People’s lives in general are lacking spiritual significance. (Perhaps revealingly, Eliot completed the poem while recovering from a nervous breakdown.) Many of the characters who turn up in Eliot’s poem – such as Lil, the mother-of-five whose unhappy marriage is discussed by her friend in a London pub – lead unfulfilling lives and their relationships are lacking in intimacy and deeper meaning. The Waste Land can be viewed as a poem about brokenness and loss, and Eliot’s numerous allusions to the First World War suggest that the war played a significant part in bringing about this social, psychological, and emotional collapse. It continues to divide readers, but its reputation as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century is secure.
Not long after its publication, The Waste Land became a talking-point among readers, with some critics hailing it as a masterpiece that spoke for a generation of lost souls, and others denouncing it for its allusiveness (the US poet William Carlos Williams disliked it because it ‘returned us to the classroom’) or for its unusual modernist style. But the poem is also strikingly modern in its references to jazz music, gramophones, motorcars, typists and tinned food. Eliot also alludes to numerous works of literature including the Bible, Shakespeare, St Augustine, Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts, as well as French poetry, Wagnerian opera, and Arthurian legend surrounding the Holy Grail. The poem is notable for its unusual style, which fuses different poetic forms and traditions. Divided into five sections, the poem explores life in London in the aftermath of the First World War, although its various landscapes include the desert and the ocean as well as the bustling metropolis. Eliot’s landmark modernist poem The Waste Land was published in 1922.
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