Remembering T. S. Eliot

Friends and foes of poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) have commonly understood him as a traditionalist par excellence—either the 20th century’s greatest traditionalist or its most lamentable one, depending on one’s view. For friends, he was a Burkean conservative who defended the “moral imagination” of high art and who disdained what he referred to in a memo as the “Surrealist racket.” For foes, he was a reactionary who lacked either the courage or constitution to write further experimental verse after he published the century’s most famous experimental poem, “The Waste Land” (1922), and retreated instead to his office at the publishing firm Faber & Faber, where he made grandiose, self-serving statements about the function of literature.