[Roger Slater]

I spent a few minutes going through it and didn't even come across that particular anti-semitic quote, but for me the issue goes far beyond anti-semitism. What a disgusting twit he was! Truly hateful to the core, it seems to me. Almost everything he has to say is repulsive and smug and harshly judgmental and dismissive of a large swath of humankind. I would think anti-semitism would be but an incidental subset of a more far-reaching hatred.

Doubtless so, Roger: though he was probably within the parameters of Normal for his era. But on the charge specifically of anti-semitism, I can't see (so far) anything more than that one reference, vile though it is; the document is hardly seething with explicit anti-semitism.

[Roger Slater]

Well, the one line you did find is perhaps sufficient to prove the case. Once he said what he said, I'm not sure any corroboration is needed. I don't think anti-semitism is excused merely for not seething.

I notice he also wrote "a right tradition for us must be also a Christian tradition," which, in the context of an essay that elsewhere directly attacks Jews, might be read as especially offensive to Jews even though Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Shintos, among others, are embraced by the remark.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Another of my old gods crumble to dust. Ain't got many left now.

We are in accord on that Roger. The context I made my original remark from was Richard's statement that "The anti-Semitism is worst--because more than just tepid modishness--in After Strange Gods, the lecture series he later tried to keep out of print", and this from VQR:

"However, the lectures, gathered in Spring 1934 as the slim volume After Strange Gods, have gained most of their notorious reputation, because they contain some of the strongest evidence of Eliot’s intolerance for non-Christian religions and his blatant anti-Semitism. At one point, he declared that, “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

-- http://www.vqronline.org/vault/2004/...essed-lecture/

The wording and tenor of these two observations led me to expect that the document contained a great number of anti-semitic remarks when in fact it contains (as far as I've found so far) just one -- which one certainly does as you say demonstrate anti-semitism. Very obviously I'm NOT saying that "anti-semitism is excused merely for not seething".

[Richard Epstein]

"Another of my old gods crumble to dust."

The godhead is in the poetry. Poets don't make very good idols. (Neither do plumbers, archbishops, phys ed teachers, or professional bowlers.)

By the way, this is an interesting clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot1VZD6b14U

RHE

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thank you, Richard. for posting the link to this video.

My remark about "fallen gods" was spontaneous and had a wider range. I've just been reading a history of the Vietnam era containing documentation on President Kennedy. I wasn't living in the U.S. during that time.

Just before I read this thread, I had been reflecting on the kids on our country road who died in that war who would have lived if JFK had pulled out at a point when he had an excellent oppotunity to do so (I'm skipping specifics) but he wanted to wait until he was reelected. Then he was killed and we know the rest.

The other eight teammates of my baseball team either died there or were changed for life.

But yes, when I was young I was a huge admirer of Eliot's poetry and that impression has remained with me strongly all these years.

[Quincy Lehr]

Oh for Christ's sake, T. S. Eliot is perhaps the best poet this benighted country ever produced, and to dismiss him, as some on this thread seem to do, is beyond repugnant. Yes, I've read After Strange Gods--I'm not only aware of it, but I've actually read that paean to damn near everything I detest, including his praise of the South at the expense of the North. BUT... perhaps part of the reason Eliot suppressed a book that is every biut as vile as its reputation makes it out to be is that, perhaps he... regretted it, maybe? Coupled with that, his break with the French Right at the time of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was essentially on an anti-imperialist basis. In addition to which, even at the time that Eliot was writing After Strange Gods, he was actively promoting the work of one Stephen Spender, who in his book on Eliot, states that he never noticed a hint of bigotry from Eliot, despite Spender being a part-Jewish bisexual Communist. I say this not to justify Eliot's flaws, but merely to say that the story with him is far, far more complex.

I say this not to justify Eliot's flaws, but merely to say that the story with him is far, far more complex.

As it doubtless is with most poets, which is why I think it's very dangerous to taint the Muse with politics. Keep 'em separate. Most poets are barking mad in one way or t'other anyway, present company excepted of course.

On the other hand, I also think it's dangerous to have idols. -- After Strange Gods indeed: but I reckon Robert Graves firmly nailed the Yeats-Eliot-Pound-Auden-Thomas idolatry cults in These be Your Gods, O Israel.

[Quincy Lehr]

Paul--

Having just defended Eliot from simplistic dismissal on a political basis, I also find the notion of an absolute separation of poetry from what it states about the world equally suspect. Poems are made out of words, which have meanings and implications, and in an art form like poetry, frequently have meshes of meanings. While I would never insist that a poem that expresses ideas similar to mine is good (I've come across plenty of crap ones that do that) or one that expresses ideas different from mine is bad (too many of those are good), I do a poem a disservice if I don't take it seriously. While I find Eliot's anti-Semitism in After Strange Gods repugnant, I nevertheless, as a reader whose work is shot through with influences from the guy, have to deal with it. What role do Eliot's religious and political views play in his work? What is it about it that resonates with me? It sure as %#^& ain't extended tirades against the "free-thinking jew." But the core of his questions are not based in dodgy racial theories, but rather in a desire for some sort of meaning in life, an order and a sublimity. Yes, his answers led him to many positions that I do not share (monarchism, Anglo-Catholicism as well), but I cannot help but feel a great deal of sympathy for him in a way that I cannot, say, for a poet primarily motivated by irrational hatred of other races and an inflated self-perception, or a critic or editor who, say, sets up Potemkin Village webzines, lambastes books he clearly hasn't read or pseudonymously attacks those toward whom he bears grudges on a personalist and dishonest basis, and promotes poets based on what they say, with a few better writers thrown in for window dressing. Those sorts of things do sully the art.

Quincy