In the period after the war, when he had achieved the status of a world celebrity, Eliot was not in the least optimistic about the future of the human prospect. He had survived into the nightmare world of the 1940s within which he increasingly felt himself to be an alien. He had never been fully ‘at home’ anyway, but this was something new. In this respect he was like Pound. But unlike Pound, he had managed to land on top of the heap, rather than in a wire cage awash in floodlight. Yet his dejection was not simply composted from the normal reactions to the common difficulties of aging. His despondency was related to a number of other matters. He had become particularly aware of the frustrations of trying to be a good Christian per se, and a good Christian in increasingly unchristian times. Eliot's biographers have chronicled these spiritual predicaments in detail. They have also recorded the tensions in his personal life which the death of his first wife precipitated in 1947.

He was disturbed by external events as well. Concern for the new role of ‘culture’ in the social and political arrangements after the war led him to write Notes towards the Definition of Culture as a polemical defense of that conservatism that runs from Burke, through Coleridge and Carlyle, to Eliot himself (Williams, Culture and Society 229). His distress in the new world which began to emerge after the war is evident in certain small ways, as Ackroyd notes, in his correspondence with friends for example, or in his use of the pseudonym ‘Metoikos’ or ‘resident alien’ for his last piece in The Christian News Letter(272).