Must we?
I s'pose. Here's a letter from one Barack Obama to then-girlfriend Alex McNear about T.S. Eliot:
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?
My favorite part: the admission that he never checked all the footnotes. I mean, he's not a nerd.
For the next few days, expect every single human on the planet to see in this letter whatever they want to see, loudly and probably in blog or tweet form. I'll give you a headstart: wimpy lib ivory tower Obama loves europoetry! Eliot even ditched America to become a British citizen, putting Obama firmly in line with Americans who would gladly drop the get-'er-done individualism of this country for the pinky-out-while-you-hold-your-tiny-espresso-cup intellectualism of the old world if only they could (except Obama wasn't born here). Also, catch that part about how he prefers certain types of conservatism to bourgeois liberalism? No wonder we didn't get single payer.
Is this letter pretentious? Ohhhh yeah. But Obama wasn't even 20 when it was written, and for a 18 or 19 year old to competently discuss the intellectual traditions of Eliot is, if not exceptional on a college campus, at least admirable. Anyway, you can't talk about Eliot without sounding pretentious, which is why you should avoid doing so in a love letter in the first place. Don't you share that ambivalence yourself, Barack?
The Vanity Fair excerpt has more where this winner came from.
---
Join: PoliticOlogy
Follow: Evan McMurry @evanmcmurry | PoliticOlogy @OlogyPolitics
Comments (2)