Skygazer
And in the end...
I suppose you could call them idiosynchratic even when it cut into his own political beliefs, he didn't tailor the truth to fit in. To his core he was egalitarian, anti elitist, anti privilige.His politics are pretty idiosyncratic for the time, aren't they? Is there anyone else from that period who is even comparable?...] [... people who label Orwell as a "conservative" thinker? What do they even mean by that?
Condemning Stalin and his distortion of communism doesn't make him a conservative ( in a political sense, I mean) I think there is a degree of wishful cherry picking there.
Is there anyone else from that period who is even comparable? It seems as if most of the heavyweights from the period such as Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, etc. were on the far-right and then you had the Boy Scouts (as Joyce called them) Auden, Spender, and such cheering on Stalin.
Yes and no... but mostly no for me. You named some of his left wing peers, both Spender and Auden went to Spain too and witnessed the Stalinists betrayal of the republic, Auden recognised later that Orwell spoke out about the morphing of communism into totalitarianism. But Arthur Koestler did that too (he was also in Spain and imprisoned) with his novel Darkness At Noon - and other work of his ( that I haven't read!)
The artists of the right that you name, some of them were not only right wing but pro fascist, a lot of it through an aversion to mass culture and the revolting masses, attracted to a cultural hierarchy (with them at the top of course).
D H Lawrence, I don't know, seems more of a Pagan than anything else? :). T S Eliot, he did publish a lot of left wing writers and poets and was I think a moderate. So maybe democracy does have bad taste and no brains, it's difficult to deny that when you see what's happening at the moment, but it's still better than the alternative.