John Carey (critic) Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939" was a critique of Modernist writers (particularly T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells) for what Carey argues were their elitist and misanthropic views of mass society. In his review of the book Geoff Dyer wrote that Carey picked out negative quotations from his subjects. Stefan Collini responded that disdain for mass culture amongst some Modernist writers was already well-known among literary historians. Carey was born in April 1934 in Barnes, then on the Surrey/London border, the youngest of their four recorded children,
T. S. Eliot observed that this time also marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot's literary influence: As Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious in "Four Quartets" and implicit in the earlier poetry. The result, fueled by intermittent rediscovery of Eliot's occasional anti-Semitic rhetoric, has been a progressive downward revision of his once towering reputation. Bush also notes that Eliot's reputation "slipped" significantly further after his death. He writes, "Sometimes regarded as too academic (William Carlos Williams's view), Eliot was also frequently