woman named Marie, then recalls a childhood visit to the house of her cousin, the archduke, where she and the young man went sledding.

A dramatically different voice begins the next stanza, that of an Old Testament prophet such as Ezekial: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / out of this stony rubbish?” (19–20). Here, for the first time, is a vision of the literal wasteland or desert that the poem posits as an analogue for the sterility of modern life. The prophetic voice promises: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (30). Lines from Wagner signal another shift of speaker. Then a girl speaks, recalling a moment in a garden of hyacinths. Two more incidents close “The Burial of the Dead.” Madame Sosostris, “famous clairvoyante” (43) reads a deck of Tarot cards. Sosostris comes across as a shyster, a greatly devolved version of the Sibyl or the ancient oracle. Nevertheless, there is still a power to the cards, for their faces prefigure the central images of the poem. Sostostris's injunction to “fear death by water,” for example, will become the title of the fourth part of the poem (55). Sosostris, like so many denizens of “The Waste Land,” is unaware of the power she has inherited. Finally, in lines that echo those of Dante's Inferno, a nameless speaker has an infernal vision of London as an “unreal city” (60). Crossing the square mile of London known as The City, he sees a familiar face in the crowd, Stetson, a veteran of an unspecified war. The speaker challenges Stetson and, in a line borrowed from Baudelaire, the “hypocrite” reader: “You! Hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-monfreacutere!” (76).

The poem's second part, “A Game of Chess,” contrasts two conversations and two marriages. First, a cultured and well-off husband and wife fail to communicate. The woman has a nervous disposition, which, toward the end of her speech, borders on hysteria: “What shall I do now? What shall I do? / I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street / With my hair down so” (131–3). The man is silent and withdrawn, responding to her querulous pleas only with darkly ironic thoughts. Her lines are placed in quotation marks, indicating that they are spoken aloud; his are not. She asks “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think” (113–114). To which he silently replies, “I think we are in rats' alley / Where the dead men lost their bones” (116). The second half of “A Game of Chess” focuses on a marriage from a very different socio-economic set. The reader overhears a woman in a pub telling a story about her friend Lil. Lil's husband is coming home from the service, and Lil has used the money he gave her for new teeth to get an abortion instead. The narrator reports her advice to Lil: get some new teeth before Albert gets home, for “he wants a good time, / And if you don't give it him, there's others will” (148–9).

“The Fire Sermon” begins by constructing a vision of modern London out of fragments of sixteenth and seventeenth century English verse. Lines by Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell are corrupted and subverted when voiced in the context of the modern city. Eliot quotes, for example, Andrew Marvell's great meditation on mortality, “To His Coy Mistress”: “But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near” (21–22). In “The Waste Land,” however, one hears not reminders of mortality, but the distractions of modern life: “But at my back, from time to time I hear / the sound of horns and motors which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring” (196–8). This third part also introduces the character Tiresias, whom Eliot in his notes terms “the most important personage in the poem” (52). In Greek and Roman mythology and literature, Tiresias figures in several stories. Ovid retells the two most famous ones in “The Metamorphoses.” Walking through the woods, Tiresias comes upon two snakes copulating. He strikes the snakes with his stick, and as a punishment for disturbing this sacred act, he is transformed into a woman. For seven years, he wanders the earth, looking to find the snakes again. When he finds them, he strikes them again and regains his manhood. A second story builds on the first. Zeus and Juno (Hera, to the Greeks) are arguing about who derives greater pleasure from the sex act, men or women. They turn to Tiresias, who having been both man and woman may draw a comparison. Honest to a fault, Tiresias admits that women take more pleasure. Hera, angry that he has given away her secret, strikes Tiresias blind. Zeus takes pity on Tiresias, and while he cannot counteract Hera's punishment, he grants Tiresias foresight. As the blind seer who knows both past and future, Tiresias figures in a number of works of Greek literature, including “The Odyssey,” where he gives Odysseus advice on how to return home, and “Oedipus Rex,” in which he knows that Oedipus has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. In “The Waste Land,” too, Tiresias is a witness to a “crime”: the loveless liaison between the city clerk and the typist. Eliot's Tiresias retains some of his androgyny, describing himself as “throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (218–9). He is therefore a particularly expert witness of a loveless, cold-blooded sex act.

