I’m not a great admirer of T.S Eliot’s poetry. It doesn’t mean I dislike it. If the much-touted Wasteland supposedly showcases his talent at its pinnacle, I must say it is not quite a talent at all. I like his Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock much better in comparison. Here’s the thing: if the greatness of your work lies in the obscure meaning it putatively conveys, you actually do your readers a disservice. Think about it.

Meanwhile, the BBC plans to do a documentary on Eliot’s private correspondence, which his widow Valerie has recently made public. A fascinating item therein is Eliot’s rejection of George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm. This article calls it the “literary snub of the 20th century.” Eliot’s reasons for rejecting Animal Farm are equally fascinating.

When Orwell submitted his novel, an allegory on Stalin’s dictatorship, Eliot praised its “good writing” and “fundamental integrity”.

However, the book’s politics, at a time when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler, were another matter.

“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

The original rejection letter discloses that Eliot was more concerned about Britain’s friendly relations with the USSR in the time of war. Here’s the revealing portion:

On the other hand, we have no conviction…that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. It is certainly the duty of any publishing firm, which pretends to other interests…than mere commerical prosperity, to publish books which go against the current of the moment. [Ed: Underlined]

Quite a giveaway, isn’t it? Thank God for Secker & Warburg, who ultimately published Animal Farm. We saw the truth fenced behind the real Animal Farm post Perestroika and Glasnost. Recall the Chief Pig who finally stands up and exercises his totalitarianism at the end of the novel?

Tags: Animal Farm, Eliot Rejected Animal Farm, English Novels, Fiction, George Orwell, Poets, T.S Eliot, Writers, Writing