<P> There is some question as to whether Eliot originally intended The Waste Land to be a collection of individual poems (additional poems were supplied to Pound for his comments on including them) or to be considered one poem with five sections . </P> <P> The structure of the poem is also meant to loosely follow the vegetation myth and Holy Grail folklore surrounding the Fisher King story as outlined by Jessie Weston in her book From Ritual to Romance (1920). Weston's book was so central to the structure of the poem that it was the first text that Eliot cited in his "Notes on the Waste Land". </P> <P> The style of the poem is marked by the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts (classic and obscure; "highbrow" and "lowbrow") that Eliot peppered throughout the poem . In addition to the many "highbrow" references and / or quotes from poets like Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Homer, Eliot also included a couple of references to "lowbrow" genres . A good example of this is Eliot's quote from the 1912 popular song "The Shakespearian Rag" by lyricists Herman Ruby and Gene Buck . There were also a number of lowbrow references in the opening section of Eliot's original manuscript (when the poem was entitled "He Do The Police in Different Voices"), but they were removed from the final draft after Eliot cut this original opening section . </P> <P> The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot's interest in exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue . This interest dates back at least as far as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". The Waste Land is not a single monologue like "Prufrock". Instead, it is made up of a wide variety of voices (sometimes in monologue, dialogue, or with more than two characters speaking). </P>

T.s. eliot’s famous poem the waste land