What impact did T. S. Eliot have on the modernist movement?

T.S. Eliot was influential both as a poet and as a literary critic during the first half of the twentieth-century. Much of his work is a seminal force in the modernist movement, and he was highly respected, even by those who didn't necessarily imbibe his literary technique or philosophy.

Modernist poetry and modernist artistic forms in general were partly a reaction against nineteenth-century Romanticism. The beginning of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" illustrates this as a kind of opening salvo against the past:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherised upon a table.

With its allusion to medicine and cold science this jolting simile is, or is intended to be, a debunking of sentimentalized Romantic imagery. The entire tone of the poem is contrary to the displays of emotion typical of the Romantics and the Victorians. Prufrock is a little man afraid of everything, worrying himself over things like "eating a peach" and "wearing the bottoms of his trousers rolled." The language of the poem is deliberately stripped of adornment and often made to sound even pedestrian:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

Eliot's aesthetic is one of regret over a lost past and a sense that the modern age is cold and uninviting. In "The Wasteland" he transforms Chaucer's opening of The Canterbury Tales into a statement of pessimism:

April is the cruelest month....

The poem is a re-creation in a twentieth-century context of bits and pieces of the great literature of the past, always in such a way as to express discontent with the modern world and a sense of hopelessness:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

This is a paraphrase of verses from Dante's Inferno, the suggestion being that modern London is like hell and that its population is like the souls of the damned. In George Orwell's writings, both his early fiction and his essays, we can see an echo of Eliot's thought, despite the fact that Orwell is not usually one whom we would consider a central figure, specifically of the modernist movement.

Twentieth-century poets, from Ezra Pound to Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and countless others, echoed the sobering, negative, and hopeless tone of Eliot's verse. His middle-period verse and his later poetry, such as "Ash Wednesday" and "The Four Quartets," are expressive of Eliot's "return" to religion, but also continue to be infused with a sense of resignation and pessimism:

Because I do not hope to turn again,
Because I do not hope,
Because I do not hope to turn.
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope.
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

In both content and technique—the latter usually being either free verse or an alternation between free verse and more regular or conventional metrical forms—Eliot's work can be seen as an archetype of modernist poetry.

As a literary critic, Eliot was an iconoclast, expressing views about poetry and literature in general that in many ways were the antithesis of the standard views of the Romantic period. He disliked the poetry of Shelley, for instance, and his views on Shelley and other poets were repeated and amplified by critics who were extremely influential in the early twentieth-century academic world, such as F.R. Leavis. Though he later changed his views on Milton, an early essay on the author of Paradise Lost was a needed corrective to the nineteenth-century's idolization of Milton. Eliot's having been influenced by Donne was also instrumental in bringing about a revival of interest in Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. His essay on Hamlet is a criticism of Shakespeare's play, which, even those who have generally praised Eliot have found rather strange and eccentric, but it was influential in its time with some sectors of the literary community.

It is a testament to a writer's importance that the thinking of even those who may not have read either Eliot's poetry or his criticism has often been shaped by Eliot.

What makes T. S. Eliot a modern poet?

Eliot's early poetry could certainly be described as modern in that he was actively responding to changes in Western society that took place after the First World War. Many of the old certainties had been undermined by the war; in the political realm, the dominance of the old classes was being challenged by the spread of mass democracy. In the cultural sphere, too, there were huge, unsettling changes to the established order with the rapid growth of the motion picture industry and other forms of mass entertainment. As a consequence, the authority of high culture was seriously undermined. Eliot's masterpiece, The Waste Land, is a response to this cultural malaise, an attempt to salvage what's left of Europe's cultural heritage in this ever-changing, chaotic modern world.

Victorian poetry was perceived as being very excessive, in terms of both its language and its subjects, and so the stark Modernist reaction to that poetry, in the early twentieth century, was spare and straightforward by comparison. Just as the Romantics rejected the Enlightenment focus on reason, logic, and scientific method, Modernists rejected the Romantic privileging of the sublimity of nature, the importance of the individual and one's emotions, and the connection between the two. By the time T.S. Eliot wrote "The Wasteland," publishing it just after World War I, it struck a new tone. It shows the lack of connection between individuals, the stark alienation that each person feels from his or her fellows, the sordid nature of the city and the industrialized world, and the absence of possibility for connection. T.S. Eliot is a modern poet because his work tends to demonstrate the era's sense of detachment, fragmentation, and disillusionment.