Thomas Stern Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 from a distinguished family. He studied philosophy and literature at Harvard. From 1910 he studied in Paris where he was influenced by French Symbolists. In 1914 he went to Germany to study Greek Philosophy, but was forced by the outbreak of the First World War to move to Oxford, where he met Ezra Pound. He lived in England for the rest of his life working on his most important writings while holding a position at Lloyd Banks. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. He died in 1965.

The Waste Land The Waste Land doesn’t have a plot, it is a sequence of fragmented images without any particular order. The meaning of this poem is not given by the single images, which can cause different feelings in each reader, but you must consider the poem as a whole. Eliot also uses different languages, such as German or French, to better give the idea of fragmentation. Eliot often makes references to other writings, philosophy, and religions. He used two main sources for the poem: the first is the legend of the quest for the Holy Grail, the second are vegetation myths and fertility rites, in particular he uses The Golden Bough by Sir James Fazer. In fact the Waste Land is a reference to Europe after the First World War, a fragmented and destroyed land where men live in a state of anxiety, loneliness and confusion. He uses the Holy Grail, the symbol of fertility, to explain that the Waste Land needs to become fertile again using the knowledge of the past wisdom.