Ernest Jesuyemi in Compact:
Poetry is the expression of an eloquent, enlightened, and enlightening subjectivity. Every subjectivity is bedevilled with prejudices, good and bad. Sometimes it happens that the unhealthy prejudices are sophisticated and have tenacious roots (one thinks of T. S. Eliot’s antisemitism), sometimes they are cheap and irritating (Ezra Pound’s). Neither is a legitimate reason to excommunicate a poet or his work.
An ability to hold divergent emotions, to respond in a way that reflects that you have apprehended all the shades of the matter—this is what poetry makes possible. Anthony Hecht, who wrote one of the most disturbing poems in commemoration of the Holocaust (“More Light! More Light!”), who was haunted all his life by that grave atrocity, and was sensitive to and indelibly marked by antisemitism, could still have the grace to love and profit from Eliot—and from Pound. He did not separate the art from the artist; that is impossible. He took the art as it is, because good art does not become any less valuable because it contains (what are to us) troubling sentiments.
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