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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFascinating: Barack Obama as a young man on T.S. Eliot
I am a lifelong fan of Eliot. His poetry is in my marrow. I think what Obama wrote was keenly insightful.
Recently, while writing an essay on T. S. Eliot for The New York Review, I read or reread the work of many earlier critics, and was impressed most by two of them. One was Frank Kermode, who was ninety when he wrote, in 2010, one of his greatest essays, Eliot and the Shudder, a breathtakingly wide-ranging and sharply-focused piece about Eliots unique response to the common experience of shuddering. The other was a twenty-two-year-old college senior named Barack Obama, who wrote about Eliot in a letter to his girlfriend, Alexandra McNear, when she had been assigned to write a paper on The Waste Land for a college course.
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I havent read The Waste Land for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statementsEliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time.
Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when hes less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.
Remember how I said theres a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalismEliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but its due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)
And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letterlife feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliots irreconcilable ambivalence; dont you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
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http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/04/obama-as-literary-critic/
Goblinmonger
(22,340 posts)"The Hollow Men" is probably my favorite poem.
I think Eliot's fatalism runs much deeper than just fertility and death, but great thoughts by our President. "Irreconcilable ambivalence" is a fantastic phrase.
cali
(114,904 posts)and several other poems of his- though not The Hollow Men.
Gregorian
(23,867 posts)Years ahead of his age.
This also puts his terms in office into a context which has me asking more questions about who controls the president.
Response to cali (Original post)
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BlueMTexpat
(15,370 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)Particularly insightful for someone in his early twenties. Not to mention well written and unpretentious.