“The Fire Sermon” is also notable for its metrical innovation. The stanza beginning “The river sweats / Oil and tar” (266–7) introduces a new rhythm to the poem, one of short, compressed lines of one to eight syllables. This rhythmical variation will return in the last part of the poem. “The Fire Sermon” ends by juxtaposing the words of representatives of Western and Eastern religion, St. Augustine and the Buddha. Somehow, this juxtaposition produces an independent meaning which fuses some of the tenets of Christianity and Buddhism: “To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out” (307–9). Eastern and Western spirituality alike evince a mistrust of the material world and a need to be purged by fires of resignation and redemption.

“Death by Water” is both the shortest and one of the earliest-composed parts of the poem. This brief lyric describes a drowned sailor who undergoes a sort of apotheosis or transformation. Earlier in the poem, the narrator alluded to Shakespeare's The Tempest: “Those are pearls that were his eyes” (48). Part IV builds on this allusion. In Shakespeare's play, the sprite Ariel describes the process by which the sea transforms the body of a drowned king: “Those are pearls that were his eyes / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a seachange / Into something rich and strange” (I.ii.399–402). Here, too, Phlebas the Phoenician suffers a seachange in the depths. This transformation is often read as a symbol of the subconscious processes by which the stuff of life becomes the stuff of art. It speaks of an image that is central to Eliot's earlier poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown” (129–30). Note that Part IV also fulfills Madam Sosostris's injunction to “Fear death by water” (55).

The fifth and final part of the poem, “What the Thunder Said,” begins with passages evoking Jesus's agony in the garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified, the apostles' journey to Emmaus, where they found Jesus's empty tomb and Shackleton's expedition across the Antarctic. It then introduces a landscape that has only been hinted at in Part I: the desert of the red rock. This waterless landscape stands in sharp contrast to the undersea imagery of “Death by Water,” and this dialectic of desert and sea remains one of the most elaborately developed sources of tension in the poem. Midway through “What the Thunder Said,” the narrator introduces a third geography: the wilderness in which sits an empty chapel. In his notes, Eliot refers readers to Jessie Weston's book “From Ritual to Romance,” a study of the ways in which the vestiges of pre-Christian fertility cults manifest themselves in the Christian tradition. Eliot seems to imply that “The Waste Land” is a modern grail legend, and that the overarching narrative of the poem is one of the journey to the empty chapel.

Yet Eliot's notes warrant further scrutiny. Eliot first published the poem in two journals, “The Dial” and “The Criterion,” and in neither publication was the work accompanied by notes. When the poem was published as a small book, the editors asked Eliot to flesh out the volume by appending notes to it. Eliot therefore wrote the notes after the poem had been completed. In a 1956 lecture, Eliot termed his notes to the poem “a remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship” saying, “I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail” (“On Poetry” 110).

The poem ends with a crescendo of allusions and references, culminating in the ritualistic closing of the “Brihadaranyaka Upanishad”: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih” (433–4). The three Sanskrit words beginning with the syllable “da” mean, respectively, “give,” “sympathize,” and “control.” In a traditional Buddhist story, these are the words that the rumbling thunder speaks. In his notes, Eliot translates “shantih” as “The peace which passeth understanding” (55). Thunder and rain thus bring peace to the wasted land and closure to a poem that has dwelt on sterility and aridity.

Historical Context

“The Waste Land” reflects the senseless destruction of the First World War. Eliot's contemporaries read it as an indictment of that war. Although never explicitly mentioned, the war is present in the veteran Stetson (69), the “falling towers” of the centers of civilization (373), and, more globally, in the sense of desolation and loss which pervades the poem.

Eliot, like most men and women of his generation, was personally affected by the war. He dedicated his first book of poetry, “Prufrock and Other Observations” (1917), to Jean Verdenal, a friend from his time in Paris who was killed in battle. Classmates from Harvard and Oxford likewise met their death in the trenches. Eliot's brother-in-law, Maurice Haigh-Wood, served on the frontlines throughout the war. Although Eliot tried to enlist upon the United States' entry into the war in 1917, he was rejected because of his health. Eliot therefore spent the war years in a London that had been emptied of its young men. He would have walked this ghostly city with a double awareness, thinking both of the grey streets around him and of the brutalities taking place in the European trenches. The narrators of “The Waste Land” are similarly aware of an infernal landscape that underlies their modern city.

