The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy, and features abrupt and unannounced changes of narrator, location, and time, conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.

It employs many allusions to the Western canon: Ovid's Metamorphoses, the legend of the Fisher King, Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and even a contemporary popular song, "That Shakespearian Rag".

[22] He began to work as an assistant editor of literary magazine The Egoist on the side, his salary of £9 per quarter partly financed by John Quinn, Ezra Pound's patron.

[31] In a May 1921 letter to New York lawyer and art patron John Quinn, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish".

Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success.

[34] Eliot had been recommended rest following a diagnosis of some form of nervous disorder, and had been granted three months' leave from the bank where he was employed, so the trip was intended as a period of convalescence.

[40] Eliot returned from Switzerland to Paris in early January 1922 with the 19-page draft version of the poem; his treatment with Dr Vittoz proved to have been very successful, at least in the short term.

[70] Eliot sent the original manuscript drafts of the poem as a gift to John Quinn, believing it to be worthwhile to preserve the effects of Pound's editing; they arrived in New York in January 1923.

[94] Pound observed that "Dante's poetry so overshadows his work in prose that we are apt to forget that he is numbered with Aristotle and Longinus among the great literary critics of past time".

[97] A reference to Edmund Spenser's poem Prothalamion, which describes an elegant aristocratic summer wedding by the River Thames, contrasts with the decaying and polluted modern state of the setting.

The thunder implores the narrator to "give", but the associated imagery suggests he may already be dead; to "sympathise", but he contends that every person is trapped in their own self-centred prison; and to "control", which is explored with the metaphor of a sailor co-operating with wind and water.

[111] As Eliot explained in his 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", he saw the ideal poet as a conduit who creates a piece of art that reflects culture and society, as well as their own perspective and experiences, in an impersonal and craftsmanlike way.

[117] Additionally Eliot makes extensive use of religious writings, including the Christian Bible and Book of Common Prayer, the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and the Buddha's Fire Sermon; and of cultural and anthropological studies such as James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance.

[126][127] Scholar Pericles Lewis further argues that Whitman's speech-like rhythms anticipate the even more free style of The Waste Land, adhering to Pound's dictum that verse should "[depart] in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (i.e.

[133] Scholar Jacob Korg identifies similarities with the collage techniques of Braque and Picasso, wherein the artists' increasingly non-representational works would include a small piece of "realistic" detail.

In the same sense, The Waste Land directly includes "reality", such as the pub conversation and the phrase "London Bridge is falling down", alongside its "imagined" content, to achieve a similar effect.

[86][135] Eliot's 1956 disavowal of this line of enquiry with his comment that they invited "bogus scholarship", however, prompted reinterpretations of the poem—less as a work which incorporates previous Romantic ideals and the "magic of the grail legend", and more as a poem describing "alienation, fragmentation, despair and disenchantment" in the post-war period, which are considered typical features of modernist literature.

[136] In his notes, Eliot credits Weston's work of comparative religion From Ritual to Romance with inspiring "the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem".

Perceval returns to Camelot, and while at the Round Table a "loathsome damsel" appears to denounce him, saying that various calamities will occur because the Fisher King cannot defend his lands, still being in his injured state.

[147] The section continues to a matter-of-fact conversation between two women about infidelity and abortion, blending into the last words of Ophelia in Hamlet before she committed suicide by drowning – an end to life, rather than a baptismal rebirth.

[151][152] "The Burial of the Dead" also describes a dry and lifeless desert scene which, despite the prospect of shade and therefore respite, promises only a vision of death – to "show you fear in a handful of dust".

"A Game of Chess" contrasts a modern woman with an elaborate description of Queen Cleopatra and Belinda from The Rape of the Lock in an ornate setting; it also juxtaposes the working class women's conversation with Ophelia's last words in Hamlet.

[164] The poem's final verse contains the titular line of the nursery rhyme "London Bridge Is Falling Down", showing that even with the optimism of potential rebirth the city is destined for ruin.

[165] The sounds of the city accompany the passionless affair of the typist in "The Fire Sermon", linking it to sterility,[149] and its inhabitants cannot rely on a shared sense of community—they live in a version of Dante's Limbo, a static lifeless realm neither life nor death.

[171] New Testament symbols include the card of the Hanged Man, which represents Jesus, and "What the Thunder Said" references the Road to Emmaus appearance, in which the resurrected Christ is not recognised by his disciples.

[178] The poem contains other allusions to Hindu scripture, such as the appearance of the sacred river Ganges called by its traditional name in the line "Ganga was sunken", and it can be read as an allegory similar to themes found in the Vedas where drought or sterility is caused by an evil force.

[34][180][181] The poem has been praised for its aesthetic value, and its originality influenced modernist poets: "While we have become accustomed to such poetic techniques as allusion, ironic juxtaposition, and sudden shifts in imagery and style, Eliot's use of them seemed strikingly new in 1922".

George Orwell used allusive techniques in a manner influenced by Eliot, most clearly in the popular song references of Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the epigraphs of Down and Out in London and Paris and Coming Up For Air.

For poets born in the thirties and forties – Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney – Eliot is monumental, although those writers have different responses to his looming edifice.

[190]Wheeler attributes this change to a number of causes, such as Eliot's lower prominence on school curricula, biographies highlighting his antisemitism, and his "misogynistic and homoerotic correspondence with Ezra Pound".