A Debate Over T.S. Eliot

To most poets of the post-World War II generation, T.S. Eliot '08 came as close as a person can to divine status.

But in recent years his reputation has been questioned, as a new group of poets and literary critics have tried to come to terms with Eliot's contradictory legacy. The most recent salvo against the Eliot mystique was launched by Cynthia Ozick in her highly critical article, "T.S. Eliot at 101," which ran in the November 20, 1989 issue of The New Yorker.

"When, four decades ago...T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he seemed pure zenith, a colossus...fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon," Ozick writes.

However, in the next page of her article, she sums up her current views on the author of The Waste Land, calling Eliot "an autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman."

Ozick's article has provoked enormous debate among poets and scholars. "I think it's going to be one of those big articles that people talk about in the little corner of the world occupied by English professors and poets," says Judith Baumel '77.

Donald Hall '51, whose book Remembering Poets was partly devoted to Eliot, called Ozick's article remarkable, not for any kind of revolutionary criticism but for its "gross, lengthy, un-New Yorkerish attack." By un-New Yorkerish, Hall says he means that the piece conflicts with the weekly magazine's policy of not doing any articles about authors except in book reviews.

Ozick, who begins her article by mentioning last year's "mostly spiritless" centennial celebration of Eliot's birth, says that the poet's reputation has sagged so much that high school and college students "barely" read his work, and cites "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as the only Eliot poem that is studied today.

Like many of Eliot's critics, Ozick says she is repelled by the poet's alleged anti-Semitism and his cruelty towards his wife. She takes particular offense at Eliot's book called The Idea of a Christian Society, in which he says that cultural unity can be achieved through a "Community of Christians."

She is also offended by the poet's insensitive wartime writings and the fact that Eliot filed for divorce from his emotionally crippled wife while in the United States, an ocean away from the woman to whom he had been married for 17 years.

Professor Eloise Knapp Hay of the University of California at Santa Barbara, whose book T.S. Eliot's Negative Way was published in 1982, lambasts Ozick's article in much the same fashion as Hall, calling the author's arguments "stupid," "ridiculous" and "outrageously wrong."

Hay admits that Eliot believed in the idea of cultural uniformity and that he felt "some Jews" fought counter to this ideal. But she also defends the expatriate poet as "anti a great many things" and for whom, she says, Jews were not particularly important as an object of scorn.

As for the poet's alleged cruelty toward his wife, Hall, the poetry editor of Harvard Magazine, prefers to use the word "cowardly" when referring to Eliot's method of ending their marriage.

"She was impossible," Hall says, defending Eliot. "She was also literary and sensitive and they drove each other absolutely nuts."

In addition to these critical comments, Ozick's article also has received some positive reviews. Baumel agrees with Ozick's charges that Eliot was anti-Semitic, and Wayne Koestenbaum '80 calls the article a sad but "beautiful" piece by someone who understands the reasons for Eliot's fall, but at the same time longs to be back in the era when the poet was king.

"It's kind of like Kennedy falling," Koestenbaum says. "For instance, could Carter ever really fall? Only Eliot could fall."