Postwar London was the center of literary modernism, and Eliot's circle of friends and associates included Ezra Pound, who was instrumental in the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915 and who later edited “The Waste Land.” Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who published several of Eliot's poems at their Hogarth Press, and novelist Wyndham Lewis, who edited the Modernist journal “Blast,” were also instrumental in the publication. He rubbed shoulders with W. B. Yeats and, on a visit to France, with James Joyce. Modernism might best be defined by Ezra's Pound's dictum to “Make it New.” Literature must develop new forms to accommodate and express both enduring values and the realities-be they valuable or not-of the modern age. Yet these new forms must be rooted in the great art and literature of the past, and indeed must reinterpret the perennial truths of such art for a new age. The publication in 1922 of James Joyce's “Ulysses” and Eliot's “The Waste Land,” both of which draw on classical texts, myths, and archetypes to represent the modern condition, brought Modernism into the public eye and signaled just how important this movement would be for novels and poetry alike.

There is yet another historical context in which to read the poem: that of the history of English literature. Eliot argued in his influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it” (15). In other words, existing and new works of literature alike must be read in the context of all works of literature, because each work has its place in a historical order. Eliot's poem draws on a tremendous number of sources, and takes much of its strength and meaning through allusion. Yet “The Waste Land” also changes the way in which one reads the literature to which it alludes. When a reader familiar with “The Waste Land” reads “The Tempest,” Ariel's song (“Full fathom five thy father lies”) has been transformed by its Eliotic context. For the “Waste Land” reader, this passage becomes a new center of the play.

Societal Context

Later in life, Eliot averred that while critics have deemed “The Waste Land,” “an important bit of social criticism,” he himself considered the poem “only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” (“The Waste Land” 1). In truth, the poem can be both, for Eliot's personal grouses tended toward social criticism, and he took society's shortcomings very personally.

The product of a classical education and the scion of an old and prominent family, Eliot was both appalled and fascinated by the lower classes. “The Waste Land” is full of characters who speak to a disintegration of the old order. Some of this disintegration is financial: the upstart city clerk, “one of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire,” is a portrait of uppity petty bourgeois (233–34). The woman in the Hofgarten, who might be German, Russian, or Lithuanian, speaks to a blurring of ethnic, linguistic, and national identity. Eliot longed for a more fixed social order and a homogenous culture. This is what he believed to have existed under the reign of Queen Elizabeth and which he credits as helping to account for the richness and unity of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature (“Selected Essays” 341).

Eliot's interest in shared belief systems and in the cultural and social identities such systems foster helps to explain the appeal that anthropology held for the poet. At the time he was composing “The Waste Land,” Eliot was greatly taken with Jessie Weston's “From Ritual to Romance,” an anthropology text which argued that any number of religious and cultural institutions have their origins in primitive nature worship and ritual sacrifices. The ritual that most appealed to Eliot was that of the sacrifice of the Fisher King, in which a primitive king or his effigy is drowned or buried in order to appease the gods and hence produce a harvest. It matters little that Weston's work has largely been debunked: she provided Eliot with a framework on which to hang some of his ideas about religion and culture. While Eliot's notes may overstate the centrality to his poem of the Fisher-King ritual, this concept nevertheless goes a long way toward explaining the connections between the poem's broken land, fallen kings, and lost faiths. Eliot also credits in his notes Frazier's “The Golden Bough,” a seminal work of anthropology, which he says has “influenced our generation profoundly” (50).

Eliot's interest in anthropology and culture would eventually become a more directed form of social criticism. In “The Waste Land,” the people of the unreal city have lost touch with the rituals necessary to bring rain, spring, and rebirth to the land. With this loss of ritual comes a loss of culture and morality. In the years following his conversion to Anglicanism, Eliot would become increasingly interested in social rather than literary criticism. Works like “After Strange Gods” (1934) and “The Idea of a Christian Society” (1940) explicitly address what Eliot saw as a loss of religion and culture in modern society, and lay out some of the means by which the traditions of a homogeneous Christian society might be reestablished.

