cause
(1) images are complex, citing a large number of allusions and fairy tales, and rarely inserting six languages into poems. The myths and allusions quoted in the poem include 56 works by 35 writers from the East and the West.
(2) Long poems use montage to wonderfully splice myths, religions, allusions and fragments of modern urban life together, and bring seemingly unrelated scenes and images together into the symbol structure centered on the wasteland, so that these seemingly unrelated scenes and images are internally connected.
(3) Crossing the boundaries of time and space, the ancient and the modern are integrated into one furnace. Long poems have no boundaries between time and space.
(4) The image is novel and grotesque, and the language is complex and changeable. Images such as The Whip of the Sun, The Sound of Bones Touching Bones, The Mouse Dragging a Wet Stomach, The Bat with a Child's Face are impressive, especially the sentence: "Did the body you planted in the garden sprout last year?" Images distorted by war, death and cruelty make readers feel creepy, but they are all true. In terms of language use, The Waste Land includes spoken language, written language, archaism, local language and foreign language. There are vernacular words such as "Everyone should be careful these days", and there are ancient Austrian English that imitates ancient masters such as Shakespeare.
(5) The original manuscript of The Waste Land has more than 800 lines, which was later written by another English poet, Ezra? Pound deleted it in chunks, and it became the 434 lines we see now. Therefore, in a sense, The Waste Land is the result of the joint efforts of two great English poets. Eliot, the original author, expressed his sincere respect for Pound and wrote at the beginning of the poem: Dedicated to ezra pound, the most outstanding craftsman.
(6) The Waste Land is neither a lyric poem nor a narrative poem. At that time, it created a new poetic style.
Of course, the obscurity of the wilderness is well known. When it was first published, almost no one could understand it. Later, Eliot added more than 50 annotations to this poem, but after reading it, readers found that these annotations were not easy to understand, so people hoped that the poet could annotate his annotations again. Eliot naturally wouldn't do that.