Whatever else its faults–and history may judge them to be many–the twentieth-century, at least in comparison to our present one’s feeble beginnings–produced giants: in politics–Churchill and Nasser–in science–Einstein and Fermi–and, in literature–Joyce, Malraux, and Thomas Sterns Eliot, the poet, among others.

The Eliots were of Revolutionary Boston stock. One of the poet’s forebears was pastor of the Old North Church; his son, a wealthy shipowner, lost the family fortune in the War of 1812, but was saved from disgrace when his cousin, John Adams, the former president, obtained for him a minor post in Washington.

The family trees of old New England are strong; and the roots run deep. So it would be, a hundred years later, the shipowners great-grandson, T.S. Eliot, wrote one of the first great modern poems, “Gerontion,” about his distant relation, Henry Adams (1838-1918), the great-grandson of the second president.

In 1834, Dr. William Greenleaf Eliot, the future poet’s grandfather, moved from Boston to St. Louis. He was a Unitarian minister and educator who founded several schools in his new city, including what later became Washington University.

In education, the doctor prized excellence. “One best,” he wrote, “was more than many good,” a philosophy that was to reflect his grandson’s aristocratic outlook on the world.

Dr. Eliot’s son, Henry, became a prosperous brick manufacturer and married a New England-born teacher, Charlotte Sterns, who was descended from a judge in the Salem witch trials. ( T.S.. Matthews, Great Tom, Harper & Row, 1973) Their son, Thomas Sterns Eliot, born in 1888, grew up to become the celebrated critic and poet.

Young Tom, as he was known, was precocious, of course. A portrait of him at age ten drawn by a sister shows him with a book in his hand. In the Eliot home there was a sense of New England superiority toward the commercial city that rose up around them. Even so, for Tom there were boyhood afternoons on the banks of the Mississippi; and images of cargo floating down the mighty river would later creep into his poetry, along with references to arcane sermons of a seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman, Lancelot Andrews.

After a year prepping at Milton Academy, Tom entered Harvard–class of 1910-redoubt of generations of Eliots and Adamses. As an undergraduate, he studied Greek Literature, Latin poetry–and took a course in the Roman novel.

Outside of class, he discovered the French Symbolist poets, including Jules Laforgue whose polite aloofness Eliot admired and whose sardonic tone he copied in poems published in the Advocate. There were also teas and afternoons spent in the company of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the collector of Japanese art and neighbor of the Adams family in Beverly where they summered in the draughty mansion Eliot was to write of in “Gerontion.”

After college, there was a glorious Left Bank winter in Paris, where, following a lecture by Henri Bergson, Eliot changed his graduate studies from literature to philosophy. All the time, he was reading, of course. At Harvard it had been Dante’s Purgatorio , then, in Paris, the moderns, Gide, Alain-Fournier, the Roman Catholic novelist who befriended Eliot and who was to be killed in the coming war.

Eliot was secretive, driven by indecision and self-doubt, a condition he called “the Eliot Way.” It was a “skepticism,” he wrote in The Athenaeum of his distant cousin, Henry Adams, “which is difficult to explain to those who are not born to it.”

So, it may be not be a surprise that when Eliot returned to Harvard to work on a Ph.D , he began to write poems that he locked away in a drawer. One was called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which critic James Longenbalt noted captured “the typically Eliot stalemate between fortitude and inertia.” The Prufrock name was taken from a St. Louis sign; the epigraph from Dante.

It was this poem, and a handful of others, that Eliot rescued from his desk drawer, and took to England when he enrolled in Merton College to work on his dissertation shortly after the outbreak of the First World War.

Through a Harvard friend, Conrad Aiken, Eliot was introduced to an American poet, Ezra Pound, who was then living in London. Writing for small magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, Pound had already revolutionized poetry, turning the flowery language of Wordsworth inside out, as he strove to achieve “the maximum efficiency of expression.” He called his latest school “Vorticism.” One poem began: "You slut-bellied obstructionist." ( The Life of Ezra Pound, Noel Stock, Pantheon Books, 1970)

Always on the lookout for new poets, Pound was pleased to hear from Aiken about a philosopher friend who had “done some very peculiar work.” After he read “Prufrock,” Pound noted: “He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own,” and arranged for the poem’s publication in Poetry, overcoming the objection of the magazine’s editor who disapproved of the poem’s tone of fear and failure. “I will not ask Eliot to write down to any audience whatsoever,” Pound informed the editor in turning aside her concerns.

