Word: eliot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When, four decades ago...T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he seemed pure zenith, a colossus...fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon," Ozick writes...
However, in the next page of her article, she sums up her current views on the author of The Waste Land, calling Eliot "an autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman...
Donald Hall '51, whose book Remembering Poets was partly devoted to Eliot, called Ozick's article remarkable, not for any kind of revolutionary criticism but for its "gross, lengthy, un-New Yorkerish attack." By un-New Yorkerish, Hall says he means that the piece conflicts with the weekly magazine's policy of not doing any articles about authors except in book reviews...
Ozick, who begins her article by mentioning last year's "mostly spiritless" centennial celebration of Eliot's birth, says that the poet's reputation has sagged so much that high school and college students "barely" read his work, and cites "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as the only Eliot poem that is studied today...
Like many of Eliot's critics, Ozick says she is repelled by the poet's alleged anti-Semitism and his cruelty towards his wife. She takes particular offense at Eliot's book called The Idea of a Christian Society, in which he says that cultural unity can be achieved through a "Community of Christians...