Rating: 
Summary: shantih shantih shantih
Review: Simply the defining poem of the 20th Century -- the standard against which all contemporary poetry must be judged. A rambling, rumbling tour de force of intellect, history, allusion, literature set amidst the decayed landscape of interwar Europe. Make no mistake -- this is a hard, hard poem to get your mind around -- no lazy metaphors or sappy sentimentalism here. But the poem is immensely rewarding -- deep, thoughtful, varied, inspired. My best advice would be to get a critical or annotated edition and move slowly, learning along the way. But don't let your own limitations prevent you from experiencing this work of art -- your understanding of the last century of poetic literature will suffer from a gaping hole if you omit this classic, seminal work.
Rating:
Summary: fear not
Review: T. S. Eliot is accused here of obscurantism, conservatism, and elitism, yet I honestly don't know what such criticism intends to accomplish. (I had to look up obscurantism in the dictionary to find out what it meant). The Wasteland is an artistic performance and as such is brilliant. It is not something one reads for simple easy diversion. If that's what you are looking for, read something else. No artist is required to make it easy for the rest of us. The good news is that none of us are prevented from going to TSE's sources, and this he helps us do with clear notes.
(By the way, Ralph Ellison, a music major at Tuskegee, began his training as a literary artist--novelist and essayist--with a thorough study of The Wasteland and its sources, and I gotta tell ya, if its good enough for Mr. Ellison . . .)
But what TSE doesn't do is force-feed us with explanations in the eventuality we don't "get it" (think about it for a moment: even he had to read this other stuff before he wrote the darn thing).
But hey, it's okay if you don't want to do the work: that's what television is for.
Rating:
Summary: Great book investigates modern culture.
Review: T.S. Eliot is, in my estimation one of the most profound modern thinkers, and The Waste Land is one of his greate The book takes a close look at modern culture and the lack of reality and meaning. It was especially relevant in the days directly following the Industrial Revolution, but there is much here that is very applicable today as well. All in all an excellent piece of literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Great poem, comprehensive edition
Review: The Waste Land is undoubtedly the most contentious and possibly the greatest poem of the 20th century. The reactions to and interpretations of the poem are as diverse as the multiple voices Eliot conjurs throughout the work. This edition is useful because it presents the variety of critical responses to the poem; historical and contemporary. The extensive bibliography points the reader to other important critical material. The edition is ultimately successful because of these virtues.North's emphasis on source materials is the edition's greatest liability. In his introdution, North alludes to the controversy over Eliot's notes, but the edition never discusses the problem that the critical reliance on the notes pose. It takes Eliot's notes as a reliable and critically uncontroversial guide to source material and spends a considerable part of the book elaborating these sources. Sometimes the source material that the notes point to provide insight into the poem and oftentimes they reveal a misplaced credulity in Eliot's ultimate critical authority.
Rating:
Summary: Thise is agreat poem, highly recomended
Review: The wasteland is a poem about Eliots genral disgust at the degraded society after WWI, with the whole world looking back at it's "childhood" ,and the deppresion and it's overwhelming staleness. I higly rreccomend this poem to fans of history poetry and classic liteartuure. It has changed my prose and poem format entirely. well have a good read!
Rating: 
Summary: OBSCURANTISM, CONSERVATISM, ELITISM
Review: The Wastleland epitomizes the elitist and reactionary undertones prevalent in much of early modernism--by which I am referring to that vague (retrospectively designated) "school" of modernism orginating in or drawing its adherents from the British Isles. Of course, Eliot was born in America, a geographic misfortune for which this certified Anglophile would repent, however implicitly, during much of his life. In The Wasteland, Eliot is nostalgic for classicist or, at least, early Enlightenment values, which he contrasts with the decaying values and moral degradation of modern society. As might be expected, his viewpoint was informed by the era of the so-called Great War, the war--it would have seemed--to end all wars. But Eliot naively fails to address the reiteration of moral crises, destructiveness, and war throughout human history and the definitively human propensity to glorify the past, out of proportion with its more prosaic realities, and to assign past works with nearly religious devotion. The works to which Eliot tirelessly alludes throughout The Wasteland--and the poem, it should be noted, is comprised of a great deal of often-obscure allusions--are not inherently better than, say, the works of the subsequent and more forward-looking American modernist "movement" (consisting of Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, et.al.). The Wasteland gives voice to the myth that tradition is validated by virtue of the fact merely that it is tradition. This is the conservative viewpoint par excellence. But the past is inherently undesirable simply because it is the past, and life and art are "progressive" ventures. Derrida and other desconstructionists would certainly have problems with the use of the descriptor "progressive" (in this, an endlessly derivative and deferential society), but by progression all that is suggested is not an aversion to the past, but an aversion only to duplicating the past and its traditions verbatim because tradition has seemingly legitimized itself. The world Eliot seeks, however implicitly, is the representation of the Old World in which--accurately or not--obscurant, elitist, and sedentary intellectualism prevails, while revolution and populism, in all of its genres, is stifled. Or perhaps that isn't the intention at all. Perhaps more privately, Eliot preferred a continuance of "vulgar" modernity in which reactionary elites (Joyce, Yeats, and Pound, for example) might feel themselves exceptional and the most insightful diangosticians of social ills--imagining they have, to whatever extent, evaded them.
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual Weightlifting
Review: This poem (which cannot be understood without a interpretive guide, don't kid yourself) is intellectual weightlifting. Comprehending all of the allusions, symbols and multiple meanings is difficult and rewarding. Eliot's barren post-WWI world does not stir my heart, but because it enthralls my brain, I call him one of my favorites.
Rating:
Summary: Ugh
Review: Williams was right. Eliot has taken poetry twenty years into the past with this poem. While others are experimenting with their poetics, Eliot falls back on an Old World school of writing that would be better obsolete. What's worse is his poems just get worse from here on out (less help from Pound on the editing, maybe?). He should have kept his day job his only job.
Rating:
Summary: Corker.
Review: You must tell Mr Eliot he has two devoted fans in Islington who think the Waste Land is a real smasher!
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