In my final year of university, sat at my desk, surrounded by empty energy drink cans, head collapsed upon my annotated copy of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, I would often drift away and contemplate what it would be like to meet the man. Choosing to write my dissertation on Eliot's poetry was a rather straight forward decision for me. His poems were complex, but they were compelling. I very much thrived on the challenge of deciphering his poems, but he also spoke of a disillusionment with modernity that, despite coming from a different cultural viewpoint, still spoke to me. Eliot to me is a genius; an artist. He is a literary behemoth who not only contributed enormously to poetry, but to the field of literary studies as a whole. Eliot, as a poet, I adore, but Eliot, the man, is a different proposition. Here I am an atheist, socialist and progressive thinker in admiration at the work of a man who was deeply religious, conservative and a bigot. It is a difficult conflict to res...