T. S. Eliot In his 1934 pageant play "The Rock", Eliot distances himself from Fascist movements of the Thirties by caricaturing Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, who 'firmly refuse/ To descend to palaver with anthropoid Jews'. The 'new evangels' of totalitarianism are presented as antithetic to the spirit of Christianity. Craig Raine, in his books "In Defence of T. S. Eliot" (2001) and "T. S. Eliot" (2006), sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reviewing the 2006 book, Paul Dean stated that he was not convinced by Raine's argument. Nevertheless, he concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do him justice, Julius insist,
T. S. Eliot us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification. With the important exception of "Four Quartets", Eliot directed much of his creative energies after "Ash Wednesday" to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in "The Waste Land". In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He