Sources which Eliot quotes or alludes to include the works of classical figures Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, and Ovid; 14th-century writers Dante and Geoffrey Chaucer; Elizabethan and Jacobean writers Edmund Spenser, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster; 19th-century figures Gérard de Nerval, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Tennyson, and Richard Wagner; and more contemporary writers Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Frank Chapman and F. H. Bradley.[115] Additionally Eliot makes extensive use of religious writings, including the Christian Bible and Book of Common Prayer, the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and the Buddha's Fire Sermon; and of cultural and anthropological studies such as James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance.[115]
As well as drawing from myth and fiction, Eliot included people he knew as figures in the poem. "The Burial of the Dead" contains the character Marie, who is based on Marie Larisch,[52] and the "hyacinth girl" represents Emily Hale, with whom Eliot had fallen in love several years previously.[10] "A Game of Chess" features a representation of Vivienne;[116] and its conversations are taken from those overheard by the couple while in a local pub.[117]
Scholars have identified more contemporary artistic influences on Eliot, contrary to the poet's own focus on older and foreign-language influences.[118] Eliot had read early drafts of parts of Ulysses and corresponded with Joyce about them, and its influence is seen in the symbolist use of cross-references and stylistic variety in The Waste Land,[119][120] as well as the mythic parallels between the characters of Ulysses and those of the Odyssey, writing that this "mythical method" had "the importance of a scientific discovery".[121] Eliot would later express the opinion that, compared to The Waste Land, Ulysses was a superior example of such literary developments, and the novel has been described as "the most important model for the poem".[122] Unlike its use in Ulysses, however, Eliot saw the mythical method as a way to write poetry without relying on conventional narration—he uses his mythical sources for their ritualistic structures, rather than as a counterpoint to the poem's "story".[123]
Eliot was resistant to ascribing any influence to Walt Whitman, instead expressing a preference for Jules Laforgue (who was himself a Whitman translator and admirer).[124] Nevertheless, scholars have noted strong similarities in the two poets' use of free verse. The first lines of The Waste Land, which are an inversion of Chaucer's opening to The Canterbury Tales, strongly resemble Whitman's imagery at the beginning of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd":[125][126]
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. — T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 1–4[103]
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. — Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", lines 1–3[127]
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; — Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Prologue), lines 1–4[128]
As well as the motif of lilacs growing in the spring, Whitman treats the inevitable return of spring as "an occasion for mourning the death that allows for rebirth", a similar perspective being put forward by Eliot and completely contrary to Chaucer, who celebrates the "sweet showers" of April bringing forth spring flowers.[124][125] Scholar Pericles Lewis further argues that Whitman's speech-like rhythms anticipate the even more free style of The Waste Land, adhering to Pound's dictum that verse should "[depart] in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (i.e. simplicity)".[129] Critic Harold Bloom goes on to identify further similarities between the two poems, with Eliot's "third who always walks beside you" as Whitman's "knowledge of death", and the poems themselves as "an elegy for the poet's own genius, rather than a lament for Western civilization".[130]
Pablo Picasso, Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass (1912)The Waste Land was also informed by developments in the visual arts. Its style and content reflect the methods of Cubism and Futurism to take apart and reassemble their subjects in different forms, and the interest of Surrealism in the unconscious mind and its influence on culture—similar themes to what interested Eliot about The Golden Bough.[131] Scholar Jacob Korg identifies similarities with the collage techniques of Braque and Picasso, wherein the artists' increasingly non-representational works would include a small piece of "realistic" detail. In the same sense, The Waste Land directly includes "reality", such as the pub conversation and the phrase "London Bridge is falling down", alongside its "imagined" content, to achieve a similar effect.[132]
