Ts eliot the wasteland meaning

In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an indelible companion to the modernist era, Eliot put to ink his views on the influence of intellectual history on modern writing: An understanding of The Waste Land depends on an understanding of Eliot’s veneration of his artistic predecessors: the “dead poets” who created the art of writing, reaching as far back as ancient Greece, who ignited the torch modernists were destined to carry. The piece is famous not only as one of the greatest literary edifices of high modernism, standing alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses, but for also being, also like Ulysses, nearly incomprehensible the first (or second or third) time through without the cultural perspicacity of someone like Eliot. It is a poem of unprecedented artistic breadth and erudition and a representation of the cultural and moral infertility that Eliot saw in the mechanized, passionless urban landscape of the new century. Eliot’s The Waste Land has been confounding English students and scholars, both the curious and the learned.