The Poetic Afterlife of The Waste Land

This chapter explores some of the ways in which Eliot’s most famous poem remains a significant, and sometimes a ghostly, presence, in poetry of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A number of critics have considered its influence on, or parallels with, later poets or poems, some of which will be discussed here.2 What follows is not by any means a complete survey of its widely-diffused poetic afterlife, but a consideration of both some generally influential elements of the poem and examples of how specific poets writing in the last seventy years have engaged with its legacies.