The Waste Land 100 Years On: The Significance of T.S. Eliot Today

Over the past century, there have been remarkable changes in the appreciation of T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). From the interwar years up to the 1950s, he was for decades an icon of high culture and outstanding moral values, of everything that is beautiful and good and deserves admiration; while from the 1970s onwards he became a symbol of a completely different kind: one of elitism and conservatism, of everything that is wrong and deserves condemnation. Over the past twenty years, gradually a more balanced view has been established. In this article I outline this development, relate it to general changes in the cultural climate, and argue that, a hundred years after publication of his major poem The Waste Land (1922), T.S. Eliot remains highly significant to us both as a poet and a cultural critic.