The Waste Land is considered to be one of the most important and influential poems of the 20th century.[34][178][179] The poem has been praised for its aesthetic value, and its originality influenced modernist poets: "While we have become accustomed to such poetic techniques as allusion, ironic juxtaposition, and sudden shifts in imagery and style, Eliot's use of them seemed strikingly new in 1922".[180] Lewis (2007) comments that "Later poetic practice was largely shaped by Pound's advocacy of free verse and Eliot's example", and Pound later took Eliot's example of using different languages even further, including Chinese characters in his Cantos which would have been completely unintelligible to a large majority of his readers.[181]
The poem has influenced several prose works. George Orwell used allusive techniques in a manner influenced by Eliot, most clearly in the popular song references of Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the epigraphs of Down and Out in London and Paris and Coming Up For Air.[182] Similarly, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner displays structural parallels to The Waste Land in its juxstapositions of different times, and its use of intratextual association and repetition.[183] Raymond Chandler makes more clear-cut references to the poem in The Long Goodbye, both within the text with characters who read Eliot, and thematically, such as in the novel's chess game.[184] Anthony Burgess employs similar stylistic elements in The Malayan Trilogy, with his characters reading the poem, and thematic elements such as Victor Crabbe fearing death by water.[185] The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald contains similarities to The Waste Land in its setting ("Central to the novel's total effect, as in Eliot's poem, are symbols and images of waste, desolation, and futility") and characterisation ("'What do people plan?' [Daisy] asks, and the sentence is symbolic of her emptiness; she is like Eliot's lady in The Waste Land who cries out, 'What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?'").[186] The poem also gives Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust not just its title, but a number of key themes.[187]
Lesley Wheeler argues that despite Eliot's large influence on 20th-century poetry, largely due to the success of The Waste Land, his impact on poets this century is much diminished:
As editor, critic, and builder of poetic landmarks from recycled materials, the man overshadowed Anglo-American poetry for generations. For William Carlos Williams, the atomic blast of The Waste Land knocked American poetry out of its groove. For poets born in the thirties and forties – Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney – Eliot is monumental, although those writers have different responses to his looming edifice. Poets born since, though, metabolized Eliot differently. It's not that modernism is less relevant. Younger writers claim certain modernist poets over and over: Williams, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, H.D., Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks. Eliot just isn't on their public lists quite so often.[188]
Wheeler attributes this change to a number of causes, such as Eliot's lower prominence on school curricula, biographies highlighting his antisemitism, and his "misogynistic and homoerotic correspondence with Ezra Pound".[188] She posits that perhaps the poem is perhaps a victim of its own obscurity, demanding interpretation over providing an engaging reading experience.[189]
Parodies
Parodies of this poem have also been written. One is by Eliot's contemporary H. P. Lovecraft, entitled "Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance". Written in 1922 or 1923, it is regarded by scholar S. T. Joshi to be one of Lovecraft's best satires.[190][191] Wendy Cope published a parody of The Waste Land, condensing the poem into five limericks, Waste Land Limericks, in her 1986 collection Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.[192] John Beer published a modern take on The Waste Land in 2010 which is part satire and part homage.[193][194]
