The Waste Land is a damn difficult poem to read. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to make themselves look good. This is a poem which, on the surface, does seem kind of impenetrable, but the more you push at it and dig into it, the more you find it has within. I feel I've only just begun uncovering some of the many possible answers that lie in this poem, but already I feel a gazillion times better than I did when I first finished it and thought '...what exactly have I just read?' As someone who is not a great lover of poetry, I find poems like this really rewarding, and I like the sense of achievement that comes in conquering them. Hence, even though counting a poem towards your Goodreads challenge is technically cheating because it's less than fifteen pages, I'm determined to commemorate my reading The Waste Land on here because I'm proud of myself. 
 Also, this is one of those texts which I think my thoughts are going to change on radically as time passes by. They've already begun to do so in the space of less than a week because what first appeared to be an unconquerable mountain now seems to me a mine of possibility. If that's the case now, then how will I feel about this poem when I come back to it in a month? A year? A decade? This is a work about loss and decay and time and death and memory. Perhaps, when I have a bit more experience of all of those things than I do now, I'll come back to The Waste Land and see a whole other side of it. Perhaps, when I read other texts that have been influenced by this poem, I'll come to esteem it more than I already to. Or perhaps, if I become more cynical with age (which is entirely possibly, knowing me), I might come back to this one day and declare the whole thing self-indulgent nonsense. At this point, I cannot say. As The Waste Land itself points out, time is always in flux, and things change. Therefore, I want to make a record of how I feel now, because there's no guarantee I'll feel the same next time I read this most provocative of poems. Already I'm excited about the future, although, if Eliot is to be believed, it's looking bleak. 
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 Earlier Thoughts - 25/09/17: 
 Currently, I barely understand a thing about this poem... but I kind of like it? I'm hovering between 3 and 4 stars at the moment, and I'll decide one way or another after I have a seminar on The Waste Land tomorrow and (hopefully) all the answers I am currently missing are revealed. After all, I was completely nonchalant about Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' until I had a seminar on it and emerged all like 'OMG BEST POEM EVER'. Maybe the same will happen this time. Maybe not. For now though, I'm impressed to the point of bewilderment.