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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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REFERENCES

I collect throughout this site annotations and creative inspirations from a variety of sources that treat directly with Eliot's annotations of his own work, not to mention a myriad of outside annotations as well. Below, find the complete breakdown of works I've drawn from in creating this resource, if not explicitly linked in specific posts elsewhere. Anderson, Tyler E. "Examining Early and Recent Criticism of The Waste Land: A Reassessment." (2010). University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Danis, George. “The World of Eliot’s Waste Land”. WR: Journal of the Arts & Sciences Writing Program, Issue 4 (2011-2012). Boston University Press. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts”. The Sewanee Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring, 1945), pp. 221-240. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.  Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green. “Disciplining The Waste Land, or How to Lead Critics into Temptation.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, 1998, pp. 82...
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