Edmund Wilson: "The Poetry of Drouth" ~ Critical response to "The Wasteland"

One of the critical responses I was assigned to read for T.S. Eliot's, The Wasteland was a critic by Edmund Wilson titled, "The Poetry of Drouth". His critic really helped me understand what Eliot was doing with his poem. Wilson describes Eliot's poem by writing, "...first meagre volume of twenty-four poems was dropped into the waters of contemporary verse without stirring more than a few ripples. But when two or three years had passed, it was found to stain the whole sea" (140). This explains the misunderstanding of the poem at first, for the first couple of years it was not even really acknowledged as any good. Wilson also believes that Eliot's poems were once considered, "vers de societe," meaning they were considered familiar, or unoriginal. But now every other poet seems to branch off of Eliot's poem. It is funny to me that Wilson brings up this idea that at first people really didn't understand this poem, and after really digging into it, and critiquing it, the poem goes from being 'familiar' to one of the most unique poems in the world. It is like my perception of it. At first, I did not understand it and just thought Eliot went in his room, shut the door and wrote whatever popped into his head. That, however is not the case, thanks to Wilson, I have come to learn alot more than I thought I would about Eliot's work.
Wilson gives a reasoning for Eliot's choice of his title, which actually really helped me get a better grasp of the mind state of Eliot. According to Wilson, Eliot got his title from a book by the author, Jessie L. Weston, Ritual of Romance. He also confirms my initial thoughts that the poem was a sort of puzzle that you have to piece together in order to completely comprehend it in it's entirety.
In Wilson's critic, he explains how this poem takes place in half the real world, and half a "haunted legend" ~ "The wasteland of Medieval Legend", he also reveals the symbolism to the water in the story. Wilson goes on to link Ms. Weston's use of the legend of the Holy Grail, to Eliot's own interpretation of it. She uses the Grail to symbolize the cries of the Sumerian - Babylonian civilizations, where Eliot interprets that as the "voices of all the thirsty men of the past," as Wilson puts it.
Wilson praise, and interpretation has helped me, as a reader understand, appreciate, and accept this poem as a mastery piece that deserves to be considered one of the all time best poems in the world.