Encouraged by Pound, Eliot abandoned his studies and moved to London to write, supporting himself and his new wife, Vivien, as a clerk in the colonial department of Lloyds Bank. Theirs was an odd friendship, the strange Bohemian and the reserved scholar, but they shared a genuine affection; and soon Pound was editing Eliot’s poems, “Gerontion,” and then “The Waste Land,” giving them a “hard light and clean edge” that guided his own work.

Eliot’s marriage was “tortured,” as he later described it in another poem, and out of that state of mind came “The Waste Land.” The theme was based on a search for the Holy Grail, but the poem’s desolate imagery and tone of “emotional starvation,” were a metaphor for twentieth century life.

“The terrible dreariness of the great modern cities is the atmosphere in which “The Waste Land” takes place,” critic Edmund Wilson wrote in Axel’s Castle in 1931. “Amidst this dreariness, brief vivid images emerge.”

It was Eliot’s phrasing, explanatory notes, and “mysterious allusions,” as Wilson put it, that attracted a following of young poets and academics that led Wilson to conclude: “There is certainly a cult of Eliot....” Writing in The Nation in 1926, Mark Van Doren described Eliot’s Selected Poems: 1909-1925 as “beautiful and perfect.”

Part of the attraction was the image of an English gentleman that Eliot carefully cultivated. He became a British subject and a member of the Anglican Church. In his early essays, collected in The Sacred Wood , he set forth his credo: “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics.”

Even some who considered Eliot a “great” poet, like Delmore Schwartz, the New York writer, were put off by his reactionary views–and what they considered antisemitism in a few essays and poems.

Schwartz was disturbed by Eliot’s comment in “After Strange Gods,” that “In the good society reason and religion combine to say that free-thinking Jews in large numbers would be an anomalous and undesirable element,” though this was but a variation of Eliot’s comment elsewhere that “If you want a Christian society, you cannot allow congeries of independent sects.” According to Schwartz’s biographer, James Atlas, “Delmore was increasingly obsessed by Eliot’s anti-Semitism” and later “made it a prominent subject of his lectures.” (James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet , Avon Books ed., 1978)

Along with “After Strange Gods,” critics of Eliot’s antisemitism largely rest their case on two major poems, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” and “Gerontion,” collected in Eliot’s first book of poems in 1920.

Set in Venice, “Burbank” follows a young tourist as he makes his way from his small hotel around the splendid Renaissance city, with its gondolas and palaces, armed with his Baedeker, the guidebook favored by upper crust visitors to Europe in the early twentieth century.

What young Burbank sees on his Joycean journey is not in his guidebook but rather the elegant, consumptive Princess Volupine whom he admires from afar as she is wooed by two Jewish parvenus, each obviously attracted by her title.

Her afternoon is taken up with Bleistein with his cigar and ignorance of Canaletto “shuttered” on the Princess’s barge that “Burned on the water all day.”

In his cryptic manner, Eliot goes on:

Bleistein made his money in the fur trade, Eliot hints, an occupation often associated with Jews. It was this caricature of a Jewish businessman that the late George Bornstein of the University of Michigan called “nasty”; and which led Delmore Schwartz, the son of prosperous Rumanian Jews, to complain: “Eliot, James and Adams did not really know the Jews. They knew only the storekeepers and social climbers.”

European nobles were often low on funds so were not averse to entering into a marriage for money or some similar arrangement; Princess Volupine may have been one of them. In any event, by the end of the poem, she had given Bleistein the slip and joined another wealthy admirer, Sir Ferdinand Klein, for the evening.

Professor Bornstein failed to appreciate “the humor” of Eliot’s “mixing of gentile and Jewish names”; and, in The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson noted dryly: “One of the [poem’s] most skillful witticisms depends on the assumption that there is something inherently ridiculous in a man named Klein being given a title.”

None of the poet’s critics, however, noted that Eliot was alluding to the scandalous practice under Prime Minister David Lloyd George of selling titles to wealthy businessmen to raise money for the Liberal Party, a practice that was outlawed in 1925.

