A quote to empower you, as a reader. Please keep this quote in mind while reading Eliot’s Waste Land, especially in those moments of frustration!
“A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” – Roland Barthes, from “The Death of the Author”
The Modernist Circle 