Similar to TRP's take on Eliot, do we think?

[Mark Kohut]

Barack Obama (in a letter published in The New York Review of Books
<https://www.facebook.com/nybooks/>): I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a
year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard
these statements—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. Read
his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets,
when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense
of what I speak.

Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect
more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. 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. You seem surprised at Eliot’s
irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
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