If you’ve ever read or studied T.S. Eliot’s excellent poem ‘The Waste Land,’ you probably have some thoughts about it that you’d be willing to share. (For me, I’ll never forget the valiant effort by some of my friends to dramatize it onstage during a talent show)

Here is what the young Barack Obama thought about the poem in a letter to one of his girlfriends, according to excerpts from a new biography of the president by David Maraniss.