The problem for the high modernists was how to create a sense of the new that might endure beyond the period of its innovation. Some were so successful that their names are still associated with what is ‘advanced’ despite the fact that they have been considered classics for nearly a century. Ezra Pound's and T. S. Eliot's conception of tradition – where ‘the really new work of art’ takes its place among the ‘existing monuments’ – relies as much on a view of future histories as it does on history itself; it is a position which reaches simultaneously forward and back and, paradoxically, towards revolt, renewal and reconciliation. Eliot's career is most often taken for an example of this somewhat contradictory position, where on the one hand his poetry seems exceedingly new and modern, while on the other hand his criticism seeks to gain a traditional footing for this poetic modernity. Patrick Parrinder, in assessing critical authority, even goes so far as to wonder if Eliot's critical position lost ‘its sense of purpose once the modernist literary revolution was completed?’ Yet implicit within this question is a whole new paradox, that of a modernist revolution which can be completed.