The hope of resurrection in the withered wasteland-vulgar and ugly people who are still alive-runs through the cold and hazy picture of the whole poem as a main line, which profoundly shows the true face of the western society, which is full of human desires, spiritual degradation, moral decay, mean and wretched life, ugliness and darkness, conveys the disgust, general disappointment and disillusionment of Westerners to the world and reality after World War I, and shows the mental illness and spiritual crisis of a generation. At the same time, the poem attributed the decline of western society to human's "original sin" and regarded the restoration of religious spirit as a panacea to save the western world and modern people, which was Eliot's answer.
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 the methods of symbol in symbol, myth in myth, interweaving myth with reality, mixing ancient and modern, and integrating reality with reality, which made poetry highly abstract and philosophical organically unified, 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.
As the first school of western modernism, symbolism in the later period made a unique contribution to the development of literature. Its successful experience in artistic creation and development has enriched the means of expression of poetry, enhanced its artistic appeal and influenced various schools of modernism. Symbolist writers pay attention to expressing their inner world, which is also an expansion of the literary field. However, the mystery and obscurity caused by symbolism's excessive pursuit of expression in art, pessimism in content, religious mysticism and reactionary and retrogressive social views should be denied.