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 in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets". Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard to "The Waste Land", Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse." Charles Powell was negative in his criticism of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible.