The history of Eliot criticism offers a depressing form of justice: the very vocabulary for appreciating poetry that he did so much to shape has turned out to be in large part responsible for the decline of his power and influence in the academy. Ambivalence now becomes effeteness, complexity idealism, and the desire for intricate unities a defensive projection of mastery by which to ward off threats of castration. Consequently, what had been staged as a revolutionary modernism now gets taught primarily as a reactionary evasion of historical realities from which we can be freed by a less pretentious modernism or, even better, by an enlightened postmodernism.

This volume's concern with the topic of Eliot and desire provides an opportunity to escape this entire revenge cycle. For we are invited to look carefully at how his formal and thematic elements are woven into specific emotional configurations, so that we have to develop for those elements an imaginative density not easily subsumed under the now standard litany of complaints about his impersonality and abstraction. This does not mean we cannot be critical of Eliot. Indeed focusing on how desires are staged within his work may reveal an even more monstrous fascist or patriarch than our more tepid thematizing has allowed us.