After “Bleistein,” the poem Eliot’s detractors invoke to support their charge of antisemitism is “Gerontion,” from the Greek meaning old man. It is a poem that critic John Crowe Ransom, an Eliot disciple, described as “wildly beautiful” and “the work of a master of his art.”

The offending lines are found in the opening stanza:

“The Jew in “Gerontion” is a Shylock,” Edmund Wilson wrote, invoking the offensive image of Jews as moneylenders; and which, according to Professor Bornstein, caused Delmore Schwartz (in his melodramatic way) to ask friends to call him “squatter Schwartz,” in “pained memory of this passage.”

Eliot was an influential critic whose writing appeared in The Criterion , a journal he founded. His close textual analysis became known as The New Criticism and gained followers on both sides of the Atlantic, including I. A. Richards, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom. “For Eliot,” Professor Robert Gorham Davis wrote in The American Scholar , “the Church” was “the great repository of wisdom,” and the New Criticism had its origin in “truth” and “dogma.”

Loose interpretation could lead to heresy. This could be avoided only through a literal reading of the text. Therefore, any biographical or historical meaning was excluded and barred to the critic.

A year before he wrote “Gerontion,” Eliot reviewed The Education of Henry Adams in The Athenaeum. The autobiography had been privately printed in 1907 and was published commercially in 1918.

Nowhere in the poem did Eliot mention Adams, but the text contained references to the historian’s life, some of which were in the autobiography, others of which, dealing with Adams’s last year, alone and bitter in his old age, Eliot may have heard from his St. Louis grandmother, Abigal Adams Eliot, who had lived in Washington when their cousin was a major force in the city.

A generation of critics, some of whom, like Delmore Schwartz, were influenced by The New Criticism, did not catch the references to Henry Adams in the poem. Schwartz considered “Gerontion” “one of Eliot’s best poems,” but analyzed it from the viewpoint of an anonymous “old man” who “finds it necessary to speak of all history as well as his failure in love.”

Others, like Edmund Wilson, writing in The New Yorker, ” took the path that many were to take: considering the poem to express Eliot’s views–his “dramatized Anglophilia,” including the antisemitic “prejudices of old Tory gentility which Eliot liked to present as self-conscious anachronisms.” Wilson added that the “Jews in the Burbank-Bleistein poem are the vulgarians of ancient caricature.”

T.S. Eliot was aware of Adams’s antisemitic inclinations from The Education (and maybe from family gossip as well); in his Athenaeum review, he noted Adams’s comment that “Fashion was not fashionable in London until the Americans and the Jews were let loose....”

As a journalist, Adams had been widely known as a critic of corruption in the Grant Administration and a crusader against the thievery of big city political bosses. In The Education , he rued that America had become “a Banker’s Olympus” that had grown “more and more despotic...” in his lifetime.

The Education enhanced Adams’s reputation; it was said a generation of Harvard students regarded the book as their bible. The author’s unkind comments about Hebrew immigrants, or his intimation that the tricky financier, Jay Gould, was Jewish, when he wasn’t, was regarded as regretfully appealing to “the age’s casual antisemitism,” according to biographer David Brown. It was a period, the banker Otto Kahn, an Episcopal convert, noted in which “a Jewish gentleman” was not disparaged about his race until after he had left the room.

Then, in the early 1940s, an historian named Richard Hofstadter came across a cache of Henry Adams letters while researching a book on Social Darwinism. The young progressive was stunned by the historian’s vicious and obsessive attitude toward Jews. “I never realized before...” Hofstadter wrote literary critic Alfred Kazin “what a. ..real pig of a genteel Anglo-Saxon Jews-are commercial-and-have-no manners anti-Semite...he was.”

With the publication of his letters in 1952, edited by Newton Arvin, Adams’s personal views became more widely known and were regarded almost as a betrayal by New York intellectuals who had admired The Education .

In a series of essays and reviews, Lionel Trilling attempted to salvage Adams’s reputation. Adams antisemitism, Trilling admitted was “hateful,” but argued it would be “a great disservice... to read Adams permanently out of our intellectual life.” Rather, it was preferable “to maintain toward him a strict ambivalence, to weigh our admiration and affection for him against our impatience and suspicion.”

