After reading The Wasteland you would notice that Eliot’s main theme here is the psychological state of the twentieth century. According to Michael Levenson, Eliot uses a distinctive, syntactic pattern in the first opening lines in the Norton Anthology:
“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
We aren’t sure who the speaker is in these lines but from what we see about he is on subject of “the life of the seasons”, as Levenson puts it. Eliot doesn’t particularly like any of the seasons, as you can see he over uses negative adjectives like dead, cruel, and dull, which reminds me of an apocalypse.
As we continue reading, Levenson points out the complex system of resemblance and oppositions in the first stanza:
Levenson tries to break it down to us as to where he describes that lines 1-6 are linked by present participles and line 15-18 are linked my personal pronouns. Lines 10-16 are also linked by the reiteration the conjunction “and.” By this, we are still not sure of who the speaker is but we see that Eliot uses a lot of personal pronouns such as: “I, we, us, me, and Marie.” Levenson says that if Marie has been the speaker throughout the entire poem, then it that suggestion is threatened in many ways considering the following: “the shift from general reflection to personal reminiscence, from landscape to cityscape, from participial connectives to conjunctions, the disappearance of the noun-adjective pattern, the use of German.” The variation of the tone throughout the poem is very unsteady as well as the attitude. 
Eliot’s writing method is very distinguished than any of the other modernists during this time. Levenson states the principle of order in The Waste Land depends on a plurality of consciousnesses, an every-increasing series of points of view, which struggle towards an emergent unity and then continue to struggle past that unity.
Levinson seems to have come up with a rather complex way of proving what seems quite obvious: TWL exhibits a dynamic “plurality of consciousness.” The “speaker” is difficulty to pin down and slippery, and that is part of what makes the poems both difficult and strikingly beautiful at times.
For the critical posts, I am looking for overviews of whole articles or a chapter in a book. I linked to these snippets of criticism as a way for your to prepare for class discussion (I didn’t intend them to be used for the critical posts).