Note 15 — How It Strikes a Contemporary
Reading edition
How violent these are two quotations will show. "It [Told by an Idiot] should be read as the Tempest should be read, and as Gulliver's Travels should be read, for if Miss Macaulay's poetic gift happens to be less sublime than those of the author of the Tempest, and if her irony happens to be less tremendous than that of the author of Gulliver's Travels, her justice and wisdom are no less noble than theirs."—The Daily News.
The next day we read: "For the rest one can only say that if Mr. Eliot had been pleased to write in demotic English The Waste Land might not have been, as it just is to all but anthropologists, and literati, so much waste-paper."—The Manchester Guardian.