Trilling’s conciliatory approach found no favor with his colleagues. In one notable encounter, Clement Greenberg, the truculent art critic, accused Trilling of “Jewish self-hatred” and challenged the mild mannered Columbia University professor “to step outside to settle the matter.” In the end, Adams’s reputation went into a decline from which it has never recovered.

In time, critics, including Bernard Bergonzi in England, linked phrases in The Education of Henry Adams to “Gerontion.” Yet, he concluded: “But Eliot’s use of those sources is not obtrusive, and the reader who is unaware of them will not lose anything.” In their textbook, Modern Poetry , the editors noted that the poem’s reference to “dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,” were “[p]ossibly adapted from Henry Adams’s description of a Washington spring”; and added: “Readers of The Education will find much in Adams himself to remind them of “Gerontion.” ( Modern Poetry, ed. by Maynard Mack, Leonard Dean, and William Frost, Prentice-Hall, Inc. 2nd ed. 1962)

In writing to Pound, Eliot sometimes signed his letters “Old Possum”; and in the first stanza of “Gerontion,” lay the most subtle clue to the “old man’s” identity:

Adams spent the Civil War in England where he served as private secretary to his father who was Minister to the Court of St. James. A third of Henry’s Harvard class had served in the conflict, including his brother, Charles Francis, Jr., who had fought at Gettysburg.

All his life, Adams felt guilt about spending the war in the tea rooms of London-or in the British Museum where he researched an article about Pocahontas, an essay Eliot praised in The Athenaeum.

In the summer of 1863 while General Ulysses S. Grant’s troops lay siege to Vicksburg, Adams wrote his brother: “I am becoming more and more uneasy...It seems hardly consistent with self-respect in a man to turn his back upon all his friends...only for the sake of conducting his mother and sister to the opera.”

T.S. Eliot loved word puzzles and mystery novels. He was stingy with the clues he dropped about the meaning of his poems, including “Gerontion,” to friends and admirers who peppered him with questions over the years.

On one occasion, Eliot off-handedly informed Emily Hale, an intimate friend, that the phrase, “By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians,” in “Gerontion” referred to Okakura Kakuzo, the Japanese-born curator at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum of Fine Arts (without mentioning that Henry Adams had met the curator on a trip to Japan, where they discussed Buddha figures rather than Titians).

More often, Eliot provided few leads to go on. In 1949, The Explicator, an American journal, reported that “Mr. Eliot seems (reasonably enough) unwilling to reveal possible models for his poems.” One reader asked about the reference to “Mrs. Cammel” in Gerontion who “whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear” and received the curious reply from the poet that she and other figures in the poem–De Bailhache and Fresca–are real “in so far as they are real at all.”

“It may be impossible at present to trace all his characters back to the flesh and blood” the journal concluded after quoting an admission Eliot made to critic F.O. Matthiessen that the images in “Gerontion” were “consciously concrete,” that is “corresponding to something he has actually seen and remembered.”

Eliot loved a play on words, and a little detective work might have uncovered the mystery of “Mrs. Cammel” and her “shuddering Bear.”

In Lincoln’s administration, there had been a wealthy banker, and former senator, named Simon Cameron who was shipped off to St. Petersburg as U.S. Minister following a procurement scandal in the War Department which he headed.

Henry Adams made no secret of his disdain for the corrupt politician and wrote his brother that he hoped the “white sepulchre” as he called Cameron, would “vanish into the steppes of Russia and wander there for eternity.”

In “Gerontion,” Eliot wrote “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors....” Henry Adams’s tight social circle in Washington included Don Cameron, Simon’s son, who had ascended to his father’s senate seat, and Don’s wife, Lizzie, who splashed “sunshine over Washington,” as Adams wrote in The Education .

It was a bitter-sweet relationship for Henry. He enjoyed the Senator’s hospitality and stays at his South Carolina retreat but resented that the banking heir had taken the place in the corridors of power which Henry believed rightly belonged to him.

In The Education, Adams noted “The old New Englander was apt to be a solitary animal but the young New Englander was sometimes human.” In the nation’s capital, the young historian proved all too human when he fell in love with Lizzie Cameron, Senator Cameron’s wife.

