Ez and Tom, on the campaign trail?

Dead for fifty years, Eliot haunts us still. A review of his collected works (a new, perhaps definitive, work) and part one of a new bio got me to wondering if American politics today is just a rehashing of old unresolved issues between Eliot and his mentor:

'The degree to which a writer shares the prejudices of his family, his class, and his culture is less telling than the degree to which he is ashamed of them. Ezra Pound was defiantly unashamed of his prejudices. Eliot was more than ashamed: he was penitential. His poems are elliptical confessions of attitudes that he knew he must reject, although he also knew that, in Montaigne’s words, “we cannot rid ourselves of that which we condemn.” This may help to explain why he continued to reprint “Burbank” and “Gerontion”—another disguised self-portrait of someone spiritually sterile who imagines himself superior to “the Jew”—despite objections from readers and reviewers; he refused to withdraw what was in effect a penitential confession because other people disapproved of the faults he had confessed.'

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/11/a-different-t-s-eliot/