ABSTRACT
The English composer Benjamin Britten is not usually considered a modernist, at least in comparison to figures like Arnold Schoenberg or Igor Stravinsky. Viewing Eliot through the eyes of a composer like Benjamin Britten gives a sense of how unfocused the edges of modernism could be and of how personal concerns and readings could take the place of centralized and "impersonal" ones-readings that Eliot did much to promote, at least publicly, and that academic criticism echoed until fairly recently. Thematically and in narrative terms, then, Eliot's early poem fits into the larger picture of Britten's oeuvre. By the late 1940s, when Britten had become an established composer of international standing, his work had begun to show a classicism akin to that of Eliot's post-Waste Land poetry. Yet Britten did not command the degree of authority as a cultural figure that Eliot did. In terms of their politics and lifestyles, too, Britten and Eliot were in many respects at opposite poles.
