Abigail Adams Eliot 1892, the youngest child of Reverend Christopher Rhodes Eliot and Mary Jackson (May) Eliot. The Eliots were a prominent Boston Brahmin family. Abby's father was a Unitarian minister and her grandfather, William G. Eliot, was the first chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. Her sister, Martha May Eliot, became a nationally known public health specialist, and her brother, Frederick May Eliot, headed the Unitarian Association of America for many years. The poet, playwright, critic, and Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot was her first cousin. After serving at the First Parish Church of Dorchester on Meeting House Hill for 13 years,
T. S. Eliot a work. More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets... at present must be difficult'." Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the