Interesting dance of ideologies there. Eliot himself was a conservative Anglo-Catholic (and he had been friends with Ezra Pound who was an out and out Fascist though I’m not sure where their relationship stood during the war) while Orwell was a democratic socialist. Eliot also had very narrow aesthetic ideals on what consitituted “great” literature which was based entirely on the internal formal structure and “tensions” within a work rather than any social significance a work might have so I doubt if any of Orwell’s work would have appealed to him . What’s really interesting as that this occured in 1944 and since Stalin was “allied” to Britain at the time Eliot, the conservative, felt obliged to turn Animal Farm down because it was critical of Stalinism. Funny he would consider the point of view as “Trotskyite.” Certainly after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War I doubt Orwell had any communist sympathies, even for its renegade branches.
As he says: ‘We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,†wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincingâ€. ‘
