"There's no evidence, though, that Eliot ever changed his views about the Jews."
Well, even assuming that those views were there in the first place, he wasn't exactly a "rabid" anit-semite in the first place. Fairly difficult to imagine Eliot "rabid" about anything. But much of the evidence against him comes from his younger days which he generally either withdrew (ASG), emended (the famous lowercase "jew" in Gerontion) or apologised for. He took a lot of criticism for his early work, which he accepted. (There's a famous occasion towards the end of Eliot's life, where at a poetry reading where he's the guest of honour, a young American poet stands up to read a furious denouncement of Eliot's early poetry for it's anti-semitism. Uproar ensues at the lack of respect shown to TSE with the organisers trying to eject the poet; TSE prevents them, queitly demuring "it's a very good poem")
He rowed back on his views on "free-thinking Jews", later seeing Judaism as the best model for a modern religion. He was also a strong backer of for the creation of Israel, hardly the action of an anti-semite.
[The Julius book which much of this stems from is interesting and well-researched but overall a long way from conclusive and, in some places pretty daft, such as a fairly awful misreading of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar". Incidentally, I think exactly the same of Christopher Ricks's rebuttal, "T. S. Eliot and Prejudice", and in general I consider Ricks one of the best critics evAH]
[Personally, I quite like Empson's theory. Eliot was (early on at least) an Imagist; Imagists, to put it crudely, symbolically substituted one thing for another, a rose = the sun, for example. Eliot had a very, very bad relationship with his father (who disinherited him after his marriage), a rich businessman who belonged to a Christian sect that denied the divinity of Jesus. Bearing in mind (c.f. Bloom) that much early poetry is Oedipal combat, both literally and literarily, if you're writing about your father, a businessman who believed in God but not Jesus, what other symbol are you going to choose?] |
