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.

Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Again, The Fields” responds to Winslow Homer’s post-Civil War painting The Veteran in a New Field.

AGAIN, THE FIELDS
AFTER WINSLOW HOMER

the dead they lay long the lines like sheaves of Wheat I could have walked on the boddes all most from one end too the other

No more muskets, the bone-drag
weariness of marching, the trampled
grass, soaked earth red as the wine

of sacrament. Now, the veteran
turns toward a new field, bright
as domes of the republic. Here,

he has shrugged off the past—his jacket
and canteen flung down in the corner.
At the center of the painting, he anchors

the trinity, joining earth and sky.
The wheat falls beneath his scythe--
a language of bounty—the swaths

like scripture on the field’s open page.
Boundless, the wheat stretches beyond
the frame, as if toward a distant field--

the white canvas where sky and cotton
meet, where another veteran toils,
his hands the color of dark soil.

Read Trethewey's poem "South."