Eliots The Waste Land

They 're all wasted ' proclaims The Who 's Roger Daltrey in 1971 's Baba O 'Riley ' a song widely and mistakenly believed to be titled Teenage Wasteland ' because of the refrain . Putting an emphasis on all ' this is a sweeping indictment : the youth are all wasted , not just one group or in one way , but everywhere and in every faculty Every potential--for rebellion , discipline , pleasure , belief--has been squandered . But The Who were far from the first to imagine this modern wasteland . T . S . Eliot 's poem , The Wasteland ' provides a wide-ranging critique

of modernity , while also modeling the aesthetics of the new epoch , that makes statements like The Who 's intelligible while building on established literary and social conventions

The historical context for Eliot 's poem can be divided into three major components . First , there is the literary tradition writ large , the collected textual productions of the world over the last several millennia . The Wasteland ' makes reference to the Bible (20-3 Buddhism (173 , Dante (62-5 , Shakespeare (172 , Greek tragedy (218 and many more sources : the Norton Anthology 's cup runneth over with footnotes . Second , there is English literature . It is more likely that Eliot 's peers would measure him against the immediate backdrop of national history , not least because education in excellence in English literature is also education of the excellence of English literature Thus Eliot must be able to demonstrate knowledge of Shakespeare and Marvell at the minimum , but also make an original contribution to the English literary tradition...