Eliot, a Poet or Propagandist

The author of this monograph--an Englishman who reversed his subject's development and came to live in America--doesn't merely dislike T. S. Eliot. He hates his guts.

Robbins' thesis is that a generation of critics and writers have been wrong. Actually, he says, when you look at the record you've got to admit that Eliot is really "a poet of minor achievement, emotionally sterile and with a mind coarsened by snobbery and constricted by bigotry . . ."

To lend authority to his iconoclasm, Robbins has collected quotations from Eliot's poetry and prose; and though these do not fully substantiate his claims, nevertheless they emphasize some of the seedier aspects of a poet too often accepted without reservation by readers who know the name.

Robbins asserts, and introduces evidence tending to show, that Eliot's work since The Waste Land has been marked more by the exposition of political reaction and religious dogma than by any genuine atatempt to write poetry, drama, or criticism.

He points out the undertones of Anti-Semitism in Eliot's early and best poetry, which he claims have been resolutely ignored by most critics in their appraisals of the poet's work. He argues, with convincing passages from the essays on "The Idea of a Christian Society" and the recent 'Notes towards a Definition of Culture," that Eliot has on occasion condoned fascism, and has actively advocated a theory of education based on the quota system and the premise that only the aristocracy are entitled as of right to higher learning.

Robbins stresses the paucity of Eliot's poetic output since 1930 and arrives at the conclusion that "It is time to ask whether his intransigeant religious and political opinions have not obtruded so much into his poetry, his drama, and his prose, that Eliot should perhaps no longer be considered a man of letters, but a propagandist."

Robbins' attack fails to rebut the fact that Eliot has contributed, directly and through his imitators, to much of the verse of our time, and the fact that he himself remains by reason of his craftsmanship and his perceptiveness, the most accomplished English poet now living. It does, however, say some things which even Eliot's most partisan readers must often have wished to say; and it provires a healthy caveat that poets may, in the public eye, become too big for their britches, though these be large indeed.