The Waste Land was a deeply unoptimistic, un-Christian and therefore un-American poem, prefaced by the suicidal words of the Cumaean Sibyl, "I want to die." It is, we could say, the first Euro-poem. In its desolation at the breakup of the Judeo-Christian past, the poem turns for salvation to the Buddha and his three ethical commandments: Give, Sympathize, Control. But on the way to its ritually religious close ("Shantih, shantih, shantih"), it films a succession of loveless or violent or failed sexual unions — among the educated ("My nerves are bad tonight") and the uneducated ("He, the young man carbuncular, arrives"), and in the poet's own life ("your heart would have responded / Gaily"). It speaks of an absent God and of a dead father; Eliot's recently dead father had left capital outright to the other children, but permitted his wayward son only the interest on his portion.

It annoyed Eliot that The Waste Land was interpreted as a prophetic statement: he referred to it (somewhat disingenuously) as "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet World War I had intervened between the writing of most of the poems included in Prufrock and the composition of The Waste Land; and in a 1915 letter to Conrad Aiken, Eliot had said, "The War suffocates me." Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines. Nothing could have been further from either bland escapism or Imagist stylization than the music-hall syncopation ("O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag") and the pub vulgarity ("What you get married for if you don't want children") of The Waste Land. Eliot's poem went off like a bomb in a genteel drawing-room, as he intended it to.

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