T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was originally published in October 1922 in the first volume of the English literary magazine “The Criterion,” which Eliot himself started and edited. It appeared in the US only weeks later in the American literary magazine “The Dial” (originally a purveyor of early Transcendentalist literature which developed into an influential outlet for Modermism). Recognized from the outset for its structural complexity, obscurity, and tone of despair, this pivotal poem of the Modern era reflects and embodies many of the cultural tropes and intellectual issues of the day. Looking at one of the leading intellectual journals in Britain of the day, “The New Age,” one can find correlations between the disillusionment presented by Eliot in The Wasteland and the general disaffected outlook towards the modern world as articulated by commentators on contemporary philosophy, art, politics, and economics. 
One article of the issue published in 1922, the publication year of “The Wasteland,” is entitled “Our Generartion” and speaks of the general sense of disillusionment that the “intelligent man” inevitable fosters when apprehending the ramifications of industrialism on individuality and the ethos of despair and futility caused by the Great War, with a rhetoric very similar to Eliot’s that most modern people had “lost all their scepticism and [could] be neither saved nor damned in the grand style.”
Another article entitled “Nietzsche Revisited” indicates the interest in critical theology, revaluations of God, and criticisms of religion that occupied much of the popular intellect of an era of pessimism about the human condition yet optimism about its potentials. Eliot’s poem and his life are reminiscent of this vein of thought too and explicitly show how Eliot’s cultural and historical context influenced (and were perhaps to an extent influenced by) his works.