To be fair, I think most people kickstart their 'unwrapping' of The Waste Land by reading the notes Eliot supplied himself - which are fairly detailed, though n

To be fair, I think most people kickstart their 'unwrapping' of The Waste Land by reading the notes Eliot supplied himself - which are fairly detailed, though not exhaustive (but neither is this webpage. for instance line 25 mentions 'the red rock' I believe is a reference to Mars-->The God of Wa-->/WW1). I agree one should read the pure text to start with, and try to make sense of things by yourself, but you're going to need help at some point. What I like about this is that it lets you see viscerally how interlinked the text is. I like to visualize modernist poems as crystalline datastructures floating through the heap of culture with pointers to other objects in (public) memory. Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem for anyone interested: http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_harp_ITH.html http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_h... Also the text on its own is here http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html I was only a teenager when I first read it (plus it was my first exposure to modernist texts), but it did take me quite a long time to even get past the 'wtf?' stage, until it eventually clicked.