No name is more closely associated with the course of modern poetry and literary criticism than that of T. S. Eliot, for no writer has had a greater hand in shaping the sensibilities, expectations, and projects of modern critical and creative letters. His formidable contributions to modern poetry and drama are the subjects of other volumes, but it is in his role as theorist, critic, reviewer, editor, and public man of letters that Eliot's influence has most profoundly and enduringly affected modern thinking about literature. This influence had a particularly direct impact upon New Criticism, the most important American literary theory of the first half of the twentieth century, and upon its most visible practitioners: John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, and Allen Tate, among others. Eliot's critical work provided the theoretical foundations for New Criticism, and his poetry supplied the New Critics with texts ideally suited to their methodology.
