Tuesday, September 20, 2011

News at Eleven: Reading T.S. Eliot in high school,

we stumbled over his sneering references to Jews. And with the 1989 publication of "T.S. Eliot and Prejudice" (University of California Press) by Christopher Ricks, and 1995's "T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form" by Anthony Julius (Thames & Hudson), poetry lovers have a clear account of how Eliot, author of "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets," expressed his problem with the Jews.

Anti-Semitism is not visible in these major works of Eliot, but it does recur in earlier poems, as Joseph Black observes in a 2010 edition of "The Waste Land and Other Poems" from Broadview Press: "Few published works displayed the consistency of association that one finds in Eliot's early poetry between what is Jewish and what is squalid and distasteful."

from Forward: T.S. Eliot's On-Again, Off-Again Anti-Semitism

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