It has become a truism that modernist writers espoused an ideology that promoted the belief that the work of art is an autonomous, organically unified whole, transcending its historical moment to achieve a putatively universal, uniquely aesthetic value. Eliot's remark concerning Joyce's use of Homeric myth as a way “of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape … to the … anarchy which is contemporary history” (SP 177) has itself been ripped out of context in order to serve as a touchstone for this interpretation of modernism in which Eliot exemplifies the error of its ways. However, a closer analysis of Eliot's writings, as of Joyce's and Proust's, fails to sustain this coarse-grained and often polemical critique. On the contrary, their works demonstrate a fundamental skepticism toward such an aesthetic ideology.

Throughout his career, Eliot was deeply suspicious of claims for the transcendent value of art and its “higher” truth because he believed that such matters were, at bottom, theological, not aesthetic. To make art into a religion, to substitute it for faith, or to take comfort in the former as a consolation for the loss of the latter was, in his view, to commit Arnold's mistake.