One of the most frequently discussed tactics used by T.S. Eliot in his influential poem "The Waste Land", is his consistent insertion of quotations into the piece. This was a technique that Eliot used to demonstrate the chaotic nature of the modern existence and was achieved by juxtaposing various literary texts against his words. In Eliot's view, humanity's psyche had been shattered by WWI as well as by the collapse of the once-famed British empire. By creating a mashup using different pieces of dialogue, various images, scholarly ideas from the Old World, foreign words and various stylistic tones, Eliot found a new way to examine the destroyed visage of the British Empire. Almost every line in "The Waste Land" echoed a canonical text or an academic work -- but only partially. By fragmenting the quotations in this poem, Eliot was emphasizing the broken and fractured nature of the modern world.

Another way that Eliot used quotations in this poem was in his examination of high and low culture. Like many modernist writers, Eliot was fascinated with the disconnect between the high and low cultures of the time. To further emphasize the cracked and hollow nature of the post-war world, Eliot included many high brow references -- such as Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer and even the Bible. However, he also included many low brow references -- best exemplified in his usage of popular song from 1912, "The Shakespearean Rag". These inclusions allowed Eliot to jump from speaker to speaker, through low and high culture and gave him the ability to redefine the canonical texts of the past through the denigrated world of the present.