It was 5:00 p.m. on a Thursday last semester—never a good time to be in class. English Professor William Sharpe, perhaps sensing this, began reminiscing about his days as an undergraduate at Columbia. It was the 1970s. Sharpe and friends (can we imagine him swapping the tweed for long hair?) were getting hyped up about a new seminar course. The idea was simple: they would spend the whole semester voraciously reading all the books referenced in the footnotes of “The Waste Land.” The goal was to understand the poem as Eliot himself did, or as closely as possible. Esoteric? Sure.
