How was The Waste Land received upon publication?

T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land was controversial for its complex style, denounced for what some critics considered to be its obscurity, and praised for its importance to the Modernist literary movement. Despite initial criticism, it became a monumental influence in poetry and English literature. Poet William Carlos Williams once said of The Waste Land, “It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it.”