Henry referred to himself as Lizzzie’s “tame cat.” His letters to her were filled with endearments and erotic overtones. She was the model for his idealistic heroine in his novel of Washington intrigue, Democracy, which was later praised by Lionel Trilling for its “clarity and brightness.”

All Washington knew that Adams adored the vivacious hostess. Her warm friendship was his but never her love. This added to Henry’s sense of failure–and even guilt, when his wife, Clover, committed suicide, partly burdened by rumors that had reached her ears.

Were there thoughts of Lizzie Cameron in the mind of the “old man” in the draughty mansion? Eliot seemed to suggest so when he wrote:

Whether Lizzie was the lady who gave “with such supple confusion” and famished her admirer’s “craving” remains hidden “In a wilderness of mirrors,” along with the identity of “De Bailhache, Fresca,” or, it may be that in editing “Gerontion,” Ezra Pound had sheared off the answers in the third of the poem he cut.

The walls that the New Critics had erected around literature finally crumbled with the rise of a new generation of critics steeped in Marx and Freud. Beginning in the 1930s, the battled was fought out in small circulation journals, like Partisan Review and the New Masses, as critics sought historical and psychological meaning in literary works.

In spite of his views, Eliot held fascination for writers on the left. There was a certain cache in writing about the cold English aristocrat; and, at some point, Lionel Trilling, Mike Gold, the critic for New Masses, and Alfred Kazin of Partisan Review, all wrote about him.

Kazin was the first to explore in depth “Gerontion’s” connection to Henry Adams, based largely on Eliot’s 1919 review of The Education.

In his review, Eliot had described Adams as “superlatively modest, diffident,” and had written: “The Erinyes which drove him madly through seventy years of searching for education-the search for what, upon a lower plane, is called culture-left him much as he was born: well-bred, intelligent, and uneducated.”

Though the latter term borrows Adams’s own description of himself-a nineteenth century man unable to navigate the modern age of science-Kazin found in Eliot’s review a strange, underlying hostility. “Eliot was unimpressed by the book,” Kazin concluded, “scornful of the man.”

Schooled in the dialectic, Kazin sought to synthesize the world-view of the two distant cousins, both of whom sprung from Puritan stock. He found this in their attitudes toward sex; Eliot trapped in a hopeless marriage, and Adams in his futile search for the ideal woman, one that led to his writing Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, a tome on Medieval architecture, with its glorification of the Virgin Mother.

Also, Kazin noted their similar view toward history and rejection of the modern era, which became “a way of despair” for both Adams “who reversed the belief in progress that had established the House of Adams, and in Eliot, who in England mourned the last of the Plantagenets as though America had killed off the Middle Ages–which indeed it had.” (Alfred Kazin, An American Procession, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)

 Fellow travelers make for strange bedfellows; and Alfred Kazin had high praise for the historian who had read and admired Marx, though Adams's own view of history was "personal" and "had none of Marx's passionate insistence on changing history."

In his revisionist view, Kazin struggled with Adam's antisemitism and omitted any reference to it in his essay on "Geronition," "Old Man in a Dry Month," a strange omission for someone whose autbiography was entitled New York Jew. In another essay on Adams, Mark Twain, and Theodore Dreiser, Kazin mentioned the "historical drama" Adams had made in The Education "of his favorite hate, the Eastern Eropean Jews," but limited his references to comments Adams had made about immigrants in his autobiography.

Books continue to appear on Henry Adams and his circle, including a biography by Natalie Dykstra of Marian “Clover” Adams, who was a skilled photographer. So the search for clues about “ Gerontion” may continue.

However, with regard to Eliot and allegations that the poem reflects the poet’s antisemitism: Writers and their characters should not be confused. “Why was I identified with the very object of my horror and compassion?” F. Scott Fitzgerald once asked, regarding his own image as a symbol of the Jazz Age.

In the same way, Henry Adams’s antisemitism should not tarnish the author of “Gerontion”; and with regard to any allegations that the poem reflects any antisemitic views of T.S. Eliot, it is time to say: “Case dismissed.”

Ron Martinetti for AL. Ron has contributed to the Columbia University Forum and other publications.

