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The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
He was also a virulent anti-semite
The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
He was also a virulent anti-semite
The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which was sadly not uncommon in those days. The Nazi party had a significant following in both the US and the UK at that time.
That doesn’t make it any better. They also had significant opposition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was also a virulent anti-semite
Like Wagner and lots of other artists around that time. Agatha Christie's most famous novel? - Ten Little Niggers. Jean Genet was a convicted criminal. I try to separate the work from the artist, even if it's difficult.
Eliot chose, in 1948, when the Holocaust was common knowledge, to reprint a poem that contains the line:
>On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.
That isn’t a poet following a common zeitgeist, that is a deliberate, provocative act.
Here's my favourite reading: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nwcP3NOCeiE .
The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
Though their genres and styles were completely different, the timing of his work, its reflections on the trauma of WW1, and then his conversion to conservative Catholicism reminds me more of Tolkien.