My Conflict with T. S. Eliot

In my final year of university,  sat at my desk, surrounded by empty energy drink cans, head collapsed upon my annotated copy of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, I would often drift away and contemplate what it would be like to meet the man. Choosing to write my dissertation on Eliot's poetry was a rather straight forward decision for me. His poems were complex, but they were compelling. I very much thrived on the challenge of deciphering his poems, but he also spoke of a disillusionment with modernity that, despite coming from a different cultural viewpoint, still spoke to me. Eliot to me is a genius; an artist. He is a literary behemoth who not only contributed enormously to poetry, but to the field of literary studies as a whole. Eliot, as a poet, I adore, but Eliot, the man, is a different proposition. Here I am an atheist, socialist and progressive thinker in admiration at the work of a man who was deeply religious, conservative and a bigot. It is a difficult conflict to resolve when my instinct is I should dislike the work of this horrible man, but I just don't.

With Eliot this is not a simple case of detaching the man from the art, because it is within his art that we become aware of his bigoted attitudes. I spent the whole of my 10,000 word dissertation, A Marxist Literary Study of T. S. Eliot, picking apart the ideology of his poetry, and its very clearly a conservative, traditionalist ideology. He often reveals glimpses of contempt for the working class, misogyny, antisemitism, and scholars have also found racism in his earlier unpublished works. Despite this, his better works are beautifully constructed masterpieces. His magnum opus,  The Wasteland, is the most important poem of the 20th century. It is an expertly constructed poem of disjointed scenes, incorporating tons of allusions and quotations from scriptures and high brow works, down to popular culture and music hall. He ingeniously keeps the reader at an arms length away from full meaning at all times, and in doing so, perfectly demonstrates the desolation that he sees in modernity. The poem is elitist and oozes snobbery, but is an example of expertly executed poetic technique.


As someone from a fairly uncultured and working class background, I am certain Eliot never intended me to read the poem let alone find meaning in it, and yet, I cant help but find admiration in its construction. How do I resolve these deeply conflicting reactions to Eliot and his work? Well I think its best that I don't. In occupying this middle ground between contempt and admiration, I am able to appreciate his works while holding an air of skepticism that is of great value in critiquing poetry. There is no need for me to denounce a piece of art because of the views of the artist, nor do I really need to denounce art because I fundamentally disagree with its message. I am perfectly content in the middle ground highlighting and criticising the ideology while respecting an artist at work. So what would I have done if I had got to meet Mr Eliot? I like to think I would have rose to the challenge and confront his views and his ideology in an intellectual clashing of minds, but perhaps I would have stood in awe and meekly asked him to sign my copy of The Waste Land.