In 1941, with Kipling five years dead, Eliot could remake him into a kind of Modernist fellow traveler, a writer whose “peculiar detachment and remoteness” from late-Victorian readers sat uneasily with the kinds of demands made on him by the public. In 1919 Eliot had imagined a quite different Kipling. Reviewing his latest volume of verse, Eliot had written disparagingly of Kipling as a mere “public speaker,” an “orator or preacher” to the masses, and therefore not a serious artist. The unsurprising corollary to this claim is that Kipling's popularity ensures that he will remain unheard by those whom Eliot calls “discerning critics.” “The arrival of a new book of his verses is not likely to stir the slightest ripple on the surface of our conversational intelligentsia.” He is, Eliot claims oxymoronically, “a neglected celebrity.” The very title of the review, “Kipling Redivivus,” implies that the older writer has been utterly forgotten, yet he is forgotten - by discerning readers - precisely because he is the most wellknown of contemporary writers. The piece closes with an exhortation. “It is wrong, of course, of Mr. Kipling to address a large audience; but it is a better thing than to address a small one. The only better thing is to address the one hypothetical Intelligent Man who does not exist and who is the audience of the Artist.”

The ideology of High Modernism is audible enough here, but there is more to be said about the essay.