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 [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind." In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past." This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work