Dear Ken,

At the risk of (again) being called a fashion monger, I'll cite the  
literary approach concerned with the changes in meaning a work  
undergoes as it moves through history.

Eliot's anti-Semitism was relatively acceptable in his social set at a  
certain time. Virginia Woolf made anti-Semitic remarks although  
Leonard Woolf was Jewish, for example. While humanity has not  
necessarily improved, public anti-Semitism is now the mark of neo- 
Nazis and other lunatics.

Words themselves change their meanings over time. If I remember  
correctly, Coleridge wrote that wind arrived in short pants, at a time  
when the word for trousers was pantaloons, not pants.

To insist that a text be read as if by a reader contemporaneous with  
its historical period yields interpretations valid for its time, but  
treats it as an artifact in a literature museum.

My guess is that Eliot would not expose his inhumane sentiments toward  
women, Jews and others he considered subhuman in today's more  
inclusive public climate.  He would have known, as you apparently do  
not, that such attitudes are now met with public disapproval by a  
large segment of the audience.

Diana

Sent from my iPod

On Mar 1, 2010, at 9:03 PM, Ken Armstrong <[log in to unmask]>  
wrote:

> George Carless wrote:
>> Ken Armstrong ([log in to unmask]) wrote the following on  
>> Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 09:30:08AM -0500:
>>
>>> DIana Manister wrote:
>>>
>>>> Who says the Jew is Jesus? He's depicted as negatively as Fresca  
>>>> and von Kulp. Who are they? Mary Magdelene and The Blessed Mother?
>>> You have to place yourself in the poem. Where is Gerontion while  
>>> being read to by a boy? What is being read? Where does one find  
>>> "the jew" (not "a jew") squatting on a window sill? One who owns  
>>> "the house"? One who has been spawned, blistered, patched and  
>>> peeled, i.e. the "fish" in stained glass in just those city- 
>>> centers of Europe? What is the significance of the poem's locale  
>>> to "the field overhead"? You'd have to give up your fantasy Eliot,  
>>> the negative one for whom all things created in his poetry somehow  
>>> equate to psychological fissures and fractures, to dig to the real  
>>> one whom the critics you quote do not touch. The odd thing to me  
>>> is how obvious it is that he hasn't been touched, that such an  
>>> easy identification of "the jew" is so difficult for the Eliot  
>>> Distraction League to simply see, not to say they couldn't sober  
>>> up, gather themselves, and push on from that obvious beginning
>>>
>>
>> Go on, then. Where *is* Gerontion, while being read to by a boy?  
>> What is being read? Where *does* one find "the Jew" (and is it too  
>> much to hope that you can justify in some way, from the text, your  
>> implication that the 'the' in "the Jew" makes it Christian rather  
>> than derogatory?   Justify, indeed, *any* of this from a reading of  
>> the text that doesn't simply fall back to "why, it's so obvious!   
>> how can you not see it?"
>>
>   George,
>
> The questions sort of answered themselves, I thought. Once you see  
> them, at least, you have to give up the superficial view that  
> Gerontion is hate speech composed by an out of control poet. I mean,  
> what foolishness.
>> All of this talk of the "Eliot Distraction League" and its like  
>> becomes quickly tiresome.
> Perhaps you should expend your limited energies elsewhere?
>> What of the Eliot Sycophancy League?
>>
>   If you were right, why bother with Eliot at all? The League of  
> Distracted Eliot Scholars (just like that, an upgrade to 2.0) is in  
> the oddest of positions: its members claim Eliot to be the crassest  
> of individuals while at the same time being a poet who  
> created......what? What's worth "recovering" of Eliot if you  
> honestly think he is the small-minded, mean-spirited poet whose  
> treatment of Jews and others is "sordid"? Sorry, but these critics  
> are fashion mongers who add nothing to Eliot studies, except of  
> course bean hill after bean hill of distraction. Based on the  
> fanciful idea that if they just find ENOUGH ELIOT LIFE BEANS, the  
> scale will be tipped in their favor. It will never happen, of  
> course, but they do not realize it, nor wish to.
>
> Do you recollect what Eliot said would be the fate of his Poems  
> 1920? Gerontion is waiting for rain, the spirit. Where do you think  
> he is?
>
> Ken
>