[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

[Roger Slater]

I guess I wonder why it's so important to experience poetry without letting any of one's feelings about the poet seep in. I mean, it's generally stated as almost a moral principle, and I can almost answer the question myself. I know what it is generally said on the subject. But is it wrong to find a poem by your own child particularly charming and sweet? It would be wrong to let that influence your evaluation of the poem in your doctoral thesis, but as part of the human activity of reading poems and experiencing art and pleasure, would you as a parent deny yourself the pleasure of excessively enjoying your child's mediocre offering? And by the same token, outside the context of your doctoral thesis or a review you are writing for the New York Review of Books, why is it wrong to dislike a certain poet's work because you dislike the poet?

Poetry is not a chemical compound that must be examined under a microscope in a controlled environment -- or at least it's not just that. It's also something that can be integrated into our lives. If your father was fond of reciting a certain poem, and you have fond memories of those recitations, then that poem, for you, can be experienced with additional pleasure. If your father beat you while reciting the poem, that poem, for you, regardless of its merits, may not be one that gives you pleasure.

Would you really go back to the restaurant where your loved one was murdered? Wouldn't it put a crimp on the dining experience, even if the food was prepared as flawlessly as ever?

[R. S. Gwynn]

The New Critics, as much as I respect their attention to close reading, did somehow downplay the idea that classical rhetoric (and how closely are rhetoric and poetry related?) was based on a speaker's use of the three appeals: ethos, the appeal to character and reputation; pathos, the appeal to the emotions; and logos, the appeal to reason. The New Critics came up with "fallacies" to more or less dismiss the first two of these: the "biographical" and "intentional" fallacies for the former and the "affective" fallacy for the latter. So they relied almost solely on a poem's logos in their analyses.

It's interesting that Eliot, whose high water mark came during the height of the New Criticism, was rarely discussed in terms of the biographical content of his work or in terms of the emotions contained in it. Not until fairly recently, that is. The flap over John Peters's notorious explication of "The Waste Land" (there's a book about it, T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land) seems to have scared critics off for a long time. But the biographies are now out and will probably multiply in the future.

Frankly, I don't think Eliot was so bad. He didn't marry wisely, and he may have treated Vivienne badly at the end but stayed with her for many years; she was not easy to live with, as many noted. He said a few silly anti-semitic things, most of them in a book he recanted; he certainly recoiled at Pound's embrace of fascism. He was not a member of Mosely's legion, but Vivienne probably did tend that way. He probably did treat Emily Hale rather shabbily, but who really knows what went on there? He was a Tory, high-church, and believed in the monarchy. So were a lot of the English of his day. So what? From the personal memoirs of those who knew him (Hall, Levy, others) he seems to have been a gentleman, perhaps a bit self-manufactured (as are lots of poets), maybe a bit of a snob, but also one who enjoyed a good joke, liked to smoke and drink, and was generally kind to those he met. As a poet and critic of the last century, he had, for a time, unprecedented power, and he seems to have used it wisely and with an appropriate amount of irony.

As for Larkin, he was a guy, as I tell my students, with all of the attendant faults of most guys. When I compare his behavior to that of most of the poets I have known he comes out looking pretty good.

I often wonder why novelists don't come under the same kind of biographical scrutiny as poets. It's as if we expect poets to be saintly somehow but fully expect novelists to be rounders. I'm just reading a memoir of Raymond Carver written by his first wife. A great writer, I think, but one who put his loved ones and himself through all kinds of hell.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Re. what John Whitworth said, both Olivier and Anthony Hopkins and hundreds of other actors of various races have played Othello. It's like when there was an Actors Equity flap years ago over Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon. Interestingly, Miss Saigon lost out in the Tonys to The Will Rogers Follies, which had an anachronistic multi-racial chorus line.

Frankly, I don't see why actors can't cross racial barriers. One of my Broadway favorites is the great Brian Stokes Mitchell, who excelled in both Ragtime and Kiss Me, Kate and was terrific in the concert version of South Pacific. The last Lucia I saw also had a multi-ethnic cast; it was horrible, but the problem was the bad acting and singing, not the racial profiling.

I think that we may be over the worst of this pc nonsense, which seems to have crested in the mid-90s. At least, one can only hope.

I have friends and relatives who are in deaf education. A strangely similar kind of thing surfaces in that area: Can the president of a university (Gallaudet) that exists for deaf students be a person who hears? Should deaf persons who try to lip-read be ostracized by those who use ASL?

[R. S. Gwynn]

Johh, it's "Newawlins," almost "Nawlins," to those who live there. Eric Burdon was wrong.

[John Whitworth]

Adam Elgar, you are greatly troubled by Eliot's racism? OK. Snobbery?OK. Religiosity? You mean religion I suppose, but OK. Monarchism? You are greatly troubled by his monarchism? Do you mean he liked Britain having a King? Or did he think America should have a king? Can you explain why his monarchism greatly troubles you? Auden said he thought the best system of government would be monarchy by lot. OK, that's just Auden being Audenish. Louis MacNeice was a terrible lefty, next door to a communist really, like many people a the BBC. But it doesn't bother me at all.

Sorry. This sounds aggressive. Discount that. But I really do want to know.

Re PC. Sorry to bang on but a man in the UK has just been arrested for the serial rape of a lot of old women. He is 52, comes from the West Indies, and though we have not been allowed to seee a photograph, we know he is ethnically 86% black, 8% chinese |(I think) and 6% white. But the original police impression of him showed a white man in a black woolly hat, though they KNEW he came from the West Indies. Not a very useful impression, you would think, and why did they publish one like that? Well, according to me, the police in the UK are very PC. They recently arrested a student for the 'hate crime' of calling a police horse 'gay'. 'Gay' is slang among the young and is mildly derogatory meaning something like 'useless'. Sorry, but there it is. Young people use it (and perhaps they shouldn't) who would not think of bad-mouthing a gay person. Although it is emphatically not true that no young person in the UK is anti-gay, most of them are not.

Sam - newawlins. Got that. Where to I live? I live in Cambry.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

I guess we should not read any poetry until we know the poet's mindset.

Should we have a biographical forum set up here so that we are made aware of the political orientation and biases of the members in case we inadvertently enjoy reading work from someone whose values we abhor?