Can't Stand The Man, Can't Stand The Woman, But...

T.S. Eliot wasn't a particularly likeable person.

Neither was Vivienne Haigh-Wood.

But out of the transcendental fuck-up that was their marriage came a certain amount of poetry that we still value.

And because of the certain amount of poetry people continue to write books about the transcendental fuck-up- even though the events and emotions at the heart of it remain beyond the reach of research.

I've just been reading a review of one of those books. Pah!

Take one very chilly person and one very needy person (a vast over-simplification of course) and grind them together- and what you get is this odd, fragmentary, evasive, horribly memorable corpus of verse that we have been gullible enough to accept as a profound statement of the human condition...

Almost as a work of scriptural authority...

And we've been conned.

I have a passing fancy to grab my Collected Eliot off the shelf and take it to the charity shop...

And so free myself of its witchery.

But, then again, so much of it is so very beautiful...