Trafficking in the Radiant: The Spiritualization of American Poetry

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2005 by Sadoff, Ira

T. S. Eliot's work and aesthetics reflect many of the discomfiting outcomes of a retreat from valuing this world. Eliot discussions are currently everywhere in our intellectual life, including new websites, prizes, and an entire 2003 issue of Modernism/Modernity. One of the most learned of the tributes can be found in an often moving essay by Mark Rudman in the Sept.-Oct. 2004 issue of APR. Others have praised Eliot's quest for absolutes; Rudman says he admires Eliot's "desire to touch something undeniable."6 As with any claim for, or aspiration to, an ultimate truth, we're required to ask, Whose, truth is it, and Who pays for that truth? An absolute truth, specifically in Eliot's case the truth of Christianity, essentializes us; it authorizes a priori design and order, a hierarchy of soul over body, it defends against subjectivity and the temporal. It not only assumes our own insufficiency as well as the insufficiency of the material world, it adheres to an authoritarian hierarchy that takes dominion over others' visions. Who pays for Eliot's quest for absolutes? The underbelly of his vision is the displacement of his fear of death, and his externalization of that fear by demonizing the other: in his case the Jew.

Much has been made of Eliot's anti-Semitism; apologists claim these expressions aberrant or personal rather than artistic. But words matter. Words are made of matter. And while one can justify any single piece of evidence, from the 1920 poem "Gerontin" ("the jew squats on the window sill, the owner / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp / Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London") to "Sweeney and the Nightingales," to "The Dirge" to the following excerpt from "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," cumulatively it's impossible to deny that this anti-Semitism contaminates his early and late work as well as his aesthetic views.

These ideas originate, I believe, in Eliot's conviction, first private and later public, in Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, that "the choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one."7

These passages, consistent with his religiosity, stem from his belief in "absolutes." This conviction allows him to issue forth the famous sentence, "Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."8 The Jew frames his attitude toward the body, passion and desire. In Eliot's anti-Semitism, the Jew becomes his threatening object of desire: his projective identification of Jews as representing the body, externalizing his feelings of guilt and shame onto the material body of the Jew, originates in his longing to transcend the body and the world: the implication of which is that the body is a source of debasement, sin and decay. Given the source of this anti-Semitism, his stance becomes an explicable element in his longed-for vision of "purifying fire." I'd assert that what motivates Eliot in The Four Quartets and what always motivated him, were lifetime fears, shame, sexual confusions and disgust around the body; passion, housed in the transitory and irrational, is the main obstacle in his quest for fixity and permanence. He turns his obsessions, his fractured drives, into principles, principles that conflate economic, social and metaphysical doctrines to create a fixed and ugly view of human culture. And if he wrestles with this vision of the body in "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (here the "shallow" seductive woman's the object of desire), he accedes to it explicitly in The Four Quartets. To give in to passion and materiality in this poem is to be betrayed by a world fleeting, contaminated and illusory, as deadly as the process of time itself. And to turn away from the passion-body-Jew nexus leads to dessication in this life. There's nothing left but to take flight.