The mind-boggling allusiveness and profundity of the text just went over the heads of his readers, who were initially baffled by a string of quotations and reference to a variety of sources in multiple languages like Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Sanskrit. It alludes to several texts such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, Shakespeare, Buddhism, Hindu Upanishad and others.
It is also richly allusive and polyvocal. The Waste Land is also a multi-voiced poem, it has a multitude of voices, voices spoken in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, German, and Italian. The reader is expected to string all these fragments together to derive meaning. It can be termed as "a heap of broken images," a poem, as asserted by Harold Munro, "a potpourri of descriptions and episodes." Since the poem is based on Tiresias's visions which come to him in spurts, The Waste Land seems to be fragmented or disjointed. The poetic fragments mirror the fragmentation of life in the cities of Europe, devastated by World War I. It is important to note that The Waste Land has no definite structure. Soon after its appearance, first in the inaugural volume of The Criterion (October 1922), a quarterly British literary magazine, founded and edited by Eliot himself, in London, and next in the American publication The Dial in New York (November 1922), the poem came to be regarded as one of the seminal works of modernist poetry, and Eliot as a very important literary figure of the time. Widely regarded as "The Poem of the Century, "The Waste Land is an "infinitely mysterious poem," which, according to John Xiron Cooper, "is a poem we have learned to handle, but not a poem, we have tamed." It is true that publication of the poem marked a watershed moment in the history of British poetry.
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