T. S. Eliot opens The Waste Land with an epigraph taken from a Latin novel by Petronius. The epigraph describes a woman with prophetic powers who has been blessed with long life, but who doesn’t stay eternally young. Facing a future of irreversible decrepitude, she proclaims her longing for death. The profound pessimism expressed in this extract prepares the reader for the spiritually degraded world reflected in Eliot’s poem. This is a world that had been shattered by the brutal violence of World War I, which left many feeling that Western civilization had been reduced to rubble. Scavenging through the ruins of this crumbled civilization, Eliot salvaged hundreds of fragments that, with the help of his editor Ezra Pound, he then assembled into a new kind of poetry. Formally characterized by the juxtaposition of images, languages, and speech registers, this new poetry features a series of fragmentary vignettes conveyed by a diverse range of speakers. Eliot organized the poem into five titled sections, each of which is distinct in structure and subject matter. Taken as a whole, however, these five sections offer a powerful vision of the barrenness of modern life and of resignation in the face of inevitable decline.

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