Lynn Summer, discussing C. S. Lewis's relationship with T. S. Eliot:

Lewis detested the Modernist innovations apparent in Eliot's poetry. According to Lewis's friend and biographer George Sayer, "He tended to regard the new poetry with its formlessness and lack of poetic diction as a revolutionary movement deliberately directed against the traditions of English poetry." Although Lewis admired Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), he attacked much of Eliot's poetry and literary criticism, frequently citing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) in which Eliot likens evening to "a patient etherized upon a table." Lewis found Eliot's imagery so distasteful that he later wrote his own poetic response (A Confession). In A Preface to Paradise Lost, published in 1942, Lewis argued that the role of poetry is to teach its readers proper reactions ("stock responses") to universal themes such as love, death, and virtue. He maintained that modern poets including Eliot have abandoned their responsibility to elicit "that elementary rectitude of human response," much to the detriment of contemporary society. Hoping to expose what he termed the "Eliotic" style, Lewis and several friends submitted nonsensical poems to The Criterion, the influential journal Eliot edited, but their poems were never accepted for publication. Not until 1958, when the Archbishop of Canterbury invited both men to serve on the Commission to Revise the Psalter, did they become friends. Indeed, Lewis developed a genuine liking for the man whose poetry he had so long reviled, Ironically, perhaps, Lewis's most personal work, A Grief Observed, was submitted to Faber and Faber in 1961, the publishing house where Eliot served as director. Although Lewis never fully appreciated Eliot's poetry, he recognized that their shared faith ultimately transcended their differences, observing, "I agree with him about matters of such moment that all literary questions are, in comparison, trivial."

The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia