Much of Eliot’s poetic potency comes from the countless allusions in his work: it endows each word with centuries of signification. A careful reading with a companion text will reveal that one cannot follow five lines of The Waste Land without uncovering a word evoking Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, or another legendary writer.

The Waste Land is Eliot’s preoccupation with the past manifested ad infinitum one of the most difficult problems for a modernist neophyte is the generous use of allusion. The significance of modernism in the annals of literature is now obvious, but to Eliot the canon was an anchor that would keep the avant-garde poetry that we would come to call modernism within respectable limits and help carve its niche in history.

involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order (Qtd.

(Source: National Portrait Gallery, London) In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an indelible companion to the modernist era, Eliot put to ink his views on the influence of intellectual history on modern writing: An understanding of The Waste Land depends on an understanding of Eliot’s veneration of his artistic predecessors: the “dead poets” who created the art of writing, reaching as far back as ancient Greece, who ignited the torch modernists were destined to carry.

The piece is famous not only as one of the greatest literary edifices of high modernism, standing alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses, but for also being, also like Ulysses, nearly incomprehensible the first (or second or third) time through without the cultural perspicacity of someone like Eliot.

It is a poem of unprecedented artistic breadth and erudition and a representation of the cultural and moral infertility that Eliot saw in the mechanized, passionless urban landscape of the new century. Eliot’s The Waste Land has been confounding English students and scholars, both the curious and the learned.

Ts eliot the wasteland meaning