THE WASTE LAND In brief, The Waste Land is a 433-line modernist poem by T. S Eliot published in 1922. It has been called “one of the most important poems of the 20th century.” Despite the poem’s obscurity which it shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures has made the poem to be a familiar touchstone of modern literature. The poem has been written in five parts. The five parts of The Waste Land are titled “The Burial of the Dead”, “A Game of Chess”, “The Fire Sermon”, “Death by Water”, and “What the Thunder Said”. The Waste Land is an allusive and complex poem. As such, it is subject to a variety of interpretations, and no two critics agree completely on its meaning. It may be interpreted on three levels: the person, the society, and the human race. The personal interpretation seeks to reveal Eliot's feelings and intentions in writing the poem. At the society level, a critic looks for the meaning of the poem in relation to the society for which it was written. Finally, the human level extends the societal level to include all human societies past, present, and future (Thompson, 1963). The question of literary value is complex. We must distinguish, first of all, between the importance of literature in our lives and the importance of any specific text. Literature defines and creates our world. In poems, plays, novels, and stories we imagine and recognize our world and ourselves. In Othello we see our own capacity for irrational anger, or, perhaps, more accurately, in reading Othello we discover that anger in ourselves. Literature is essential because it constantly recreates and extends our understanding of humanity. We do not, however, treat all literature as equally important. Some works have seemed to