Summary
Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot became prominent poets, literary critics, and social commentators of the literary universe of the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. Eliot mocked Arnold in his poetry before he became a critical expert. Since around the 1960s, however, Eliot has not received a favorable response from critics because his achievements in royalism, classicism, and Anglo-Catholicism conflict with a democratic society.
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Extract
Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot.
As early as his first published book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, T. S. Eliot made a habit of mocking Matthew Arnold. "Cousin Nancy," a humorous poem about the rebellious, cigarette-smoking "Nancy Ellicott," contrasts her "modern" behavior with the staid bookshelves in her family's home: "Upon the glazen shelves kept watch / Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, / The army of unalterable law." Here, Arnold is on the receiving end of a gentle joke; he is an old fogey, and Eliot mocks his books as a teenager today might mock his parents' vinyl albums.
But "Cousin Nancy" was written before Tom Eliot of St. Louis became T. S. Eliot, critical czar. To assume that role, Eliot had to do more than just make fun of Arnold; he had to dethrone him. For Arnold, despite the contumely to which Eliot subjected him, was to the nineteenth century almost precisely what Eliot became to the twentieth: the poet, literary critic, social commentator, and man of letters who sat at the center of the Anglo-Saxon literary universe. In thousands of homes across the English-speaking world, it is now Eliot himself who "keep...See the full content of this document
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