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

[Robert Mahnke]

I had trouble following what Mark was quoting, but he prompted me to find
this article, which I thought was kinda fascinating:

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/04/obama-as-literary-critic/

Thanks, Mark.

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 1:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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