ABSTRACT
Eliot’s thinking about poetic composition led him to believe in the autonomy of the imagination, which, tempered by the poet’s intense engagement with literary tradition, could in his estimation lead to the creation of an art that would heal social ills at the root, through the reconnection of communities with the divine—even without the poet consciously aiming at social utility. Eliot sought, with this kind of thinking, to revive the grand ideal of the class from which he came: a spiritually and socially concerned paternalism. His greatest success, though, would come from the appeal of his work to a new, educated social class that rose after World War II, who occluded his aesthetic tendencies in favor of his more overt moralism.
