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The modernist poet T. S. Eliot has been applauded and denounced for
decades as a staunch champion of high art and an implacable
opponent of popular culture. But Eliot's elitism was never what it
seemed. "T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide" refurbishes this
great writer for the twenty-first century, presenting him as the
complex figure he was, an artist attentive not only to literature
but to detective fiction, vaudeville theater, jazz, and the songs
of Tin Pan Alley.
David Chinitz argues that Eliot was productively engaged with
popular culture in some form at every stage of his career, and that
his response to it, as expressed in his poetry, plays, and essays,
was ambivalent rather than hostile. He shows that American jazz,
for example, was a major influence on Eliot's poetry during its
maturation. He discusses Eliot's surprisingly persistent interest
in popular culture both in such famous works as "The Waste Land"
and in such lesser-known pieces as "Sweeney Agonistes," And he
traces Eliot's long, quixotic struggle to close the widening gap
between high art and popular culture through a new type of public
art: contemporary popular verse drama.
What results is a work that will persuade adherents and detractors
alike to return to Eliot and find in him a writer who liked a good
show, a good thriller, and a good tune, as well as a "great" poem.
Which Sin To Bear? mines Langston Hughes's creative work, newspaper
columns, letters, and unpublished papers to reveal a writer who
faced a daunting array of dicey questions and intimidating
obstacles, and whose triumphs and occasional missteps are a
fascinating and telling part of his legacy. David E. Chinitz
explores Hughes's efforts to negotiate the problems of identity and
ethics he faced as an African American professional writer and
intellectual, tracing his early efforts to fashion himself as an
"authentic" black poet of the Harlem Renaissance and his later
imagining of a new and more inclusive understanding of authentic
blackness. He also examines Hughes's lasting yet self-critical
commitment to progressive politics in the mid-century years and
shows how, in spite of ambivalence-and, at times, anguish-Hughes
was forced to engage in ethical compromises to achieve his personal
and social goals.
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