T. S. Eliot’s Conservative Modernism

For much of the twentieth century, the most revered, influential figure in English literary criticism was unquestionably T. S. Eliot. He was poet, critic, dramatist, essayist, editor, reviewer, publisher, and public intellectual; and although he had rivals in some of these fields and superiors in others, none of them could match his authority as a whole. Eliot’s consecration as high priest of English letters was all the more remarkable given the outrage that had greeted his early work as a poet. In the words of one of his first champions, F. R. Leavis, he had been regarded as “literary Bolshevik,” audaciously avant-garde and bafflingly opaque; yet by the early 1930s he was being hailed as the preeminent literary mind of his generation.