The Waste Land 1922 is a poem by TS Eliot After suffering a nervous breakdown Eliot took a leave of absence from his job at a London bank to stay with his wife Vivienne at the coastal town of Margate He worked on the poem during these months before showing an early draft to Ezra Pound who helped edit the poem toward publication The Waste Land dedicated to Pound includes hundreds of quotations of and allusions to such figures as Homer Sophocles Virgil Ovid Dante Saint Augustine Chaucer Baudelaire and Whitman to name only a fewDivided into five sectionsquotThe Burial of the Deadquot quotA Game of Chessquot quotThe Fire Sermonquot quotDeath by Waterquot and quotWhat the Thunder SaidquotThe Waste Land is a complex poem that translates Eliots fragile emotional state and increasing dissatisfaction with married life into an apocalyptic vision of postwar England The poem begins with a meditation on despair before moving to a polyphonic narration by figures on the theme The third section focuses on death and denial through the lens of eastern and western religions using Saint Augustine as a prominent figure Eliot then moves from a brief lyric poem to an apocalyptic conclusion declaring quotHe who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patiencequot Both personal and universal global in scope and intensely insular The Waste Land changed the course of literary history inspiring countless poets and establishing Eliots reputation as one of the foremost...
