The Today's Relevance of Waste Land Eliot's poem, The Waste Land, is at least as relevant to today's life as it is It was 1922 when it was first published. All the themes stated at the beginning of the introduction to the Norton Anthology poem ("spiritual dryness", lack of "regenerative belief" to give meaning to life, and death without resurrection) are even more present in us than they are. 'were before. were at the time the poem was first published. (Introduction 2146) Nor have the attitudes toward sexuality that are implicitly condemned throughout the work changed in any way that Eliot would be likely to consider an improvement. "The Waste Land" does not simply present an anthropological description of a culture, however, and Eliot's proposed solution seems as relevant today as it should have been in 1922. Like Blake, Eliot constructs a personal mythology , but Eliot draws on a greater number of sources than Blake: various religions of the East and West. the West, literary works from around the world and works of philosophy and anthropology. Eliot refers to the fragmentary references throughout the poem at the end of the poem by saying, "These fragments I have propped up against my ruins" -- that is, Eliot has taken fragmentary references and has been pieced together in an attempt to understand the modern situation in which he finds himself. (line 431) The poem's references are almost always references to the past, when a cultural heritage was common to an entire people, the themes described in the Norton Anthology introduction were non-existent (or were problematic to a much lesser extent than in the modern era), and when sexuality found expression in a context that Eliot would have considered appropriate – a mature relationship between men and women that expresses both love and physical passion. But perhaps more important than the construction of this personal mythology is the solution that Eliot explicitly proposes in “What the Thunder Said.” Eliot weaves a Hindu story in which gods, devils and humans each seek advice from their common father, Prajapati..