Endnotes: Ezra “Pound’s struggle on behalf of Eliot’s poetry” and Eliot’s own praise of Pound, including his famous dedication of The Waste Land (“il miglior fabbro”) are in Noel Stock’s The Life of Ezra Pound (Pantheon Books, 1970). When Eliot sought Pound’s advice whether to print “Gerontion” as a “prelude” to “The Waste Land” or in “pamphlet form,” the older poet replied in his fractured style: “I do not advise printing Gerontion as preface. One don’t miss at all of the thing now stands....” (italics in original) (The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. by Valerie Eliot, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1971)The quotes from the late Professor Bornstein are taken from his essay, “T.S. Eliot and the Real World” (1997). Speculation regarding “Mrs Cammel” and other figures in “Gerontion” may be found in “Eliot’s ‘Gerontion,’ “ The Explicator , Vol. 7, No 4 (1949). Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) was a cult figure among New York intellectuals. In his essay, “T.S. Eliot as the International Hero,” Schwartz took the “old man” in “Gerontion” to “refer to human beings of many nationalities to Mr Silvero at Limoges, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fraulen von Klup and Christ [the tiger]... .” Schwartz also concluded that the tourist in “Burbank” had an unsuccessful romantic attachment to Princess Volupine–an interpretation shared by other critics. Schwartz’s essay is reprinted in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker (University of Chicago Press, 1970). T.S. Matthews, whose informal biography, Great Tom (Harper & Row, 1973) covers Eliot’s St. Louis roots describes “‘Gerontion’ as a monologue...in the guise of a little old man....” Eliot enjoyed toying with those who were curious about his real life models. In a letter, the poet told Emily Hale that “Mr. Silvero” in “Gerontion” was based upon a curator, Matthew Prichard, but the name may be a reference to Henry Adams who supported “the Silver Standard,” as he wrote in The Education over gold which was favored by Boston bankers. Prichard had worked at the Museum of Fine Arts and knew Isabella Stewart Gardner; he and Eliot lived in the sam pension in Paris. In his novel, Put Out More Flags , Evelyn Waugh wrote of Lloyd George’s government: “The worst time had been after the Armistice when peerages were sold like groceries.” (Dell ed., 1961) Robert Gorham Davis set forth the literary origin of the New Criticism and Eliot’s influence in his 1949 essay, “The New Criticism and the Democratic Tradition.” The essay is reprinted in The American Scholar Reader, ed. by Hiram Haydn and Betsy Saunders (Atheneum, 1960). Edmund Wilson’s New Yorker essay “Miss Buttle” and “Mr. Eliot” was reprinted in The Bit Between My Teeth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965). Wilson (1895-1972) wrote book reviews for The New Republic and The New Yorker where his conventional views, set in polished prose, won him many admirers. Bernard Bergonzi (1929-2016) was a professor at the University of Warwick. “Although I do not wish to minimize the difficulties of “The Waste Land,” he wrote in his study of T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion” is certainly much more obscure.” Nevertheless, in his close reading of the text, Bergonzi perceived that one of the poem’s themes was unrequited love: “...the old man vainly trying to find meaning in past experiences is tormented by some elusive if erotic failure.” ( T.S. Eliot , The Macmillan Company, 2nd ed. 1978) Eliot scholars continue to search for the origin of words and phrases in “Gerontion.” In Young Eliot: From St. Louis to the Waste Land, Robert Crawford, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, traces the poem’s reference to “in the windy straits/Of Belle Isle” to Eliot’s sailing off Cape Ann during his family’s summer holidays in Massachusetts. Like many modern Eliot scholars, Crawford draws on the four volumes of Eliot’s letters (covering 1898 to 1929), co-edited by Valerie Eliot. Eliot wanted no biography written of him but gave Valerie permission to edit his letters. She died in 2012. According to Professor Crawford, in later years Eliot denied that he was antisemitic and spoke out against Nazi persecution of Jews. However, his parents seem to have harbored prejudices that were typical among upper-class Americans in the nineteenth century. In 1920, Eliot’s mother confessed to him: “It is very bad in me, but I have an instinctive antipathy toward Jews...Of course there are Jews and Jews, and I must be not so much narrow-minded, as narrow in my sympathies... Father never liked to have business dealings with them...” (Professor Crawford’s biography also mentions Matthew Prichard’s residence in the Pension Casaubon with Eliot.) Mike Gold (1894-1967) was a pugnacious critic