YOU CAN ADMIT THE DEAD LITERARY EMPEROR'S SOCKS HAVE HOLES

You don't have to praise T. S. Eliot

while admitting his antisemitism,

you can acknowledge The Waste Land

is great, that he treated his first wife

abominably, and that Burbank with a Baedeker

is trash and antisemitic, not finding

any saving grace among its forced

imagery, its facades of modernism;

without his name it would be dismissed

- so dismiss it, declare it garbage.

This belief that one must praise

to criticize, because someone's

plaster head collects dust atop bookcase,

is servitude to fame,

appeasing those who keep up

the faltering flame.

19.09.2026