This book has examined Eliot's sustained preoccupation with agrarian issues between the 1930s and the 1950s and revealed agriculture to be a predominant aspect of his oeuvre. The focus throughout has been on establishing organicism as a notable theme in both his social criticism and poetry, while simultaneously aiming to strengthen Eliot's position in the British organic husbandry movement. Prior to this study, literary scholars and historians alike had pointed to the significance of agriculture for Eliot in passing, but none had indicated the full extent to which discussion of the subject pervades his writing. This study, then, has endeavored to provide the first comprehensive account of Eliot's engagement with agriculture and, more specifically, with the ideas of the organic movement.

What emerges from a thorough investigation of Eliot's interest in agriculture is a picture that is more complete than the one painted by previous accounts. Although Ellis is correct to stress the limitations of Eliot's agrarianism and to highlight that a return to rural life was never the supreme aim of his late social criticism, his conscious effort to dissociate Eliot from the organic movement in his essay on “Eliot and Earth” is mistaken. Ellis claims that we should “not … get carried away by Eliot's ruralism—it is far from cosy, or ‘organic’ in any farmers’ market sense.”1 But, contrary to Ellis's suggestion, we have seen that much of Eliot's agricultural thinking was in harmony with organic concerns. These issues not only included an increasing perturbation with the draining of soil fertility and the effects of soil erosion, as Ellis himself recognizes, but a preoccupation with more everyday issues, such as adequate nutrition, organic fresh produce, and culinary skills. Throughout this book, the breadth of Eliot's influence in agricultural circles has come to the fore and the previous conception of him as a rather peripheral figure in the organic movement can now be challenged. It is no doubt true that Eliot's friendship with eminent organic figures such as Philip Mairet and Viscount Lymington had a formative influence on his thinking, and critics have been right to point to this as an important dimension of Eliot's agrarianism. It has been made clear in this book that Mairet's ideas on “culture,” for example, had a vital influence on Eliot's own discussions on this topic.