T.S. Eliot was flawed, but a new book reminds of his greatness on the page
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
And maybe ask whether they look so closely at the morals of the script writers for their favorite movies & TV shows.
The man’s work is amazing.
He's bad man because he likes Rudyard Kipling? Am I bad man?
TS Eliot spent a good amount of time writing negatively about Jews as diseased or as beasts, particularly when you take into account that TS Eliot wrote very little to begin with.
Anti-semitism wasn’t an uncommon feeling during his time, but even then his work was often deemed anti-Jewish by Jewish critics
I used to think this way too, but there are popular people in my life whom I revile despite the valuable deeds they are known for, because that person happens to specifically offend my own personal traumas. So who am I to say that it is wrong for people to reject other people’s work just because they are flawed? What do I know if their flaws affect people in a deeply personal level? Do I know what it is like to be a victim of such circumstances?
One should also take with a critical mind such narratives that elevate an imperfect talented person into a hero. It’s not necessary for one to cause hurt upon others in order to produce something good.
There isn't a single one of us who couldn't be judged harshly in the context of a future values system decades from now, but the most judgmental among us assume that we are the first generation to be enlightened enough to harshly judge all who came before. It's a narcissistic, juvenile attitude, once laughed at as a teenage right-of-passage practiced by naive, Che Guevara worshipping cloaked in fashionable self-righteousness. Now it's morphed into a quasi-religion, complete with performative acts of piety designed to boost in-group status amongst the adherents.
I think you’re running off the assumption that there’s no objective basis for morality and the sense for it simply changes over time, but don’t you think that the changes over time reflect progress in ethical wisdom in the same way that science progresses in terms of knowledge over time? For example, is believing in the equal rights of women, African-American, and LGBT people narcissistic (we used to think of them as less, many still do) or is it just the right thing to do and the old value system was objectively wrong to oppress them? The stupid things you did as a child—were they stupid only because you’re older now, or were they categorically stupid? Was burning witches actually OK? How about the way that justice was administered in terms of the Old Testament or the Quran, was that also OK? I struggle to see where you can insert the narcissistic aspect here.
> Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.
- Solzhenitsyn
And anyway the narrative of the great man is bunk meant to sell something or convince you of something or elect somebody.
Here's what Eliot had to say about Judaism in After Strange Gods:
> 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.
After Strange Gods is a compilation of lectures given at the University of Virginia in 1933. This was the Jim Crow-era Deep South -- and Eliot regarded the outcome of the US Civil War as a disaster.
His grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, was a Unitarian minister and abolitionist. One of T.S. Eliot's literary preoccupuations was the degeneration of society. If you contrast his grandfather's life of civic virtue with his cosplay reactionary Anglophilia, you get a pretty good illustration of the principle that every complaint of the conservative is fundamentally just projection.
I really like, "contrast his grandfather's life of civic virtue with his cosplay reactionary Anglophilia"!
The article is not offering hagiography. It isn't defending Eliot's ideas or personality, it's merely reaffirming him as a great poet and writer anyway.
Finally, dismissing conservatism as "fundamentally just projection" is a vice of modern liberals. You're missing something if you don't understand the points being made by great conservative intellectuals and artists.
Its interesting that we are discussing a famous poet from a bygone era when we juxtapose those works with what passes as wit in our modern era. Affinity for your own people over others has been the human condition for much of its existence. Even though we "know better", the conflicts we see in history and even today help me to at least understand why heterogeneity would not have seemed like the obvious or intuitive solution to our forebears.