Oh, T.S. Eliot....

Maybe it's because of where I come from creatively, and I might be eating these words in years to come, but there's a lot of what Eliot does that is everything I dislike in poetry. I've always thought of the novel as the more cerebral art, or rather, the form that you'd want to undertake if you were going to write an overly cerebral work. Poetry, on the other hand, shouldn't be stupid, but there's no reason to litter your work with all kinds of obscure references. Perhaps that's just me, but you should write to BE understood, not to keep your audience at bay.

But like I said, that's just me. "The Waste Land" might be a masterwork, I just don't see it.