A Response to Ronald Schuchard

In what way, Ronald Schuchard's essay asks us to consider, does the expression of a particular attitude in poetry resist the contextualization of that attitude? To what degree might new evidence persuade us that the line "the jew is underneath the lot" does or does not represent an anti-Semitic point of view?

Thinking of the reception of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," the poem in which this line occurs, Eliot said, "here I am considered by the ordinary Newspaper critic as a Wit or satirist, and in America I suppose I shall be thought merely disgusting" (7). Eliot made another version of this remark in a laudatory review of Edith Wharton's Summer: the novel "should add to Mrs. Wharton's reputation as a novelist the distinction of being the satirist's satirist," said Eliot, but it would "certainly be considered 'disgusting' in America." Eliot himself thought that Summer was a novel of "unrelieved horror," a quality that amply distinguishes "Burbank with a Baedeker" and other poems of the period. ¹ Eliot not only admired Wharton; he saw some of his own most treasured ideals reflected in her work.

Around the same time, Eliot also made statements expressing contempt for women writers. Praising the Jewish poet Isaac Rosenberg, as Schuchard reminds us, Eliot said that an audience ignorant of Rosenberg's work must ask itself "why it has heard of the poems of Lady Precocia Pondoeuf and has seen a photograph of the nursery in which she wrote them" (23, n.22). This sentence is meaningful because it manipulates a prejudice. Eliot does not simply ask us to consider why one poet is more well-known than another; he also tells us why: the general public prefers decorative poems by women to difficult, substantial poems by men.

As any reader of Eliot knows, one can easily find other sentences in which Eliot expresses prejudices against women, homosexuals, Jews, or the Irish. At the same time, one can just as easily find sentences in which Eliot expresses the deepest admiration for particular writers who happen to be female, homosexual, Jewish, or Irish. Schuchard wonders how Eliot could have considered "Burbank with a Baedeker" an "intensely serious" poem if its motive "was to exercise a little gratuitous anti-Semitism in the face of his Jewish friends" (7). Missing from this argument, however, is the possibility that the prejudice is not gratuitous but essential to the poem, just as an anti-feminist prejudice is essential to Eliot's praise of Isaac Rosenberg. Does evidence of Eliot's admiration for Wharton or Rosenberg suggest that he could not have been anti-feminist or anti-Semitic? Or does the variety of his statements suggest that Eliot was conflicted, capable of admiration that did not necessarily dismantle the structure of his prejudices?

Schuchard presents a wealth of new evidence that must alter our sense of Eliot's long-documented prejudice against Jews, but the relationship of that evidence to Eliot's poetry is difficult to calibrate precisely. Thinking of these lines from "Burbank with a Baedeker"—"The rats are underneath the piles./ The jew is underneath the lot"—Schuchard suggests that they express Eliot's sense of "the terrible irony that the new foundations of post-war Europe were being laid on the corpses of Jews" (10). At issue in this reading of the poem, however, is the fact that this bit of parallel syntax, conjoining the fates of rats and Jews, is extremely provocative. No matter how it is contextualized, no matter what new evidence arises, this syntax will continue to be controversial, just as Eliot's comparison of the poems of Isaac Rosenberg and Lady Precocia Pondoeuf will continue to seem manipulative. For better and for worse, part of the power of "Burbank with a Baedeker" inheres in the fact that it is a highly provocative poem, a poem that asks us to feel provoked to judgment, just as Eliot's remark about poetry by women asks...