![]() ![]() I went along with this for some time, and gave little thought to something that had seemed to me, on my first exposure to Eliot, to be an immense problem. These interpretations of the poetry were too limitedly Jewish, and culpably insensitive to the specific properties of poetry (or so it was implied). Whenever such misreadings were advanced, usually by readers outside the universities, they would be met with a swift, and decisive, put-down. Perhaps these readers were a little over-sensitive to the possibility of insult or affront. ![]() It was much more likely that the Jews who found it to be anti-semitic were just misreading it. But while, in some notional way, it was thus conceded that poetry might be anti-semitic, it seemed unthinkable that this could be true of Eliot's work. It meant both that Jews might misread poems as anti-semitic and that anti-semites might versify their prejudices. ![]()
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