T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture: After attending one of Eliot’s readings in New York in 1933, the critic Edmund Wilson wrote to the novelist John Dos Passos: “He is an actor and really put on a better show than Shaw. . . . He gives you the creeps a little at first because he is such a completely artificial, or, rather, self-invented character . . . but he has done such a perfect job with himself that you end up admiring him.”
In his criticism, Eliot wrote much that was prophetic of the age in which we now live. As early as the 1920s, he remarked “on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing.” He foresaw the rise of “the half-formed science [of] psychology, [which] conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of a statement.”
He wasn’t accusing modern writers of immorality, or even amorality, but of ignorance “of our most fundamental and important beliefs; and that in consequence [contemporary literature’s] tendency is to encourage its readers to get what they can out of life while it lasts, to miss no ‘experience’ that presents itself, and to sacrifice themselves, if they make any sacrifice at all, only for the sake of tangible benefits to others in this world either now or in the future.”