The Waste Land is a modernist poem written by T. S. Eliot and published in 1922.

It is Eliot's representation of a journey through the modern world, the main theme is the quest of sense and of a solution to men's problems. It is very difficult to understand because it is based on intertextuality: there are a lot of quotations, references and allusions in different languages to ancient myths and traditions.
The title "The Waste Land" means "terra desolata" and it is strictly connected to the legend of The Fisher King. The legend tells about a king that is sterile: for this reason all the land around becomes sterile. Therefore the kingdom turns into a waste land. In addition starting from the title the reader cannot expect something positive, because something "wasted" means that survival is not guaranteed as if you were live in a desert and it gives the reader the impression of loneliness and sterility.

The Waste Land opens with a quotation taken from Petronius' s Satyricon where the reader come across Sibyl words. Sybil asked Apollo for eternal life but she forgot to ask for everlasting youth, so she when she is asked by some young people what she wanted she answered: "I want to die".

It follows a dedication to Ezra Pound, when he calls her in the Italian language "Il miglior fabbro", it is a quotation taken from Dante's Purgatorio in which Arnaut Daniel was defined "il miglior fabbro". The definite version of The Waste Land is the result of what Ezra Pound suggested T.S. Eliot to cut in his poem. She suggested to cut the narrative parts of his poem so that in literature as in poetry narration left its place to myth. Narration becomes less important as in V. Woolf and J. Joyce, because what was important was the juxtaposition of scenes, which made the dramatic effect. For example in Joyce's Ulysses the myth had given a structure to the novel. Myth had become an unify principle.

The poem is organized into five sections:
 The Burial of the Death
 A Game of Chess
 The Fire Sermon
 Death by Water
 What the Thunder Said

"The Burial of The Dead" means "la sepoltura dei morti" and deals with the cycle of birth and death, connected to the cycle of seasons, with nature and the opposition between fertility and sterility. In addition it talks about ancient rituals of fertility and Anglican funeral rites. And the ides of death is present in all great poets.

The first section starts with "April is the cruellest month"; because it is an allusion to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: but while in Chaucer's work April has positive value, here acquires a very negative connotation. April is cruel because it promises a regeneration that will not come. Eliot wants to underline the lack of hope for the modern man and the impossibility of a regeneration for him. On the other side "winter kept us warm": it means that winter, that is the coldest season, has got a positive value. In winter people stay at home to find warm and protection. After that the time shifts from spring to summer, "summer surprised us"; it means that people have not recognized the arrival of spring because it haven't brought regeneration and so summer surprised them.

Going on reading some childhood memories come to surface. They are at the Starnbergersee near Munich where 1886 Ludwig II had drown. It is a very important reference to the myth of death by water, which reminds the legend of the Grail. Than they are in the Hofgarten, a park in the city centre, where a women remembers her childhood when she stayed at the arch-duke's and was on a sled with her cousin. They were in the mountains and she remembered that only in the mountains she felt free. Eliot wants to underline that people need freedom and that they do not stop to go in search of it.

On line 18 there is an important question: "what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?" It creates an atmosphere of death and desolation. In addition there is a quotation taken from Ezekiel. He speaks to "the son of man" saying that "you cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images": the fragmentation of reality comes to surface. And he continues "where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief and the dry stone no sound of water": these words convey a terrible image of nature. Also men cannot find relief in nature because it seems as if there could not be life. There are only stones without water. But after this description he says to the modern man that he can show to him something different: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust". It is a reference to the funeral rites: after death all becomes dust.

Going on there is a quotation taken from Tristan und Isolde by Wagner. There is a song of a sailor that is addressed to his girlfriend. After that there is a reference to the hyacinth garden: they go there to pick flowers. She says "I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing... the silence". It means that the emotions are caught her so that she is unable to speak.

In the following line there is another reference to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, "Oed' und leer das Meer", when a watchman tells to Tristan, who is dying, that he does not see Isolde's ship on the horizon.