T.S. Eliot’s prejudices—in particular, his anti-Semitism—were grim. On the centenary of “The Waste Land”, the challenge is to reconcile his masterpiece with his monstrous views
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe thicket of references is one reason readers have often struggled with the long poem since it was first published 100 years ago, in October 1922. Chaucer, the Bible, Dante, Wagner, Buddhist and Hindu texts, Shakespeare and St Augustine, Ovid and Arthurian folklore—T.S. Eliot put them all in.
But that is part of the point. Elsewhere Eliot warned readers of verse not to seek “a kind of ‘meaning’ which is not there and is not meant to be there”. He talked of a “logic of the imagination” that joins up disparate images, and an “auditory imagination” that operates “far below the conscious levels of thought”.
In the past, the poet’s fans, and Eliot himself, tried to explain away the slurs that scar his writing. “The rats are underneath the piles”, runs one poem. “The jew [sic] is underneath the lot.” He wasprejudice, he was a man of his time, don’t be a philistine; and so on. Letters newly cited by Robert Crawford in “Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’” put an end to the casuistry. “Why is there something diabolic about so many Jews?” Eliot asked in 1934.
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