Hi All,
Hmn, very interesting. I didn't know that this thread had gotten into politics and poetry. Some of this is rehashing our conversation in another thread:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...?t=9219&page=2
However, just to be a bit of a Devil's advocate, I will say that unlike others in the thread who have bent over backwards to say that Eliot's antisemitism hasn't damaged their enjoyment of his poetry, I find that I find myself flinching in disgust quite often when reading his poetry, precisely because he made antisemitism a part of so many of his poems:
"Sweeney Among the Nightingales," "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," "Dirge," "A Cooking Egg," "Gerontion," and
The Waste Land. It's even worse if you look at ms. facsimile
The Waste Land and see how it read before Pound edited out some of the antisemitic elements.
It is true that Eliot is a poet whom I continue to learn from, many of whose poems I think are quite brilliant, and a poet whom I continue to teach with relish in my classes. However, I think it is a mistake to claim that his racism was a passing fancy present only in a book he later disavowed. He took it seriously enough to weave it into quite a few of his poems, and since he wrote so very few poems in his lifetime the racism pollutes a significant percentage of his ouvre.
I have sympathy for his sad self and mental breakdowns, and am attracted to the honesty of his lifelong spiritual search, but in truth I read Eliot more for the brilliance of his language, for his extraordinary technique, for the compression and emotional intensity of his images, than for what he's
saying. Thus, I can reread him often, usually with pleasure, and most of the time I can spit and largely ignore the foul taste he leaves in the mouth in these moments when his bad angels take over.
How is this reaction not "PC" in the sense in which it is used in this thread? Well, 1) it is based upon a careful lifelong reading and rereading of his poems and essays, not on a knee-jerk reaction, 2) it really is a personal reaction, not one that I ask others to have. Eliot's antisemitism matters to
me because I'm am partly Jewish, though not religiously so, and had relatives die in the death camps. There is a difference between unthinking prejudice and genocide, clearly, and the two should not be equated. However, I am also aware that the one lays the groundwork for the other, whether it be Hutus and Tutsis, Turks and Armenians, or Serbs and Muslims from Kosovo.
I'll keep reading and enjoying the guy, but in the slightly careful way you have when talking in a bar with a fellow who seems like he just might have a gun in his pocket.
All Best,
Tony
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