The intertextuality within The Waste Land struck me when reading. Most of the references I caught were when trying to translate the different parts of the poem that are in different languages, and I then realized they were references to other stories; Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner, Bauldelaire poems, Parsifal by Verlaine, the story of Philomela, the Oedipus Rex plays, and The Baghavad Gita. I found all of these, and I’m sure there are more. This hearkening back to old stories and understandings is something that Brittain does in Testament of Youth, but Eliot seems to be doing something a bit different here. While Brittain is looking for comfort in literature while also wondering how art can continue to be created in a time like this, Eliot seems to be taking the old to attempt to explain or bring a different light to the new. Put another way, Eliot seems to be testing whether the old traditions of writing still hold up to explain what is happening during the war. By doing this, Eliot is literally making the old new, which is one of the big tenants of Modernism. In attempting to describe the current with the past, Eliot creates an intertextuality that readers must define and analyze to attempt to understand how the war affected those that experienced it.