Few critics have attempted to answer the question most often asked by those who grew up to find the revolutionary young poets of the Twenties embalmed as Elder Statesmen of the Fifties. Is Eliot really a great poet? What are the indisputably major poems and how do we read them? Why—a question so far ignored by all Eliot commentators—why has Eliot had so little influence on the younger English poets? This last question is even more relevant now that we can see that 1918–55 produced in England little more than a few good but essentially minor poets. And the fact that the emphasis must now be placed on (for example) Empson, Graves and Betjeman, rather than the fashionables with which we were plagued in our youth, does not render the question any the less relevant. There are certainly points of difficulty in Eliot's technique that make it possible to understand at least some of the resistance to his poetry when it first started to come out. J. C. Squire's review of The Waste Land is well enough known: ‘a grunt would serve equally well’. And, as Mrs Leavis has pointed out, George Gordon's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford was little more than a series of gibes at Eliot as representative of the ‘moderns’. Still, these men were not fools. Granted that their reaction was a mistaken one, ought we not to enquire how exactly the mistake came about?