How did T.S. Eliot influence the world?

- Mamta Jaiswal

From the 1920s on, Eliot's influence as a poet and a critic was enormous in
both Great Britain and the United States, not least in helping to create English
Literature as a separate academic field of study. He also had his critics, who
ranged from American avant-garde poets who thought he had given up on
trying to write about modern-day America to traditional English poets who
claimed he had severed the ties between poetry and a sizable general audience.
But throughout his lifetime, sympathetic exegesis of his work was
commonplace.
Interpreters have become much more critical of him since his passing,
focusing on his complex relationship to his American origins, his elitist
cultural and social views, and his exclusivist notions of tradition and race. This
increased criticality has coincided with a wider challenge to the academic
study of English literature, which his critical precepts played a significant role
in establishing. But in terms of how he held his audience's attention, Eliot was
unmatched by any other poet of the 20th century.
It is challenging to talk about Eliot's poetry and criticism separately because
they are so intertwined. Two years after Eliot was confirmed in the Church of
England (1927), and the same year he also became a British national, the
magnificent essay on Dante was published. Ash Wednesday (1930), a religious
meditation written in a style very different from any of the earlier poems, was
the first lengthy poem he wrote after becoming a Christian. Ash Wednesday is
a day to express the discomfort and tension that come with accepting religious
belief and ritual.
In contrast to his earlier works, where the dramatic element had been stronger than the lyrical, this
poem and many that came after it were written in a more calm, melodic, and meditative manner. In a
time when it was believed that poetry, while independent, had a totally secular outlook, Ash Wednesday
was not well received; some critics mistook it for a manifestation of personal disillusionment.