moving away from tradition

In Eliot's The Waste Land, the first part "the burial of the dead" uses traditionally live bearing imagery, but pairs these images with dark and depressing ones. I thought this was pretty cool, because  Eliot is doing what the modernism thinkers were all about. The modernist wanted to move away from traditional forms and art and get rid of all those restrictions emplaced upon all forms of art by the previous generation. Eliot's juxtaposition of words that symbolize life with those that symbolize death  to give the traditional sense of the words no "rules" to follow.