The social critic and his discontents

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: ELIOT AND CULTURAL POLITICS Few of those who admire Eliot have done so for his social and political criticism. Usually this prose has been used to elucidate difficult poems, or ignored altogether, or seen as gratuitously problematic, and a hindrance to the survival of Eliot's reputation. But for those who continue to be struck by the unity and importance of Eliot's art, the social criticism cannot be so marginalized. The result is not just a problem but a perplexity, and at times a scandal. Great visionary poets have usually had visionary politics as well, and have frequently devoted their prose to immediate causes which in retrospect seem not only reactionary but futile. One thinks of Dante's hopes to resurrect a Roman Empire, or Milton's last-ditch defense of the Commonwealth. We think today of their social criticism on a higher level: as efforts to redefine their relationship, and that of their age, to the cultural authorities of the past. In their oppositional use of canonical texts against the entrenched rulers of their own age, they form a single tradition, as much progressive as reactionary. We may perhaps think of them, in their largely successful claims upon the minds of the future, as practitioners of cultural politics.