The Early 20th Century: T. S. Eliot

Abstract

Beneath a superficial semblance of harmony, peace and concord there were many strains developing in the artistic fabric of Victorian Britain. The poets were homogeneous in appearance only. A closer inspection reveals a far greater range of doubt, scepticism and revolt than is normally associated with Victoria’s reign. Even the queen’s favourite poet, Tennyson, confessed now and then to ‘faltering where I firmly trod’. It is only from the promontory of the present age – when, teetering on the brink of mutually assured destruction, man casts his eyes back to those halcyon days – that Victoria’s Britain assumes the faint luminosity and the granite durability of one of its civic statues. The past solidifies only in retrospect. To those who actually lived in it, it seemed fluid and mutable enough.