Benjamin Lockerd “Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his record”—so wrote Roger Kojecký at the beginning of his 1971 book, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism.1 Thirty-five years later, the situation has not changed, for T. S. Eliot’s cultural criticism continues to be more maligned than studied. It is not uncommon to hear Eliot accused of having “flirted with fascism” and of having proposed the...