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Here's a few notes that might help with The Waste Land...
by Thad Curtz

1. There are some notes by Eliot in the back. They are a certain amount of help, but some of them are rather tongue in cheek - Eliot apparently wrote them because the publisher insisted that there needed to be more pages in the book... I've put a xerox from a standard textbook version on reserve, if you want to consult some more detailed and explicit notes.

2. Jessie Weston - From Ritual to Romance...

Weston drew on Fraser's Golden Bough (12 volumes, 1890-1915), a study of ancient vegetation myths and fertility ceremonies, centering on the death and rebirth of the year god, who starts young and vigorous in the spring, ends up old and exhausted in the fall, and then is sacrificed and reborn. Weston argued that these myths and rituals were related to Christianity and especially to the legend of the Holy Grail. She argued that there was an archetypal fertility myth, the story of the Fisher King whose death, infirmity or omnipotence brings death and desolation to his land and the failure of fertility and reproduction in men and the natural world. If a questing knight goes to the Chapel Perilous, in the heart of the wasteland, and asks certain questions about the Grail and the Lance (the cup and the spear from Christ's crucifixion, which Weston takes to be female and male fertility symbols) then the king and the land will be restored to health.

Weston argued that this pattern was related to the ancient myths of dying and resurrected gods like Tammuz, Adonis and Attis from a wide range of cultures, and that it lay at the heart of Christianity, the Fisher King being related to ancient uses of fish as symbols of Life.

As you'll see, Eliot uses fragments from a wide range of sources to present modern life in a range of aspects as a sort of wasteland. Some of these fragments contrast other richer and more fertile modes of existence and feeling with the present situation; others just present the shortcomings of modern life. The poem ends on a different tone, though...