[The] war book above all others in the 'twenties was The Waste Land, and no account of the forces that formed the 'thirties generation would be accurate that neglected that powerfully influential poem. Eliot had an acute sense of what he called 'the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history', and he put that sense of history into his poem. And in 1922 contemporary history meant vestiges of the war: hence the two veterans who meet in the first part, and Lil's husband, who has just been demobbed, in the second, and the shouting and crying in part five, which Eliot's note identifies with the Russian Revolution. But beyond that, the world of the poem, with its heaps of broken images and its shocked and passive and neurasthenic persons, is a paradigm of war's effects, and of a world emptied of order and meaning, like a battlefield after the battle. And the manner of the poem—its ironic tone, its imagery, its lack of heroes and heroism, its antirhetorical style—is also a consequence of the war, an application of war-poet principles to the post-war scene. (p. 25)
To Eliot's young admirers, The Waste Land was the essential vision of the post-war world, and the generation's donnée. It is worth noting that the generation involved here includes both the friends of Waugh at the beginning of the 'twenties, and the friends of Auden at the end…. [In] the 'twenties, when the two groups overlapped at Oxford, they were one post-war generation, sharing a view of society as decadent and emptied of values. And Eliot's poem seemed an immediate and authoritative expression of what they saw.
