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barack obama writes about the waste land in a letter to his college girlfriend

The relevance of this quoted epistolary excerpt to the overall criticism (and meta-criticism) of The Waste Land is marginal at best, and the young future president doesn't mention Tiresias even once.
I include it here not just for the celebrity perspective but also to draw attention to his "particularly insightful comment" (as one Genius annotator describes it), which provides a tip toward the thin line Tiresias treads in the poem:
Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order,
― Barack Obama – Analysis of "The Waste Land"
With these poles set, the substance of the poem jags from one end to the other, settling in neither camp. Tiresias represents th

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