*T.S. Eliot*

Consider how "The Waste Land" is different than most of the rest of the modernists you've read so far and how Eliot embraces the modernist movement.

After reading T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land", I honestly had no idea what he was trying to say (I seemed to have gotten lost somewhere looking between the poem and all of the footnotes.) So, in my opinion, its the complexity of Eliot's poem which separates him from the other writers. William Carlos Williams for example, would never have needed footnotes to translate or explain references in his poetry. His subjects are simplistic but what he says has a deeper meaning that can be explored easily. "The Waste Land" however, is excessively complex and it's deeper meaning is very well hidden beneath all the layers.

From what I did understand in the poem it's easy to see that Eliot was a modernist. The title alone creates a picture in my mind of ruin. Also the language that Eliot uses, even just in the first section, doesn't give the reader an uplifted feeling: "April is the cruellest month", "dead land", "Dull roots", "A heap of broken images", "dead tree" and "no relief" are just examples from the first 23 lines. I thought "A heap of broken images" was the most important phrase because it goes along with the idea of a fragmented world which has been a theme of all the modernists we've read so far.