No one writing in the English language is likely to establish a reigning authority over poetry and criticism and literature in general as T.S. Eliot did between the early 1930s and his death in 1965 at the age of 77. Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot’s career strikes one today, at time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down. The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.”...
Joseph Epstein has a lengthy but fascinating essay, "T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture," over at Commentary Magazine. It's one that the members of our literary club, the Notting Hill Napoleons, will love reading. Well, some of them. But for all those (perhaps you're among them) who are interested in the strange and difficult life of the Pope of Russell Square, his bizarre marriages, poetry, literature and culture, literary criticsm, publishing, conversion, and self-made men, this look at T.S. Eliot will make for very good reading.
