Dig It Up Again

Like any significant artist, Eliot was a complex, contradictory person: his views changed with time and circumstance, and his public persona was not always in accord with his private life. The persona gave rise to the widespread critical view that Eliot was not so much avant-garde as arrière-garde. He was a Modernist but a Modernist against modernity, “to the point,” in the words of scholar Tony Pinkney, “where [he] sees in his secretary’s supper of baked beans in ‘The Waste Land’ … a terminal threat to a Great Tradition that has come down to us from Homer.”