Eliot was a failure. That's right, a failure. He spent his whole life lamenting that the critics got him wrong. Ironically, Eliot had a decades-long feud with my other favorite writer, C. S. Lewis, because Lewis disliked Eliot's modern style. Yet I think much of what Lewis criticized in Eliot was based upon the standard critics' interpretations, rather than on what Eliot intended (does Prufrock not, prophetically, lament "That's not what I meant at all?"). Eliot may have initiated a new era in poetry, but what he initiated was a rebellion against 19th-century romanticism and liberalism. When studied on a deeper level than mere style, one sees that Eliot's poetry is at heart traditional and anti-Modern, overladen with Christian and Oriental thought. There is no better analysis of Eliot, in my opinion, than Russell Kirk's _Eliot and His Age_. Poems which the critics see as discussions of failed romance are actually laments about failure to appreciate art, and descriptions of the hell in which we live. Critics see a decline from "Prufrock" to "Ash Wednesday", but I (like Kirk) see the fulfillment of Eliot in his later poetry: he tells us what's wrong with the world, and then he points to a higher standard, "redeeming the time" as the voice calls out in "Ash Wednesday"