The Last Patrician (39 page)

Authors: Michael Knox Beran

BOOK: The Last Patrician

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31
.âIt will not be thought surprising that T. S. Eliot disliked Emerson or that Henry James found him wanting. See James,
Literary Criticism,
pp. 268â70. Eliot rejected the democratic and individualist creed that grew out of the Puritanism of his own (and Emerson's) ancestors; he was received into the English church in 1927, and became the subject of an English king (as James had before him). For Eliot, Emerson's essays were “already an encumbrance,” a burden, a moral and intellectual dead end. Matthiessen,
American Renaissance,
p. 193. Eliot found his calling not in the profession of his own genius and powers (self-reliance), but in the assimilation of these to a series of larger traditions and creeds (reliance on others). He wrote poetry not merely with himself or even his own generation “in his bones,” but with the feeling that “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” had a meaning and canonical significance. Eliot,
Selected Essays,
p. 4. A mature poet could not, in Eliot's view, rely on his own subjective self as the principal source of his poetry, even if such experience was always, at some level or other, present in his work. Gordon,
Eliot's New Life,
p. 2 (describing her “attempt to elicit the autobiographical element in Eliot's poetry by measuring the poetry against the life”). Far more important than the poet's own personality was what Eliot called “the historical sense,” a sense that he believed “nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year.” Eliot was dismissive of the type of poetâand of the type of manâwho had too little historical sense, too little “maturity,” too excessive a reliance on his own individual self. Eliot,
The Sacred Wood,
p. 49. Eliot's conception of the “historical sense” helps, of course, to explain his own poetic technique; his own poetry is haunted, perhaps burdened, by the weight of the whole of “the literature of Europe from Homer.” The notes Eliot appended to
The Waste Land
give the impression almost of a pastiche of Baudelaire, Dante, Webster, Shakespeare, Ovid, Virgil, Spenser, Marvell, Augustine, Kyd, and Frazer. See Eliot,
Collected Poems,
pp. 70â76. Edmund Wilson observed that in reading Eliot “we are sometimes visited by uneasy recollections of Ausonius, in the fourth century, composing Greek-and-Latin macaronics and piecing together poetic mosaics out of verses from Virgil.” Wilson,
AxÃ«l's Castle,
p. 111. “Immature poets imitate,” Eliot asserted. “Mature poets steal.” Eliot,
The Sacred Wood,
p. 125.

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10
.âThe use of tax incentive and forgiveness schemes to stimulate private investment in underdeveloped areas was pioneered in the so-called Bootstrap program for Puerto Rico in the 1940s. See John R. Newsom and Herbert Sturz, “A Proposal for Major Economic Aid to Harlem,” August 12, 1964, in Walinsky Papers, file 2. As David Rockefeller observed in his testimony during the Ribicoff hearings on urban affairs, the tax code had also been used to encourage American investment in developing nations. See Bobby's memorandum re: Urban Housing Investment Act, circa 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 11. By January 1967 Edelman was at work on a scheme to use “the Internal Revenue Code to encourage private enterprise to go into the ghetto.” See memorandum, Edelman to Bobby, January 25, 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 112; letter, Edelman to John R. Newsom, January 16, 1967, in RFK Senate Papers, file 112. On July 12, 1967, Bobby introduced a bill “to provide federal tax credits, accelerated depreciation schedules, and job-training programs as incentive for businessmen to locate industry in poverty centers.” See Ross,
Apostle of Change,
pp. 155â57. President Johnson declined to support the bill. Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy,
p. 789; Newfield,
A Memoir,
pp. 105â6.

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