I don't get it. It's "beyond repugnant" to mention bad things about a poet, but not to mention good things? That's sort of the way Sarah Palin ran her campaign. Take bows and accept cheers when people want to praise her heroic soldier son (must be that she raised him so well!) but cry foul and leave-the-chldren-out-of-it when the subject turns to her pregnant teenage daughter.
Personally, I think it's beyond repugnant to excuse a poet's personal views just because you happen to like his poetry, particularly when those views are expressed in the course of what is being put forward as literary criticism expounding on what he regards as right and proper in poetry. That he did not misbehave with Stephen Spender hardly makes up for his detestable views in print, which it is healthy to speak out against.
If he tried to suppress the work in question, I have no indication that he ever stepped forward and publicly stated that he was wrong. It sounds to me that he was more embarrassed by the likely reaction than by views he no longer sincerely held in such a natural and ingrained way that it didn't occur to him until after publication that some might not react too kindly.
This is not an argument against his poems, which never moved me in any event even if he had been a man I could deeply admire. The same goes for his good friend Pound, who, purely by coincidence of course, had, shall we say, something of an anti-semitic streak.
I didn't see anyone here claiming that our assessment of Eliot's poems should depend on our assessment of the man. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be simply curious about the man behind the poems, the way we are generally eager to read biographies about famous people from all walks of life and it is generally considered entirely proper to have such interests. To bowlderize and excuse the life story of someone you would like to admire with less ambivalence is beyond repugnant.
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