who championed the “proletarian” view in literature. In one of his many swipes at T.S. Eliot, Gold wrote: “If the...snobbism of T.S. Eliot and the beer-garden aristocracy of H.L. Mencken had their origin in the boom decade of capitalism, the democratic renaissance of the Thirties was born out of the great depression...Alike did the disciples of Mencken and Eliot find themselves going through the bankruptcy wringer, jumping out of penthouse windows and hunting for jobs with the rest of the American people. Being sophisticated, snobbish or skeptical was no more help now than it would have been on a shipwreck.” (“The Second American Renaissance,” collected in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. by Michael Folsom, International Publishers, 1971) The Lionel Trilling-Clement Greenberg exchange is referenced in Professor Trilling’s letter to Commentary in July 1961 which is reprinted in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, ed. by Adam Kirsch, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). Trilling was an influential teacher and writer but seldom explored the off-ramps of literature. “Henry Adams,” the 1952 essay in which Trilling balanced the historian’s virtues and shortcomings is collected in A Gathering of Fugitives. (Beacon Press, 1956 ) In his 1948 study of the Progressive Era, The American Political Tradition, Professor Richard Hofstadater (1916-1970) noted “...there are fine insights in The Education of Henry Adams ” and Adams’s “novel of Washington, Democracy, ” but Hofstadater makes no mention of the historian’s antisemitism. The letter from Hofstadater to Alfred Kazin is quoted in David S. Brown’s biography, The Last American Aristocrat (Scribner, 2020). Ezra Pound’s own troubling history of antisemitism is well documented in Evan Kindley’s review of The Bughouse by Daniel Swift which appeared in The Nation, April 23, 2018. In spite of his views, Pound’s poetry and place as a father of Modernist Poetry have been widely recognized by many writers, including Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, and critic Hugh Kenner. Adams seems to have had only one prominent disciple, Gore Vidal (1925-2012) whose novel, Washington, D.C., reflects Adams’s influence; and though Adams has fallen from grace, there have been attempts to resurrect his reputation, e.g., a study of the historian’s seven volume history of the Jefferson-Madison era by Gary Wills, a libertarian scholar: Henry Adams and the Making of America (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005); and Andrew Delbanco’s essay, “Henry Adams and the End of the World,” reprinted in Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now ” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). The neo-conservatives appear split in their reappraisal of Henry Adams: In his New York Times column, Bret Stephens condemned the way Adams “sneeringly described the immigrants he saw in New York,” pointing out that “Within a generation those Yacobs and Ysaacs would be Goldmans, Frankfurters, Salks, Rickovers and Bellows.” (“Weaponizing America Against Itself,” NYT, May 18, 2022). On the other hand, Joseph Epstein referred to Henry Adams approvingly in a Wall Street Journal column, “When Character Mattered In D.C.,” in which he rued “...the end of WASP culture, beginning sometime in the 1960s.” (WSJ, July 13, 2013) In his sweeping study of 500 years of Western cultural life, Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), the distinguised Columbia University historian, who admired The Education, masked Adams's prejudices in explaining, "Adams saw increasing multiplicity and diversity in the loss of enegy" (that Adams believed drove history). (From Dawn to Decadence, HarperCollins, 2000) Alfred Kazin's reluctance to criticize Adam's antisemitism may have been an act of intellectual discipline that otherwise would water- down the views of a writer whose Education Kazin considered "high art," as well an attack on "the represive spirit of modern capitalism" ; and whose History had been written "in the proud spirit of the intellectual-like Tocqueville in his Recollections of the 1848 Revolution and Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution." ("Henry Adams," collected in An Amercan Procession, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) Biographies of Marian “Clover” Adams (1843-1885) include Natalie Dystra’s Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2012) and Otto Friedrich’s co-biography, Clover: The Tragic Love Story of Clover and Henry Adams and Their Brilliant Life in America’s Gilded Age (Simon & Schuster, 1979). RM would like to thank Erik Rebain for tracking down Eliot’s Athenaeum review , and F. Martinetti for her notes on Valerie Eliot’s edition of the annotated The Waste Land, but all errors of judgment remain the author’s own .