[Michael Cantor]

I agree with Roger. The thread had morphed into an interesting, intelligent, adult conversation. Nobody had been insulted, nobody was complaining. It's what happens in any discussion. It wasn't hijacked by somebody with a one-track cause, and people were actually talking to each other, rather than posturing and preening. And it's not as if the thread was being sidetracked - it's been up for months, and has almost 100 comments - and has now shifted focus. Why can't we simply go with the flow of a lively and thoughtful interchange?

[Maryann Corbett]

You can. But I'll state my personal preference for being able to come to this board to find conversations about poetry, like the ones that appear if we go back to Mastery's earliest days. GT is available for political talk; I find it disturbing that politics has to take over other boards as well.

[Mary Meriam]

I'd just like to say that I find this whole thread fascinating, and please look again at Maz's poem at post #31. Rigidly trying to divide poetry from life is not so easy to do, and perhaps not the best thing to do.

[Adam Elgar]

I agree entirely with Mary. And I'm not so sure, Bob, that nobody is allowing the bad things Eliot said to affect the way they read his poetry. I am one of those nobodies. A great fan of Eliot - no one has influenced me more - and greatly troubled by his racism, snobbery, monarchism, religiosity etc etc etc. The main reason why The Waste Land lasts better than Four Quartets and Ash Weds is that it lacks the didacticism of the later work. And it's what he was didactic about, that is the problem.

[Richard Epstein]

Didactic poetry always poses difficulties, for it requires us to consider the truth of the content, not just the truth made poetry. Nevertheless, the point here is that you need to evaluate the poem, not the man outside the poem. Eliot may have said he was royalist, classicist, and catholic; but it's not that didacticism which matters when one is reading Ash Wednesday: it's what he put there in the poem. The Cantos mostly fail not because Pound was an incoherent crackpot, but because the poems themselves are incoherent. There is a difference.

RHE

[Roger Slater]

"And I'm not so sure, Bob, that nobody is allowing the bad things Eliot said to affect the way they read his poetry."

Well, I may be splitting hairs, but what I meant is that nobody is claiming that Eliot's poems are any better or worse based on his personal life. However, it is still possible and reasonable for someone to enjoy Eliot's poems less based on bad associations with the man.

If a member of your family gets murdered in a fine restaurant, it doesn't actually affect the decor or the quality of the food or service after the body is removed and the blood cleaned up, but you still might not like eating there any longer. Does this make you a dilettante when it comes to fine dining because you are unable or unwilling to separate your personal associations of murder, on the one hand, from the impeccable service, wine list, and food preparation on the other hand?

No, it simply creates the unfortunate situation that your enjoyment of the restaurant has been ruined for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the restaurant.

Why shouldn't such a thing ever happen with poems?

Let's say someone broke into your home and brutally killed your family in front of your eyes, but then published a ravishingly beautiful poem in the New Yorker that was widely praised. Are you a dilettante if you find yourself unable to enjoy that poem?

Change that. What if the poet who published the ravishingly beautiful poem is not the fellow who slaughtered your family in front of your eyes, but a blogger who claimed that it never happened, but, if it did, your family had done worse things and you have no reason to complain? Are you a dilettante if you find yourself unable to enjoy that poem?

And if either of these fellows then is published frequently in an online zine, are you some sort of wacko if you decide you do not want to submit to that magazine because you do not wish to appear in the same magazine with either the murderer of your family or the poet who said your family had it coming?

I mean, it's all very pretty and noble and idealistic to keep insisting that Art is sacred and stands alone and trumps all other concerns, but did I mention that the poet who wrote the beautiful poem also beat you up so badly you were in a coma and when you woke up you were paralyzed and disfigured and breathing through a tube? Must you enjoy the poem as much as the rest of us or be dismissed as a dilettante who totally doesn't get art and poetry?

Sure, my examples are hyperbolic, but if you buy my premise (and perhaps you don't) then we're just quibbling over where to draw the line.

So yes, I think we all agree that nothing actually changes about the poem itself when we learn that the poet is someone who makes our skin crawl, but that doesn't mean we are required, under pain of arrogant aesthetic dismissal by New Critic snoots, not to allow our personal feelings about the poet influence our enjoyment of the poem.

[Richard Epstein]

I am, of course, a New Critic snoot. However imperfectly, I aspire to the condition of one who reads, evaluates, appreciates, or condemns a poem based upon the poem an sich. I might have declined to allow Mr Pound into my living room to meet my family. That is not why I find The Cantos unsatisfactory. Lord's Byron's incest neither contributes to nor detracts from my pleasure in Don Juan. Dr Johnson is one of my personal heroes. That doesn't salvage Irene.

Because I am a man, I like the gossip of literature as well as the substance. People are perpetually interesting. Eliot is an interesting man, Dickens even more so. I endeavor to separate my view of Fagin in Oliver Twist and Riah in Our Mutual Friend from my own ethnicity and the way Semitic prejudices "wants to make my flesh creep." I don't entirely succeed. But I mostly do.

RHE