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[rayheinrich]

... P.S. T.S. Eliot (may God have mercy on his soul for his hyper-religious swerve towards the end)
possessed one of my favorite ragingly complex megalodonic male egos. He thought western
civilization's and his contemporaneous crumblings were not unrelated.
(And all this without foreknowledge of Paris Hilton.)

I must admit, you (more than likely) understand The Wasteland much greater than I. 

I love the last half of the poem and it's melodic changes. There are also quite a bit of religious reference at the beginning of the poem (second stanza--the red rock part referring to Matthew verses, and obviously son of man being Jesus), and perhaps there a lot more religious references I haven't caught throughout the middle. I guess it does become hyper-religious towards the end though!

Maybe as I get older and reread the poem I will continue to have a greater understanding for it 

Emma

Sorry, I was just having too much fun to say anything reasonable. I admire Eliot and have grown
to understand him less (meaning I once thought I understood him more but have realized my conceit).
What I do take from him is his ability to infect me with his intellectual passion, to realize (at least for
myself) that reason, while essential, is never sufficient.  The religious reference, I should have been more clear,
was refering to the timeline of his life, not of the poem.  

I'm more of a Pablo Neruda / William Carlos Williams type; Eliot has always seemed foreign to me,
like a Norse god imbued with brains instead of muscles...