During an online discussion on linkedin, someone castigated me for praising Eliot’s talents as a poet and ignoring his racist views. Here’s what I wrote in response:

You’re right to bring up what I will call "Eliot’s possible bigotry." I don’t always mention them, but I’m always aware of Eliot’s failings. Eliot was an extreme anti-Semite, according to Anthony Julius and others, though critic Denis Donoghue disputes the charge or tries to lessen it. If I refused to read a writer from the past (or present) for being racist, sexist, jingoistic (e.g., Kipling) or for being in some other way majorly flawed, there would be very few writers left to read. As a person of color, I have, my entire life, been reading writers whose craft I respect but whose political, social and personal views nauseate me. I’m not excusing these writers for their racism, sexism, etc. Not at all. What I advocate is seeing these writers’ merits as creators of literature and their flaws as individuals. Certainly, the two sides (creator and individual) can’t be completely separated. Maybe they can’t be separated at all. And I, for one, don’t try to. This is what Cornel West was getting at when he used the phrase “ambiguous legacies.” Writers, philosophers, intellectuals, etc., from the past have good things to offer present and future generations. But many of them also have much in them that’s regrettable, even despicable. Rather than seeing just one side of such writers, etc., I strive to see both sides. The good and the bad. Sometimes I might discuss one and not the other, but I assure you the other is in my mind. Sometimes I don’t bring up the other, but if I don’t, it’s because it’s a given. It’s an understood, if unspoken, fact. But it’s a given, an understood, unspoken fact for me, but not for every reader. So you’re on to something. I should bring up Eliot’s flaws while praising his merits lest others get the mistaken idea that I’m not aware of his plentiful flaws. I assure you: I don’t downplay his anti-Semitism (if indeed he was an anti-Semite) just because I admire his line breaks, musicality and striking imagery. I will never let racist/sexist/homophobic writers off the hook for their hateful beliefs and actions. To be completely honest, what I think of such writers is similar to what I think of America. This country has come a long way since the time of slavery, lynchings and marginalized status for people of color and women, and yet America is still full of racism, sexism, homophobia and other hateful thinking, behavior and policies. A major aspect of my existence has to do with seeing the good and bad in America, the good and bad in American writers, and really the good and bad in the world and its writers. And for that matter, the good and bad in me.

_This Easter I posted, on an alumni discussion group for writers, T.S. Eliot’s lines about the events that preceded and followed the Crucifixion.* An alum wrote me back and claimed that Eliot’s body of work has fallen out of fashion.

The alum was right, of course. Eliot’s impersonal style doesn't resonate with readers and poets now the way it once did. Though I'm a huge fan, that aspect of his work doesn't appeal to me much either. When I was learning the craft of poetry, Eliot was, at one point, a major influence (he still is). Even then, I cherry-picked his "bag of tricks," scrutinizing his line breaks, use of meter and musicality and leaving behind his impersonality.

I think Eliot would have approved of the way in which I stole from him. As he put it, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way."

To return to Eliot's loss of vogue, he is not alone. What happened to him has happened to many a poet and writer. Those talented and lucky enough to be canonized still suffer the vicissitudes of literary taste. Usually, anyway. But I'm sure interest in Eliot will resurge one of these days. Even if his impersonal style never catches on again, readers and poets will again, in droves, find something in his work worth contemplating.

His talent and achievements are too large for it to be otherwise.


*Below are the lines in which Eliot describes the events that preceded and followed the Crucifixion. This passage is from The Waste Land:

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience