Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky: these are the composers most obviously in, behind and around T. S. Eliot's poetry. Beethoven, the apogee of Classicism; Wagner, the epitome, zenith and in embryo the decadence of Romanticism; Stravinsky, a Proteus of modernism, myth-and-motors, pastiche, jazz and neoclassicism: Beethoven, behind Four Quartets ; Wagner, in The Waste Land ; Stravinsky, a contemporary with whom Eliot was in dialogue. Together they are an index of Classical and Romantic legacies in modernist eclecticism. But music is more to Eliot than three composers, however broadly representative. The Wagnerian backgrounds of French Symbolism mean that music is fundamental to Eliot's aesthetics. And although he had no technical training, music was the art that personally affected Eliot most deeply.

Stravinsky commented on their connection from his own point of view: