The Waste Land by TS Elliot.

Since the moment I started to read “The Waste land” by Elliot I wondered why it has been called “one of the most important poem s of the 20th century”, but I jut had to read the first lines to realized why it has been considered as one of the most important poems, because a phrase like; “April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and (its last line) are quite difficult to forget, due to the fact that they are very meaningful for anyone who has a sensitive heart.

Elliots’ greatest masterpiece “The Waste Land” impressed me a lot, because we can find all Eliot’s knowledge, about Latin, Greek, German and Sanskrit elements from mythology and history. Moreover what really called my attention was the first part of the poem in which it is intended to show the problems of life and death, on existentialism.

From that point of view in the first part of the poem we can come up with a final conclusion of it; life brings death and death brings life, like in a closed perpetual circle.

To conclude I’d like to mention that even though the poem was hard to read and understand, I could get at a first glance the importance of the poem as it was written in a realistic way, because if we observe the first stanza of the poem we are going to realize that it contains a few romantic and beautiful imagery from the past, which will not again reappear in the rest of the poem. These past almost pastoral imagery serve as a sharp contrast to the horrifying and real images depicted throughout the rest of the poem-degenerating, destructive, decomposing and debilitating, which in result creates a very disturbing picture of the wasteland-the world we live in.