Eliot (1888- 1965) was born in the United States and became a British citizen. He is the greatest representative of late symbolism literature and the most influential poet and critic of western modernist literature. 1949, awarded Nobel Prize in Literature and "British King's Medal of Merit" for his contribution and pioneering role in contemporary poetry. 1955 won the Goethe Prize.
The Waste Land has made more artistic achievements than other modernist poems, and it is a masterpiece worthy of reference and serious study. This lyric poem is diverse in style and eclectic in expression, which softens some characteristics of symbolism, imagism and metaphysics. In the poem, sentences and hymns, lyricism and satire, descriptions and epigrams, solemn and elegant poems and humorous proverbs are intertwined into colorful scenes. A large number of allusions (the author quotes 36 writers, 56 works and 6 foreign languages), symbolic techniques such as metaphor, suggestion, association and correspondence, and modern poetic expressions such as image superposition and space-time interlacing are handy for poets. He even boldly adopted symbols in symbols, myths in myths, the interweaving of myths and reality, the blending of ancient and modern, and the fusion of reality and falsehood, which organically unified the high abstraction and philosophy of poetry, greatly enriched the means of expression of poetry and expanded the ideological content of poetry.
The shortage of artistic expression in The Waste Land is that there are too many allusions, and imagination, association and suggestion are very casual, which makes the poem difficult to understand and makes the general readers flinch. Without more than 50 comments added by Eliot himself, many places can't be understood.