Scientific & Technological Context

“The Waste Land” is a product of the modern, post-industrial city. To put it another way, the modern, post-industrial city is a wasteland for Eliot. Its citizens have become automatons who function according to the dictates of their workaday schedules:

This unreal city is full of reminders of the time, from the bells of averred, which ring “with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine” (the start of the workday), to the publican's recurring cry of “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” (141). Frank Budgen, an early critic of James Joyce, argues that industrialism has produced the modernist preoccupation with time: “James Watt invented the steam engine and the steam engine begat the locomotive, and the locomotive begat the timetable, forcing men to think in minutes where their grandfathers thought in hours” (129). Men no longer live their lives in accordance with the progress of the sun or seasons, but of the abstract hands of a clock.

Modern technology tends, in “The Waste Land,” to cheapen nature and the sublime. Man makes his mark on the river Thames, for example, with “empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends” and, on a larger scale, with the “oil and tar” that the river “sweats” (177–8; 267; 266). Likewise, the introduction of a modern element frequently subverts the narrator's attempt to allude to a line of poetry or a sentiment from a pre-industrial age. The sound of motorcar horns distracts Mrs. Sweeney from what she should be listening for-the sounds of “time's winged chariot” (Marvell 22). Nor is it insignificant that the woman who goes through the motions of a sexual liaison in “The Fire Sermon” is a typist. After her lover departs, “She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (255–6).

Yet in other places, modern technology becomes the stuff of lyric poetry: “At the violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (215–7). Eliot was quite concerned about the implications that technological innovations would have for poetry. He wrote in 1926, “Perhaps the conditions of modern life (think how large a part is now played in our sensory life by the internal combustion engine!) have altered our perception of rhythms” (Smith 51). It would be reductive to read this alteration as wholly negative. In Eliot's later work “Four Quartets,” the tube-train becomes a place of contemplation, while in the play “The Cocktail Party” a character declares of an elevator “I like to manage the machine myself—In a lift I can meditate” (311). Eliot seems to measure the value of a particular technological innovation according to whether it leads to distraction or encourages contemplation.

On another level, too, “The Waste Land's” juxtaposition of narrators and of fragments of verse or conversation may owe a debt to the telephone, radio, the gramophone, and other technologies which allowed, for the first time, voice to exist entirely independent of speaker. A poem of disembodied voices, “The Waste Land” could not have been written in any century but the twentieth.

Religious Context

Although raised in a Unitarian family, Eliot was not a practicing Christian at the time he composed “The Waste Land.” Yet throughout the teens and twenties, Eliot evinced a wary fascination not only with various denominations of Christianity, but with Buddhism, as well. In 1914 and 1915, he wrote a series of poems that treat martyrdom. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” likewise draws on images of Christian martyrs; Prufrock says he, like John the Baptist, has “seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter” (82). However, Prufrock ultimately concludes that he is “no prophet.” Both Dante, whom he first discovered at Harvard, and St. John of the Cross, also enthralled Eliot. Nor were his religion interests limited to Christianity. He studied Buddhism at Harvard, attended a few sessions of a Buddhist society at Oxford, and briefly contemplated converting to the Eastern religion. A decade later, Eliot did convert, but not to Buddhism. In 1928, he was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England. The orthodox and ritualized faith of The Church of England, or Anglicanism, stood in sharp contrast to the liberal-humanistic Unitarianism of Eliot's boyhood. One of the challenges for Eliot's biographers, then, is to determine the nature of his religious sentiment and convictions at the time that he was composing “The Waste Land.”

“The Waste Land” is shot through with Christian imagery and loci, and the poems' churches, like the rock of Eliot's desert, seem to offer shelter. Amid the “clatter and chatter” (262) of Lower Thames Street, the interior of the church of Magnus Martyr holds “inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold” (265). The chapel of “What the Thunder Said” represents a quest's end. While the chapel may be empty, the quester's arrival there seems to invoke presence: a cock on the roof crows, lightning flashes, and life-giving rain finally falls on the broken ground. At the end of both “The Fire Sermon” and of the poem itself, Eliot fuses Christianity and Buddhism. If anything, the conclusion of the poem falls more heavily in the camp of the latter faith, with the “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata” of the Vedic Upanishad providing a sense of structure and peace (432).

