ABSTRACT
The origins of the dominant Anglo-American traditions of criticism in the mid-twentieth century (roughly from the 1920s to the 1970s) are complex and can appear contradictory. We can say, however, that the British nineteenth-century poet and literary and cultural critic Matthew Arnold was a strong influence upon them especially in his proposition that philosophy and religion would be ‘replaced by poetry’ in modern society and that ‘Culture’ – representing ‘the best that has been known and thought in the world’ – could mount a humanistic defence against its destructive opposite, ‘Anarchy’. F. R. Leavis was later similarly to denigrate what he termed the ‘technologico-Benthamite’ civilization of urban, industrialized societies. The principal twentieth-century inheritor of Arnold, however, and himself a wide influence, including upon the development of a new Anglo-American criticism, was the American (and subsequently naturalized English) poet, dramatist and critic, T. S. Eliot.
