In a letter to the Hampshire farmer and agricultural writer Viscount Lymington dated 7 June 1938, T. S. Eliot declared that “no one has greater practical ignorance of agriculture than I; but I have for a long time been seriously disturbed about its position in this country.” As Eliot's comment indicates, this concern with the issue of agriculture was sustained over a considerable period of time and his first expression of interest in farming can be seen as early as 1915. When responding to Ezra Pound's latest modernist “manifesto,” Eliot drew a marked distinction between universities and schools of agriculture: “America has schools of agriculture which are better and honester places than its universities; because they have a work to do which they can take seriously.” At first glance, such comments could perhaps understandably be dismissed as another example of the willfully provocative and outlandish observations that adorn both his prose and personal correspondence, and farming is not necessarily something one would immediately associate with Eliot’s metropolitan lifestyle or lifelong abode in London. However, he gave profound and prolonged attention to various agrarian, agricultural, and environmental concerns, of which the following chapters will offer a comprehensive account.

The emergence of a scholarly awareness of Eliot's interest in agricultural matters can be traced back to the late 1980s. One of the first to acknowledge Eliot's engagement with agricultural issues was Robert Crawford, in The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. In this seminal study Crawford highlighted Eliot's tendency to join together “apparent opposites,” before going on to discuss Eliot's stance on the city and the countryside. Crawford noted that in Eliot's social criticism of the 1930s and 1940s he “wrote of an almost sanctified rural life as something vitally different from the separately developing urban culture.” In addition to a brief consideration of Eliot's comments on rural issues, he also indicated the extent to which these concerns permeated Four Quartets. Another significant study to have acknowledged Eliot's agrarianism is The English Eliot, in which Steve Ellis elucidated some of Eliot's agricultural concerns as expressed in The Idea of a Christian Society. For both Crawford and Ellis, however, Eliot's concern with agriculture was peripheral to their analysis.