T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is widely acclaimed the most thoroughgoing poetic analysis of the psychological and spiritual dislocations of the 20th (and now the 21st) Century. It’s also held to be “real hard” to understand. Take this 2-part seminar, and you’ll be the envy of all for your confident mastery of its complexities. It’s very beautiful. It faces the blunt brutalities of our times; but it is, in the final analysis, spiritually optimistic. It’s in touch with the human journey toward enlightenment, ancient, medieval, and modern, Western, and

Eastern. It’s evidence of the usefulness of the much-maligned Liberal Arts education. Its rhythms guide us. Soon Eliot will declare himself an Anglican Christian, but the poem leaves us with the Sanskrit triple blessing “Shantih shantih shantih.”