[neel_k]

Of course Eliot was a great poet, but the impulse to hagiography is one that should be resisted, and despite a gesture at that fact this article mostly fails to do so.

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.

[blacksmith_tb]

It's a strange exercise in hagiography that points out his many flaws? Dirda seems content to mostly enthuse over Eliot's work, not his person. I am inclined to agree with him, from the Moderns onward we've had a much clearer picture of the people behind the art, and many of them were unpleasant, not just Eliot but Picasso, Charles Mingus, and on and on. But I wouldn't want to never enjoy their work again (and rejecting it won't help anyone they trampled along the way). Better to hold our contemporaries to higher standards, which might do some good.

[jeegsy]

> If you contrast his grandfather's life of civic virtue with his cosplay reactionary Anglophilia

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.

[slibhb]

I don't find that quote antisemitic. It's reasonable to be in favor of cultural or religious homogeneity. Many Jews thought the same way...hence zionism. Some of Eliot's poetry contains passages that are antisemitic; he's still a great poet.

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.

[pinewurst]

https://iamthelizardqueen.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/emanuel-l...

I really like, "contrast his grandfather's life of civic virtue with his cosplay reactionary Anglophilia"!