Eliot moved ever closer to an Orthodox Christianity in an era in which more and more people were drifting away from the faith. “The Waste Land” offers a bleak vision of modern life, but religion and literature remain the means by which one may transcend this bleakness.

Biographical Context

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born into a prominent St. Louis Unitarian family in 1888. He attended Harvard, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a master's degree in English Literature. He began writing poetry and spent a semester in Paris. It was as a Harvard doctoral student that Eliot first came to England in 1914. Having won a traveling fellowship, he studied first in Germany and then, with the outbreak of World War I, in England. He studied philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, and wrote a dissertation on philosopher F. H. Bradley.

In 1915, Eliot abandoned this orderly, academic life by impulsively marrying Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman. Haigh-Wood suffered from a nervous condition and other vaguely diagnosed medical conditions, and their marriage would be a fraught one. It was also in 1915 that Eliot met Ezra Pound, who immediately took Eliot under his wing. Pound, a few years Eliot's senior and already a published poet was instrumental in getting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” printed in 1914.

Both his marriage and his new role as a published poet prompted Eliot to remain in England and make his living as a writer. After a brief stint teaching middle school, Eliot adopted a rigorous schedule of writing book reviews and teaching extension college classes. In 1917, he took a job at Lloyd's Bank in the square mile of London known as the City, where he would work until 1926. Eliot published his first collection of poetry, “Prufrock and Other Observations,” in 1917. This was followed by “Poems” (1920), his first book of criticism, “The Sacred Wood” (1920), which gathered excerpts from some of the dozens of book reviews, and critical pieces he had written over the previous five years.

The Eliots' marriage was a trial for both husband and wife, and effectively ended with their separation and with Vivienne's subsequent commitment to a mental hospital in the 1930's. Vivienne's role in the marriage and her impact on Eliot's work has been the subject of gossip, scholarly debate, and even a popular play, “Tom and Viv.” It is tempting to read the marriage of “A Game of Chess” as a roman-a-clef, with the woman with the bad nerves standing in for Vivienne and the silent, morbid husband for Eliot. One must note, however, that Vivienne read this episode in Eliot's draft and wrote “brilliant!” in the margin. Certainly, Eliot drew on personal experience in his poetry. The conversation about Lil and her husband, for example, was suggested to Eliot by a conversation he overheard his housekeeper having in the back parlor. However, Vivienne seems not to have read the marriage of the first half of the poem as a betrayal. In print, at least, she was nothing but enthusiastic about the poem. She suggested several other changes to “The Waste Land,” and composed the line “What'd you get married for if you don't want children?” (“The Waste Land” 21).

Vivienne contributed to “The Waste Land,” but the poem's real editor was Pound. Eliot sent Pound the manuscripts for a long poem called “He Do the Police in Different Voices” (the title is drawn from Dickens) which drew together poems and fragments that Eliot had composed separately and was struggling to hammer into a coherent shape. Here Eliot was following a process he describes in a 1959 interview with Donald Hall of the “Paris Review,” as “Doing things separately and seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them” (Gardner 14). “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” contained almost all of the passages, which would become the text of “The Waste Land.” Pound's contribution was ruthlessly to excise the text, cutting away many of Eliot's narratives and transitions. Pound summed up his role in the genesis of “The Waste Land” in a poem he appended to Eliot's manuscript: “Know diligent Reader / That on each Occasion / Ezra performed the caesarian Operation” (Letters 498).

The last part of “The Waste Land” was written under very different circumstances than the preceding ones. Eliot suffered some form of nervous breakdown or anxiety attack in 1921, immediately following his mother's first visit to England. Three months leave from the bank allowed him both to recuperate and to finish his poem. At Margate in October, he finished Part III. At a sanitarium in Lausanne during November and December, he wrote parts IV (which was a recasting of an earlier poem) and V. He gave the work to Pound upon returning to London in January 1922, who again edited with a heavy pen. The poem was published later that year.

“The Waste Land” cast a long shadow both on English and American literature and on Eliot's life. In the wake of its success, Eliot was lionized as the most prominent voice of Modernism. Indeed, the great popularity of the poem proved something of a double-edged sword to Eliot, who struggled for the next several years to find a new theme and voice.

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