This is the third time I have read The Waste Land for class, and each time is a little bit different of an experience. The first time I was completely lost and utterly confused. However, once we began to pick it apart it began to make more sense. My second experience with the poem was very similar. This time around I remembered much more of what I had learned, which helped me as I read. What makes this poem so difficult, at least in part, is its extensive use of quotes and fragments from a wide range of classic works such as poems, plays, books, and more modern writings and scenes. 

I find I spend about the same amount of time reading the footnotes explaining all of the quotes and references as I do reading the actual poem itself. Eliot obviously intended this to be a difficult poem, and I think he's making a very interesting comment on the state of civilization, modernity, and the war by using so many strange juxtapositions and fragments. He builds this extremely modern poem on fragments and pieces of some of the greatest works of literature (in English and in other languages), suggesting that the modern era is built off the pieces of different aspects of the past as well. It also shows a tension between high and low culture, as both of these are present, and placed side by side within the poem. The disjointed, confusing, searching, fragmented nature of the poem also seems to me to reflect the sentiment that people would have had after WWI. The world had fallen apart and broken around them, and they had to piece it back together the best they could with the pieces and fragments of literature, culture, history, and technology as best they could. That is how I see the importance of Eliot's use of quotations and references in The Wasteland, and how it comments on the time and the war. I think that there is a lot more to it that even that though, because there are so many possibilities with a poem like this one.