T. S. Eliot's Neo-Medieval Economics (Critical Essay‪)‬

Introduction Whether poets have ever made good economists is debatable, but one would certainly not turn to the milieu of the 1930s if one wanted to make an argument for the affirmative. Since poets have often tended to press toward cultural extremes, the decade that saw, perhaps, the most violent political and economic polarization in history, as fascism and communism staked their claims in world affairs, was a doubly dangerous time for poets to enter the fray. Two notable instances immediately come to mind: W. H. Auden, the youthful British poet who led the rush of idealistic literati who joined the Communist cause of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and Ezra Pound, the maverick American who found, in Mussolini and the Fascist regime of Italy, a realization of his peculiar political and economic vision. Though he did not actually enter into combat, as did many other fellow writers, including George Orwell and Federico Garcia Lorca, Auden apparently gave a limited number of radio addresses for the Republican cause. Seeing that the situation in Spain was intractable and increasingly brutal, he eventually left for America, where in 1940 he began a journey not only toward American citizenship, but also toward a reaffirmation of his Anglican roots. Pound, on the other hand, endured in his chosen situation much longer, becoming a familiar voice on Italian radio and generating enough vitriol against the Allies to warrant placement in an American prison camp, a subsequent trial for treason against the United States government, and the bittersweet exoneration of being proclaimed mentally unsound and thus placed in a sanitarium. Clearly, neither of these poets could have been pleased with the results of their socio-political-economic forays in the 1930s.