Thomas Stearns Eliot ("Tom") is a young American in 1920s London seeking personal mental stability and professional success as a poet. For two years he has been working on his most famous poem, The Waste Land and hoping to publish it. In the household of a friend and contemporary writer (Virginia Woolf), Tom meets a young serving girl, Lottie, who becomes the inspiration for him to be both the man and the poet he wants to be.
Tom is in an unhappy marriage with his English wife, Vivien. They are sexually dysfunctional (she uninhibited, he frigid), both physically unhealthy, yet unable to separate (she, because she is devoted to supporting his art, and he because of his strict sense of moral and religious responsibility to their marriage). This relationship is both a cause of Tom's mental instability and the source of his poetic genius.
Lottie, an innocent housemaid infatuated with Tom because of his looks and manner, is easily seduced by him and, given the mores of Victorian and Edwardian society, stoically accepts her role as merely his mistress. He, in turn, is seduced by her innocence and simplicity.
With the advice of his close friend and contemporary writer, Ezra Pound (in Paris), Tom has been working on what he believes will be his "best poem." Living in London literary society where he, as an American, feels he must always prove himself, Tom succumbs to a nervous breakdown and eventually finds a cure in Lausanne, Switzerland with a neurologist, Dr. Roger Vittoz.
His cure-an early 20th century version of behavior modification-allows him not only to complete his unusually long poem, but also to successfully negotiate his broken relationship with his wife. Once cured, he ambitiously seeks the fame and fortune he expects from publication of this unusual poem.
He is a better poet but not a better man. Now hailed as the foremost poet of a new literary movement, Modernism, he renounces what he views as his "crutches" that he needed in his mental illness: his devoted wife, Vivien, and his naïve, sweet lover, Lottie. To further prove his independence, he has a guilt-free one-night fling with a promiscuous socialite.
Tom has rid himself of his ailments and frailties, and now a successful poet, he decides to embrace convention: live the pretense of a happy marriage until it becomes impossible, embrace religion more closely, and shed the scandal of an illicit affair. No longer "Tom," he is now T.S. Eliot. And Lottie: she has learned that even in the modern times of the 1920s, it is better and safer to be content with one's station.
