The Waste Land, Thomas Stearns Eliot

The poem, written in 1922, consists in 434 lines divided into 5 sections: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water and What the Thunder Said. The title represents a land that is no longer fertilize indeed the title anticipated the main theme of the poem: the contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the sterility of the present world, peopled by alienated characters.

Following the title there's a quotation dedicated to Esra Pound, “the best smith”. Pound, indeed, helped Eliot to refine his work cutting all the narrative parts and creating a poem that embodies the characteristics of dramatic poetry. All the sections of the poem are not connected by a logic connection but also by one main theme of the poem. The fragmentary poem creates in the reader a sense of confusion because there is no order in it, and the reason why the order cannot be recompose is that it doesn't exist. The readers also judged the poem as something complex and obscure. Moreover the poem reflects the breakdown of a historical, social and cultural order, destroyed by the war and by modernity.

The poem is built through multilingual quotations and this use reflects the concept Eliot had of time. This was the new vision of time according to which time exists simultaneously in people's mind through memories of one's life and one's future expectations.