Hello and welcome to Young Heretics, the worst hookup ever edition.

Today on Young Heretics, we are resuming our two-part series on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Last week we did the first half of this series and now we are finishing up this, I think,

really deep and incredible poem by T.S. Eliot, the great modernist, a lyric poem.

If you did not see that first episode, go ahead and take a look at it, go back and watch it,

but it's not necessary to follow along with this episode because we are going to recap just sort

of the major points and what this work is before we get into kind of how it all works and why it's

great. So just to briefly go back over who well it is, why we care about him, what's the deal.

Eliot was an American expatriate, he lived most of his professional life in England, in the UK,

although he was born in the US, suffered from a lot of congenital disorders as a kid,

was kind of a sickly child, and grew up eventually to become a scholar, a scholar, especially

of philosophy and Sanskrit literature, which we'll get into a little bit on this episode.

He famously converted to Christianity, and that's one of the things that we've been tracing

across this two-part series because the Waste Land is really of all of his works. It is his great work,

sort of pre-conversion to Anglican Christianity. He was born into a unitarian family,

but the Waste Land is really, takes place or is written from a kind of bleaker, more, you might

even say godless perspective, although we'll get into just how true that is as we discuss this text.

But we are tracing in this two-part series, the part of Eliot's career, that really emerged

from his sort of pre-conversion state, and it was after his conversion that he wrote another great

work, which we will work on, and think about later on, four quartets. We're going to do another

two-part series on four quartets. And the reason that we're doing it this way is that

T.S. Eliot offers us an opportunity to kind of watch somebody moving, and you might say in real

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