The Burial of The Death
This is the first section of Eliot's poem The Waste Land.  The subject of this part is a month, April which is defined as the " cruellest month", because it promises a regeneration that will never become real. The poet speaks about April in a different way, as if it brought negative elements, even if it is the month that marks the change into spring.

The whole poem starts with a quotation from a Greek language which works as an epigraph. The lines in Greek are taken from Petronius' Satyricon and they deal with the episode of the Sybil of Cuma. It anticipates the atmosphere of a land which is waste, no longer fertile, which does not produce anything.
The Sybil is different from ordinary people, she is not like the others, she represents the human being quintessence. She is immortal, but not forever young; that's why she expresses her will to die.
Immediately after the epigraph, the intelligent reader can find the dedication. The poet decided to dedicate his work to Ezra Pound, that he considered the father of imagist poetry. The poet dedicated his poem to him because he promoted innovative forms of poetry and also because E. Pound was one of the most significant people with whom T. S. Eliot had come into contact and E. Pound had read The Waste Land in its manuscript form and had suggested T. S. Eliot to cut some of the poem parts, which were the most narrative.
In the dedication Eliot called E. Pound "smith". The choice refers to the revision work he died but it also carries Eliot's vision of the writing, which becomes as a sort of workshop.
The title reminds to the loneliness of the human beings. People feel alone and they are not able to find tools or food or whatever which could help them to survive. That's why the land is waste, not fertile.
The poem belongs to the Modernist movement. It focuses on anthropology, it presents intertextuality ( for example Eliot regained some verses of the Canterbury Tales) and, as Joyce did in fiction, the structuring principle of the work is the myth.
A particular technique Eliot used is that of juxtaposition: he juxtaposes scenes that are now different from what they originally was. This choice conveys an implicit judgement of degradation of the world (indeed the land is defined as waste, not as fertile).