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Unread 04-30-2017, 01:25 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Default The Waste Land

This is from a letter to a friend that was written by someone who was 20 years old at the time. Some of you may have come across this before and so you know who wrote it. For those who don't, I wonder if you can guess.
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"I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?"
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Unread 04-30-2017, 01:30 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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I don't know, but it sure sounds like a twenty-year-old...
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Unread 04-30-2017, 03:09 PM
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RCL RCL is offline
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How occidental!
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Unread 04-30-2017, 04:12 PM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
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This is Obama, right?
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Unread 04-30-2017, 04:15 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Google is able to answer that question.
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Unread 04-30-2017, 04:50 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Yes, Obama.

I find it pretty remarkable. Though John is apparently not impressed, I am. But it's not so much what Obama has to say, but that as a young man this was the kind of thing he spent his time saying. Does anyone suppose that Trump, or even Clinton, was closely reading and reflecting upon Eliot's poetry at that age? I've always thought Obama was smart, of course, but this is a side to his intellectual curiosity that I hadn't been aware of.
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Unread 04-30-2017, 04:52 PM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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Obama? Oh damm, I was sure it was Trump.
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Unread 04-30-2017, 07:09 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Yeah, Trump and Eliot. Trump couldn't even follow Cats.
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Unread 04-30-2017, 07:25 PM
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May I be my usual, unslanted, obvious self? He's likely to turn my beloved country into a Waste Land!
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Unread 04-30-2017, 07:36 PM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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Thanks Roger. This is more gratifying than I can express. I have always been an admirer of Obama's capacity to capture a complex set of information and then formulate a reasoned, compassionate response. I wish he would take up writing poetry. He has a command of language few others possess in public life, I think. It's a shame that so much of his vision and wisdom fell on deaf ears.

This blew me away: "life feeds on itself." It has been a theme I've been wrestling with in recent weeks -- since Aaron N.'s poem entitled, “don’t worry I know how many eyes spiders have”.
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