T.S. Eliot spent his days working at Lloyds Bank in London, processing foreign transactions, while writing the poem that would demolish Victorian literary tradition and reassemble the fragments into something entirely new. The Waste Land — dense, allusive, fractured — was composed by a man in a bowler hat commuting to a desk job, and it changed the course of English-language poetry forever.

This episode traces Eliot from his St. Louis childhood through his self-imposed English exile, the banking years, the mental breakdown that produced The Waste Land, and the later conversion to Anglo-Catholicism that shaped Four Quartets.

• Eliot’s American upbringing, his move to England, and the deliberate reinvention as an English gentleman
• The years at Lloyds Bank and the first wife’s mental illness that shadowed his creative life
• The writing of The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s famous editing that cut it in half
• The conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Four Quartets, and the Nobel Prize that crowned his career