The difficulty that has beset Eliot scholarship from the very beginning is how one fits together the Eliot who led an apparently apolitical aesthetic revolution and the Eliot who abruptly (or so it seemed) announced himself to be classicist, royalist, and Anglo-Catholic in 1928, a year after his secret conversion to the Church of England. How did one fit together the lyric poet of chaos and the plus orthodoxe que les orthodoxes champion of cultural institutions? Even those closest to Eliot were hard pressed to make sense of the split. Puzzled, Pound read the transformation in light of his own ambitious nature and chalked it up to careerism, though this did not prevent him from considering it an act of betrayal. Paul Elmer More, friend and correspondent with Eliot from the time of the conversion up until More's death in 1937 and, unlike Pound, in obvious sympathy with what Eliot had become, was unsure enough to wonder in print if the “new” Eliot's position did not entail renunciation of the past.

Faced with coming to terms with the two Eliots, most critics have followed some variety of the explanation that the early Eliot had after all, despite the skepticism and cultural despair, manifested a hankering after the Absolute ever since the dissertation on Bradley. The Waste Land thus becomes a comprehensible landmark on the road from doubt to belief – the last dark night of the soul before the grace of conversion.