A new biography offers a glimpse into an Obama most people haven’t seen. | REUTERS Obama the poetry critic

April is the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot, but May is proving to be pretty kind for President Barack Obama’s reputation as a literary critic.

The first excerpts published Wednesday of the highly anticipated David Maraniss biography offer a glimpse into an Obama most people haven’t seen before: Fresh out of Columbia, frustrated in his first job, finding his way around Manhattan, women, literature and himself. And still hung up on a girl back at Occidental he was trying to impress in angst-filled, post-college love letters that only people like presidents have to suffer through having on public view.


The musings now on display in Vanity Fair tackled Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” one of the toughest poems of the 20th century, full of obscure allusions, complex metaphors, lines in an array of languages — and 433 footnotes.

“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance,” Obama wrote, musing on William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound as he went. “You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

One part Holden Caulfield, one part Immanuel Kant. And no parts that most people could make sense of.

( PHOTOS: Obama over the years)

The excerpt won’t disabuse politicians from Mitt Romney on down who want to portray Obama as more engrossed with his own words than action. For voters whose blood starts to boil at the mere mention of poetry, a young Obama writing about “a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, [Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality” will add an especially pretentious tile in the pointy-headed professor mosaic.

But the literary crowd loved it — even if they didn’t know who the guy with the umlaut was when Obama wrote, “Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats.”

“If we talked about ‘The Waste Land’ together when he was 22, we might disagree about some things. But insofar as he alludes to it here, there’s nothing that seems to me mistaken or untoward or indefensible,” said Donald Hall, the former poet laureate and an old friend of Eliot himself.

That includes even those who think Obama is wrong on just about everything else.

“I’m pretty impressed. He seems to have understood ‘The Waste Land’ better than I did as a 22-year-old,” said Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol.

Hall remembers the president talking about Robert Frost’s trip to Russia when Obama gave Hall the National Medal of Arts back in 2010. But he didn’t realize how deep the president’s interest in poetry ran: When Obama whispered a few sentences into his left ear — in which, Hall said with a laugh, he’s stone deaf — he didn’t think too much about what he was missing.

But after reading Obama’s comments on Eliot, now he’s wondering if Obama might have made a refined literary point that he missed.

“He’s quite a smart guy, and that’s the impression I really get. It’s not bullshit. What he’s saying here, he’s read ‘The Waste Land,' he really has a good feel for the big issues, he can separate out the big issues from the little details, and yet he knows some details, too,” said Bob Perelman, who teaches poetry at the University of Pennsylvania.

The amazing thing, Perelman and others point out, is how much of a window into Obama’s thinking and personality appears to shine through those few short lines. Obama’s critique reveals a sense of detachment, a focus on transcendence over religiosity, a grappling with tough ideas and both an eagerness to impress and an ability to do so.

“It kind of makes the case for him being not religious in any organized way, but in a spiritual, philosophical way,” Perelman said. He added later, “You could read this as pointing toward a strain in him that favors ambivalence. But basically it just makes him to me about four times smarter than most politicians.”

Paul Cantor, a conservative English professor at the University of Virginia, also saw hints of the Obama of 2012 in the Obama of the early ’80s — but not ones he liked.

“These words certainly point to a deep radicalism in his early political thinking. Much of twentieth-century literature was polarized between extreme leftwing and extreme rightwing positions, rejecting the liberal middle,” Cantor said in an email. “It seems that the young Obama was attracted to the political extremes rather than the American mainstream middle of liberalism.”

What’s clear is a sense not only of literature but also of poetry and history, said Lawrence Rainey, an Eliot scholar and author of “Revisiting The Waste Land,” who started grappling with the president’s analysis himself.

“He credits Pound with more rational choice in supporting Mussolini than recent scholarship would allow: it appears to have been more a case of infautated hero worship, at least in the early years (from 1923 to 1930). Likewise, he assigns to the Eliot of 'The Waste Land' (1922) the more theologically grounded conservatism of his post-conversion period (after 1927),” Rainey said. “But both these assumptions were fairly standard assumptions of the time, only modified in recent years. Given these limitations, he makes a sophisticated and astute analysis, one that shows an adventurous mind searching for ways to make sense of materials he’s only recently encountered. He is bold in trying out daring juxtapositions.”

That’s a lot of high-minded language to describe a president who’s spent the past five years beating back attacks that he’s a snob, an elitist — or perhaps worst of all, a pseudo-intellectual. And being revealed as a deconstructor of poetry might not be an exact fit for the populist rallying cry that he’ll need as he campaigns for reelection this fall.

But Ted Strickland, the former Ohio governor and frequent critic of Democratic elitism, said he’s no longer worried about that being Obama’s problem.

“I think Obama is talking in a way that conveys to the people that he does understand what they’re dealing with, the struggles they’re going through,” Strickland said.

And sure, there’s always the risk of new attempts to caricature Obama, but Strickland said he’s confident those will fall short — no matter how many old discourses on modernist poetry Maraniss or anyone else unearths.

“We blue-collar folks like poetry, too. I’m not sure that those things are contradictory,” Strickland said. The problems come, he said, “only when the individual is focused on those issues and at the same time incapable of meaningful communication about real life.”

Strickland didn’t leave anything to the imagination: He said he was talking about Romney — a politician he thinks blue-collar voters will see as both elitist and uncaring.

Michael Levenson, an Eliot expert at the University of Virginia, is also among the impressed — but not just because of what the letter says about Obama then.

“No one stops struggling with the poem, and no one really leaves it behind,” Levenson wrote in an email. “So somewhere in the president’s mind, there have to be some haunting lines that never leave him, for instance:

‘ you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief’

Or

‘ I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?’

Or

‘ These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’”

So sure, the letter may have been written to woo a girl, said Hall, but that doesn’t necessarily take anything away from the thoughts Obama laid out there.

“Many such letters,” Hall said, that “have been written seriously about poetry actually have another intention we speak of.”

Jennifer Epstein contributed to this report.