Obama, at 22, on The Wasteland

[Mark Kohut]

Obama sent her a series of letters, one of which concerned an essay she was writing on “The Waste Land,” by T. S. Eliot:
Eliot 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…. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s 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 letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/05/the-young-obama-soul-searching-with-the-young-obama.html#ixzz1tpIPFEvF
 
Lyndall Gordon's biographies have focussed strongly on Eliot's fear/hatred of sexuality and his belief in a spiritual Sainthood of some kind....