Well, let's say pornography inclined towards paedophilia, John. I know about the schoolgirl fantasy novels, but Andrew Motion's biography talks about (p. 266) how Larkin and Robert Conquest used to swap picture and prose pornography in which Headmasters did unspeakable things to schoolgirls (though PL and RC DID use to explicitly speak about what those things might be). There's more on this in Anthony Thwaite's Selected Letters.

I think Richard has a very good point about New-Critics-nurtured readers of poetry. As I see it a true poem has a life detached from that of the poet-vehicle who brought it into being. One way of seeing the poet-to-poem relationship is as that of artisan-to-artifact. The jeweller might think a thousand lurid fantasies, beat her spouse, say mean and hurtful things to neighbours, cheat on her tax return, write poison pen letters and advocate that leftists all be gaoled. Does that really mean she can't craft a beautiful piece of jewellery? Perhaps an even more beautiful piece than that made by the pious PC prude working at the next bench in the jewellery workshop?

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Janet Kenny]

Roger,
So much depends .... upon the way we met the work.

I met Eliot's poetry when my big brother was laughing at it and I was young and hungry for things like poetry which were not in my daily world. I stole my brother's book and absorbed the poetry, saw that my brother was wrong and am indelibly imprinted with that undeniably important experience.

I value that moment of discovery. I make no other claims for Eliot. He showed me new ways of being. That's all I need from him.

[Quincy Lehr]

Well put, Janet!

And Rogerbob, Paul, and Janice--I don't think I was making any claims that Eliot's views were not deeply hateful in many regards--I read After Strange Gods to see if it was as bad as all that--and it was. However, at this point it's hardly news, is it, any more than Larkin's pornography fetish is (which, unlike Motion's notoriety for chasing female students, was at least a private fetish). But what got me incensed was Rogerbob's claim that Eliot's anti-Semitism (and hatred more generally) was at the center of his being, and thus (implicitly) his poetry. One makes no excuses for such things, but it only brushes Eliot's poetry, which is, on balance, deeply humane.

And Paul, if I got a bit cross with you (and it was only a bit), it's because you at the same time seem to be making good points and then copping the insanity plea. "All poets are mad," etc. Sure, there's a degree of eccentricity and Behaving Badly inherent in the enterprise, but most of us, personal comfort zones aside, know the difference between honest and dishonest dealings. Including you, by the way.

I suspect that at this point, we're probably all talking past one another a bit, and we all agree that anti-Semitism and the like are not things to be lauded or excused.

Janice, you weren't in my line of fire at all, really.

Quincy

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Quincy Lehr

But what got me incensed was Rogerbob's claim that Eliot's anti-Semitism (and hatred more generally) was at the center of his being, and thus (implicitly) his poetry. One makes no excuses for such things, but it only brushes Eliot's poetry, which is, on balance, deeply humane.

Quincy

I certainly never intended to imply that his hatefulness as a human being should affect the way we read his poetry. In fact, I wrote:

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.

I am more concerned with allowing one's admiration for his poetry lead to excusing his hatefulness as a human being, which (rightly or wrongly) I understood some people here to be doing as they pointed out that he later tried to suppress his own hateful utterances or that some of his best friends were gay or Jewish and he was always nice to them.

I don't attack Eliot the person in order to demonstrate anything about his poetry. By the same token, I wouldn't use his poetry to defend Eliot the person.

John, in my neck of the woods, as I understand it, sexual relations with those under the age of consent or minors is considered as paedophilia by the law. The sources didn't specify whether or not the particular characteristic you mentioned was present. But it was all done via pictures and fiction: there is no suggestion that L actually pursued the objects of that particular fantasy in real life, though he was mightily interested in the subject. There's plenty in Motion's biography and Thwaite's selected letters to justify a total boycott of Larkin's work if you are of the school of thought that says that racists, homophobes, misogynists and other degenerates should have their poetic artifacts denied publication.

Quincy, when I read about Eliot and Larkin being like that it depresses me in terms of lamenting the fallibility of humanity, but it in no way diminishes my response to the poems that these fallible humans produced. Like you probably do I have an ambivalent attitude on those grounds towards poems like Eliot's 'Gerontion', but not towards the main body of his work; and I like Larkin's writing very much indeed -- apart from such references as "black scum" and "the scum of Europe".

