Obama, in a "letter to one of his romantic partners".. [View all]

[Laura PourMeADrink]

http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/05/the-young-obama-literary-critic-122253.html

By BYRON TAU | 5/2/12 10:14 AM EDT
Vanity Fair excerpts some of David Maraniss forthcoming Obama biography, exploring the future president's time in New York and his relationship with two women as the young Barack Obama struggled with race, identity and his purpose in life.

In this letter to one of his romantic partners, Obama holds forth on literature — praising author T.S. Eliot's "conservatism" and saying he respects it more than some "bourgeois liberalism."

Obama:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?