The earthquake that split modern poetry into Before and After. Five sections, five voices, multiple languages, a fragmented terrain of cultural collapse and spiritual drought. "The Waste Land" said what it felt like to be alive in post-WWI Europe: broken, allusive, overwhelmed by inheritance, unable to believe. Its famous opening ("April is the cruellest month") is the most quoted line in 20th-century poetry. Whether you love it or hate it, everything since responds to it.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.