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THROUGH AN ONGOING PROCESS of critical rereading that began in the early 1980s, the relations between modernism and mass culture have become better understood. The once secure conviction that modernism was uniformly hostile to mass culture has undergone a series of challenges--for example, by Andreas Huyssen's distinction between "high modernism" and the "historical avant-garde" and subsequently by Bernard Gendron's demonstration that even this dichotomy "fails to map completely the space of modernist practice" (Gendron 4-5).(1) In addition to a high modernism inimical to mass culture and an avant-garde receptive to it, that is, there are various individual and group positions that cannot be reduced to either of these extremes. But for Gendron, as for Huyssen, high modernism continues to represent an absolute position that is "altogether committed to the ideal of autonomous art," "politically unengaged," and devoted "to aestheticist goals" (5, 19). This characterization retains the force of critical consensus.(2)
Certainly there has been little inclination to question the applicability of this view to T. S. Eliot. "Modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ortega y Gasset," writes Huyssen, "emphasized time and again that it was their mission to salvage the purity of high art from the encroachments of...modern mass culture" (163). Another critic identifies Eliot and Ezra Pound as "the most vocal of American modernists" in their efforts "to preserve the autonomy and integrity of institutional art" and to "[fortify] the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass culture" (Berry 168-69). References to Eliot's "modernist dogma of hermetic art" are commonplace (Stade 15). Central to twentieth-century literary history as it is currently represented is the image of Eliot as the hero or antihero of a losing struggle to defend a pristine and sacralized high art from the threatening pollution of "lower levels" of culture.
My goal here is to show that Eliot cannot be characterized accurately by this simple metaphor. I am concerned primarily with the Eliot of the 1920s and earlier; the older Eliot was somewhat more willing to play the part for which he has been remembered: a human monument to "absolute art...high art, when art was at its most serious and elitist" (Ozick 122). This is the laureated poet whose profile appeared on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly in February...