It frequently happens that an artist who has had enormous prestige during his lifetime suffers a temporary decline in his reputation after his death. T.S. Eliot is the perfect example. The challenge that his early poetry, and especially The Waste Land, raised for the young poets of the 1920's is simply a matter of literary history. Alien Tate and Robert Penn Warren, Hart Crane and Archibald MacLeish (to name American poets of the period) immediately responded to the challenge in various ways. Eliot had the further advantage of being a persuasive and influential critic who set up the context for his own poetry, but in the end it is poets, not academics, who create the canon of their predecessors. For at least thirty years Eliot had a charmed life among many other poets, even those who could never accept his theology and politics. It was a truly international fame which affected the life of poetry in such different places as India, Greece, and Latin America: the kind of fame that a poet such as Hardy or Frost never had outside his own language. I refer to Joseph Brodsky's elegy, "Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot," written in exile in the Soviet Far North on Jan. 12, 1965, as an example of the way in which Eliot could affect young poets in the remotest places.

But at the same time one could tell that the drift of opinion was turning in the Anglo-American world. One of Eliot's closest friends, Herbert Read, wrote in 1965, soon after Eliot's death, that "The Hollow Men" is "the last example of what I would call his pure poetry. "Ash Wednesday," which followed in 1930, is already a moralistic poem, especially in the last two sections. All the poetry that follows, including