Erudition And Despair Poem by gershon hepner

Erudition and despair,
thriving symbiotically,
synergistically, a pair
devoid of what, erotically,
might seize the readers by the guts,
consume in their banality
and soi disant finality
my work with ifs and ans and buts.

All my insights merely heightened
awareness of how incomplete
were my attempts be enlightened,
seeking goals I could not meet.
If were not so erudite,
perhaps I could give up despair,
but though God’s great, and always right,
that doesn’t mean He must be fair.


Richard Bernstein, reviewing Lyndall Gordon's 'T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life' (W. W. Norton) ('Portrait of a Visionary In a Heap of Broken Images, ' the NYT, August 18,1999) writes:

'Unlike the artist, Eliot does not criticize an actual world but creates a 'phantasmal' world of lust, filth, boredom and malice on which he gazes in fascinated horror, ' she writes. Ms. Gordon also argues that the work has largely been misread. Critics have 'fastened on his despair and erudition, ' she argues, and in so doing they have missed the 'visionary alternative' that Eliot presented in the poem, the 'possibility of regeneration'.

8/18/99,1/19/09