On the Waste Land

There are beautiful lines here that make a lot of sense, but I have no idea what the composition as a whole is trying to say. Thomas C. Foster says it has something to do with Celtic myths about wastelands needing to be reinvigorated by a hero, and I can see that from the opening lines, but the rest doesn’t seem to fit together. It doesn’t help that the poem is so dense with allusions to other works that it reads more like a chakchouka that tastes nothing like its constituent parts than an independently crafted piece of writing — though then again, aren’t we all just retelling the same stories over and over? I read some of the notes in the Norton Critical Edition and tried a few of the analyses, but didn’t get far, so this is really just a response to the poem itself.