Among the many tributes that Eliot paid to the Baudelairean tradition in French poetry throughout his career, there is none more eloquent than the one he gave in 1933, in his third and final Turnbull Lecture. Speaking in particular of Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière, he extends his acknowledgements to other poets:

Shortly afterwards he declares roundly: ‘The ultimate purpose, the ultimate value, of the poet's work is religious’ (VMP, 288). It is no accident that this declaration should follow so close upon the naming of his different French masters. True, the wider context is philosophical and/or metaphysical poetry, and the overarching figure is Dante, but it is in reference to the French (and to something he often referred to as the ‘French mind’) that Eliot so often, implicitly or explicitly, came to define his own choices on moral and aesthetic matters.