My "all poets are mad" comment was supposed to be along the lines of "there's nowt so queer as folk -- all the world's queer save thee and me, and even thee's a little queer!" -- ie we're all on a spectrum of beastliness, we can all be banged up good to rights if someone takes a mind to sift through our doings and sayings and paint us as this or that. I think poets are often particularly prone to extreme or bizarre psychological states all along the spectrum, and to shooting off their mouths, and so make good subjects for vilification.

Furthermore, every individual of us has her own particular set of buttons that make the behaviours of one person problematic and those of another not. I guess it is selective outrage that bemuses me: why individuals pick one set of bad behaviours in one particular evil-doer to be unforgivable, beyond the pale, and representative of absolute evil incarnate, and yet a very similar (perhaps to other observers even worse) set of behaviours in another evil-doer (or even in themselves) to be regrettable perhaps but not defining. In my opinion it finally gets down to personal dislike or animosity, not high principle. And I'd like to see a little room for the possibility of redemption in there as well, and the possibility of moving on to more interesting matters.

[Mark Allinson]

Ham. Gods bodykins man, better. Vse euerie man
after his desart, and who should scape whipping ...

The selection or rejection of art according to the extra-artistic thoughts or behaviour of the artist is a sign of dilettantism.

Any reader who would reject, say, Eliot's Four Quartets because of some non-PC statement he made in a lecture is a poseur - pure and simple: a political beast posing as an art-lover.

It seems equivalent to me as rejecting a pearl on the basis that it formed in slimy guts of an oyster. Such a person is incapable of actually seeing a pearl.

Who cares WHERE or HOW great art comes into being - the fact of it is enough for me.

[Richard Epstein]

A classic statement of the issue is in Cleanth Brooks's "Criticism and Literary History: Marvell's Horation Ode," available on line at

http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/brooks1.htm

His argument is summed up in this paragraph, I think:

But I propose to deal here with a more modest example than Milton’s epic. I propose to illustrate from Marvell’s “Horatian Ode.” If we follow the orthodox procedure, the obvious way to understand the “Ode” is to ascertain by historical evidence—by letters and documents of all kinds—what Marvell really thought of Cromwell, or, since Marvell apparently thought different things of Cromwell at different times, to ascertain the date of the “Ode,” and then neatly fit it into the particular stage of Marvell’s developing opinion of Cromwell. But this yields at best only an approximation of the poem; and there lurks in it some positive perils. For to ascertain what Marvell the man thought of Cromwell, and even to ascertain what Marvell as poet consciously intended to say in his poem, will not prove that the poem actually says this, or all this, or merely this. This last remark, in my opinion, does not imply too metaphysical a notion of the structure of a poem. There is surely a sense in which anyone must agree that a poem has a life of its own, and a sense in which it provides in itself the only criterion by which what it says can be judged. It is a commonplace that the poet sometimes writes better than he knows, and alas, on occasion, writes worse than he knows. The history of English literature will furnish plenty of examples of both cases.

A poem "provides in itself the only criterion by which what it says can be judged." It can be elucidated by external materials. If a poet refers to "the swan of Mantua," it seems fair to go outside the poem to find out he's alluding to Virgil. As Brooks says, "To put the matter into its simplest terms: the critic obviously must know what the words of the poem mean, something which immediately puts him in debt to the linguist; and since many of the words in this poem are proper norms, in debt to the historian as well." But these are tools to find out what the poem says, not who the poet was. When Brooks concludes, "Was this, then, the attitude of Andrew Marvell, born 1621, sometime student of Cambridge, returned traveller and prospective tutor, toward Oliver Cromwell in the summer of 1650? The honest answer must be: I do not know. I have tried to read the poem, the 'Horatian Ode,' not Andrew Marvell’s mind. That seems sensible to me in view of the fact that we have the poem, whereas the attitude held by Marvell at any particular time must be a matter of inference, even though I grant that the poem may be put in as part of the evidence from which we draw inferences[,]" I can only agree, even though I must sometimes remind myself that knowing what I know about Pound's crackpot fascism and Eliot's semi-genteel anti-Semitism makes no specific poem either better or worse.

RHE-

[John Whitworth]

Paul, you are quite right about the jewels. Rochester is perhaps the nastiest poet I can think of, I mean as a human being. Good poems though. We all know Ben Jonson was a murderer. Wasn't Villon one as well? Great poems though in both cases.

I think the schoolgirls were over age. I think that's the point. I mean Larkin et al had a considerable thing about breasts. Children as a rule... well you catch my drift.