Griskin is a Russian beauty, a femme fatale: a trap.

The question Eliot asks is if the bony and austere metaphysical poets can outweigh the loss that giving up the beauty and danger of Griskin would entail.

Whispers of Immortality

WEBSTER was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense;
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience,

He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone.
. . . . . . . .
Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye
Is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The couched Brazilian jaguar
Compels the scampering marmoset
With subtle effluence of cat;
Grishkin has a maisonette;

The sleek Brazilian jaguar
Does not in its arboreal gloom
Distil so rank a feline smell
As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

And even the Abstract Entities
Circumambulate her charm;
But our lot crawls between dry ribs
To keep our metaphysics warm.

T.S. Eliot.

To the post modern, this is a nonsense. Eliot was an antisemite, Pound a fascist, both must go. We must instead consider the lyrics of the blues, because the very allusions that Eliot uses are unthinkable. One cannot link to that unacceptable caste of white reactionaries.

I was telling folks in my life that the music and poetry of the blues and jazz constitute Modernism just as much as the poems of extremely well-documented virulently racist poets who we are often taught heralded Modernism like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. For an in depth exploration of T. S. Eliot’s awful cultural bigotry, I highly suggest reading Anthony Julius’ T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, and even though Allen Ginsberg “forgave” him, and many apologize for him, Pound’s bigotry was appalling.

In middle school, high school, and college poetry classes, youth are often taught that these problematic individuals are the kings of Modern poetry. Yet, so much of the time, black blues and jazz traditions are excluded from the annals of Modern poetry and that has bothered me since I too was taught a version of “high Modernism” that consistently left out home-grown black American folk artistry.

One of the most fabled hallmarks of poetic Modernism is the complexity of allusion to prior elite literary texts within “great modern poems.” These allusions are said to represent the highest forms of greatness and the public must unlock the key to these references with arduous study.

But high modern poems by white men like Eliot, Pound, and Hart Crane are not the only sophisticated artistry that weaves allusion. The blues frequently depend on complex allusions to black cultural life, and, without exaggeration, these allusions require just as much penetrating study as those within poems like “The Waste Land.”

However, racism is an insult, not a logic. It is the work of a fool to quote it. To not see art when it is there, to censor yourself so only the progressives count. That is a deeper trap than Griskin.

And Griskin is a trap.