T. S. Eliot is no longer an idolized literary figure. Instead he is likely to be an easy target of recent critical and political attacks partly due to the demise of modernism and partly due to the denunciation of the anti-Semitism of T. S. Eliot by Anthony Julius’s T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. This paper is to prove that Julius’s criticism of T. S. Eliot is a logical fallacy. The notorious phrase of “any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” in After Strange Gods is one of Eliot’s well-known anti-Semitic remarks. However, in his letter to J. V. Healy on May 10, 1940, Eliot clarified that he intended to emphasize its religious aspect because the unity of religious background is very important to the ideal homogeneous culture and that thus “free-thinking Jews are only a special case.” Julius’s criticism is focused on the following five poems; “Gerontion,” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “A Cooking Egg” and “Dirge.” In this paper, I tried to prove that Julius’s indictment of Eliot’s anti-Semitism is a hyperbole. Julius acts like a prosecutor bringing the case of Eliot’s anti-Semitism to the legal proceeding of felony. However, the actual case is like a misdemeanor with which a policeman can dismiss Eliot with a caution.
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