Eliot's preoccupation with agricultural issues has usually been seen to originate in the 1930s. One clear example of this comes in T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet, where Gareth Reeves suggests that the beginning of “Eliot's Virgilian conviction of ‘devotion to the land’” can be “traced to the early thirties, when Eliot seized on agriculture … as the one practical panacea for the ills of society.” However, I shall argue here that we should interpret Eliot's engagement with agrarianism as part of a more gradual development, and will demonstrate that the origins of his agricultural sensibility emerged far earlier than the 1930s.

Until recently it had been standard for critics to allude to Eliot's religious “conversion” and to categorize his oeuvre in the light of his formal adoption of Anglo-Catholicism in 1927. Indeed, many critics conveniently divided Eliot's body of work into “pre-conversion” and “post-conversion” poems. In “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T. S. Eliot and Christianity, however, Barry Spurr encouraged a re-evaluation of this prevalent critical tendency. Addressing the use of the term “conversion,” Spurr argued that it conveyed an inaccurate picture of Eliot's journey to religious faith:

In accordance with David Moody, Spurr interprets Eliot's poetry from The Waste Land through to “The Hollow Men” and Ash-Wednesday as “a further development, not a new start” in Eliot's “consistent personality.” This notion of a continual development in Eliot's disposition should not be confined to his religious growth, though, as it is also an apt means by which to consider the formation of his agricultural sensibility. In the same way that Spurr concludes that Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism was the “result of a logical progression,” so we can construe Eliot's increasing concern with agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s as a natural advancement from his earlier poetry and prose writings.

Before Eliot began to enter into agricultural discussion and debate in the pages of The Criterion he was drawn to the issue of the land and infertile soil.